Self-Made Man and His Undoing (1993)

Book Review from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jonathan Kingdon: Self-Made Man and His Undoing. Simon At Schuster £20.

Human beings are related to other animals, and most closely to the other primates, especially chimpanzees and gorillas. The first hominid fossils (those belonging to the homo family) are found in Africa, and date back perhaps two-and-a-half million years. The origin of modern humans — as opposed to earlier hominid species such as erectus or Neanderthals is more controversial, but one theory again sees an African homeland, around 200,000 years ago. Since that lime, members of homo sapiens have expanded over most of the planet, changed the world we inhabit in numerous ways, and have themselves been changed in the process. It is this last point which is the focus of Kingdon's book, and, as the title suggest, his view is that humans have changed themselves, by dint of adapting to the world around them.

Our differences from our nearest animal relatives, the chimps, are enormous, even though we are genetically very close to them. For instance, we have a very different facial structure, with far smaller jaws and teeth. This may be explained as the result of humans' developing cooking, so that we no longer needed massive jaws to cope with raw meat and plants, which were eliminated through natural selection. Our hands became more efficient at manipulating tools, as an upright stance meant that they were not needed for support. In general, the invention of tools and technology led to quite drastic changes in our physical characteristics. As jaws became smaller, relative brain size increased and the capacity for speech — with all its implications for social organization evolved.

If the idea of an African origin for modern humans is correct, our ancestors must have spread out from there to the rest of the Earth. Probably the first expansion was to India, and thence to the rest of Asia and Australasia. Sea levels were lower than today, and 65.000 years ago Australia was linked to New Guinea, but travel from the Asian mainland still required boats, which can now be seen as one of the greatest human inventions. Perhaps 40,000 years ago, moderns expanded into Europe, replacing the Neanderthals (though others regard Neanderthals as one of the many ancestors of modern humans). The American continent was settled, from Asia, only around 15,000 years ago.

Human expansion over the Earth led to encounters with many different kinds of prey and different types of climate, and humans adapted to their local circumstances, thus leading to the evolution of different human appearances in terms of build, skin colour and hair type. For instance, people from tropics have on the whole far less body hair than other humans: this is presumably because body hair impairs the efficacy of sweating and so makes it harder for the body to remain cool. Comparably, people in areas where malaria occurs have developed defences against it, such as the sickle cell trait. Brown eyes, probably the original human colour, are a better protection in bright sunlight than blue. Blue eyes turn up in various parts of the world, including Africa and India, but are dominant only in northern Europe, where summer is short and selection working against non-brown eyes must have been weaker.

Kingdon deals dismissively with the concept of "race”: all humans are hybrids with mixed ancestries, and it is quite impossible to identify distinct races. As he says in a fine phrase:

“What it is to be a human will always be more complex, interesting and important than what it is to be any particular type of human."

The "undoing" of the title is dealt with in the last couple of chapters. Unfortunately this is a familiar and unoriginal discussion of environmental damage and the supposed dangers of over population. The usefulness of the book, however, lies elsewhere. It helps, to be honest, to have some prior knowledge of the topics he discusses, but Kingdon gives a clear and well-argued account of human evolution and adaptation, stressing all the while how solving the problems of surviving and reproducing has been the key to this aspect of human history.

Paul Bennett