What is Human?

Here you will find several modern cases of what are known as 'feral children'. These are children who, through abandonment or some other misfortune at a very young age, have been forced to live and develop outside normative human social structures; often raised by animals. An excerpt-

Jean-Claude Auger, an anthropologist from the Basque country, was traveling alone across the Spanish Sahara (Rio de Oro) in 1960 when he met some Nemadi nomads, who told him about a wildchild a day’s journey away. The next day, he followed the nomads’ directions. On the horizon he saw a naked child “galloping in gigantic bounds among a long cavalcade of white gazelles”. The boy walked on all fours, but occasionally assumed an upright gait, suggesting to Auger that he was abandoned or lost at about seven or eight months, having already learnt to stand. He habitually twitched his muscles, scalp, nose and ears, much like the rest of the herd, in response to the slightest noise. He would eat desert roots with his teeth, pucking his nostrils like the gazelles. He appeared to be herbivorous apart from the occasional agama lizard or worm when plant life was lacking. His teeth edges were level like those of a herbivorous animal. In 1966 an unsuccessful attempt was made to catchthe boy in a net suspended from a helicopter; unlike most of the feral children of whom we have records, the gazelle boy was never removed from his wild companions.

When children ARE returned to civilization, they have a very hard time adapting; and, in fact, never do to a full extent. Also, I should note the anecdotal nature of some of the literature. This kind of stuff certainly begs to be hyperbolized and distorted to some degree. Still, there is a more than insubstantial modern record of this stuff. As always, you be the judge.

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is because I was thinking about the essential differences between human beings, and the rest of the animal kingdom. And I was thinking, you know? When you boil it all down, there are really only two, with the second following naturally from the first.

The first is capacity. Human brains are simply more evolved processors: more memory, for the most part. Faster and more complex processing, I suppose. But these are quantitative differences from our lower primate cousins, NOT qualitative. I know Chomsky has some theories about embedded language capacity unique to humans, which seemed to hold up for a while, but I think maybe not so much these days. Don't argue with me about that, it's just some stuff I've run across in my reading. It's a sidetrack anyway, since I think the main word here is capacity, which differs tremendously from the idea that our humanity is somehow hardwired from birth. As can be seen from these examples of feral children, capacity doesn't mean much of squat without input. And that brings me to the second difference between human beings and the rest....

Culture. When mankind, through the processes of evolution as commonly understood, passed through that probably somewhat hard-to-define threshold, he gained the ability to recall, thus to learn, and to pass things on. Not that even this is a uniquely inherent human capability. Apes and birds have both invented and learned to use simple tool, and we know that a variety of animals pass lessons down to their offspring. But with humans, it was different.

Consider: a man and an ape making camp on either side of a dry wood. Both are hungry, and feeling a bit grumpy because of it. It hasn't been a good season for hunting or foraging. Coincidentally, and at the very same moment, both man and ape pick up a piece of hard stone and fling in to the ground in anger and futility. There is a spark at the point of impact. Some dry grass nearby starts to smolder, then ignites in a small flame. How do our pair of potential Prometheus's act?

Well, PP (potential Prometheus) the ape shrieks, and runs off. Or, if he's a little more thoughtful, he wonders in a very vague way about the connection between his action, and the subsequent fire. If he's the Einstein of all apes, maybe he tests a bit. He throws another rock, witnesses the spark, and perhaps even gleans the causal path, or at least bears witness to the correspondence. Beyond this, we have to speculate. Has any ape ever delivered his burning brand to the tribe, perhaps learned to harness its power in some way, thus learning to appreciate, nay...love, bbq? Maybe. But the discovery never seems to have 'caught fire' amongst the apes of the world at large *nyuk nyuk*.

Now consider our friend PP the man. He picks up on the correlation between flint and flame pretty quickly, and through a simple test roughly groks the causal part in usable terms. He goes back, recreating the event for the rest of the tribe, earning himself some stature and a roll in the dirt with the local Raquel Welch lookalike (sans shaved pits, of course, but who the hell cared?).

Ah, but now the most important thing! The discovery of firemaking gets documented through tale and song, and is passed on to succeeding generations. Slowly, the ways and means, as well as the uses, are both refined and expanded. Ultimately, fire becomes both the boon and bane of mankind, both a light and a consuming monster raging its way through history unto today.

This is the way humankind got out in front of the pack. In fits and starts, with bits and pieces of knowledge gleaned; and, much more importantly, SAVED. First by gesture and grunt, later by spoken word, and finally in writing. Writing was a really big deal, because a lot less got lost. Slowly, men/women built themselves a culture. But realize this! Unlike the creationists would have us believe, and how in fact most of us probably look at things sometimes- because we're often very lazy thinkers- no one man/woman, or isolated group of men/women, created civilization through ad hoc means, drawing on the knowledge of the invisible, god-given 'human spirit' for inspiration and instruction. Through a small but crucial biological superiority, man became a part of MANKIND, and it is MANKIND which is now evolving by leaps and bounds, investigating the atom, and flying to the moon (sorry, Gideon...they really did).

The reason I've introduced these examples of feral humans is to point out that man (lower case and individual) is really almost exactly the same as pre-man, with that one crucial difference that means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WITHIN THE WRONG CONTEXT. There's basically no qualitative difference, folks. But that small difference is the kind of difference that can be built upon in the context of historic MAN, and that makes ALL the difference! When we speak of the many achievements of man, we're really talking about the achievements of MANKIND. And it is all which MANKIND entails, the history of MANKIND fed back to us through various means of communication, that finally makes us men, and not just smooth apes wearing Casio watches. In a very real way, men and women are like cells in the body of MANKIND. This is partly metaphor, but also partly not. I'd like to go through some of the examples where this is literally so, but I'm burnt out now, and just want to post this damned thing. Maybe another time.