Over the years, the old woman's skill, knowledge, and experience had kept the group going. She knew when to move, the trails to follow, and where to find good drinking water when there was none. She knew all about the animals and plants. She knew which plants and plant parts were edible, the preparation some plants needed to make them edible, and where the animals and plants could be found. She also knew many uses for plants, ranging from which plants healed to which could be used for construction and cord and packaging material. Fortunately for the group, the knowledge the old woman had of the land, animals, and plants didn't die with her. It was passed on to her grandchildren. The old woman also passed on her habits, those everyday things she did that made everyone's life in the group easier.
She had picked up the old woman's habits, although she was not always aware of it. Whenever her actions reminded her of the old woman, she would think of the handful of cherries and smile.
From The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, created by G. J. Sawyer and Victor Deak.
The above passage is just the end of a chapter, and much of the chapter is quite lovely. It seems to depict the daily life of Homo georgicus, which may have been the first hominin in Europe.
When you look at reconstructed pictures of ancient hominins, you can see different tendencies. Some looked like apes, but a feature or two gave away that they were something a little different. Others look like people, but again there are unusual details. Little things that remind you of how far you are from home. The georgicus people were somewhere in between, it seems. A retroactive hybrid.
But it probably is true that they experienced a lot of the same things we do. It's hard to imagine ourselves in the Million BC range. Still, we had things in common with the people alive back then.
1 comment:
Although it's unlikely I'll ever find this book it's been interesting to read your appraisal as well as some excerpts from the book itself. Paleontology is a fascinating study as the google preview proves in this case doing an admirable job in summarizing all of the current evidence for human evolution over the past 3.5 (or 6 to 7) million years. The images I saw look as authentic as could be deduced from what we know of modern individuals.. and far more acceptable than looking at skull fragments.
There were a couple of places where I had to stop to read about subjects of special interest:
Human language as an emergent event - a coincidence of a new biological acquisition with an existing mental substrate led to something with an entirely new potential. There were dead ends and setbacks; it could even be argued we are still in the process of learning just what we can do with these symbolic gifts - a notion that holds out some hope for the human future.
Or not, in consideration of our evident intolerance for competition.
Then again, among the Homo georgicus sapiens found at the Caucasus site was a male who had lost teeth but the loss was judged to have occurred long before his death because the remains had been reabsorbed. This means he had been cared for by his family or tribe, showing that cooperation may have spread through natural selection. Perhaps they just loved one another. Too bad we can't ask them.
I enjoyed that story about the old wise woman at the beginning.
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