Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (13 page)

Vizzini then goes on to logically slice and dice the situation, not to mention the psychological makeup of his nemesis, with each deduction making the hero increasingly nervous until at last Vizzini comes to his conclusion.

“I have already learned everything from you,” said the Sicilian. “I know where the poison is.”

“Only a genius could have deduced as much.”

“How fortunate for me that I happen to be one,” says the hunchback, growing more and more amused … “Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”

He was quite cheery until the iocane powder took effect.

The man in black stepped quickly over the corpse.

How did our masked hero win the battle of wits? How could he be so sure his deception wouldn’t be found out, leaving him to drink the poisoned wine? Here’s how: He had spent two years building up an immunity to iocane. It didn’t matter which goblet Vizzini drank from. Both were poisoned! And with that move, he raised the evolutionary stakes. Unfortunately for Vizzini, he fell one step behind in the arms race and was selected out.

Goldman’s little story encapsulates the ongoing battle our ancestors found themselves fighting. In dealing with their increasingly complicated relationships, those early humans who became more skilled at climbing inside the minds of the others around them would more often win the battle of wits. They would also enjoy a decided evolutionary edge because they would excel at practicing deception as well. This makes us a tricky species indeed.

Psychologists call this unique human ability to hop back and forth between our own point of view and someone else’s Theory of Mind or ToM. Uncovering deceit isn’t the only time we use it (though it’s certainly a helpful application). We employ ToM almost every waking moment we are interacting with others or thinking about interacting with them. It is, if you examine it closely enough, the foundation upon which all human social commerce is built. It enables us to empathize, anticipate, and outfox. We exercise it when we talk with one another, or about one another. It’s in play when we lie awake in bed wondering why our spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend did this or said that, or the boss gave us a hard time about the quarterly report, or even why he put his arm around our shoulder and said, “Atkinson, helluva job!” What, we wonder, did he really mean by that? To put it bluntly, we are a species incessantly thinking about what everyone else around us is thinking.

Yet ToM has even broader applications and effect because it provides us with a remarkable talent for running infinite numbers of what–if scenarios, all simply by firing the neurons in our own heads. You can imagine one of our ancestors wondering, “What if the leopard
jumps out of that tree? What if I get caught wooing this female? What if I come back with some meat and give it to Woog? Will that get me a little troop cred? Is it worth the trouble?”

What–iffing allows you to not only step into someone else’s place, it gives you the magical power to step into the future and prepare for what might happen next. Or to create parallel universes where you can run multiple scenarios about taking this action or that one, then weighing them to see which might lead to a better outcome; something we call, among other things, imagination. As I write these words, my mind is what–iffing furiously about which are the best scenarios to run by you to make the points I want to make.

Being able to say to ourselves, “If this, then that,” builds the infrastructure of human creativity (more on this a bit later in the book). Scenario building is pure make–believe, a return to that time in our childhoods when we used to say, “Let’s pretend …” It is a way to create and explore possibilities that don’t exist in the real world, but live completely in the universe of our minds, and nowhere else. A remarkable thing.

Whatever the uses to which we personally put the mind–reading/scenario–building powers that our ancestors developed, this much is beyond debate: no brain in nature had ever before seen its like. This is, neurologically speaking, inconceivably difficult to pull off. It
demands billions of neurons and requires that the newest
and
most ancient parts of the brain be wired deeply to one another. Valerie Stone’s experiments with R.M. illustrated this. R.M., remember, had damaged his amygdala, whose evolutionary roots are reptilian; the temporal pole, which is part of the limbic/mammalian brain; and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is among the newest cerebral additions to have evolved. Our ancestors were becoming chimeras, of sorts, creatures built out of the spare parts of both ancient and modern evolutionary mutations, an amalgamated animal, both ancient and new, self–aware, yet driven by unconscious, subterranean impulses. In a phrase, we were becoming really complicated.

We can’t know for certain when the rudimentary ability to climb inside another’s mind evolved. Such abilities are almost certainly not the result of a lone adaptation. More likely they resulted from scores of suites of adaptations that surely took an immense amount of time to emerge. One point two million years ago the robust human lines had seen their last days. It was a good run, but the evolutionary path followed by the gracile apes, unlikely as its success was, had won out. Yet, who would have predicted it? Not even a what–iffing creature. Larger brains forced earlier births, earlier births lengthened and complicated childhoods that created minds increasingly shaped by personal experience, which in turn made the mind more creative and adaptable. Brains over brawn.

And as if this wasn’t messy enough, now longer childhoods were producing people that were genetically similar, but behaviorally unique; every troop was loaded with highly complicated individuals, each with her own talents, psychological baggage, foibles, and agendas. Yet they bonded, despite their individual needs and selfish competitions. An odd, astonishing species, or group of species, if ever there was one.

A mix this complicated would still seem doomed to failure. How do you weigh and balance all of these competing needs; manage the increasing complexity of your own motives let alone the motives of those around you while avoiding simultaneously alienating the allies you need? Depending on the situation, did “might make right,” was it better to be conciliatory, or was deception the best path?

It all had to be worked out, and apparently it was, otherwise you and I would not be here. Out of this complexity, these competing needs, a moral ape was born, made possible by the early childhood that had shaped our gracile ancestors. They had managed to find strength in
numbers, and a workable code of conduct. It may not have been perfect, but they were successful enough that they had begun to take the species, several species actually, global. They had not only become a moral ape, they had evolved with an irrepressible case of wanderlust.

Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose
.

—J. B. S. Haldane

Our species is the most itinerant and restless animal on the planet. That’s a simple fact. You will find polar bears on the ice sheets of the Arctic, silverback gorillas in the mountains of central Africa, reindeer in northern Europe, tigers in India, and penguins in the Antarctic, but you will find humans in all of those places and more. We are the only mammal that inhabits all seven continents, and it doesn’t matter to us how hot, how high, how humid, or how frigid the geographies are in which we live. We have even found our way, God knows how, to thousands of remote islands around the planet that amount to no more than an oceanbound fleck of dirt that your eye could easily lose looking at a decent–size map—Easter Island, for example, whose nearest inhabited neighbor is more than a thousand water–soaked miles away. We are everywhere. But we weren’t always so. At one time we were almost nowhere. How we went from a few locations to many makes a fascinating story. It also says a lot about who we are.

At the tip of South Africa where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet lie shores of basalt rock that look out on an expanse of cold and turbulent water that doesn’t see another shoreline until it meets the ice cliffs of the Antarctic more than a thousand bracing, windblown miles away. If ever there was a place you could call the end of the earth, this is it.

Seventy thousand years ago, a few hundred human beings lived here; anatomically modern humans or AMH, as anthropologists like to call them. They were like us in every way it seems, except for the technologies they used to survive. They were bereft of cell phones and SUVs but looked like us and carried around the same evolutionary and psychological baggage we do. In those days, they were also the last remaining members of our species, a tiny enclave of humanity twisting precariously at the end of an evolutionary thread, rubbing elbows with extinction.

One hundred and twenty thousand years earlier this species, one that would later name itself
Homo sapiens
, had come into existence, a new branch of the human family, split off from an earlier primate that had arisen on the Horn of Africa, where so many other varieties of humans had emerged.

This particular tribe, the one that lived along Africa’s southern shore, were gracile, built for running, and clever hunters. Because of their high foreheads, prominent chins, and brains weighing more than three pounds, triple the size of those of the first upright walking primates from which they had descended, they looked far less apelike than their predecessors, though you could certainly see the family resemblance. They were inventive, too. Not only did they use fire, they controlled it, cooking food with it and applying it like a tool to harden and shape an impressive assortment of other cleverly fashioned gadgets—knives and axes more advanced than any used before. They may have been at the ends of the earth, but this was the Silicon Valley of its time, a hotbed of innovation. They had also developed an extremely powerful way to communicate—words.

Fortunately for these last survivors, the land was Eden–like. Not tropical, but temperate and sustaining. What it lacked in the big game that walked the northern savannas, it made up for with lush stores of fruit, nuts, and beans, and an inexhaustible supply of protein–rich seafood. Life must have looked very good. After all, deprived of CNN and the Weather Channel, they had no way of knowing they were the last representatives of their species, nor that much of the world and the continent beyond their small slice of paradise had been under climatological assault for thousands of years. A harsh and unrelenting ice age had already wiped out others like them farther north. Europe, Asia, North America, and the Mediterranean had been buried for millennia beneath uncounted miles of snow, howling winds, and frozen seas. Oceans of water were now locked in enormous ice
sheets, leaving seas more than 225 feet shallower, and the rest of Africa chilled and bone–dry. This was the apocalypse.

It was possible that they were not entirely alone. Tiny pockets of other modern humans may have survived the ice epoch in the north and west of Africa, but no one can say with certainty.

No, this was probably it. Just a few hundred people dug in, the current crop of an extended family who had colonized the area as many as fourteen thousand years earlier. One catastrophic event, a plague, a typhoon, or a freeze, and that would have been the end of
Homo sapiens
. And none of the seven billion of us who exist today would ever have been the wiser; in fact we would not have “been” at all. We came that close to being snuffed out.

That, at least, is how paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean sees it. It’s a sobering thought, the idea that we were closer to extinction than today’s mountain gorillas, and not much better off than India’s dwindling prides of tigers.
¹

Plenty of scientists dispute Marean’s scenario. It wouldn’t be paleoanthropology if they didn’t. Our past is a messy business, and today’s efforts to understand how we came into existence, based largely on the ossified leavings found in the world’s dust and rock, has been something like a blind man’s trying to describe the details of a football stadium by feeling his way through it. If we didn’t have ourselves around to inspect, we would know more about
Homo habilis
and Neanderthals than we know about
Homo sapiens
. You would think that our being among the most recently arrived branch of the human family we would be knee deep in the evidence of our own existence, but that’s not the case. Outside of Africa, fossils of early
Homo sapiens
are nearly nonexistent. Thankfully, we have been learning to read the path of our evolution in our DNA (see sidebar “Genetic Time Machines,”
page 76
), and that, together with some meager findings in the fossil record, has illuminated the story of our emergence at least a bit. The story goes something like this.

Between 160,000 and 200,000 years ago the first anatomically modern humans emerged, probably near Ethiopia. (But there is anything but universal agreement on this.) Among these was a woman, now called the matrilineal “Eve,” the “mother” of the human race, though that term is a little misleading. Eve wasn’t herself the first modern human, and unlike the biblical Eve, she wasn’t the only woman alive two hundred thousand years ago. She was, however, the sole woman alive then that still has descendants today. Other modern human women lived during her time and before it, but she is the one to whom every living human today is related. So it’s more accurate to say she is our “most recent common ancestor,” at least when looking at mitochondrial DNA as a marker.