I recently was leaving a comment on a previous post and thought it worth reposting it here.

Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza’s Death from a Distance sits on my shelf unread. It’s over 600 pages. The hypothesis is:

Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe attempts to explain both human evolution and human history with one theory, that the unique human ability to kill other humans with projectile weapons has made it adaptive for humans to cooperate with one another.

(Google summary from the Goodreads entry)

I haven’t read Death from a Distance because I believe I already know the entire theory. (I could be wrong. The authors have not returned my email.) There are 2 major issues here:

1. Apes throw
2. Apes cooperate with one another

I assume the authors then begin explaining:

1. how gradual improvements in throwing created a crisis that demanded a resolution
2. how human cognition gradually evolves in order to resolve this crisis and create cooperative society

The result is a 600-page theory that, I can only assume, follows the same Darwinian gradualism as the mainstream theories. Gradualism bloats theories.

Interestingly the authors seem to attack the mainstream theories of human violence in the opening chapters. I share their sentiments here. These theories feature the Copernican Effect, which states humans are just space dust, animals, 1s and 0s, etc. This is accepted as a quasi-religious tenet (look out for words like “humbling”) which states that we must reduce or eliminate the special-ness of humans in order to find scientific truth. They appear to agree with this, but appear also to be caught up in gradualism themselves.

To touch on their throwing theory, this can’t be the catalyst for the advent of humans, since apes also throw. And they throw rocks. Apes also improve their skills using objects for cracking nuts and subsequently teach these skills to offspring¹. There’s no clear differentiating factor in throwing itself.

Apes do use object-based intimidation. The question is, Where, when, and who did these apes begin to use it in combat? We can look at some maps to make some rough estimates.

One question plaguing the sciences is, Why did only one group of apes cross the Rubicon into hominization? Why don’t apes cross it anymore? From an evolutionary perspective, I can only assume it’s because apes don’t leave the forest anymore, not for long enough to acquire ROBA anyway. Chimps don’t cross the Congo river anymore either, but they did once. Literally once. Apes can’t swim, and so chimps and gorillas were forced to cohabit north of the Congo, chimps taking to the trees, gorillas on the ground, the two vying for food supplies. Chimps were stuck with gorillas until the droughts of the Pleistoscene era 2.6 million years ago allowed them to cross the Congo river to the southern region. Gorillas thrive in mountainous environments in the north where they retreat when the heat destroys low lying crops, but with no mountains in the south, the gorillas wouldn’t have survived. The southern chimps acquired new food options without the pesky gorillas and this somehow created bonobos². Whatever the mechanics of this chimp-bonobo split, the best minimal hypothesis is this momentary change: apes crossing the Congo.

We can imagine a similar, solitary crossing out of the forests into the eastern and southeastern woodlands. Below are sites where they found remains of Australopithecines, the supposed “missing link” between humans and apes. If that’s true, then the first migration would have been out into these woodlands.

Another map shows the harsh terrain that early “protohumans” would have entered after leaving the lush forest.

Olduvai Gorge is where many of these important “protohuman” remains were located. The terrain is brutal. Not sure how a chimp could survive here.

All this is to say that migrating from the forest to any adjacent spot in Africa is nothing short of treacherous for an ape. The standard model holds that the danger of the new environment imposed physiological and cognitive changes on this “ancestor,” introducing bipedalism, a better throwing arm, a growing brain, and language. How and when do these things kick into gear? We would assume that only upon exit from the forest do these changes kick in, much how bonobo genitals would only have changed so significantly after first exiting (allowing for a more, uh, face-to-face interaction). But other than that, the standard model and Death from a Distance give us no clear differentiation. Nothing in this migration indicates that a gradual improvement in throwing or cognition would have effected speciation. It’s certainly possible, but it’s not a minimal hypothesis. It doesn’t have the simplicity of the chimp-bonobo split.

To pick on the authors some more, gradual throwing capacity doesn’t have a clear feedback mechanism on the phenotype. Better throwing could just as easily have incentivized less face-to-face interaction and therefore less warfare. Improved throwing also takes for granted that we could even think of using objects in combat anyway. Why would hunting suddenly become combat? Chimps use rocks to break nuts for sustenance. Why haven’t they gradually improved their ability to crack open an enemy chimp’s skull? No aiming necessary! Yet these things never happen. Without ROBA, none of the downstream benefits – throwing, language, thatching – ever emerge.

ROBA Emerges

I won’t speculate on how or why ROBA emerged. We only know two things and speculate a thirdL

1. ROBA emerged at some moment
2. we’re the only ones who have ROBA now
3. ROBA produced language

Maybe once ROBA set in, we simply killed any other ROBA-potential beings that entered our turf. The variety of protohuman “species” along Eastern africa might have simply been varieties of early ROBA users, with varying physiology. By my model, if they used ROBA, they were all “human.” But I digress…

The advent of ROBA has vast repercussions since it creates the recursive loop. All gradualist theories of hominization due to fire use, dietary change, skeletal changes, language use, etc. are too vague, since all animals are candidates. All these are better understood as developments downstream from ROBA.

ROBA is the only candidate I’ve found that could trigger an acute shift in behavior from ape to human. We can see it under transition in today’s chimps which use object-based intimidation with sticks and rocks. The neural network during intimidation appears to be “reaching” for combat, but it can’t touch it. And we can assume that it never will. The two sets of axons are too far away to connect. The completion of this connection would have created ROBA and been immediate. Object-based intimidation must have led to the bridging the neurological “spandrel” between object usage and combat. I can only assume that this reaching had to endure for a prolonged period among these protohumans in some kind of critical mass. The extended reaching would have engaged these two previously-unconnected regions (object-usage + combat) and completed the loop to produce ROBA. Language might have followed immediately after this, or thousands of years later, who knows?

Technically, for ROBA to exist, 2 people must participate. Otherwise the neurological bridge can’t hold: both antagonists must wield objects for intimidation, knowing that he himself could also use it for combat, while also anticipating that the other could also use his object for combat, and their signals, Parsed in the Merge environment (in their shared moment of anticipation) would verify their shared suspicion of one another. Both would thereby acknowledge that 1) ROBA now exists, 2) human combat is now apocalyptic, and 3) humans need a new way to set the hierarchy. It’s possible that 30 of these guys could have had the same sudden realization. In fact, a larger mass of participants, all thinking the same thing, might have been necessary to quicken the speciation process.

The bridging of this spandrel had to be inherited by their children, but I don’t think it had to be genetic, not immediately anyway. With these early adopters of ROBA, the Unoptimized Merge field never closes, so ROBA is always a threat, even away from the theater of battle, even at home with their siblings and cousins, and even after the first ritual sharing of a meal. ROBA always being a threat, the spandrel is now bridged, but it functions more as a meme in the culture, a continual point of thought, something everyone would obsess over. ROBA would therefore be more of an “idea” that kids could pick up on intuitively. Meanwhile the adults are using new recursive language, which is spewing from this spandrel, to defer future ROBA episodes.

Continued use of ROBA might have folded and the brain until the spandrel was connected genetically. Children are now born with ROBA as an “idea”. This connection point is the same thing as Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD). The bridge is super simple, but its circuitous nature produces infinite linguistic potential.

1. Boesch, Christophe – Aspects of Transmission of Tool-Use in Wild Chimpanzees – in Kathleen Gibson’s Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, 1993, pp 171-186
2. Wrangham, Richard – The Goodness Paradox, 2019 – pp. 103-108