Evolution and exploration complement each other. Evolution in human beings as well as evolution in society leads us to explore and understand things. One could also argue that the urge to explore could lead to evolution but among the many unanswered questions in the story of human evolution and the intelligence that came with it, this is one of them. We may understand that human beings evolved into intelligent beings through time but how and especially why it happened so is still a mystery.
The evolution of the human brain allowed the sapiens to understand things and achieve feats it never was able to before. But that evolution didn’t just happen in the brain. Human’s ancestor chimpanzees used to walk on four legs. The human beings that developed from the chimpanzee still walked on four legs. The next phase in the evolution allowed the human being to start to stand erect on two legs, thereby freeing the other two legs, which became the hands. It gave the humans the freedom to use its hands to make tools with which it did scores of things. This was also around the time when human beings started developing larger brains because the new freedom gained by the hands allowed them to make fire and cook food. Before fire, humans ate raw meat, which took a lot of time to chew and still an enormous amount of time to pass through the intestines, which had to be much larger due to the tough food to deal with.
When food started to be cooked with fire, there was no need to chew it for a long time and still much shorter time was needed to digest it, thereby causing an evolution in the intestinal tracts to be much shorter. Both the long intestinal tract and large brains are massive energy consumers, therefore, humans could only have one. Once the intestines became shorter, it allowed the appearance of jumbo brains in the Neanderthals and Sapiens.
The ability of the humans to stand erect, use two hands for doing various tasks, and the newly larger brains didn’t come without a price. Standing erect tightened the hips, creating back pains. Especially for women, the trouble was much worse. The narrowing of the birth canal caused many deaths both for the baby to be born and the mother. This situation was made worse by the larger size of the head that humans had already evolved at this point. Gradually, only those mothers and babies survived, where the birth happened prematurely. This was the next evolutionary phase. In chimpanzees and other animals, the newly born baby is fully developed and ready to join the society as a capable member from day one. A human baby, on the other hand, is not fully developed. He or she needs to be nurtured and supported for a number of years before he or she can do the normal and easy things in a routine.
While human beings’ time was no more wasted in chewing and digesting food, it now had to spend an enormous amount of time growing the newly born baby. The one advantage that came from an immature baby birth in humans was that since not fully developed, the human baby could be shaped and molded into any manner. Hence, the need for a complex language and communication system that we came to use and love.
If human beings had not started to stand tall, we wouldn’t have reached where we have today. It was an evolution into the physical form and function of human beings that allowed them to do the things they never did and achieve what they never had. Standing tall also allowed human beings to have a farther vision of the landscape. Perhaps something similar is up next in order for homo sapiens living in a 3 dimensional world to understand the mysteries of a universe beyond our dear 3 dimensions.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 28th, 2024.
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