"Not that adequate hands prove effective intelligence; on Earth, not only simians but a number of reptiles and amphibia boast as much, even if man has the best, and man's apish ancestors were as well-equipped in this respect as we are today." (p.584)
Hands had to evolve physically before they could start to be used in conjunction with brains to change the environment.
Who are "we"? The author cannot directly address his twentieth-century readers in the text of the story. The use of the first person pronoun informs us that this narrator is not the omniscient narrator lurking behind the texts of many works of fiction and also that s/he inhabits the same timeline as van Rijn. If not a contemporary, then s/he speaks/narrates in a later period when van Rijn is a historical figure. The story is preceded by a passage attributed to "Le Matelot" but this reads like a quotation from some other relevant work, not like a direct introduction to the current narrative. If "Hiding Place" had been included in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, then Hloch would have identified its author but this was a later layer of narrative added by Anderson enriching the future history in that particular volume. Usually, fictional authors of third person narratives remain unidentified.
9 comments:
The primate hand evolved to handle climbing. We repurposed it when we became bipeds, but the basics had to be there for evolution to work on.
That's why raccoons make a good source for an intelligent species if we were to kick the bucket and get out of the way.
They're already clever, have pretty good hands, they're omnivores, and reasonably social.
I read somewhere that, to avoid predators, a quadruped species climbed into trees, where it was free to chatter and developed opposable thumbs for grasping branches, then descended as social bipeds with forelimbs freed for manipulation. However, I have more recently heard that the evidence suggests that bipedalism preceded opposable thumbs.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
One interesting point discussed by Kermit Pattison in his book FOSSIL MEN was that the evidence discovered by Dr. Timothy White and his team in Ethiopia was that in some ways hominins/early humans were more PRIMITIVE than chimpanzees. That is, the feet of chimpanzees continued to evolve, to become more like an extra pair of hands. So they could climb and move about in trees more easily. But that was not the case with hominins/humans. Their feet evolved more and more to become what we have now. True bipedalism, leading to freeing up the hands for ever finer and more precise manipulation.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: apea have opposable thumbs; they're just not -as- opposable and suited to fine manipulation as ours.
I've personally seen a chimp take a closed box of matches and a closed packet of cigarettes, take out a cigarette, close the package, take out a match, light the cigarette and then close the box of matches, and lie on a tree-limb puffing away.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And chimpanzees were still interbreedable with hominin/human ancestors up to about three million years ago. But chimps still can't GROW tobacco or make boxes and matches.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: they do make elementary tools. Eg., they strip twigs so they can insert them in holes in termite nests, so the can withdraw them and lick off the termites clinging to the twig.
That's not instinctive, like weaver-birds; they learn it by observation of their elders.
One of the chimps Jane Goodall studied improved its social standing by learning to drum on an empty kerosene tin, terrifying the other members of its band. It would frighten them all into flight, and then sit there grinning.
Chimps are sort of eerie, up close. One named Sebastian at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage was a friend of my brother David; they used to smoke together when we visited (the above description of a chimp smoking is from that).
Sometimes Sebastian would light two cigarettes and hand one to Dave.
You could -see- him thinking and figuring things out.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I am not denying the intelligence of chimpanzees, compared to most other animals. Or that some, like the one called Sebastian, could be more intelligent than other chimps. But have chimps gone on from stripping leaves off twigs to carving wood or chipping stone? Or learning how to make use of fire in any way beyond lighting up cigarettes?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: chimps live in a warm place and can digest anything they eat without cooking it. They don't -need- fire.
We lost the capacity to digest lots of coarse vegetable matter during the transition from late australopithecine to early homo.
(Take a look at an australopithecine ribcage; it's splayed open downward to accomodate a very large gut, the way a chimp's is.)
Early homo used fire -- certainly as long as 1,000,000 years ago, possibly right back 2,000,000 years. We -needed- it.
Kaor, Mr. Stiring!
And some might argue that NEED helped to drive human evolution, including developing the intelligence needed for discovering the uses of fire. And that reminded me of Anderson's story "The Little Monster," with its Promethean echoes.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment