I found paradise! It existed on Earth 4.5 million years ago in Northeast Africa. And the lucky ones who lived there were the ancestors of the Australopithecus. So the head of the laboratory for the development of the human nervous system of the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Professor Sergei SAVELIEV, intrigued me. From his hypothesis, set forth in the monograph "The Emergence of the Human Brain", it follows that: there was a lot of tasty and tender food in paradise; the ancestors of people began to speak out of idleness; Adam and Eve suffered from a lack of canine teeth and tooth decay
Australopithecus jaw, teeth show signs of caries
“Paradise life”, “live like in paradise”. Homo sapiens have been repeating these phrases for many centuries, and everyone puts his own meaning into the concept of "paradise". And what is it like to live in paradise? Where did the concept come from and was this paradise at all?
- I was, - says Professor Savelyev. - Information about him is stored in our subconscious for many millions of years, however, during this time many details have been erased from the memory of mankind. But the main thing remained: paradise was a glorious place where a person did not need blood and then get food for himself, he was kind, balanced, unsophisticated, until he was fed up with abundance and something terrible happened. But more about him later. I'll tell you in order, first - how I got to paradise, exploring the history of the origin of our brain with you.
So, everyone knows that a person naively believes that he is the king of beasts. And he became such thanks to the special mental function of the brain. But how could this have happened? After all, there was no place for abstract thinking in biological evolution. The ancestors of man only knew that to get food, nourish stomachs, reproduce and escape from wild animals. No abstract thinking is needed for this. In general, our body is so arranged that any more or less tense reflections cause great harm to it. When we sleep or just rest, our brain consumes 10% of its energy. Thinking, we immediately spend 25% of the total body supply.
Why is our body so arranged?
- Because the ancient creatures never had the confidence that tomorrow they will have food. Therefore, the body's task is to save energy as much as possible so that it remains for the production of food (its modern equivalent is money) and reproduction (that is, the desire for your kind to dominate the rest).
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But then out of nowhere appeared homo sapiens, who sometimes wants to dream, to invent a time machine. And this ability of our brain, as it turned out, is also a product of biological evolution. The question arises: where did this function come from in our brain?
Probably, it appeared to better satisfy all of the above-mentioned needs: reproduction, obtaining food, etc
- For this, as they say, you don't need a lot of intelligence - our ancestors did all this without making great mental efforts. That is, food and reproduction could in no way become the prerequisites for the development of a perfect human brain, a thinking brain. At first glance, it seems that it arose contrary to evolutionary laws. You can, of course, imagine that some intelligent creature, like a breeder, selected people with large brains into a separate reservation, forced them to reproduce there separately from the main mass, to create, and then suddenly released them into the wild and they ate everyone else. But this, alas, is not so. Look around you: the most successful are not the smartest. Creators with abstract thinking are rare.
Uncontrolled paradise
Well, then why did we have a complex brain apparatus?
- Rather not why, but because of what. At some stage, humanity found itself without the control of biological evolution, falling into very greenhouse conditions.
If we look at the dental system of the earliest humans - Australopithecus, who lived 4.5 million years ago, we will see that the most interesting thing about them is their teeth. The Australopithecines had the same useless teeth, without fangs and with caries, as modern humans. It is interesting that until now no one even had a question: how did this happen? If, according to the traditional version, they ate meat or rubbed the roots with their teeth, then the ancient people should have had fangs or grinded, like elephants and mammoths, teeth. If they are not there, it means that the ancient people ate some very soft, delicate food.
It is unlikely that 10 million years ago, toothy proconsuls and toumays (pre-Australopithecus primates) were given fresh blood through a tube or they used the services of a Chinese cook. So what happened?
Here we got to paradise, if you can call it that, because it, as it turns out later, did the poor animals a very bad service, turning them into humans.
So, the ancestor of Australopithecus finds himself in some very comfortable conditions in which he lost the need for fangs, they became useless to him.
What is this place they got to?
- Until now, most scientists believe that the ancestors of people sat in the trees, and then, when the forests began to retreat, they went out into an open field, where they found a lot of food and root crops. Then, according to the traditional version, the man began to hunt by the driven method. How Australopithecus was not eaten then, no one thinks, because it is impossible to hide from predators in the field.
I believe that the first ancestors of people chose in the eastern part of Africa, in the area of the famous Lake Turkana, a coastal subtropical zone with a huge number of lakes and channels. They were brought there by food rich in protein - fish spawning in shallow water, mollusks, quite possibly even some invertebrates.
The period of life in this zone lasted a very long time, so long that the teeth of the animals changed and they turned into bipedal.
Walking upright - a consequence of fishing
By the way, why did it become more convenient for a person to walk on two legs?
- Judge for yourself: at four points you won't be able to get into the water and get a lot of caviar - you have to straighten up. By the way, bears do the same when they hunt fish. Modern primates also walk in water on two legs.
How does the traditional version explain bipedality?
- According to the traditional version, the man got down from the tree and ran after the roots - whatever you want, understand it. I believe that he only ran because of fishing. Lived on the shores, fed and migrated behind fish spawning grounds.
What else did our ancestor eat? Did he have the apples of paradise?
- Undoubtedly, some paradise plants with juicy fruits grew along the coast, but besides them, the ancients diluted their diet with poultry meat (it was most likely invisible in the spawning grounds). Well, besides the poultry meat itself, the first people could eat bird eggs.
But if ancient people had a lot of food, with whom did they have to compete?
- When everything is there, competition for females begins. With an abundance of food, the latter, by the way, gradually changed the cycle - from a year to a month. After all, if it became possible to feed the cubs all year round, it means that it is possible to breed more often. The next biological regularity, which led to competition, is dominance: whoever has a female thicker and shaggy, he leads the herd. But how did the ancient ancestor of Australopithecus, who was not distinguished by martial arts, establish dominance and attract the best female to himself? Yes, only thanks to speech! Imagine a male comes to you and says that he just went and killed a mammoth, bitten him with his own frail teeth. You believe him.
But in fact, he never went anywhere - he lied to get your attention. In my deep conviction, speech emerged in this period as a means for lying, a mechanism for imitating an action, and after it the brain also developed. Judge for yourself, because the informational part of any speech is very small. In 9 cases out of 10 in a conversation, people pursue completely different goals than those they are talking about.
It turns out that if we hadn't lied, we wouldn't have learned to speak? How did you find out that Australopithecines could speak?
“Their brains told me about it. These bipeds had a brain mass of up to 450 grams, which allowed them to chirp on some block.
Sorry, but where did you get their brains?
- It's not a problem. After archaeological excavations, many copies of the found skulls of ancient people are made. Not here, of course - in the West. So, having acquired good copies of the skulls of Australopithecus (they were found in large numbers in East Africa), I recreated the surface of their brain. According to him, he already estimated the shares due to which the person's brain began to grow. So, the speech center of Australopithecus was developed very well. I compared his brain with the brains of sick people, microcephalics (a brain weighing less than 500 grams), collected in Europe for two centuries, as well as the brains of modern microcephalics. And what do you think? Modern talking idiots have a few tens of grams less brain mass than those from "paradise". This means that these human ancestors could well, like microcephaly, joke,primitively to deceive each other … Well, then something terrible happened - the paradise period ended.
Did some sin of the Australopithecines lead to this? Who appeared to them in the form of the Tempter Serpent?
- No, I am far from church dogmas. These creatures have sinned for 8 million years, and then suddenly - bang, and in one moment everything was over! No, I don't think it was punishment. It was just that climatic changes took place, their favorite lakes gradually dried up and their favorite food disappeared. Most of the Australopithecines, not adapted to anything, then became extinct. The most agile and fastest began to strenuously search for new places for a more or less normal life.
This is how the outbreak spread of Australopithecus around the world began. And the brains that they developed during their paradise life and turned out to be too large and unclaimed, later came in handy while overcoming life's difficulties - some especially gifted representatives no, no, and some brilliant ideas arose. Having passed millions of years before modern man, we have become beings with heavier brains. However, for the majority, it still performs only a primitive function - it works in three directions: eat, multiply and dominate.