The spear wasn’t our ancestors’ only weapon. At some point in the distant past they developed something very new: the slingshot like the spear gave our ancestors the ability to strike and kill at a distance. ibid.
This ability to plan ahead was something our hominid rivals lacked. ibid.
Another advantage we had was language. ibid.
Imagination, the ability to visualise what can’t be seen, would prove another defining advantage for our species. ibid.
Like us, [Homo] erectus are believed to have lived in small family groups; there is evidence they cared for each other and looked after the sick and injured. ibid.
Recent studies suggest that [Homo] erectus were infected with tapeworms which you get from eating raw meat. It seems erectus liked his food red and bloody, even though he could have cooked it. ibid.
Above the ash only our tools are found. The lack of evidence of erectus after the Toba eruption suggests that they might have been wiped out of India never to return. In other parts of Asia they hung on. Fossilised skulls from Indonesia show Homo erectus living here as recently as 30,000 years ago. A descendant of theirs – Homo Floresiensis, nicknamed the Hobbits – lived until about 18,000 years ibid.
Socially too Toba left a mark on our species. Evidence reveals that social networking in surviving humans increased. ibid.
This is our world. We have shaped it in our image. Made it our own. We are now the only humans in existence. Absolute rulers of the Earth. Planet of the Apemen: Battle For Earth II
Why against the odds did we win the battle of planet Earth? ibid.
32,000 years ago a new species of human was spreading out across Europe. Southern France. The colour of their skin betrayed their African origins. Homo sapiens hadn’t been here very long and there wasn’t very many of them. These people were modern humans. They were our ancestors. As they spread out across our continent they entered the territory of another species – the Neanderthals. ibid.
That physical power was complimented by another vital asset. So as well as having significantly larger bodies Neanderthal had considerably larger brains. Making them a formidable enemy. ibid.
This is a film about one very simple question: how did we get here? Professor Jim Al-Khalili, The Secret Life of Chaos BBC
Almost 99% of the human body is a mixture of air, water, coal and chalk, with traces of more exotic elements. ibid.
For the first time I believe Science has pushed past Religion and Philosophy in daring to tackle this most fundamental of questions. ibid.
There is a strange and unexpected relationship between order and chaos. ibid.
Morphogenesis ... The cells begin to clump together and become different from each other. How does this happen with no thought, no central coordination? How do cells that start off identical know to become say skin while others become part of the eye? ibid.
Turing was on to a really big bold idea. ibid.
The wonders of creation are derived from the simplest of rules. ibid.
The whole idea of self-organisation seemed absurd. ibid.
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings. Franklin Thomas
The twentieth century, according to Sigmund Freud, would see man’s capacity for both destruction and technology bring us closer to extinction. As his prophecy came close to reality a new breed of thinker emerged who would try to steer humanity away from disaster. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words 1/3 Human: All Too Human, BBC 2011
1938: A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria arrived in the leafy suburbs of Hampstead. Already viewed as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century he had spent decades looking into the secrets of the human mind. His name was Sigmund Freud. ibid.
Freud saw an irrational side to humanity which he was determined to put on the couch. ibid.
Jung had formulated his own ideas: he believed that each of us has an individual destiny which was achieve through a process of individuation. ibid.
Jung believed each of us must face up to our own dark side. ibid.
Another thinker would go on to find wickedness not in the individual but in the very structure of society. Stanley Milgram was born in New York to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the ’20s. ... He began to ask unprecedented questions about the human capacity for cruelty. ibid.
[Stanley] Milgram’s results would stun the scientific community. ibid.
‘Ordinary people are easily integrated into malevolent systems.’ ibid. Milgrim
The idea that most of us are capable of performing acts of cruelty simply because someone tells us to forces us to ask key questions about how we structure society. ibid.
In Britain a radical Glaswegian psychoanalyst R D Laing was using television to speak out about his views on the sickness in society. ibid.
Laing was a popular and a persuasive lecturer who insisted doctors should listen to their patients instead of abusing them. He believed much of what we call insane behaviour could be explained by family circumstances and life experiences. ibid.
Across the Atlantic admid the turmoil of the 1960s a group of thinkers came on to the scene who believed that society could be cured and that human behaviour could be improved. One of these was anthropologist Margaret Mead. ibid.
Like Laing, Mead suspected that Western anxieties and problems were caused by the values of our society. ibid.
[Margaret] Mead had been roundly debunked, though some still think her theories have merit. ibid.
Later Spock wrote a book – Baby and Child Care – which changed for ever the way we relate to our children. ibid.
B F Skinner believed he had found an all-embracing antidote to the ills in society. ibid.
Skinner was the most radical practitioner of behaviourism. He believed that each person starts out as a blank slate and is moulded purely by their environment. ibid.
Skinner’s successes were seen as momentous achievements, and his work lives on in every child and employee reward system around the world. ibid.
What Skinner seems to have missed was that humans are not simply blank slates. Each of us is born with innate qualities which affect our behaviour. ibid.
In the latter part of the twentieth century a group of British thinkers emerged who would offer radical new ideas about what makes humans tick. These thinkers would take their cues not from humans but from animals. Enter Desmond Morris who started his career as a zoologist. ibid.
The book that made Morris’s name was The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal, and it had a shocking new claim at its heart: much of our normal human behaviour is derived from our animal ancestry. ibid.
Goodall did publish, and some did draw the conclusion that violence in humans and chimps is impossible to avoid. ibid.
Are we slaves to our natural instincts or can we master our behaviour? ibid.
In 1976 Dawkins published one of the most successful science books of all time. The Selfish Gene was a radical updating of evolutionary theory. ibid.
Genes often stand the best chance of survival if rather than fighting it out individuals cooperate and look after each other. ibid.
For Dawkins then humans are not simply selfish individuals who will do whatever it takes to reproduce our genes. ibid.
This is where a century of enquiry into human behaviour fought out on the airwaves has brought us. We are undoubtedly products of our biology, and the potential for human failing will always be there. But that doesn’t mean we’re slaves to our nature. The sophistication of the human brain and the ways in which we live together have given us the power to recognise and master our worst impulses. This after all is what being human is all about. ibid.