Who Was Homo habilis—And Was It Really Homo?

Who Was Homo habilis—And Was It Really Homo?

Compare this article with the Wired science article from last week which questions the origins of erectus. "New Fossils Push Homo Erectus Origins Back to Asia" | Wired Science | Wired.com

Archaeologists unearth Britain's first 'construction boom' | Culture24

Archaeologists unearth Britain's first 'construction boom' | Culture24

Are humans extinction-proof?

Are humans extinction-proof?

Stop On Red! The Effects of Color May Lie Deep in Evolution… | Science Blog

Stop On Red! The Effects of Color May Lie Deep in Evolution… | Science Blog: "

The play of color on emotion and behavior is intriguing, and seems to offer a lot of promising fodder for fiction writing. What strange superstitions were some of the primitives able to build based on the strength of their manipulation of the fears of their fellow people? This is actually one of the central themes of Totem, yet I didn't think to exploit the use of color on this level. I incorporated the use of various colors by the rulers in the novel as a means of showing status and manipulating their people, but I hadn't thought of making any real psychological connections. Although on the other hand, if color does display status then it must be rooted in the brain somewhere.

New Fossils Push Homo Erectus Origins Back to Asia | Wired Science | Wired.com

New Fossils Push Homo Erectus Origins Back to Asia | Wired Science | Wired.com

This is certainly an interesting fact in the record of man. Homo Erectus fossils have been found dating back 1.8 million years in the Caucus Mountains. This is prior to their dating in East Africa.

Fishing has driven evolution of smaller Alaskan salmon - environment - 07 June 2011 - New Scientist

Fishing has driven evolution of smaller Alaskan salmon - environment - 07 June 2011 - New Scientist

Since I love to fish this idea intrigues me greatly. It also seems at least likely that increased pressure on larger fish has caused these Salmon to decrease in size by some five percent in sixty or so years. Size is a heritable trait. But it also leads me to wonder what we mean when we say evolution in this case, especially if the size these fish now measure and the size they formerly measured are just part of the creatures possible range? Take the larger ones out of the pool and the species is what you're left with, but even this is evolution of a sort, but is not "evolution" in the context many would think of it, which is really more of a speciation.

Robots show the evolution of altruism | ECN: Electronic Component News

Robots show the evolution of altruism | ECN: Electronic Component News: "Robots show the evolution of altruism"

University of Utah study shows that men hit harder on two legs | Deseret News

University of Utah study shows that men hit harder on two legs | Deseret News

Well, if this were true, how ingrained is violence in the human species in general? And not just in the most violent, or the best violent males as they were those who carried their seeds on into the next generation. This process, which rewarded violence, would therefore change the whole population over time. In a way it means that men were programmed over time to be better at being violent, which got them on two legs, and women were conditioned to choose those males who were the most efficient fighters. In other words, women rewarded the winners.

I don't know how well that bodes for writers, where do we fit in this survival of the best violent. At least there is the slight consolation that those apes that stood to fight were using their brains to win more than just brute force.

Chris Moore

7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes | Cracked.com

7 Animals That Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes | Cracked.com

While these creatures have not truly "evolved"or actually speciated as they can probably still interbreed this cracked article is a humorous look at the changes man has forced on animals.

Quest for Fire

QUEST FOR FIRE:<BR>In the search for what made us human, a new take on the importance of fire<br><I>Sky Valley Chronicle Exclusive</> | FEATURE NEWS | Sky Valley Chronicle Washington State News

This is a fantastic article in favor of the idea that humans didn't just learn to harness fire. But they were actually shaped by it, having lived in the Rift Valley beside a 200,000 year running lava flow, which gave them easy access to fire and cooked food, which in turn allowed them a high protein, more easily digestible diet that led to the big brains we have now. And while I prefer the idea that man harnessed fire cause by lightning strikes out on the grassy Savannah as advocated in my novel Totem, this is an endlessly fascinating hypothesis that's worth looking into.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie: Schools Can Teach Creationism

NJ Gov. Chris Christie: Schools Can Teach Creationism

Human Exceptionalism: Evolutionary Theories Don’t Cut It » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog

Human Exceptionalism: Evolutionary Theories Don’t Cut It » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog

Joseph Campbell and the Unity of Mythology

Chris Moore

There is a wonderful quote at the beginning of  each of Joseph Campbell's books in the Masks of God series that nicely sums up his work and is applicable here to the creation of evolution ficiton. Campbell wrote that the result of his twelve years working on the books confirmed one of his long held beliefs:

"of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge."

This is a large piece of text to take in all at once, I know, but the point is that in the beginning, man was united. Meaning, for Campbell, and for those who believe in mitochondrial Eve, even those who believe in Genesis, back in the mists of time there was only one group of humans closely grouped together and sharing a mythology. From that point, and after years and years of exploration and adventures man inhabited the earth, but he always took with him biological marks of his common ancestry and, somewhere tucked inside, the memories and myths of his earlier people.

But what does this mean for the writer. And here it should be plain enough, but Campbell in the same passage gives the answer when he writes: "I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still..." His book, as he says, furnishes those motifs and suggests "ways in which they might be put to use by reasonable men for reasonable ends--or by poets to poetic ends--or by madmen to nonsense and disaster." This passage opens up the wonder and possibility of the past for the next stage of human life and mythology. It's only for the poets of the moment and in the future to take them and help to create the reality we live in.

Respect the Ancestor

Levi Strauss and Evolution Fiction

There has been a trend among authors of fiction about the prehistoric past to paint their human characters as, while not exactly stupid, then either childlike or ideological. The primitive characters are not only ignorant but their thought patterns and cultural arrangements are modernly atavistic and retarded at some lesser stage of human development. In other words, authors generally paint their primitive fiction characters as stereotypical cavemen, whose beliefs are not only irrational but unscientific and anti-modern.

The problem is that this is an arrogant view of human primitive history, and this modern, euro-centric view should not find its way into fiction. Primitive man was not simply, or at all times, a slave to and of their savage environments. And though they would have been in danger of attack, or drought, or climate change, and vulnerable at so many times of their lives, our ancient ancestors were certainly capable of accurate thought. Claude Levi-Strauss in "Myth and Meaning," called this "disinterested thinking." Which is a form of thought that proceeds by "intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do." To be fair, Strauss follows this statement by arguing that primitive man's thinking was not in fact the same as scientific thinking, in that primitive man sought to find a total understanding of his world and used mythology to do so in an illusory manner. Whereas scientific thinking moves "step by step" seeking only to prove those things that it can prove. Yet the idea that primitive man could think disinterestedly and "scientifically" about his world and that, in order to survive he had to have an intensely accurate picture of his surrounding environment, knowing the local plant and animal life better than we know our super markets or local road systems, is to say that he was closer to us than we give him credit for.

And while primitive man would have had a total mythology that while descriptive was less than accurate, its narrative gave his life cohesion and order, which is somehting it seems that man everywhere in everytime has sought. Just think of things that people tell themselves today. While there is not a single cohesive narrative that all westerners tell themselves, to think that myth is not alive and well is to believe in a very different myth all together.

This is to say that primitive man was thinking and active, and every bit as modern as we are now, though he did not have the internet and he did not believe that he was detached from his natural environment. And that writers of evolution fiction should take into account  that man at all times was always man. He may have been ignorant of many things, but he was not stupid, nor, as many like to depict him, was he blinded by modern ideology. What primitive man did had to work. If it did not he died. There was no room for a cosmogony or political view that could not help him to live, and this should be expressed in our fiction about the prehistoric past.

Feature: Exploring the bounds of human genetic diversity

For anyone writing evolution fiction the implications in this recent Life Scientist article can be amazing so long as writers avoid the typical eugenic pitfalls that so many writers of the late 19th century fell into. But, a side from those objections, exploring the exceptional diversity of  humans is an incredibly fertile field for fiction. 

Tim Dean 

Did you know that there is more genetic diversity between two individuals living only 800 kilometres apart in the Kalahari desert in southern Africa than there is between a European and an Asian living half a world apart?

If it wasn’t for the southern African genome project, co-led by Vanessa Hayes, no-one would have known this remarkable fact about humanity.  More....

Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

This article from American Scientist has interesting implication for evolution fiction because it suggests that human beings were always modern. There was no time where people were just brutes. At the moment that they (we) were anatomically human, we were, in effect, human, and behaved accordingly. We may have been ignorant, but we were not stupid. The reason this is an opportunity for evolution ficiton writers is because characters can and should plausibly exhibit complexity finally stepping out past their cavemen portrayals. They were us.

Homo sapiens emerged once, not as modern-looking people first and as modern-behaving people later.

John J. Shea

For decades, archeologists have believed that modern behaviors emerged among Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years after our species first evolved. Archaeologists disagreed over whether this process was gradual or swift, but they assumed that Homo sapiens once lived who were very different from us. These people were not “behaviorally modern,” meaning they did not routinely use art, symbols and rituals; they did not systematically collect small animals, fish, shellfish and other difficult-to-procure foods; they did not use complex technologies: Traps, nets, projectile weapons and watercraft were unknown to them. More...

Stephen Baxter: EVOLUTION

Evolution follows a fictional course of primate evolution up to and beyond the reign of humans. The novel focuses on moments of change and tension which lead to conditions necessary for the evolution of species. Those who can adapt and survive live on to bring about the next generation giving their lines a chance to transmit their kind into the future.

An interesting feature of the novel is that it also traces certain dead ends, even following some species which are trapped on the moving landmass of Antarctica where they will eventually die out as the climate gets colder and the ice caps overtake the continent. In this aspect, Baxter shows  courage for allowing his narrative to follow a meandering uncertain path that mimics, in a sense, the actual path of selection and speciation. In this respect, the work is enhanced by these strange dead ends, which in effect symbolize nothing, but you see the dire consequences both of choice and chance on the future of a species or group which can lead to extinction. You also get to see the pivotal moments as certain primates slowly pull themselves from the forest to become human and beyond. And at times you can feel how inconsequential and fleeting our shared moment of dominance is.


Change is the novel's recurrent theme, and in this I greatly admire the work, as Baxter dramatizes great moments of advancement which come about nearly accidentally or as the result of immense pressure which certainly makes it a great work of evolution fiction. The novel is also written well enough that you feel a sense of empathy for the different creatures and their merciless dilemmas without recourse to Walt Disney style sentimentalism or any overt ideological bent. Despite the fact that Evolution is not a conventional novel in any sense it is a book well worth reading.  

New Genre???

Yes. We need a new genre, and not just because I wrote a novel which I consider evolution fiction. I didn't start from the premise that we needed a new prehistoric fiction genre. Instead, I wondered about the invention/discovery of fire. I thought, what if a boy living in a really backward tribe had one day decided  to play with a small clump of dry grass lit from a lightning strike? And what if when he did this he was observed by one of the warriors of his culture and taken back to the tribe for his punishment? A punishment that the leaders were more than happy to give him as they needed a scapegoat to blame the drought on. But then he escapes.

Now, more or less, that's basically the story of Totem, but when I finished writing it and turned back to look at the market and to place it in its proper genre, I noticed that so much of what is called "prehistoric ficiton," which is where Totem would truly fit, was really nothing like Totem. The difference between what I wrote and the genre that's supposed to represent it is the difference between Batman and Robin on one side and the Dark Knight on the other; or it's the difference between Clan of the Cave Bear and Totem. And not only did I not want to be associated with that stuff, I thought it was totally inaccurate to represent the book as something it was most certainly not.

I also knew that there was more story left in the Totem world that fit the idea of natural selection. In the novel, I only tied up the direct loose ends, but there was a whole world of problems for the tribe outside of the struggle of one little boy turned violent young man. In fact, there was a struggle for life in a harsh and changing environment that speaks so well to the idea both of evolution properly understood, and the sort of "pop" evolution, or cultural evolution where a group of individuals will have to learn to change and to adapt to an indifferent natural world that is in convulsions or they will die.

The prehistoric aspect of that comes in because it is in a time and place before records, but since the prehistoric fiction genre has ossified to be a certain thing, and Totem has its own style and purpose, I knew it would be better off in a category that was friendly to its nature; therefore, this blog and the term "evolution fiction." But this is not to say that Totem is a genre to itself, there are plenty of books about the prehistoric past that share the drive and sentiment of Totem. Specifically, a book like the original Tarzan, which is so far from the Disney movie as to be funny. But Tarzan is perfectly in line with the idea of evolution fiction. There are plenty of others also. For current works of evolution fiction, I could use help in finding more authors who write about prehistory who don't adhere to the recent pattern of the genre and who are, at least to my eyes, writing evolution fiction.

Chris Moore
chris@crmooreauthor.com

Why Lord of The Flies?

Why should I consider Lord of the Flies a work of evolution fiction when it is clearly not about any sort of prehistoric past? The answer is simple. First, William Golding was no stranger to the prehistoric ficiton genre. He had written prehistoric fiction  prior to writing Lord of the Flies. In 1955, Golding published The Inheritors, a story following the final extinction of neanderthals by a competitive brand of humans. Golding, as a novelist, clearly had the misty history of man on his mind. And when he wrote Lord of the Flies he was able to set his novel in a place where the niceties, or paint, of tradition and civilization were stripped away and what remained was the core of man--both its beauty and its ugliness--which was at one time a staple of the prehistoric genre and is now a principle of evolution fiction. By using the secluded island and a band of boys, Golding explored the essence and growth of man without having to set his novel in some far away epoch.

The second reason that Lord of the Flies falls into the evolution fiction genre is because the subject matter of EF is the same regardless of time or age. Lord of the Flies is an expression of survival under dire circumstances without the mushy romanticism of more recent prehistoric ficiton and what some people can and will do in this position, and this is exactly the territory that evolution fiction charts out. Lord of the Flies is EF because the boys on the island must struggle against both nature and the perverse actions of other men, which is a theme central and dear to the evolution fiction genre as a whole.

Whereas in the last twenty years, and while still narrating the struggles of man's distant past, prehistoric fiction has become, well, soft. And while the subject matter might on its face be rather dire, its treatment is romantic in the feel good sense of the word. Gone is the struggle, beauty, and violence of the murky pagan past. In its place, and in the name of prehistoric fiction, writers craft tales more fit for sheltered house wives and aging and equally sheltered males.

In this treatment, the strength of man is papered over for ideology and moralism. Even the hard face of nature and the triumphs of people and the excellence of their achievements is muddied in the waters. And this is what Golding did not do in either his prehistoric fiction or in Lord of the Flies. In Lord of the Flies he was able to express a feeling of life, not simply a comment on war or human nature, that speaks to what is at the heart of evolution ficiton and is a necessary correction to the prehistoric fiction in favor now.