The Lost Forest
Page 54
Chapter 53
THE HUMAN TRIBE
It’s the same old question”, he laughed, ‘Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?’ Lundy asked.
‘Do you have an answer?’ HG asked half seriously.
‘Yes and no!’
‘Well!’
‘Well, human beings are by instinct social animals. We have been formed by evolution, over more than four million years of living in small groups, tribes if you like.’
‘That’s what the Bible talks about, tribes.’
‘Absolutely, but going back a little further than the Bible, when we invented fire and tools about two million years ago, our life was that of a hunter gatherer.’
‘Like the Punans.’
‘Sure, the survival of the individual and his family, living in the wild depended entirely on the survival of the larger group or tribe.’
‘Not only the tribe but various groups within the tribe.’
‘Who?’
‘Women of course, they looked after the young and the old, looked after the camp, prepared food and foraged.’
‘Whilst the men took on the dangerous tasks bringing home meat and skins, hunting and fishing, and defending their territory.’
‘Yes and they still go fishing and hunting at weekends, it’s called leisure today, fun for the boys!’
‘No, seriously the structure of human society is the result of millions of years of evolution, which has ensured man’s survival in family groups and small tribes.’
‘It’s the same today in business, the better the organisation, the greater the chances of survival.’
‘Our organisation, language and customs form human culture, part of man’s evolutionary process, it’s not a genetic attribute even though some of it is based on instinct
‘Our primate ancestors had a form of culture, as do modern monkeys and apes with an elementary form of vocal and gestual communication They had food gathering and sharing strategies as well as defence against predators. They cared for their young. All this was instinctive. As man developed, certain instincts were strengthened and other instincts were added.’
‘What kind of life did those early men live in the forest?’
‘They were basically small groups foragers; the reason for small is because small groups are more efficient than large groups, look at the orang-utans.’
‘What is the advantage of a small group then?’
‘Simple, if you are at the back of a large group then you will not find much in the area that the leaders have been through, but if the group is small they will always find enough to eat within a small radius, this also gives them security from predators.’
‘Did they hunt?’
‘Yes, they hunted and scavenged. In any case the strategies adopted by these early men were successful since they survived. If their numbers grew they separated into smaller independent groups and spread the hominid territory, gradually moving along the rivers and valleys over the mountains and into other valleys.
‘They discovered fire that meant he could cook which meant in turn that the meat they ate was tender they same went for roots and tubers. That sounds simple but with small teeth it was not easy to eat raw meat they had to wait for it to become half rotten.’
‘That’s what people do with game today!’
‘But that’s a question of taste. In any case meat eating was part of their culture and they did not have to forage all day. A deer or a wild pig could feed a family for a few days and provide them with skins, horns, teeth and bones to use as tools.’
‘What about their neighbours.’
‘Well we can see today that longhouses are very isolated even though they have canoes. So primitive man lived far from his neighbours and fought for food and territory.’
‘Which went on her for almost a couple of million years.’
‘You’re dead right there.’
‘Until only a couple of thousand years ago, at least here.’
‘Even less, men lived in small tribes; each valley was almost a different tribe that can even be seen in Europe today, like in Alsace, near to the seat of the European Parliament.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘In Alsace, there are small dialectal variations in each valley; of course they all speak a form of German, but isolation until recent times created variations that grew with isolation.’
‘So were all tribal folk.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what we are. The couple of million years of hominid tribal life formed us as individuals and groups. Man is a tribal animal. We are born like that and it will take another million years before we change.’
‘That explains all our problems today, we only have to look at the conflicts here in Borneo, between Malays, Dayaks, Chinese and immigrants from Java.’
‘My tribe is the best! My language is the most beautiful! My God is the true God! All the other tribes or nations on a larger scale are potential enemies. Conflict for food and food producing territory, territory rich in raw materials is a matter of survival. That’s what evolution has been all about, from the beginning.’
‘So erectus was like us, or are we like erectus?’
‘You’d better believe it if you’re going anywhere in life.’
‘Our ancestors lived a very hard life and survived!’
‘Was he as intelligent as us?’
‘He had to know a lot of things, remember he didn’t have books, he had to relearn everything generation after generation, he had to use his memory more than us, all knowledge was passed on by word of mouth.’
‘So our evolutionary prospects are now reduced to knowledge stored on hard disks or computer memories!’
‘If you like!’
‘They’ll probably evolve faster then we do.’
‘Who?’
‘Machines!’