Reference essay
The View from Here
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Climbing is the easy part. This book pictures human history as a spiral staircase that turns at fire, agriculture, industry and the digital world. Every turn was taken by people who could see the improvement in front of them, and none of them had to think about the descent.
What they could not see was the cost: each turn took away some of the everyday signals a human body evolved to read, a gap called mismatch. This last chapter asks how to win those signals back. The steps are small, and the evidence behind them is uneven.
Sources cited above
- 1.Brunet, M., Guy, F., Pilbeam, D., Mackaye, H.T., et al. (2002). "A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa." Nature, 418(6894), 145-151. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature00879; dating: Lebatard, A.E., Bourlès, D.L., Duringer, P., Jolivet, M., et al. (2008). "Cosmogenic nuclide dating of Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Australopithecus bahrelghazali: Mio-Pliocene hominids from Chad." PNAS, 105(9), 3226-3231. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0708015105. Chapter 2 sets out the competing candidates, the disputed thigh and limb bone evidence, and the case for and against each. (the oldest candidate is a skull recovered from the Djurab Desert of Chad, dated to 6.8 to 7.2 million years old; whether it walked upright or mostly climbed remains unresolved)
- 2.Berna, F., Goldberg, P., Horwitz, L.K., Brink, J., et al. (2012). "Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa." PNAS, 109(20), E1215-E1220. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117620109 (described by its authors as the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context).
- 3.Roebroeks, W., and Villa, P. (2011). "On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe." PNAS, 108(13), 5209-5214. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018116108
- 4.Hublin, J.-J., Ben-Ncer, A., Bailey, S.E., Freidline, S.E., et al. (2017). "New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens." Nature, 546(7657), 289-292. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22336; Richter, D., Grün, R., Joannes-Boyau, R., Steele, T.E., et al. (2017). "The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age." Nature, 546(7657), 293-296. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22335 (315 ± 34 thousand years).
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