Rarely does a discovery change the history of humanity and the image people have of themselves. Together with a team of Moroccan archaeologists, French paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, born 61 years ago in Mostaganem (Algeria), discovered in Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) fossils of Homo sapiens – the same species as modern humans – much older than any other remains, which were found by then (300,000 years) and in an unexpected place, North Africa, when the birth of our species was in the south of the continent. This discovery changed the geography of humanity, but also blurred the boundaries between what is human and what is not, between our species and the rest of the natural world.
In addition to being one of the world’s most respected paleoanthropologists, Hublin offers a deep and heterodox insight into his work as a researcher, as prehistory raises many questions that question us about the present, from climate change to the relationship to technology and to the other environment. . The author of numerous papers, Hublin was director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute and taught at numerous universities, from Harvard to Berkeley to Bordeaux. He currently holds the chair in paleoanthropology at the Collège de France, a centuries-old French institution that included Michel Foucault and Georges Duby. Although his place in the world lies at the bottom, in places like Jebel Irhoud, where humanity’s past and present are changing. The interview took place at the end of June at the Collège de France in Paris.
What does it mean to belong to a human species? What is a human species?
I don’t think there is just a scientific answer, but also a metaphysical one. We want there to be a clear boundary between the human and the non-human. In fact, for thousands of years, all cultures have defined this boundary between the human world and the animal world, which belongs to nature. But the discovery of evolution led scientists to question this limit. This is interesting because if we go back to the 19th and 20th centuries, the obsession was to find the so-called missing link, a sort of mediator between the primate world and the human world. However, fossils disprove this theory. Even today we still encounter the difficulty of what we should call human in comparison to other hominids. These are all representatives of the genus Homo: Homo habilis, erectus, sapiens. But in reality the boundary is much less clear than we would like. There is a tendency in paleoanthropology to humanize as much as possible what we think of as the good side of the frontier. For me it represents a great difficulty: there is no clear boundary between the human and the non-human. And it’s something logical from an evolutionary perspective.
Jean Jacques Hublin. Leah Crespi
You wrote that man is not descended from monkeys, but that man is a monkey.
It is a very special species of monkey. But it is true that when we look at the great primates of today and the relationship they have with one another in terms of proximity, of common ancestry, rather than appearance, we see that humans are closer to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are the orangutan. . Scientifically, it makes little sense to assign orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees or bonobos to one group of great apes and humans to another group because humans are very close to them. One could say that humans are very special apes who have acquired original characteristics. It is also important to remember that kinship should not be confused with similarity in appearance.
You define them homo sapiens as an orphaned and invasive species. Because?
Since we know that hominid evolution takes six to eight million years, different species coexisted for millions of years, sometimes in quite impressive numbers, which we know to be as high as eight. In total we know of 30 hominid species, some of which lived together in the same regions. This is very difficult for us to imagine today, because for us, people are, above all, unique. And it’s the same everywhere. And it is a very homogeneous species. But this situation only occurred in a very short period of time, because on a geological time scale, 40,000 years is nothing. In this sense, we are an orphaned species because all our relatives have disappeared. And we are invasive because our species, Homo sapiens, has colonized all sorts of natural environments, both habitable and barely habitable, such as arctic areas, deserts, mountains. And no species had ever achieved this before. And we are invasive because our species competes with other native species, ultimately driving many of them to extinction. And that’s exactly what many of the species we consider invasive do. A species’ influence on the environment is not a unique feature of Sapiens, it has existed before, but we have taken it to the extreme. Instead of adapting to different environments, men adapt the environment to their needs. First they did it on a smaller scale, through fire, clothing. Even in the times of hunters and gatherers, large-scale environmental changes occurred, primarily through the use of fire to change the landscape and also through the effects on wildlife. And currently, this species has taken complete control of the planet with dramatic changes that already include the climate. There are many lessons to be learned from the past: Sapiens arrive in Australia and the megafauna disappear, they arrive in Europe and the Neanderthals disappear, they arrive in America and the megafauna also disappear.
So are we experts in destroying our environment?
I don’t know if I would destroy the word, maybe because I’m an optimist. I think we can draw two important lessons from what we know about human evolution. One of them is that humans are changing their environment, and this hasn’t just been happening for centuries, it started two million years ago. To talk about the natural world, we would have to get rid of hominids entirely. Second, humanity must draw energy from the world around it and use that energy to change the world. The key is whether you do it destructively or intelligently.
Many prehistorians claim that the absence of evidence is not evidence because we have a very biased view of the past due to what may have disappeared or not been found over millions of years. Is that so?
There’s a metaphor I use often that I think sums up our attempt to understand distant prehistory: It’s like the joke about a drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight because it’s the only one is a place where there is light. There are things about the past that we do not know and that we will certainly never know. We don’t know why they drew what their languages looked like on the walls of the caves, most of the wood has disappeared. Only a small part is illuminated and the rest remains in darkness forever.
Jean-Jacques Hublin holds a replica of a Neanderthal skull.Léa Crespi
But do you think things will be discovered that previously remained obscure?
Yes, paleoanthropology is a very young science. Humanity has been studying mathematics for thousands of years, but the history of paleoanthropology goes back a long way, beginning in the mid-19th century. This explains why so many revolutions have taken place in the way human evolution is imagined, because many discoveries have been accumulated in very few generations. However, researchers and the public must be warned about a bias in the documentation: the sites of hominid fossils are in regions where these types of remains are preserved for geological or climatic reasons. When we see a map showing the distribution of this or that group in the past, it actually shows the sites where fossils appeared, but we do not know whether it is a reliable portrait of the past. For a long time we believed that only australopithecines existed in western and southern Africa. In reality, they were found in the past, and everyone went there looking for fossils. Because when you invest a lot of money in an excavation campaign, you want to get something back, and that’s easier to do in places where you’ve had luck in the past. But suddenly an Australopithecus appeared in Chad, very far from these regions. However, I’m pretty cautious about the idea that new discoveries could come along that completely change our view of the past. We often see headlines of this kind in the press, but in reality it is extremely rare for such twists and turns to occur.
Was Jebel Irhoud one of them when they met? homo sapiens much older than thought in North Africa?
Yes, but in reality the tree of human evolution is a picture that becomes clearer with each new discovery. We see things we haven’t seen before, but that doesn’t mean we start the tree from scratch, in reality it is more or less the same. However, we discover really new things from time to time. When I was a young researcher preparing my dissertation, I experienced a moment of crisis because I thought I was too late, that all the important discoveries had already been made, that I was arriving too late to a very old world. The Neanderthals, the Sapiens, had been discovered. I thought it was impossible to go further. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There have been huge advances in dating techniques and genetics that have changed the way we look at things. I tell young researchers not to worry, a lot will happen.
That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you. For example, don’t you think that the sequencing of Neanderthal DNA and the discovery that sapiens have a share of Neanderthal genes at the Max Planck Institute, where you worked, represented a real revolution?
Yes, but these are methodological revolutions. Revolutions happen in this sense: we suddenly discover a new technology that can reveal something we didn’t know. It is true that paleogenetics has allowed us to discover extraordinary things about the reproductive behavior of hominids who lived 50,000 years ago or even longer. What I believe, however, is that there is a false impression that a new discovery means that what we previously knew would be erased, that we would start from scratch. But that’s not how science works: it moves through successive additions and corrections. It is a building that is constantly being improved, that is constantly under construction. What we don’t do is replace one building with another.
But his discovery in the north of Morocco Sapiens Very old ones change history. It makes the species significantly older and occurs in places where no one has looked for it.
It seems to me to be a very significant example, because it is a discovery that fits in some ways with what we have known for a long time: that our species is of African origin. Saying that now seems completely banal. But until recently we couldn’t even imagine that our species had only this origin. Paleoanthropology is a science that was born in Europe, and at the beginning of the 20th century it was believed that sapiens were born here. On the other hand, such a discovery calls into question a model that has long been held: that there was a kind of Garden of Eden in western and southern Africa, home to the oldest Homo species. However, this discovery shows that older forms of Homo existed very far away. Another point that raises doubts about this discovery is the idea of Homo sapiens. They are Homo sapiens because they share a number of features peculiar to our species, particularly their teeth. But at the same time they have different, very primitive properties. They are sapiens, but not modern humans either. Anthropologists often use the term modern man, but I don’t like it. What does that mean? That they are men like us because of their cognitive abilities, behavior and anatomy? In reality, there is something called evolution, and it has never stopped in our species. The sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago are sapiens, but they are not quite like us. We can call them modern if we want. But are they? I don’t know it. Those who lived 300,000 years ago were even more different.
Jean-Jacques Hublin, portrayed at the Collège de France in Paris.Léa Crespi
So you don’t agree with the phrase that they wouldn’t hit us if we found them on the subway…
I don’t know, because the thing that is most similar to modern men is their face. We wouldn’t be very surprised to see them, although they would certainly have quite an impressive, very robust face. But other properties, for example the brain, are completely different. In fact, thanks to the discoveries made in northern Morocco, we were able to understand that the brain of our species develops very differently than that of other very related species such as Neanderthals or Denisovans.
Why do you think we are so fascinated by Neanderthals? Because of the idea that there are many ways to be human?
It fascinates us, but is also the subject of endless debate and controversy. I think this is because it is the final branch in the tree of evolution. It is very close to us, but at the same time clearly different. And it creates the schizophrenic effect on us that, on the one hand, we want to lure the Neanderthals to us: They are hominids, with a large brain, with very unusual behavior. But on the other hand, it is clear that there is a difference between Neanderthals and us, from the point of view of the brain, genetics…
Why are they extinct?
They are our closest ancestors. And it’s impressive that a species that survived for 400,000 years became extinct in a relatively short period of time. Evolution is the story of a great extinction. We often think of evolution as endless change, the transformation of species into other things. What actually happens in evolution, and we see this very clearly in hominids, is that life tries to adapt in every possible way to different conditions, but in the end most species disappear. There are sponges and sharks that haven’t changed for a long time. But, and this is a word I don’t like, more complex species have fairly short lifespans.
In his lectures he explains that the brain consumes a very important part of our human energy and that this has had a very clear impact on evolution. Can artificial intelligence change that?
I think it’s a very interesting topic. Evolution can be told through the energy that the brain requires, because it is an organ that consumes it enormously: in an adult it is 20%, but in a six-year-old child it is 60%. And what has happened over the course of human evolution is that some functions have been outsourced to save energy. These are initially purely mechanical processes, for example the transition to bipedalism, which is significantly more economical from an energetic point of view. Also everything related to food: we invent utensils that allow us to hunt, cut, mince and later cook meat, allowing huge energy savings in the digestive system and also changing our teeth: they don’t have to be like that anymore be powerful because these are foods that are easy to eat. All the energy we save is invested in the brain and thanks to the brain we invent other technical systems that accelerate this process. By writing, even beforehand, with drawings on the walls of a cave, we externalize part of our memory. Plato was already worried because he said that people used to know many things by heart and that today people no longer need to learn it because it was written. But in a very short and very recent time, we have gone much further in this process because when we are asked a question, our first reflex is to pick up the phone and search on Wikipedia or Google. And we have outsourced our computing capabilities with computers and now we have started to outsource some of our intelligence with artificial intelligence systems. In the end, we may end up using our brains for something else.
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