Human Things

Disconcerting circumstances can sometimes yield serendipitous benefits – if only because one is so far out of one’s customary comfort zone. Thus I found myself, a native New Yorker, in a wretched little town in southern Utah sitting at a table across from a young woman who would soon break my heart worse than anyone had since I was 18 years old, and nonetheless happy to be living where I was and doing what I was doing there. I had taken a seasonal job as an archaeologist in one of the most archaeologically and environmentally rich places I know of, a place that I already frequented as a hiker and backpacker and general ogler about as often as I could manage. Between bites of small-town Utah diner fare, then, came that oft-asked and almost never satisfactorily answered question: “So why archaeology?”

Why indeed? Answers abound in both the academic and popular literature, ranging from the erudite (“because knowledge of the human past is inherently valuable and furthermore…”); to the practical (“so that we can learn from the triumphs and mistakes of the past”); to the more subjective (“because it’s interesting”); to the extremely subjective (“because it’s sacred”); to the selfish (“because I enjoy it”); to the patently frustrated and, also, somewhat plagiaristic (“because it’s there!”). Among the innumerable possible responses to this question, there are only two in which I have any enduring faith – one of which is tautological and the other paradoxical. But then that’s us, isn’t it?

To begin, a prompting question: why do people do crosswords? Or word-searches? Or Sudoku? Play video games, or board games, or word games and riddles…? Why, in short, do people so often, so thoroughly and passionately, devote themselves to creating and solving puzzles? To begin to understand the answer to this question, we have to delve down toward the deepest tendrils of the roots of humanity itself, to the tiniest gearwheels that precipitate our ticking, some several conceptual hours before the dawn of anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

So far as we know, the earliest obligate bipedal hominins, the australopithecines, lived their lives entirely within their respective ecological niches in Africa from about 4.4 to about 1.8 million years ago, spanning some two and a half million years. Despite occupying a variety of territories across the African continent, they appear to show surprisingly little in the way of morphological alterations during that considerable timespan. Instead, their proliferation was more likely due to variability in the australopithecine lineage itself, with different subspecies occupying different environments – there are at least seven distinct subspecies of Australopithecus recognized in the literature, nine if you include habilis and rudolfensis. It’s only with the emergence of Homo erectus, the first truly definitive member of our own lineage, that one finds widespread migration and expansion over a tremendous range of habitats – stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to as far  north as modern-day Siberia and about as far east as Asia goes – by a single hominin.

Not insignificantly, it was also in the last epochs leading up to this time that global climatic conditions shifted from relatively stable and mild to positively chaotic. During the Miocene epoch, which extended up to about 5.5 million years ago, overall conditions were warm and wet without much in the way of seasonality. The succeeding Pliocene epoch, stretching from then to about 2.6 million years ago, was one of gradually drier and cooler conditions with generally increased seasonality. And then came the Pleistocene, an epoch in which factors like orbital forcing and tectonic uplift took a coalescent and colossal toll, when the intensity of both short-term seasonality and less predictable long-term variability became the climatic norm. The effect of this on local environments had some magnitude to it: a narrow swath of land could go from jungle to desert and back again within a decade or two.

Creatures alive during this era had therefore to deal with an enormous amount of environmental diversity and complexity, leading, in the words of paleoanthropologist Robert Potts, to “evolution of adaptability.” Simply put, it doesn’t pay to be a specialist in the face of near-constant change. What pays best in those circumstances is to become, in effect, a jack of all environments, one more adapted for adaptability itself than for any particular ecological architecture – to become, in other words, an obligate puzzle-solver.

Pleistocene archaeology underscores this point with considerable definitude. As mentioned, erectus managed to colonize so much of the Earth’s surface that the type specimen was found not in Africa but in the Indonesian province of East Java, with subsequent and more expansive discoveries emerging soon thereafter near Peking. But they weren’t different subspecies occupying different environments, as with the earlier australopithecines and modern analogues like grizzly and polar bears. They were all erectus, a species which had evolved to specialize in non-specialization and to learn, and learn, and learn in order to adapt to nearly any environmental circumstances. So that now, erectus’ descendants – the one writing this, say, or the one(s) reading it – have colonized almost every type of environment on the planet’s surface and are beginning to leer lasciviously at places beyond even that.

That’s why we love to solve puzzles. It’s because we’ve evolved to gain tremendous pleasure from doing so. The experience of pleasure associated with solving a puzzle is the result of the same neurological mechanisms we’ve inherited to signal when we’ve achieved what behavioral scientists call “fitness gains.” In a creature adapted for supreme adaptability, what this means is that we’ve been hard-wired by natural selection to enjoy solving trivial puzzles because those of our ancestors who managed to solve somewhat less trivial puzzles enjoyed greater fitness as a result. All of which is borne out in our anthropology in general, and our archaeology specifically, evidenced by our dizzying array of behavioral and technological innovations throughout the millennia.

In sum: why do we love to solve the puzzles of prehistory? Because the puzzles of prehistory designed us to.

The second, and more concise of my preferred answers to the perennial question of my choice of vocation centers upon the life lessons derived from – and this phrase will soon strike the reader as ironic – a career in archaeology. It's based on one of the most salient observations I've ever made whilst studying and conducting archaeology, which is this: you can spend your entire professional career plowing as deeply and broadly as possible through human prehistory, and you know what you won't find any of? Professional careers. They're a totally modern phenomenon, along with gluten intolerance, road rage, and Facebook addiction.

Relatively speaking, for all but about the last few moments of the total anatomically modern human experience (that is: the last few hundred out of, by current estimates, as much as 190,000 years) our “jobs” consisted of “whatever has to be done to secure food and shelter for the foreseeable future.” According to ethnologists like Marshall Sahlins, this was usually achievable with about +/-20 person-hours of labor per calendar week. Presumably, then, the rest of our time was spent on craft specialization, or on chasing lovers, or hanging out, exploring, fighting, learning, playing.... That is to say: all the things we now think of as distractions from what’s really important in our lives. They used to constitute practically the entirety of our lives, at least if the Sahlins camp is to be believed, and again the archaeology bears this out: right about the time we start seeing full anatomical and behavioral modernity, we also start seeing art.

In his 1954 volume Motivation and Personality, famed psychologist A.H. Maslow conducted a thorough review of texts and publications by the recognized authorities on American psychology, and discovered that the very concept of fun or “joy” simply never appears. Even pleasurable endeavors like sex and play are perceived as existing, at their core, purely for (respectively) procreation or to unwind before going back to the serious business of life – not, in other words, for their own ends in any way whatsoever. The pleasure associated with such activities is dismissed as adaptive motivation; i.e., if it didn't feel good we apparently wouldn't bother doing it, and would instead crumble into extinction either through overmuch toil or under-abundance of offspring. Thus, as a result of its articulation with our culture, the prevailing concept of our own behavioral processes is “overpragmatic, over-Puritan, and over purposeful,” and by such means we are missing out on “the other – and perhaps more important – half” of life.

Earlier in this same essay I argued for the pleasure associated with puzzle-solving as just such adaptive motivation, and I very much believe that, but said pleasure should not therefore be dismissed on this account in the way that Maslow charged the main body of American psychology with doing. As Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss famously quipped, “the nose is [adapted to] fit spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles.” Well, no, the nose evolved for entirely other reasons; but that doesn’t mean we should stop wearing spectacles as a show of solidarity with better hypotheses about nasofacial adaptation. Similarly, setting aside, deprioritizing, or altogether missing out on the enormous variety of possible joys inherent to human life seems an abominable sin to commit in solidarity with a cultural mythos that holds pragmatism in the highest possible esteem – regardless of how pragmatically evolutionary history has designed us.

Maslow summed up his review by arguing that a great deal of our behavior is and, in all healthful regard, should be “unmotivated” by the bugbears of practicality and pragmatism. That joy and pleasure should be regarded as ends in themselves, human things in their own right rather than enticing but vagarious stimuli for drudgery, and at least as important as so-called serious struggles like professional careerism. And I agree; not merely because I try to live my own life that way, but because I see the material evidence of myriad such-lived lives every time I go to work.