Evolution is the citadel that everyone from religious nuts, political carpetbaggers, serious scientists and the sci-fi crowd is ever eager to storm. It is also the stormy petrel of faith, an idea without which history would simply be a line in the sand. Living beings are wired to evolve as a species, individuals, nation and society until they are upgraded to First Class on their final journey from the place they occupied at their acme in history. If evolution is an unavoidable elitism, a civilisation’s smirk indicating that it has arrived, remember, the yang of arrival is departure. In between exists the great continent of complexity.
Biologists say cranium size matters in successfully performing complex tasks; the more complex the job, the more evolved the performer. The more evolved the performer, the bigger the brain. Recently, a team of paleontologists discovered a number of prehistoric, covered-up holes in the Earth in the ‘Rising Star’ cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg. It turned out to be the oldest-known burial site in the world.
This discovery upended some known theories on human smarts. The 100-ft deep graveyard contained the remains of several Homo naledi, a species of Stone Age apes who could climb trees and lived in 200,000 BC thereabouts. The holes were intentionally dug as graves two lakh years ago, and then filled in to cover at least five corpses. Clearly, burial practices were not restricted to the social actions of humans or primates with large brain sizes who came later. Since small brains most likely have swollen heads, some Indian politicians will be unsettled by the fact that the Homo naledi is a crucial link in the chain connecting apes and people. The dead hominids had brains the size of oranges.
Discovering that fruit-sized brains countless millennia ago could perform complex social tasks is like suddenly being told that Zomato delivers on Mars. For god-fearing people who are certain that On the Origin of Species is a Left-liberal toolkit to discredit divinity, grave-digging monkey ancestors are baffling. A primeval deepfake, perhaps?
The South African graveyard shift is going to seriously upset some people; Rightwing textbook tamperers, Bible-thumping American Midwesterners and maniacal mullahs are guaranteed to go apeshit, pun intended, at the thought that social evolution is even more ancient than believed. The take of Agustín Fuentes, the Princeton anthropologist who co-authored the subsequent study, is that “burial, meaning-making, even ‘art’ could have a much more complicated, dynamic, non-human history than we previously thought”. Ignorance and bigotry have made landfall after two centuries of scientific discoveries corroded Conservative notions of social order, religion and economics. The world around, knowledge is being besieged everywhere. Science is being questioned, and centuries of research dismissed by demented demagogues. Their maxim is simple: ‘What can’t be seen doesn’t exist.’ Never mind electron microscopes, the Webb telescope or even X-rays.
Both faith and science pursue the same mystery: life. To give it meaning is the ritual of remembering our transient insignificance amid the vast swirling galaxies where shards of the Big Bang still spin somewhere, riding the cosmic chaos from which arises all order. Meaning is what knowledge gives it. A long lost grave of an extinct species proves that the timeless voyage of discovery continues through storms big and small.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com