Read Online Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online

seem to hark back to the central creation myth of Western culture, that business of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Many of the hypotheses have been wildly speculative, seemingly based less on the evidence than on modern desires or old social mores, particularly as they relate to the roles of the sexes. During the 1960s, the Man the Hunter story was widely accepted and made popular by such books as Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis, with its famous opening line “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was man born.” It suggested that violence and aggression are ineradicable parts of human disposition, but redeemed them by proposing that they were the means by which we evolved (or males evolved; most of the mainstream theories have tended to leave females doing little but passing along the genes of their evolving mates). Early challengers of the Man the Hunter scenario, writes the feminist anthropologist AdrienneZihlman, “point out parallels between the interpretation of hunting as propelling humankind into humanity, on the one hand, and the biblical myth of expulsion from Eden, after Eve’s eating of the tree of knowledge, on the other. The authors argue that both fates—that of hunting and of the expulsion—were precipitated by an act of eating—meat in the first instance and forbidden fruit in the other.” And they argue that the division of labor—men as hunters, women as gatherers—reflects the distinct division of roles given Adam and Eve in Genesis. Similarly, during the 1960s and 1970s, the theory went that human walking evolved during a time of radical climate change, when the species was transformed from an arboreal forest dweller to a creature of the savannah, another expulsion from Eden. Nowadays both the dominance of hunting and the residence on the savannah have fallen from favor as evolutionary explanations. But the language remains: scientists now pursuing human origins not in fossils but in genes describe our hypothetical common ancestor as “African Eve” or “Mitochondrial Eve.”
    These scientists have sometimes looked for what they wanted to find, or found what they were looking for. The Piltdown man hoax was believed from 1908 to its denouement in 1950 because British scientists were eager to believe the evidence of a large-brained creature with an animal jaw. The bones suggested that our intelligence was of great age and gratified them by showing up in England. Much was made of clever Piltdown man as an Englishman, until new technologies proved him a liar cobbled together from a modern ape’s jaw and a human skull. When Raymond Dart found a child’s skull in South Africa in 1924 that, unlike Piltdown man, turned out to be genuine, it was widely discredited as a human ancestor by the British masters so pleased by Piltdown. It was discredited because the scientists of the era preferred not to come from Africa and because the skull of the Taung child, as it was called, had a small cranium but evidently walked upright, suggesting that our intelligence had come late rather than early in our evolution. At the base of the skull is an opening called the foramen magnum through which the spinal cord connects to the brain. The foramen magnum of the Taung child was in the center of the skull, as it is in us, rather than at the back, as it is in apes, and so it was evident that this creature had walked upright, its head poised atop the spine rather than hanging down from it. Like most of the skulls of the australopithecine hominids who would evolve into humans, this one looks to the modern eye like a house with odd proportions: the porch of the brow and jutting jaw is enormous, the attic where the modern brain rises isnonexistent. Most early evolutionists proposed that our human characteristics—walking, thinking, making—originated together, perhaps because they found it hard or unpleasant to imagine a creature who shared only a part of our humanity.