I recently finished Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth today. While he doesn’t question the idea that the last common ancestor (LCA) of humans and chimps was an animal (I say there’s no evidence of this; chimps could also be genetically “broken off” from a human lineage that have different chromosome counts, yet were able to continue reproducing in ways perhaps no longer possible), he at least acknowledges that the comparisons between humans and primates have been vastly overstated. In fact we’re far less like primates and far more like dolphins, elephants, and other herd animals. These traits include suicide (dolphins and whales), sociability (elephants and rats), following instructions (dogs), pair-bonding, complex communication, and many others. Chimpanzees basically feature none of these traits. They do like jokes, though, but I would hardly count this as much of a similarity. Human humor is, at its basest level, sacrificial, and at its highest level conversion-al, both of which are highly religious.
Leaf never really treads into religion, which is unfortunate. He follows the standard line of “we used fire to cook more meat to get more calories which made our brains bigger” hypothesis that Richard Wrangham made over a decade ago, which is not compelling at all. Far more compelling is the idea that fire is primarily a means of offering food to the god(s) or at least participating in eating with them. Just ask anyone with a religious bone, which used to be everyone.
The other main issue I had with the author is that he, like every author, fails to see ROBA. And I think that if you believe that we gradually (however quickly) evolved out of an ape-like animal, it makes it basically impossible to see ROBA. ROBA becomes occluded. I call this gradial occlusion, and I think the entirety of human sciences are suffering from it. Sad. By acknowledging ROBA as specifically human, you not only begin questioning the primate-to-human transition theory, but you also have a huge tool for understanding domestication, both human and non-human. By my measure, ROBA produces vastly larger changes in the human phenotype than random genetic variation, which can hardly keep pace. On that note, Leaf unfortunately barely talks at all about domestication, neural crest cells, and other emerging sciences that are really changing the discussion.
Basically, if ROBA is endemic to the human genetic line, then you could technically hypothesize all these other herd animals breaking off from it millions of years ago as domesticated variants. Gradial occlusion makes ROBA invisible to mainline scientific thinkers, so they will never produce such hypotheses, and would probably consider them totally insane. I’m not saying this is actually what happened, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than hypothesizing a transition from non-ROBA to ROBA.
2/5
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