The Origins of Noble Savagery

The Origins of Noble Savagery

There are essentially two schools of thought on what life was like for early humans: Thomas Hobbes’ famous quote that life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and the popular Western image of the “noble savage” that dominated literature and archaeology in the Victorian era. In our modern era, this view has been termed the “Garden of Eden” conception of early humanity, as expounded by Ponting in his book, A Green History of the World: a fruitful, easily productive environment that allowed its inhabitants a heavenly existence living in connectivity and harmony with nature. The difference between these two polarized views is essentially the difference between idealizing and condemning early humanity through its evolutionary stages from ape to Homo erectus.

In her article “Modern Human Origins,” Mary Stiner raises the question of whether the evolutionary transitions from H. erectus to H. sapiens to H. sapiens sapiens were sudden, occurring among one or two populations and allowing the rest to die out, or gradual, with evolutionary change and adaptation spreading slowly among populations all over the world. The boundary of transition to modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, is traditionally defined at approximately 35,000 years ago.

Stiner argues that it was at this point that early humans began learning from and putting into practice the advanced hunting techniques of the wolves, big cats, and other large predators cohabiting their environments. If, as she suggests, the transition to humanity was marked essentially by new, sophisticated methods of hunting and predation, methods that could later be adapted to use in warfare among humans, then our origins do not very well fit the “noble savage” conce...

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...t of modern humans. This date fits well with the “jump” evolutionary theory, that early humans developed slowly into H. sapiens but as soon as they reached a crucial point in sophistication they suddenly “became” more modern as a whole, with the entire species poised in readiness to evolve and learn. Now, however, scientists are studying new finds in France and old ones in China and, according to Michael Balter in Science magazine, some have pushed back the date of our earliest fireplaces to approximately 465,000 years ago. Fire use is not widespread since that period and has only been found in a rare few scattered sites, providing support for the gradual evolution theory and giving H. erectus due credit as the ancestors of modern humans, rather than as a breed of noble savages, living natural lives and innocent of any connections with us, the modern world-ravagers.