The Human Revolution [and Comments and Reply]

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. THIS ESSAY attempts to set forth the story of the emergence of the first humans from their prehuman ancestors. A special feature is that we have tried to incorporate the various steps and stages of the evolu-tion of language into the total picture.2 We dedicate this essay to the memory of Paul Fejos, whose encouragement, over a number of years, played an important part in bringing the work to fruition. The inquiry into human origins is a collective task to which hundreds of investigators have contributed. Virtually none of the proposals in the present paper are our own. Even for the ways of thinking about the evidence that seem to be fruitful, we are com-pletely indebted to our predecessors. We do accept responsibility for the particular way in which we have chosen among alternative theories, and for the way in which we have tied them together. We believe that the time is ripe for a synthesis of this sort, if only as a clear point of departure for the further investigation of both method and detail. The term "revolution" in our title is not intended to be flamboyant. A revolution is a relatively sudden set of changes that yield a state of affairs from which a return to the situation just before the revolution is virtually impossible. This seems to be the sense of the word intended by V. Gordon Childe (1936) when he speaks of the "Neolithic Revolution" and of the "Urban Revolution." But these two revolutions were experienced by our fully human ancestors. The second could not have occurred had it not been for the first. The first could not have taken place had it not been for an even earlier extremely drastic set of changes that turned nonhumans into humans. These drastic changes, as we shall see, may have required a good many millions of years; yet they can validly be regarded as "sudden" in view of the tens of millions of years of mammalian history that preceded them. For the reconstruction of human evolution we have evidence of two sorts, plus certain firm and many