by Barry Lopez
The human effort to listen to each other is, for me, one of the most remarkable of all human capacities, though, compared with commentary about, say, the origins of art in human culture, hardly a word is ever said about the human capacity to listen to another person. I bring this up because if the creation and maintenance of effective social networks, a particularly striking human attribute, is necessary to protect individuals against threats to this species’ health, then the ability to listen carefully to one another becomes critical.
In looking back on our origins, we might easily fall prey to two misconceptions. First, that H. sapiens evolved toward perfection (as opposed to simply changing in response to changes in its environment); and second, that whatever might have been lost from one millennium to the next as modern man evolved is something that we are well rid of. The idea of “improvement” in a species over time has no footing in evolutionary theory. And it could be that something H. sapiens “lost” on his way to modernity, perhaps a willingness to cooperate closely with others on a daily basis, is something he can reclaim because he has, unlike any other animal, a historical imagination and a knack for innovation.
A key to maintaining large, effective social networks is having the ability to comprehend what someone else is thinking and, importantly, being able to understand that whatever someone else is thinking, it might be different from what you yourself are thinking in the same situation. It’s not until a child is four or so that she or he can grasp that someone else who sees the same world they do sees it differently. Evolutionary psychologists, in an attempt to describe levels of increasingly more complex human awareness, call this achieving the second level of intentionality. Levels of intentionality are arranged hierarchically within a framework called theory of mind, where the first level of intentionality is an awareness only of one’s own perception of reality and the belief that all others see the world this way.
Awareness at the third level of intentionality would be the ability to grasp how someone else is interpreting the thoughts of a third person in a group conversation. Evolutionary psychologists assume that most adults are able to achieve a fourth level of intentionality. Some can operate at the fifth level of intentionality; a few may be able to achieve a sixth or even seventh level of intentionality.
Here’s one way to understand levels of intentionality:
First level: I think this about X. Doesn’t everybody?
Second level: I think this about X, but understand you think something different about X.
Third level: I think this about X. I know you see X differently, and I understand that Jane thinks yet something else about X, different from what you think or I think. But, I also understand you’re not aware that Jane interprets what I just said to you differently. She’s not hearing what you’re hearing when I speak to you.
Fourth level: I think this about X. I know you and Jane each have different views about X, and I also know you can’t grasp what she’s thinking about what I just said, that you did not hear it the same way she did. If Richard had been here, I know he would not accept my assessment of your misinterpretation of what Jane is actually thinking about the conversation you and I are having now at this table.
The ability to operate at high levels of intentionality in social situations is crucial for achieving high levels of cooperation in social situations. The ability to understand how others perceive a situation amounts to a kind of empathy. It can lead to an amelioration of tensions in a group faced with a problem. Or, of course, it can lead to the manipulation of others in the group. At higher levels of intentionality, one can find great empathy, great compassion, and a great capacity for cooperation—or just the opposite.
What most of us notice in small social settings, I think, is not the ability of another person truly to empathize with someone else’s point of view, but the inability of some people to do this. They cannot entertain another point of view without fearing the loss of their own, or they’re simply less capable of being empathetic. Autistics and psychopaths, though some in either group might be highly intelligent, have a limited ability to empathize, to move into higher levels of intentionality and to be attentive there to the needs, the fears, and the hopes of other people. They quickly become impatient with a world not organized according to their preferences.
The relevance of these thoughts about empathy, higher levels of intentionality, and social cooperation to the search for human origins lies with the convergence in our time of two extremely powerful forces. One is ecological, our ability essentially to bypass nearly every natural control on the increasing size of our population. Only a catastrophic viral outbreak or widespread nuclear warfare now threatens man’s ability to exploit all of Earth’s ecosystems in order to secure energy, sustenance, and economic profit. (Unfortunately, continued success here will likely produce diminishing psychological rewards, and will move humanity closer to an existence not dissimilar to the life of a machine.)
The second powerful force is the accelerating rates of change in the man-made world, when considered in the light of recent research on the biochemical, morphological, and histological landscape of the human brain. The social and cultural development of H. sapiens over the past 55,000 years has been relatively swift. The rate of change in the man-made environment today is so great, in contrast, that the idea that one generation is meant to teach the next generation how to manage has begun to seem quaint. Also, evolutionary psychologists question whether all human beings have the same ability to adapt to such rapid change. Some people, then, might seem marked for marginalization if human societies are to continue to pursue higher levels of efficiency or adapt easily to increasing amounts of social control. We’re reluctant to address publicly the inability of certain people to “keep up” for fear of being regarded as bigoted, intolerant, chauvinistic, or xenophobic. The failure to speak in defense of marginalized or persecuted groups is a constant in recent human history. It is also an act of cowardice that asks to be reckoned with before mankind faces truly staggering shortages of energy, freshwater, and food.
If H. sapiens’s future is threatened by environmental factors, both natural and anthropogenic, and if the ability of many people to cope with the complexity of the man-made environment is compromised, and if the need for cooperation seems great, how are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?
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THIS LONG SPECULATION about the fate of modern man is a simplified, perhaps somewhat simplistic, overview of a problem not exclusive to any single nation or people or style of governance. All people, every culture, every country, now face the same problematic future. To reconsider human destiny—and in so doing, to leave behind adolescent dreams of material wealth, and the quest for greater economic or military power, which already guide too much national policy—requires reassessing the biological reality that constrains H. sapiens. It requires “resituating man in an ecological reality.” It requires addressing the inutility—the biological cost to the ecosystems that sustain him—of much of mankind’s vaunted technology. Whether the world we’ve made is not a good one for our progeny—asking ourselves about the specific identity of the horsemen gathering on our horizon and what measures we need to take to protect ourselves—requires a highly unusual kind of discourse, a worldwide conversation in which the voices of government and those with an economic stake in any particular outcome are asked, I think, to listen, not speak. The conversation has to be fearlessly honest, informed, courageous, and deferential, one not guided by concepts that now seem both outdated and dangerous—the primacy of the nation-state, for example; the inevitability of large-scale capitalism; the uni
lateral authority of any religious vision; the urge to collapse all mystery into one meaning, one codification, one destiny.
When I’ve passed through different troubled parts of the world and sought local advice—on Indian reservations in the United States, at Banda Aceh in northern Sumatra after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, in Western Australia during the heady days of mining ceaselessly for iron ore (financed by the Chinese)—I’ve seen the same pattern of coping with disaster. Deferential local cooperation. This suggests to me that for many people in difficult circumstances, the notion of needing help from a centralized authority, especially one living at a remove from the problem, and the notion of fully protecting certain types of economic progress are not much on people’s minds. What I see consistently in these situations is the emergence of individuals who embody that culture’s sense of competence into positions of authority. They are its wellspring of calmness. They do not disappear with defeat or after setbacks. They do not require reassurance in their commitments to such abstractions as justice and reverence. In traditional villages they’re called the elders, the people who carry the knowledge of what works, who have the ability to organize chaos into meaning, and who can point recovery in a good direction. Some anthropologists believe that the presence of elders is as important as any technological advancement or material advantage in ensuring that human life continues.
I’ve not traveled enough, read enough, spoken to enough people to know, but this observation feels almost eerily correct to me. At the heart of the generalized complaint in every advanced or overdeveloped country about the tenor of modern life is the idea that those in political and economic control are self-serving and insincere in their promise to be just and respectful. I sat down once at my desk and wrote out the qualities I observed in elders I’d met in different cultures, nearly all of them unknown to one another. Elders take life more seriously. Their feelings toward all life around them are more tender, their capacity for empathy greater. They’re more accessible than other adults, able to engage in a conversation with a child that does not patronize or infantilize the child, but instead confirms the child in his or her sense of wonder. Finally, the elder is willing to disappear into the fabric of ordinary life. Elders are looking neither for an audience nor for confirmation. They know who they are, and the people around them know who they are. They do not need to tell you who they are.
To this list I would add one more thing. Elders are more often listeners than speakers. And when they speak, they can talk for a long while without using the word I.
Living in one of the most highly advanced of human cultures, I often wonder, What have modern cultures done with these people? In our search for heroes to admire, did we just run them over? Were we suspicious about the humility, the absence of self-promotion, the lack of impressive material wealth and other signs of conventional success? Or were we afraid they would tell us a story we didn’t want to hear? That they would suggest things we didn’t want to do?
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SOME NIGHTS WHEN I awakened in darkness in Nakirai, lying supine with Ngeneo on my right and Kamoya on my left, I’d quietly slide out from under my bedsheet and go for a walk in the moonlight. Most often it was the memory of the intensity of some moment I had found myself in that sent me off into the dark. I might have been staring into the Jewel Box with my binoculars and wondering if these stars were old enough to have planets yet. Or trying to imagine what some set of fossils once looked like as a fleshed-out living animal. I wouldn’t walk far, and I swept the ground continually with my flashlight for snakes. The guidebook I was using warned that red spitting cobras (emun lokimol in Turkana), black mambas (emun lokipurat), and northeast African carpet vipers might be out hunting at night in this locale.
The thought of an encounter with a poisonous snake, by day or night, was never far from my mind. A few days before we arrived at Nakirai I was out with Kamoya, Wambua, and Nzube, looking for fossils in a wadi south of Richard Leakey’s camp at Nariokotome. We were carefully searching the walls of the cutbanks. The wadi was about twenty feet wide and the banks were about four feet high. Suddenly Nzube and Wambua, walking about thirty yards ahead of us, came running hard around a bend toward Kamoya and me, shouting in Swahili “Ikuuwa!” “Mamba!” said Kamoya, yanking me toward him as we bounded up a notch in the cutbank with the others. My left biceps still in Kamoya’s grip, I turned to watch the mamba pass. It was about eight feet long, a uniform olive-gray color, moving swiftly through the middle layer of twiggy brush growing on the opposite cutbank. An otherwise understated guide to the poisonous snakes of Africa says the black mamba attacks “with unbelievable speed and ferocity” and that it often lifts its head high in an effort to strike a person in the chest.
Years before this, on the upper Boro River in northern Botswana, during an afternoon nap which the guides urged our small group to take because of the terrific heat that day, I walked away from the others and ranged around a stand of acacias, looking for anything interesting. When I knelt down to peer into the entrance to an aardvark den, one of the guides came running, waving me off and shouting, “Get away! Get away!” When it’s this hot, he said, mambas seek out the cool air in aardvark dens.
So I step carefully. Most nights I move off no more than a dozen yards from my companions. I want to listen to the Nakirai night, apart from the breathing of the men, to hear the crickets and the barely audible seethe of the acacia twigs brushing against one another. I listen for the alarm calls of birds who suddenly find a predator, a snake or striped polecat, in their nests.
I look at my companions asleep beneath the acacias. I get along well with everyone but Ngeneo, who often seems out of sorts, even sullen, when he’s not engaged in some task with the others. And Wambua, who keeps up a gruff countenance. Of us all, Christopher aside, Wambua is the one most likely to be keeping his own counsel.
I know this rhythm of camp life “out bush” from other experiences. One day moves easily into the next at a camp like this one, while a small number of people pursue empirical evidence that will support some idea or theory. The momentary annoyance of biting flies, sunburn, unfamiliar food (boiled goat intestine one morning for breakfast at Nakirai), compromised hygiene, minor wounds, or a lost notebook fades before the intense pleasure of looking for the things you search for every day and sometimes find. The nature of these things and the impossibility of ever fully grasping what they are are intoxicating to feel. You do not want to reduce the mystery they represent with terse or restrictive language, for fear that their ineffable essence will then slip away from you.
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IN THE LATE PALEOZOIC, 300 million years ago, Africa was embedded in the center of Earth’s single supercontinent, Pangea, and Pangea was surrounded by Earth’s superocean, the Panthalassic. At that time, “Africa” included three other landmasses. Later they would separate from it and become Madagascar, the Arabian Peninsula, and a swatch of land that today stretches north from Jordan to the Bosphorus, the strait that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and that separates Anatolian from European Turkey. About 160 million years ago, Pangea split apart to become the supercontinents of Laurasia, in the north, and Gondwanaland, to the south. In a scenario now familiar to many schoolchildren, Gondwanaland soon disintegrated, with South America moving to the west, Australia and Antarctica moving away to the south, and the subcontinents of India and Iran drifting to the north. By 90 million years ago Africa finally stood apart, separated from South America by the Atlantic Ocean, from Europe by the Tethys Seaway (the proto-Mediterranean), from India by the Tethys Ocean itself, and from Madagascar by the Mozambique Channel.
Several million years ago the Great Rift Valley was continuing to open in East Africa, creating a geography that would become the major focus of research into humanity’s origins. The section of the African Rift Valley farthest to the west, running roughly north and south, embraces a serie
s of lakes, from Lake Albert (or Mobutu) in the north to Lake Nyasa (or Malawi) in the south. The other major section of the African Rift, forming, together with the western section, the African half of the Great Rift Valley, runs northeast and southwest. It, too, includes a line of lakes, the largest of which is Lake Turkana. The other major section of the Great Rift Valley begins in western Syria. It includes the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, and becomes the trough that holds the Red Sea. At the southern end of the Red Sea, a sequence of lava flows formed on the African continent an area now called the Afar Depression. It includes the Danakil Desert and the modern nations of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the (internationally unrecognized) Republic of Somaliland. It also marks, as I’ve said, the area in Africa from which most paleohistorians believe modern man departed the continent, crossing the gap at Bāb al-Mandab, sometimes translated as the Strait of Grief or the Strait of Tears or Sorrow.
Great Rift Valley
Three million years ago, australopithecines lived throughout eastern and southern Africa, and sites in the southern portion of the Great Rift Valley have proven so far to be the greatest repository of their fossil bones and those of some of their progeny. The first of these hominin fossil sites to draw widespread interest was Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where Louis and Mary Leakey discovered “Zinjanthropus,” a robust australopithecine now called Paranthropus boisei. Subsequently, their son Richard and his wife, Meave Leakey, developed hominin fossil sites farther north on either side of Lake Turkana. Still farther north in that valley, the American paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tim White developed sites in the Awash River valley, in the Afar Depression, among them Hadar, where the fossil bones of the gracile australopithecine Australopithecus afarensis (popularly known as Lucy) were found, as well as sites in the lower Omo River valley which yielded the bones of both Paranthropus boisei and Paranthropus aethiopicus.