Reimagining our future in light of changing views of the evolutionary past

“The future ain’t what it used to be.” This inadvertent witticism attributed to Yogi Berra would seem to apply, at least implicitly, to a number of contemporary paleoanthropologists writing about human origins and the prospects for our collective future. In previous eras, most people in Western Europe and North America tended to think that the future would continue an unbroken line of progress from primeval primitive squalor toward sophisticated abundance in an astounding technological future. Prognosticators talked glibly about progress and expansion. Pop culture portrayed a future that would always be “new and improved.” It turns out that such optimistic talk about the future reflected deeply embedded capitalistic, colonialist, and consumerist biases.

After two devastating world wars, gulags, gas chambers, nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, climate change, widespread extinction of species, pop-up terrorism, famines, and persistent poverty, many have grown skeptical of the myth of perpetual progress, to say the least. Bringing democracy to the world has tended to have a dark underside of economic exploitation in too many places in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for realistic thinkers to continue waving that flag without some pause for reevaluation. If we still want to talk about progress, we might limit such talk to technology and communications platforms, but probably not the betterment of humankind in moral, political, or economic senses. Postmodern efforts of various kinds to overthrow Hegelian theories of history as inevitable progress have largely prevailed today.

In-between the rosy optimists and the pessimists posing as skeptics, we can find those who just aren’t sure about what the future will hold. It could be better than we can possibly imagine; it could also be worse than our darkest fears. Faced with overwhelming choices and possibilities, many simply do not know the way forward.

To find our way in the midst of massive cultural change, political unrest, and avalanches of data available at our fingertips, we can turn to a variety of resources. We can learn from those who extrapolate current trends and see what might result if things continue as they currently exist. We can also learn from those who study the future that the future rarely turns out to be what the futurists predict it will be.

We can also learn from those who study the past. To be sure, we all stand to learn a great deal from the historians. In many respects, “there is nothing new under the sun” when it comes to human behavior. Even when faced with unprecedented problems and opportunities, we can still learn something about how our forebears navigated similarly unprecedented situations. The historians, however, can only help us to learn from the most recent layers of human experience—say, the last 6,000–8,000 years. Seems like a long time until, that is, we grapple with the fact that modern humans have been around for something like 200,000 years. Even if we differentiate between “anatomically modern” humans at two hundred millennia ago and “cognitively modern” humans at 80,000 years ago with a bias toward the latter, the historians can only tell us something about ourselves for the most recent 10% of our collective existence.

Paleoanthropologists can take us much farther back in time. They can provide sketches of the distinctive pathways that our species took as we differentiated from our great ape cousins—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—over the course of millions of years. The paleoanthropologists can help us understand what makes our way of thinking and socializing unique from our closest hominin relatives, the Neanderthals. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we can learn from the paleoanthropologists about the future for two reasons. First, whatever lies ahead for us will likely be built upon and have continuity with our deep past. This is not to say that it will be the same as our past—only that there will be a dialectical relationship between continuity and change that always leans a bit more strongly on the side of continuity. Second, we can perhaps see more clearly how we are and what we are when we look at the picture of human distinctives that emerges from a study of our evolutionary past. Our imaginations about the future have to have some mooring in biological and ecological realities if they are not to drift off into a purple haze of phantasy. We cannot ignore evolutionary realities, we can only build upon them.

Three recent works in paleoanthropology shed light on our deep past while providing some resources for thinking about how to move into the future. Pat Shipman, retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, uses theoretical frameworks from the field of invasion biology to shed light on questions of human uniqueness as well as on the question of why our species still exists and the Neanderthals went extinct. As one of the most successful invasive species of all time, Homo sapiens have proved remarkably adaptive to all climates and conditions on the planet. In addition to spreading over the face of the planet, our species functions as an apex predator—a species located at the top of the food pyramid. Remarkably, our ancestors unseated several other apex predators and hunted them to extinction. In addition to our adaptability, early humans hunted cooperatively, were “coursers” (those who hunt by chasing or running down prey), and used projectile weapons in order to put some protective distance between them and their often quite dangerous prey. Shipman argues further that one of the most effective strategies used by early humans involved the domestication of wolves for purposes of hunting and protection. Also an apex predator, wolves hunt socially, are coursers, and possess significant abilities to attend to the cues of their own kind and, apparently, of ours. Making “wolf-dogs” into living tools for hunting was an evolutionary stroke of genius because together we made an unbeatable team.

Controversy continues to swirl about the nature of the relationship between our ancestors and our nearest kin species, the Neanderthals. Within only the past few years, Svante Pääbo led a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany that decoded Neanderthal DNA and compared it to that of humans. Paabo’s research shows that all descendants of European and Asian humans have 1–4% Neanderthal DNA mixed in with their own. No one is quite sure how or how often such commingling took place. Likewise, paleoanthropologists struggle to understand how it is that Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago and Homo Sapiens remain until today the last hominin species still standing. Shipman compellingly weighs in on the question of Neanderthal extinction.

She argues that early humans effectively outcompeted our close cousins. Our smaller body size allowed us to adapt more easily to a range of climates because we needed fewer calories to sustain bodily existence than the Neanderthals. We had a wider bandwidth when it came to dietary matters—they preferred a somewhat narrow range of predatory red meats, while we tended to supplement our diets with fruits, nuts, roots, vegetables, and various kinds of seafood. They were ambush hunters (leaping upon prey from hiding places), while we were coursers who used projectile weapons (making us less vulnerable to injury from close fighting with prey). Perhaps most important of all, we used “wolf-dogs” as hunting partners. The combination of climate change—which Shipman acknowledges as a factor, yet insufficient on its own to account for Neanderthal extinction—and the dramatic ecosystem changes brought about by the invasion of Homo sapiens supplemented by their co-apex hunter partners the “wolf-dogs” seems plausibly to fit the available fossil evidence connected with the demise of our larger hominin cousins. Even though Neanderthals used tools, mastered fire, expressed rudimentary symbolic reasoning through decoration and burial of the dead, and functioned as apex predators, they were no match over the long run for our wily, flexible, and partnered ancestors.

The theme of partnership as key to what makes us distinct as a species figures prominently in the most recent book by Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Following up on his 2012 book A Natural History of Human Thinking, in which he delineated the distinctive features of human cognition in comparison with our great ape cousins like chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans, this work builds on the evolution of human cognition and illuminates in complex detail the astounding relational and moral capacities of our species. Tomasello holds to the “interdependence hypothesis” to explain the rise of distinctively human morality. As a response to environmental shifts, Homo sapiens began to work cooperatively or jointly in dyadic partnerships of obligate collective foraging. In short, for reasons of survival we went beyond the parallel self-interest of other great ape collective action and developed the ability to work in genuine collaboration as “we.” The joint intentionality of “I–we” partnerships gave rise to sympathy, mutual-perspective taking, interchangeability of roles, role ideals, self–other equivalence, and shared standards with respect to the carrying out of roles. This cluster of social developments laid the groundwork for the two-pronged foundation of human morality as sympathy and fairness.

As human groups grew in size, the dynamics associated with dyadic joint intentionality were scaled up into the even more complex social systems of collective intentionality. Sympathy morphed into group loyalty and fairness developed into norms and rules that “any rational person” would affirm and internalize as moral self-governance. Cultures developed on the basis of collective intentionality and, morally speaking, this always involved negotiating conflicts between four sets of evolutionarily cumulative, but now commensurately legitimate, issues: me-concern, you-concern, we-concern, and equality concern. Particular cultures provide normative frameworks that function like “interpretive justificatory belts” around the four sets of concerns that help people within them to face moral dilemmas and challenges that activate the four concerns in varying ways.

Tomasello readily admits that this account functions as an imaginative reconstruction of how we got from the social set point of other great apes (essentially, parallel egoism) to the complexities of human moral reasoning marked by sympathy, fairness, accountability to norms, and tensive dilemmas. In good scientific fashion, he also acknowledges that some key pieces of the puzzle concerning how distinctively human moral reasoning evolved may still be missing and, therefore, that the picture he puts forward today may have to be revised tomorrow.

Yuval Noah Harari, lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, while not a paleoanthropologist by training, draws from recent work in that field to paint a grand and sweeping portrait of human history from our great ape origins to the present day. Harari treats human origins and the great Homo sapiens’ cognitive revolution as prelude to cultural developments marked by the agricultural revolution, efforts to unify large cultural groups into empires and economic systems, and the scientific revolution of the modern era. The cognitive breakthrough of our early ancestors made possible the use of fire, the cooking of food, the use of tools, the development of language, and the ability to imagine things that go beyond current observable realities (including “what if” thinking, myths, and religion). With respect to the last item, Harari—as does Tomasello—invokes “Dunbar’s number” to make the case that for any group larger than 150, humans had to invent myths in order to provide social cohesion. Any group beyond that number exceeds the human cognitive capacity to know others on a face-to-face basis. Harari notably lauds early human migratory forager bands as they were relatively free from disease and lived in primitive yet relatively egalitarian harmony.

The first wrong turn taken by human beings in Harari’s view came at a point some 9,000 years ago in the ancient Near East when nomadic hunter-gatherer bands put down roots, literally, in the agricultural revolution. He argues that “history’s biggest fraud” led to disease, conflict, poverty for the masses, and the systematic and sustained torture of sheep, chickens, and donkeys. He rues our violent tendencies toward animals of all kinds and would much prefer that we had stuck with vegetables. In marked contrast to Tomasello, Harari argues further that our species did not evolve the necessary capacities for effectively scaling up the social dynamics of hunter-gatherer bands into towns, cities, and empires. Moreover, the development of writing and mathematics served mainly as instruments of oppression of the masses by dominant elites. Hierarchies that arose from the cascade of changes to human social life as a result of the agricultural revolution also brought about the social evils of racism, patriarchy, and heterosexism. If only we had remained in nomadic bands of berry pickers!

Culture—the bastardization of our natural instincts for nefarious ends, according to Harari—eventually set the conditions for the rise of large-scale efforts to unite all people into oppressive overarching social realities. Harari argues that money, empires, and religion continued the woeful trajectory that began in the agricultural revolution. Each of these aspects of human social life has played a role in dehumanizing and oppressing us all. Things got even worse when these three socially constructed evils teamed up and reinforced one another.

The penultimate section of Harari’s history of our species titled “The Scientific Revolution” opens with a photograph of the mushroom cloud of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. This image sets the overall tone for Harari’s treatment of the rise of modern science, the myth of progress, and the insidious ways in which science, empire, and capital viciously support and feed into one another to become various forms of North Atlantic colonialist genocide. Consumerism, mass commodification of animals, ecological destruction, and digital age pseudo-community bring the reader up to the present moment. Harari ends his sweeping and increasingly apocalyptic history of Homo sapiens with an open question about our fate: “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?” (416).

The recent works by Shipman, Tomasello, and Harari shed new and sometimes provocative light on what it means to be the last hominins standing. These authors all laud the superior cognitive capacities of our kind, particularly with respect to imagining things that do not yet exist and working to bring them about. Further, our abilities to work collaboratively with one other and with dogs to survive and thrive in even the farthest reaches of the planet far outstrip the abilities of even our closest animal relatives. Even if we do say so ourselves, we are truly a wonder to behold.

At the same time, these authors give us reason for pause lest we break our arms by patting ourselves on the back. We are also the most successfully invasive, disruptive, and predatory species the world has ever known. While we possess capacities for moral reasoning and behavior, we have a horrible track record when it comes to violence, torture, destruction, and death. Due to our actions, we now find ourselves at a place in history when we might well be responsible for the largest mass extinction of animal species and habitats since a cataclysmic meteorite hit the earth near the Yucatan peninsula several million years ago. Moreover, we can now destroy millions of our own kind with the push of a single button.

Taken together, these two claims—human greatness and human despicableness—uncannily parallel one of the most basic claims in Christian theological anthropology. Simultaneously, we are created in and continue to exist in the image of God, and we live in fundamental contradiction with God, with ourselves, with one another, and with the whole of creation. Both things are true. The Shipman and Harari books end not with grim pronouncements, but with invitations for us to rise to our true character as those who care for the natural order. Though he does not want to appear overly positive about human moral life as it has actually played out, Tomasello, too, marvels at the prospect that “morality appears to be somehow good for our species, our cultures, and ourselves—at least so far.”

That last bit of Tomasello’s concluding sentence—“at least so far”—points us once again to the question of the future. Shipman, Harari, and Tomasello leave us at a crossroads. They do not know what the future will be. They only know that we stand at the threshold of momentous decisions that will have massive implications for how the future unfolds. Each one ends on an ominous note and calls us to constructive action before it is too late. In the face of a cataclysmic future largely of our own making, the two paleoanthropologists and the historian of humanity call upon us to save ourselves. By our choices, we can save ourselves, the remaining species of plants and animals, and even the world itself. In short, the future stands before us as an existential question mark. What will we do?

As a practical theologian working in the mode of ecclesial pedagogy, I always teach the seminary students in my classes that when doing interdisciplinary work in the natural and the human sciences there are two theological issues that have to be reckoned with critically: the existence of God and the pervasiveness of human sin. When scientists remain true to their own disciplinary lights, they cannot make any pronouncements about the existence of God one way or another. Scientific researchers in fields like psychology, sociology, and anthropology can only focus on matters of human religious experience, if they venture into such dicey territory at all. The field of science has to be strictly agnostic about such matters as God that go beyond the physical—despite what some recent high-profile celebrity scientists like E.O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins, might loudly proclaim. On this score, Shipman and Tomasello tend to stay in their disciplinary parking spaces. Harari is another matter. He regularly and forcefully makes religious claims, almost all of which are of a negative character. His strong and consistent rejection of any form of religion other than those that take their cues from rational observation of nature combined with several factual inaccuracies and some confusion about the facts of religious history makes me wonder if he did not come to the study of human history with certain materialist and Marxian conclusions about religion already in mind before he typed the first word. None of this, though, is really new or particularly surprising.

I did find myself a bit surprised by the way in which each of the three authors portrayed human beings in a fundamentally ambivalent light. The reader does not find in these books unqualified praise of human capacities and goodness. Though they do not use the concept of sin, they certainly do brush up against it. Human capacity for death, destruction, and evil do not receive short shift here, particularly in Shipman and Harari. Despite the anthropological realism, though, all three opt, in the end, for a kind of secular Pelagianism that calls for us to save ourselves through the making of better rather than worse moral choices.

What I did not anticipate when working my way through these engaging pieces of scholarship is the way in which they open out to eschatology. Each of them has significant contributions to make to a contemporary theological reflection on the shape and character of the future. Tomasello obliquely points in the direction of a Hegelian vision for a profoundly relational future in which humans coordinate with one another at a global level. By this I mean that his evolutionary development of human morality from dyadic joint intentionality to large-scale collective intentionality at the cultural level need not reach its terminus at the collective human level. One could reasonably speculate about another scaling up of human relationality that could encompass the entire human sphere as well as the realm of plants and animals. Why could not collective intentionality scale up to something like terrestrial intentionality? From a theological point of view, we might even suggest that something like relational cooperation among humans, plants, animals, and God could be the final scaling up into a eucharistic intentionality.

Shipman also suggests that our unique human abilities to solve problems of survival and to work in partnership with at least one other species could scale up to include a vision that entails solving problems of survival for the whole of the created order, and that calls for creative partnership with other species beyond canines. Harari, too, despite his proclivities for vegan atheistic primitive socialism, points to a central role for Homo sapiens in the shaping of the world’s future. If we could have our consciousness raised in the right way, we might come to our best senses and make choices that preserve the lives of humans and animals alike. It might not be too late after all to reclaim our original vocation as tenders of the earth and its creatures.

And maybe these authors are more theological than I have given them credit for being. Are they really wrong, after all, to say that the salvation of the world lies in human hands? The shape of the future doubtless does lie in human hands outstretched in compassion for others and for all of creation. From a Christian point of view, we might want to say that we can “remember the future” by looking to a specific moment in the past when human hands were spread out in compassion on a Roman cross.