Where Are the Bronze Age Beavers?

Byron Reese asks one of those questions that sounds ridiculous until it rearranges your brain: where are the Bronze Age beavers? Why did no other animal build even a primitive civilization?

We follow that question from Homo erectus hand axes and the cave paintings at Chauvet to language, memory, and the moment humans became a superorganism. Byron calls that superorganism Agora: the collective intelligence that lets us imagine a future, coordinate around it, and build it.

Transcript

Byron: The new book is called Stories, Dice, and Rocks to Think: How People Learn to See the Future.

Pablos: Stories, Dice, and Rocks to Think? This doesn't sound like a best-selling title yet. I don't know—not that I would know—but okay. It's too obtuse. Nobody has an association for any of those things. Wait, just make sure I got it: Stories, Dice and Rocks to Think.

Byron: I was going to call it something else. I was going to call it Where Are the Bronze Age Beavers?

Pablos: No. Also useless.

Byron: Let me ask you the question, though.

Pablos: I like Infinite Progress. That's a good title. Wasted is a good title.

Byron: Thank you. Where are the Bronze Age beavers? Where are the Iron Age iguanas? Where are the pre-industrial prairie dogs? How come we're where we are? And then you say, who's in second place?

Pablos: Where Homo sapiens are, and who's in second place? We killed them off.

Byron: Dolphins are supposed to be smart. I don't expect them to have the internet, but why don't they have telegraphs? What is your answer to that? Think about that for a minute. Why is there no other species?

Pablos: There's no opposable thumbs.

Byron: You could say that, but that wouldn't limit their cognition. They could still be smart.

Pablos: Maybe they're smarter than we know, but they still don't have opposable thumbs, so they weren't able to get into building stuff and tools.

Byron: Let me start it off this way. When you think of the accomplishments of humanity—that we have our cities and our laws and our heroes and all of that—that's like a billion times more than any other creature. But we're not a billion times smarter than other creatures. I might be a thousand times smarter than a dolphin, but I'm not a million. So why is my outcome that different?

Pablos: I guess my supposition is that dolphins seem to have some language, so they should be able to coordinate in groups a bit. We're doing that. That's why we're better, or more advanced.

Byron: Then you're just back to: they're not that smart. Again, you would assume they would have something by now. Let me put it to you this way.

Pablos: Maybe they do have something by now compared to where they came from.

Byron: I don't think they do. I think the beaver is building the same dam a beaver built a thousand years ago. And they don't even know why they're building it, because if you put a recording of water running in a field, a beaver walks by, he'll build a dam around it. Even if there's no water, they don't know what they're doing. That's the question I set out to answer: Where are the Bronze Age beavers? Why aren't there any penguin poets? Why aren't there any platypus playwrights?

Here's how it starts. Here's the coolest thing I've learned all year: a creature called Homo erectus, who lived from 2 million years ago to 100,000 years ago. That creature had a tool called an Acheulean hand axe. It looks like an arrowhead that's about the size of your hand, and it's shaped like a teardrop. And they knew how to make those. Over the 2 million years, they didn't change any, and even experts date them to within half a million years.

And if I put two in front of you that were a million years apart and said, which one's older, you wouldn't be able to tell. Furthermore, Erectus roamed Africa, Asia, and Europe. We have found hundreds of thousands of these now. They are so plentiful, you can buy one on eBay for $100—an actual tool used a million years ago by Homo Erectus.

Here's the fact that blows my mind. What does it tell you? We got from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in three generations. We got from the first writing to William Shakespeare in 250 generations. But 80,000 generations never changed that hand axe. You know what that means?

Pablos: My presumption is that there weren't very many. The overall population was low, so still not a lot of people. And there's a lot of dynamics that are needed for an individual, or even a group of individuals, to feel innovative. If you're busy just trying to survive, you don't have a lot of time to ponder ways of improving how you would survive.

Byron: Again, we found hundreds of thousands of them.

Pablos: That's hundreds of thousands. There's 100,000 people in this neighborhood, and they're probably not actually advancing that much.

Byron: If every erectus just tried to copy their dad's hand axe, they would vary by 2 or 3%. And then, when they spread around the world, they would vary, but they don't. And so the takeaway is it isn't a cultural object. It's a genetic object—the way a bird will build a certain nest.

Pablos: An epigenetic hand-axe code lives in your DNA if you're a descendant of an erectus?

Byron: That's right.

Pablos: The teardrop shape: they search for a stone that has that shape because it's handy to have a blunt side and a sharp side?

Byron: It's like the swallows that build the same nest. They don't gradually vary over time. And when the swallow goes to a different part of the country, they still keep building the same nest. And so that erectus was like a beaver. He doesn't know why he's building a dam. If he even knew what he was doing and just was copying another person, it would slowly change. And this one would change. The ones up there change. And they don't. They're all the same. That's the thing that just blows my mind.

But then you come to us, and we're a very different thing. 40,000 years ago, we started painting caves. And if you look at the cave at Chauvet in France, one of the very oldest, the art on it is beautiful—a famous panel of four horses. There's bears. There's lions. And they are just brilliant. You would imagine that the oldest cave art we have would start as stick figures and it would gradually get better. But it doesn't. It begins at Chauvet. But it's more interesting than that.

Pablos: Like the way my handwriting has degraded.

Byron: What's even cooler is: in Chauvet, not only did they do all that, but they had to have scaffolding because a lot of it isn't at ground level. And there was this mineral that they used to make black. The only way you could get it to make black is you have to heat it to 1600 degrees. Very hard to do. The closest source to Chauvet is 140 miles away.

They had charcoal. They could just sketch it in charcoal. But it wasn't black enough for them. These people would go 140 miles away, heat it to 1600 degrees, add fat to it to make it sticky, add talc to it to make it an extender, build scaffolding, and paint this stuff. And those were the first people to paint on caves. And those are people like us.

Those are not people who, for 80,000 generations, made the same one tool. Meanwhile, at this exact same time in history, we get the first flute—first musical instrument. Same exact time: 40,000 years ago. You get the first statue of a person, 40,000 years ago.

All of a sudden, you get this image—that we gradually improved over millions of years to culminate in us—is exactly wrong. There was nothing like us for 2 million years. Then one day it miraculously happened, perhaps to one person who got this genetic mutation. And all of a sudden, those are us. And that's what the book sets up, and from there it's off to the races.

Pablos: I don't know about the paleontology of brains, but how far back did the brain evolve to get this huge mass of brain that we have? Did Erectus just fail to get that?

Byron: The bad news is brain size grew for 2 million years. It tripled over 2 million years. And nothing happened—nothing in the archaeological record. Then it stopped growing, and that's when you got what we have.

Pablos: It stopped growing?

Byron: Correct. Our brains are smaller than those people 40,000 years ago. But that's fine. I write extensively about what was happening with biology. Clearly, something happened to us that gave us a very different outcome than other creatures. Why aren't there Bronze Age beavers? Why aren't there other creatures that have these primitive societies of their own and have rudimentary technology? Because it didn't happen. They didn't get bit by the radioactive spider that we got bitten by.

I said, what is the essential element of that? The essential element of it is, I first said, speech. If I were to ask you, what's the purpose of speech, what would you say?

Pablos: Communication.

Byron: Wrong. That's what you would think. The purpose of speech is thought.

Pablos: Maybe the purpose of language is thought.

Byron: That's what I meant. The purpose of language. Did I say speech or language?

Pablos: Speech. That's okay.

Byron: I get it now. The purpose of language is thought. My mistake.

And we don't have any organs that are dedicated to speech. Everything else is repurposed. It's a clue. Your lungs are breathing; your tongue is for eating. And we learned how to think in language before we ever learned to vocalize it. And I think the distinctive characteristic of it was that we had knowledge of the future and knowledge of the past. And that's what animals don't have.

They aren't able to recall episodic memories, and they have no knowledge of the future. We're actually the only creatures that are mortal because we're the only creatures that know we're going to die. Animals don't know they're going to die.

All of a sudden, what happened is we became this tribe of people who could now communicate. They could think in language.

It's funny because I include a quote in the book from Helen Keller, who talks about what it was like before her teacher came, and she said that she was not aware she was a thing, and she had no sense that there was time. You couldn't articulate thought.

Pablos: That's an interesting point, because Helen Keller had the experience of being an erectus. We learned the language because it was taught to us, and that helped us to think from an early age. Whereas if you didn't have that and you were trying to develop powerful thinking skills, you'd be at a major disadvantage.

Byron: Then all of a sudden we started talking, and when we started talking to each other, we became a superorganism. And so superorganisms are these things like beehives and anthills, where they're associated with high levels of differentiation in jobs—so, division of labor—and high degrees of communication. And through that, emergent behavior happens.

Your brain is sort of like that, too. It's all these neurons. And the beehive regulates its internal temperature to 96 degrees. No matter what it is outside, it can warm it or cool it. And no bee is sitting around like, ‘It's hot in here.’ People don't know how we regulate our body temperatures.

We became this super organism. If we made a plan to take down a mammoth and we talked amongst ourselves, then we are now all of a sudden a giant organism, with all these arms and legs. And we can be this new thing.

I name this super organism Agora, which is the Greek marketplace where all the chatter and all the debate happened. This human super organism emerged, which I called Agora. And that's where stories came in. We think in stories. That's their main purpose.

You think: if I go up to that bear and I do such-and-such, he'll do this, right? You start thinking about the future, and you recall things, and now you have this continuum—this time continuum. And then you start to think: dolphins don't have that. That is all going to be this very first section, called Stories, and it ends by saying: with stories, we learned how to imagine the future and to achieve it.

And then imagine another future and achieve it. And that's what animals don't have. That's why they don't have progress. It says, however, we just had the ability to imagine it. What we wanted next was a science of it.

Transcript

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