Transcription
Oh, hi there! Hi, hi. Welcome to this video. If you want to watch my previous video that leads up to this one, a link should be showing up in the top corner of your screen right about now.
In my last video, I looked at how our distant ancestors may have moved from being a grazing herd animal into being a scavenger of meat from kill sites, who then learned to assist canines in hunting. Furthermore, I argue that apes and wolves eventually formed a cross-species hunting pack. This postulation is in contrast to the standard view where we, as a species, had all on our own leaped into being a superior predator who then domesticated the inferior wolf.
Stories of origin are always very political, no matter how hard you try to be objective. This video is titled "The Authority of Stories of Origin" and asks the question: Who gets to tell our story of origin?
Ever since Darwin published *On the Origin of Species*, there has been a debate. Recently, in Western society, this has primarily been an argument between a Judeo-Christian view and a scientific view. Basically, the Christian view of human origin has been based upon an interpretation of pre-existing ancient stories collected in the Bible, and these stories have been interpreted by a clerical hierarchy and, in some cases, the followers of the religion. The scientific view has been based upon a collection of stories written in recent times by a class of professionals following the sacrament of the scientific method.
Yet, it is interesting to note that the stories of human origins that both the biblical and scientific view tell are remarkably similar. In the biblical version, humans originally live in a lush garden and are forced into a new environment after eating something which leads to a change in their very nature of being. With this change of essence and environment comes the discovery that they are naked, and "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked." Our ancestors then put on clothes and developed agriculture, and "thou shalt eat of the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."
In the scientific view of evolution, our ape ancestors first developed in jungles, then due to an environmental change, the jungles reduced in size, and our ancestors were forced onto the savannas. This less sheltered habitat did not provide our ancestors with their staple of fruit and nuts that the jungle had previously provided in abundance. Once on the at times thorny savannas, our ancestors were reduced to eating what the grasslands could provide. However, while the plant life on the savannas provided our ancestors with enough food to survive, it did not provide them with enough to thrive.
In the scientific version of our story of origin, it is generally agreed that something dramatic happened that changed the very nature of who we once were as apes, and this change led to us becoming who we are today. This idea of a dramatic change in our nature of being is not dissimilar to the biblical notion of the fall from an original state of grace.
Desmond Morris, in *The Naked Ape*, looks at modern humans through the eyes of a zoologist. Morris's basic thesis is that we are vegetarians turned carnivores. Morris's scientific study of the human animal argues that the behavior of the modern naked ape is primarily that of a carnivore, but the naked ape also remains an animal with a dual personality in that the behavior of this carnivore ape is still affected by its vegetarian origins. Morris sees the evolutionary change from being vegetarian to being a carnivore as a dramatic shift.
This brings us to the last million or so years of the naked ape's ancestral history and a series of shattering and increasingly dramatic developments. Several things happen together, and it is important to realize this. Too often, when the story is told, the separate parts of it are spread out as if one major advance led to another, but this is misleading. These things did not follow one another in any major set sequence; they blossomed together, minute advances being made first in one quality, then in another, each urging the other on. A hunting ape, a killer ape, was in the making.
Man has evolved as an animal with a dual nature. He evolved as one thing and then made a dramatic shift in order to survive and took on a very different role in the social order of the animal world. It could be said man has had two births, and this is a common motif found throughout literature and the stories we tell about ourselves. As Carl Jung puts it, the motif of the "dual mother," an archetype to be found in many variants in the field of mythology and comparative religion, is found throughout the world, and this motif of the dual descent is everywhere in the stories we tell about ourselves, in both fact and fiction. According to Jung, the idea of a second birth is found at all times and in all places. This, then, is a major archetype and has remained as an integral piece of who we are and our subconscious throughout recorded history.
But who is the mother of our second birth, and where is it best to look for evidence of this second mother? I believe we should look to our long prehistorical relationship with the canine species, going back all the way to when we were novice hunters needing to learn from the wolves we had come to rely on. Has an identification with a canine other engendered an ape with a cyborg identity, and has this resulted in a human culture that is a hybrid of ape and wolf? Furthermore, is the best place to find evidence of this primary identification in literature?
In my next video, "Totems, Taboos, and Naked Apes," I will begin by talking about Sigmund Freud and how adopting totemic behavior was instrumental in the development of our species. I will argue our first totem was the wolf, and that the wolf was, in fact, the invention of the first metaphor. It was the development that moved us beyond simple metonymic communication into the realm of full-blown language, where the use of metaphor is necessary. We identified as a wolf, and that metaphor became who we were. Metaphor gave us the gift of language. We moved beyond being a revolutionary ape, and we became the revolutionary wolf-ape we now call human.
So, if you want to be part of the pack hunting down our story of origin, remember to like this video, subscribe, make a comment below, and hit that bell as we keep tracking and hunting for the signs that are hidden in the stories we tell about ourselves.
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