We are no different than cavemen …

I have to be honest, for me it’s been a brutal few weeks which have taken their toll on my mental health.

It’s been the 25th anniversary of a murder I witnessed, and world events have acted as a trigger. The bombing of an Ariana Grand concert in Manchester was almost too much to bear — terrorists targeting children on a night out, just wanting to have fun. Children.

Bombings happen all over the world, but this was a corner of the world I was familiar with, where I lived for 7 years. I couldn’t help but remember that given it’s location there would have been people there who were children of the students I taught in Yorkshire nearby. That’s upsetting. A child is a child no matter where in the world, but when it’s close to you, it’s unsettling and upsetting.

And then there were the fatal stabbing of two men in America who tried to stop someone’s hate speech on a train. If you’re familiar with my writing and my history, it’s all eerily reminiscent of an altercation I witnessed in Germany. There the racist would later join a gang, and be responsible for a series of racially profiled murders around Germany.

A brutal awakening

When 25 years ago I witnessed a gang punch a man to the ground, so that one of their friends could run a car over their head, snapping their neck, I was left with a traumatic event that I couldn’t make sense of. We just can’t make sense of such things.

We want to think people can be reasoned with, but when hatred bursts into our world causing such damage we can’t make sense of it.

Being so close to a significant anniversary, it’s all churned and bubbled inside me. I’m lucky to have just a few friends I’ve been able to talk about this with.

Today I look through how I’ve explored and tried to understand where this comes from. And on the way, I found a little bit of redemption and hope from the same source as my despair.

The roots of our aggression?

Where does such hatred have it’s roots? Is it a modern phenmonon? That seems unlikely, as a child my parents would be careful about what public events we attended over fear of IRA attack — we’d never go to view royals opening anything local. Indeed terrorism is neverending, you hear of anarchists attempting to assasinate Queen Victoria, Czar Alexander II was assasinated in Russia by bomb.

Heck you even have Englands most famous would-be-terrorist, Guy Fawkes in the 17th Century. And in his age he was considered a religious radial as a Catholic.

Artist’s impression of Oetzi.

Then I read about the murder of Oetzi, one of the world’s oldest cold cases. Oetzi the Iceman is the name given for the frozen remains of one of our ancestors, who was found in the Oetztaler Alps region.

Being preserved in ice, it’s allowed for detailed forensic examination on his cause of death, even though it was over 5,000 years ago.

He was shot in the back whilst eating, and died from blood loss. However he had some wounds on his hands indicating he’d been in a fight a few days beforehand, and had successfully defended himself against an assailant. However whoever he’d fought wanted revenge in a bad way, and had obviously tracked Oetzi to attack him when he was weakest (shooting him in his back).

The fact that Oetzi was killed but his copper axe was left with him was an important clue. If the killing was motivated by gain, the assailant would have taken that. They fact that is wasn’t indicated a “strong personal emotive” reason for the killing. Murder for sure, but whether for jealousy or revenge, who can tell?

Even by accounts found in the Bible, as soon as man is created, we have the murder of Able by Cain not too long afterwards. We might like to think we’re superior to our “cavemen ancestors” (who are even further removed from us than icemen like Oetzi), but biologically we’re identical to them, with only our our society and technology marking us as different.

And our society today evolved from their culture.

This is the “caveman” version of Instagraming what you had for dinner

Today, the term “cavemen” is frowned on in academic culture in preference to the designation “early modern humans”. These early modern humans lived in tribe groupings of up to about 30-50.

When different tribes were competing for resources in a same area, conflict would inevitably occur. We see something very similar in our closest cousins, chimpanzees today. Groups of chimps will conduct ritualistic raids against rival groups, picking off stray, lone individuals.

Chimp social structure is also much more complex than say gorilla structure. With gorillas, the largest, most powerful rules the group. The dominant chimps in their society is attained not by being the strongest, but from being able to form alliances with other chimps.

These alliances can frequently change, shifting the dominance of the group. It can also cause some groups to turn on each other. Once such incident saw a group turn on a former alpha male who’d been cast out, and later rejoined their group.

There’s hope for us yet …

All this might leave you a little without hope for the human race. We can be a violent species, with aggression locked into our DNA.

Thankfully, all is not without hope. Thanks no doubt to increases in better monitoring and advances in forensic science (meaning it’s harder to get away with it) murder rates in general are falling in most first world countries. So don’t go thinking that there’s a need for a death penalty as a deterrent!

[America still has a much higher murder rate than comparable first world country, but remember, as we’ve been told, increased access to firearms isn’t to blame!]

But that to one side, we inherited more than just aggression from our ancestors. Studies of remains of our early modern human ancestors has found something unexpected. Within many remains that have been found, there is evidence of bones which have healed over time. In some of these cases, the injuries were so severe, that the injured human wouldn’t have been able to fend for themselves whilst they recovered.

Such finds were an important find in uncovering a crucial part of what makes us human — our capacity to care for one another. A human tribe of 30–50 does not have a lot of capacity to care for it’s injured whilst surviving as hunter-gathers. But they still found time to — indeed remains in Vietnam seem to suggest a human who would have been disabled all their life was cared for all their life.

Caring for another human in early modern human society was not about that person ultimately contributing back to society. The care was not some part of a transaction arrangement that would later “pay itself off”.

It seems along with aggression, we also inherited compassion from our “caveman” ancestors. There’s even evidence of similar behaviour in their contemporaries, the Neanderthals. Another group we consider traditionally as brutal and backwards.

Aggression and compassion. It seems our ancestry has us equally cursed and blessed. But they do seem to go hand in hand.

Even in the recent cases I mentioned at the start of this article, in almost every tale of brutality, there are tales of ordinary people being compassionate. The homeless man who rushed to aid the wounded in Manchester. The restaurant owner who led 130 to safety away from the attackers.

Every war, no matter how brutal or savage has scores of tales of those who put themselves into harms way to try and make it a little less so. Sometimes risking their life for people they never really knew, they only saw another human in peril.

As Mr Rogers says,

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.” — Fred Rogers

So how would Oetzi view our world?

If we could bring back to life one of our early modern human ancestors, what would they think of our world? I’m of course assuming here showing them a typical first world society.

First of all, they would be amazed that we’ve for the most part eliminated the basic driving need of survival. For most of us, the question of “what am I going to eat next week?” isn’t a matter of life and death. Although poverty can still be a significant problem.

They would be amazed that we consider ourselves members of a tribe some millions in number, as our country now often defines us as a tribe. And that such tribes can contain such diversity of human beings, the like of which he’d never have seen before.

Somehow the idea of war, wouldn’t surprise them, although the scale in which modern industrial war could be fought would shock them.

But somehow, I think it would be healthcare which would shock them the most. How countries like the UK and particularly America consider it too expensive to care for all and provide conditional healthcare. If a tribe of just 50 humans found it possible to care for it’s injured and ailing, even those “with pre-existing conditions” who would never contribute fully as hunter-gatherers, what’s stopping a tribe of millions?

That’s a difficult question to answer, and makes me realise we don’t always fare well comparing ourselves to “our primative ancestors”.

Dedication

I’d like to dedicate this article to brother-in-arms and shameless liberal Tim Hall who died this week after a short battle with cancer.

Tim, who you might know as Kalyr on Twitter, was a fellow tester, music nut, game-head, confidant. We’d often run controversial articles with each other, and I’d love to share my latest musical find with him.

I’ll miss you so very much Tim.