The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 3: The First Band Stage

The Last Human-like Apes Become the First Ape-like

Humans by Virtue of Their Struggle to Create Value.

By “value” we mean that which is created in modern society (say, capitalist and socialist) in the process of putting “labor-power” (a special economic category; distinct from simple “labor”) to work on machinery (the system of machinofacture we shall discuss more extensively below: Chapter 12 “The Capitalist Stage”) which is used to reimburse the possessor of said labor-power her subsistence, and that which is created to maintain the machinery itself. However, all things have origins. Labor-power is a commodity having its origins in the collective labor of primitive society - also, collective labor has itself an origin, and that can be found in the evolution of Homo. We can arbitrarily define the period when the first ape-like humans emerge, as the period in which collective production of necessities of life and the tools obtaining them co-exist together, and as a complex of traits constitute the dividing line between Hominid and the earlier Hominoid stock.

From the dim mists of antiquity, some seven to five million years ago, there did emerge this entirely new phenomenon among living, breathing, animal life - and that was the complex of anatomical features we have just reviewed - which in their totality brought about the capability of cultural creativity. At first and for many millions of years it would center around the creation of tools and necessities, and in the maintenance or re-creation of said tools - that is, the creation of “primitive value.” Which is to say the process of manufacturing things of everyday life (consumables) via the use of other things that had also been created - i.e., tools. - And, in using these tools, the first hominids entered into “social” relations.

Along the way people began to become creative in another way also. They began to experience the feeling of freedom that comes with cognition of self and the belief one understands something of the world around one’s self. Thinking, cognizant, self-aware, conscious, self-actualization vis a vis the “material” world (real world environment) in which this awareness emerged created along the way simple real life reflections. Necessarily, where real life reflection was not self-evident in its operation, we have the creation of hypothesis (we call superstition) about those non-tangible or non-understandable phenomena; in this way people created the “spiritual” world.

These mental or psychological categories constitute what we call the superstructure or ideological essence that arises on the mode of creative production of the fundamental needs of daily life (food, shelter, clothing, warmth, defense.) That production mode, and the ideological superstructure that arises on it, constitutes an entirely new and separate form of matter. What anthropologists call culture. This Mode of Production has two internal categories: technology and social organization.

Ideology

Technology à ß Social Organization

This Above is What Anthropologists Call Culture

Culture is both tangible, as you can see above; and, somewhat intangible, at the same time. It arises on biology, as biology arose upon physics and chemistry. Yet it is entirely new. As biology was once entirely new. Culture is subject to its own laws of cause and process. Intimately related to its biological carrier yet fundamentally separated. As biology was subject to its own laws of cause and process. Intimately related to the non-living physical world yet fundamentally separated.

When the human-like apes could walk, talk, and engage in social life and cooperation in pursuing the reproduction of their daily needs, as the key to the reproduction of themselves from generation to generation, they had become the first ape-like humans. We call them the australopithecines.  The hominids had arisen from the hominoids.

Both the tools and the things that these early people made with them are what we call primitive value. These creatures had a type of social organization that has been called a horde; in its initial stages it was probably not much different from a chimpanzee band. A group of males sharing the sexual favors of a group of females. The females bearing and raising their children. Bonds of affection and reliance develop among the children for their mothers and quite often between certain males and certain females. Among some chimps between females also; so it must have been between females among the australopithecines. Then as now. {- And, presumably, the same for some males.}Thus, the work of contemporary field primatologists is of critical importance for us to understand the social and sexual lives of our earliest ancestors. A molecular biological search is underway and currently is providing promising results in the evolution and development of human vs. chimpanzee RNA genes where human-specific changes occurred in a much accelerated fashion. Thus, as time proceeds we should be able to nail down the natural selecting factors and correlate them with specific steps in hominid emergence. Until then we are stuck with our rather old-fashioned stones and bones approach to these earliest humans.

The australopithecines used sticks and stones and built crude shelters. They fought against predators, as well as capturing animals as food, in a collective fashion. Gathering what they could from the environment in which they lived they found solace and security in collectivity and talking. Having along with this an omnivorous food consumption pattern the world was theirs.

Physically, the australopithecines were not much different from the norm of stature and weight of the World’s Homo sapiens populations today. They were a little shorter and weighed a little less but not that much. {Never compare fossil specimens to North American averages for stature and weight, because these are skewed far to the extreme even on today’s modern population spectrum for stature and weight.}

What is different about the australopithecine  populations anatomically, is the size of the cranium. They had about 1/3 the cubic centimeter capacity of modern people. The key question is why?

Better put, we might say why did the Homo cranial capacity double and then grow by half once again in the three grades of humanity?

From one million years ago:

Homo sapiens --<-----  ~1500 cc

Between two and one million years ago:

Homo erectus <-------------  ~1000 cc

From five million to two million years ago:

Homo australopithecus <--  ~500 cc

It is not a question with a simple answer. It looks simple. One says to oneself that the reason must be because they made better tools and thus benefited by increased rates of survival, as they got smarter. It’s such a seemingly obvious answer that the question has not been seriously considered very often.

A closer examination, however, shows us that it took millions of years for people to produce tools more sophisticated than hand axes. Yet their brains doubled in size in that period of time! - And, they spread into the most northerly climatic regimes of the Old World.

Yes, as they moved northward they needed more clothes; they had to have an associated tool kit of hide-cutting and sewing tools; but, these are not such a great technological advances over what they had in tropical and subtropical zones of Africa and Asia. There had to be some other factor at work which put a heavy premium on abstract thought. What could put so heavy a demand on Homo that people would pay such a high price for the ability to think in increasingly sophisticated ways that this brain structure trait became the only DNA segment of substance that did change in their biology? (Mitochondrial DNA markers are not matters of “substance” in this presentation regardless of their utility in tracing population relationships.)

What Other Genetic Alterations Occurred?

Yes, skin color changed. As people moved northward they acquired the genetic prohibition on the production of melanin (from the melanocytes in their skin) giving them whiter skin. This allowed the vitamin D production which would have been lethal in the hot tropical zone to reach proper levels in the effected skin in the cold sunlight depleted northern temperate and alpine zones. If you were in Scandinavia or Britain you would have only your hands, face and feet exposed to the sun for much of the year; what vitamin D was produced was going to have to be produced on those tiny skin areas so you can’t have a lot of melanin screening out the suns rays. {All races have the same amount of cells that produce melanin. But different races have different genetic prohibitions on the amount produced by these cells. Among negroids the melanocytes make lots of melanin. Among caucasoids very little. This regulation of Vitamin D production is the principal reason.}

But, skin color doesn’t mean anything fundamental! It has nothing to do with what really counts. Brain power.

Nor, does hair form, nor stature, nor weight, etc. etc. These things vary according to local need, when populations are resident in said areas for ten thousand years - or more. That’s all.

So, what was driving the doubling of cranial capacity among humans?

So, Why Did People Expand Into Northerly More Hostile Regions?

Yes, they needed to make better tools to deal with the more hostile environments into which they were moving - but, why move there to begin with?

Population pressure?

Not really. These human bands were tiny. These people had short life spans. Most died not long after reproductive age (menarche in women starts the clock); at any rate in their twenties they were on their way to the grim reaper. They lived in groups of 20 to 60 individuals and had no inherent need to move very far for reasons of population pressure. There were very few of them and as individuals they weren’t around long

We are not sure how many people lived on the Earth at the end of the last ice-age; the beginning of the agricultural revolution proper, in other words. But, estimates based on various criteria put the number no higher than ten million, globally. - And, many experts think that it was only 1/10th of that - or one million on the entire planet. Africa alone could easily have handled a million to ten million hunting and gathering humans. So what propelled them all over the globe. {By this time no one disagrees that the entire Western Hemisphere was populated by hunting and gathering bands, as well as the Old World.}

The answer is that migration into increasingly difficult areas had inherently within it the fact that more social product would be necessary day to day, than the day to day amount of social product required in the original Eden. In other words, migration indirectly assures compliance with the prime directive not to produce surplus social product by making expanded production necessary rather than surplus.