I think Kubrick’s 2001 would have been more correct if this ape had been smashing another ape skull. Kubrick was a fan of Raymond Dart and Robert Ardrey (author of the African Genesis and The Hunting Hypothesis). These men held that the defining moment of the “transition” from ape to man was our ability to use tools for hunting, called the Killer Ape Theory. These weapons would then “naturally” be turned against other “protohumans” in warfare. A later scene shows the apes engaged in object-based combat, but by then the Rubicon had been crossed.
This theory has a logical hole: apes and even sea otters use tools for hunting, but they don’t use them in combat, and never have, not in a meaningful way. They do not ever cross the Rubicon into hominization. If object-based hunting allowed apes to transition only once into hominids, then we have to explain why the Rubicon has been closed ever since. If it happened twice, the second time being in the supposed second African exodus ~100,000 years ago, then we have to explain why Neanderthals (part of the first wave) and Homo sapiens sapiens could have interbred, as 1-3% of our DNA comes from Neanderthals.
If object-based hunting is the “defining trait” of humans, then humans aren’t very well defined, nor very special. Some see this as a feature, as evidence that speciation is vague and indeterminate. This has been the angle of pop scientists like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and others. They hold a paradoxical viewpoint: humanness is vague, maybe chimps are slightly human! At the same time, every person, no matter how disabled, or how small the brain is (as in Microcephaly), is definitely human and has equal human rights, and we cannot force sterilize anyone. No other species can be called as a witness or acquire welfare rights. So humanness is philosophically vague, yet it is pragmatically a definite “thing” or else we couldn’t have a legal system.
The practicality of this viewpoint is absolutely zero.
Those who are not content with this vagueness seek better minimal human theories such as inc3st avoidance (Freud’s Totem & Taboo, Fox’s Red Lamp of Incest), human sacrifice (Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred), and a hypothetical threshold of danger which necessitates the creation of human language (Eric Gans, The Origin of Language). These are endemic theories, positing that the main driver of hominization was the interpersonal relationship, but these theories must also posit some kind of special moment when chimp violence changed fundamentally to human violence allowing the crossing of the Rubicon.
I believe Kubrick was wrong. His “tool” becomes a space station, as though human evolution leads us to explore space. A better transition would have been bone to ICBM.
But I think everyone’s been wrong so far. The best minimum human property has been Chomsky’s, which is only half there. He says language is what makes us human, specifically “recursion” or “self-nesting”. He’s only half-there because he doesn’t see recursion existing in anything except language. So half of his books are about language, the other half about the inanity of violence.
Chomsky’s wrong. Human violence also has recursion, the same recursion. Violence would have made more sense to him had he thought this way. But I doubt he was punched in the face or fell on concrete for a living. You live these things in stunts, and they’re highly recursive, as much so as language. Part of my project is to give a grammar to violence. I started with the 5 Stages video.
I don’t think there’s any way to gradually cross a Rubicon to go from an ape’s lack of recursion to the human’s having recursion. It’s like gradually connecting a car battery to a light. It’s either there or it isn’t. If there was a transition, it wasn’t gradual, possibly not even temporal. I have no idea how that would work, but it can’t logically work on a standard historical timeline.