Episode 076 - Early Humans and Their Society
Date: 06/26/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2062-episode-seventy-six-the-rise-of-humans-and-early-human-society/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads Book Five lines 925–1027, covering: why the variety of early earth creatures does not support mixed-species births (each species breeds true to its kind); the greater hardiness of the first earth-born humans (larger bones, stronger nerves, able to endure cold and heat); their wandering, lawless, individual existence before society; their freedom from fear of eternal darkness (a foreshadowing of the rise of religion); the contrast between primitive mortality (individuals eaten by wild beasts) and modern mass death (war, shipwrecks, deliberate poisoning); and how fire, sexual love, and children softened humanity toward the first social agreements — the Epicurean basis for justice.
Cassius and Martin (Charles and Don absent for Father’s Day) discuss the passage’s relationship to Darwinian evolution: natural selection is present but descent with modification is absent; Lucretius’s earth-born first humans would have lived differently from how he describes (prehistoric humans were social, not solitary, based on anthropological evidence — Martin cites the rotating night watch pattern seen in both apes and humans). Martin closes by noting that Plato, drawing on memories of shepherd-warrior settlers in early Greece (as analyzed by Karl Popper), was more accurate than Epicurus/Lucretius on at least one point about prehistoric human society.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 76 of Lucretius Today. I am your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this episode 76, we’ll read approximately Latin lines 925 through 1027 of Book 5. We’ll talk about the initial forms of human life on Earth and the early stages of human society. Now, let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
It means therefore those who pretend that this new earth and vigorous ether could produce such creatures as these, and support their fictions only upon the empty argument of their being new, may by the same reason put upon us other fancies. They may as well tell us that golden rivers flow through the earth, that trees blossom with diamonds, that men were made with such mighty strength and bulk of limbs that they could stride with their feet over wide seas and wrap the body of the heavens with their hands. Although there were many seeds of things in the womb of the earth when she first began the production of living creatures, this is no rule that animals could be formed of a mixed nature and compounded of different bodies. The various products of the earth, which are in great abundance — the herbs, the fruits, and pleasant trees — never blended in such confusion together. Everything proceeds in its own proper order and preserves its distinct kind by the established laws of nature.
And the first race of men were much harder upon the earth, as was fit, for the hard earth bore them. They were built upon larger and more solid bones, and their limbs were strung with stronger nerves. Nor did they easily feel the inclemency of heat and cold, or were affected with the strangeness of their food, or any weakness of body. They led a long life of many rolling years and wandered about like wild beasts. There was no husbandman to guide the plow, nor that knew how to cultivate the fields. They learned to plant young stalks in the ground, or with pruning hooks to lob the old branches from the high trees. While the sun, the rain, and the earth voluntarily produced, that bounty satisfied their grateful hearts. They commonly refreshed their bodies with acorns among the oaks, and with those wild arbutus berries which you see ripen in winter of a red color, which the earth then bore in abundance and of a larger size. Many other excellent fruits the new earth, fresh and in her prime, produced in great plenty for her wretched offspring. But the rivers and springs invited them to cool their thirst, as the fall of waters from the high hills cooled their burning thirst. Wandering in the night they rested in hollow caves, the sylvan temples of the Nymphs, where flowed a running stream that washed the slippery stones with its large current. Among the slippery stones covered with mossy green, it found its way, and some of its little tide broke out and spread into the plain below.
As yet they knew nothing of fire to bless their food, nor the use of skins or how to cover their bodies with the spoils of beasts, but inhabited the groves, the hollow mountains, and the woods, and hid their naked bodies among the shrubs. This they did to avoid the rains and the blasts of wind. They had no regard for the common good; they had no order among them or the use of laws. Every man seized for his own what fortune gave into his power. Everyone consulted his own safety and took care of himself. Their amours were consummated in the woods, either as they were urged on by their mutual heat, or as they were overcome by the superior force and raging fire of their gallants. They were softened by presents — a dish of acorns, of apples, or of choice berries. These unpolished mortals, relying on the mighty strength of their arms and the swiftness of their feet, pursued the wild beasts through the woods, dismissing stones and heavy clubs. Many they hunted down. Some secured themselves in the thick brakes when night overtook them like roosting birds. They threw their rough bodies naked upon the ground and wrapped themselves up in leaves and grass. Nor did they run howling about their fields, frightened that the day was gone and the sun was set, or wander about in the darkness of the night, but they waited without complaint and lay buried in soft sleep till the sun with his rosy beams should again spread light over the heavens. For, from their very infancy, they had been used to observe that there was a regular succession of light and darkness, and therefore they did not think it possible. They never feared or distrusted that an eternal night could cover the earth, or that the light of the sun would never more return.
But what disturbed them most was that the wild beasts often surprised and destroyed them when they were asleep. They were forced to quit their homes and fly out of the caverns of the rocks at the approach of the rough boar or the strong lion, and trembling in the dead of night to give up their beds of leaves to the cruel guests. And yet in those times fewer died than do now; for then the one unhappy wretch that was seized was sure to be devoured alive between their cruel teeth, and therefore he filled the groves, the mountains, and the woods with his cries as he saw his quivering limbs buried in a living grave. But those who saved themselves by flight, with their bodies torn and covering their smarting wounds with trembling hands, cried out to death in dreadful accents, till gnawing worms put an end to their life, for they were unskilled in medicine and ignorant what to apply to their gaping wounds.
But then many thousands did not fall in battle in one day. No boisterous waves dashed ships and men against the rocks. The sea then, and its swelling tides, raged in vain, and to no purpose, and let slide its empty threats, and grew calm again. Nor could the deceitful flattery of its smooth waters cheat anyone into the deceit, or tempt him to venture upon this smiling surface. The dangerous art of sailing was then unknown. Many then languished and died wretchedly for a want of food; but now plenty is the destruction of mankind. Even then, through ignorance, some would mix poison for themselves. Now they study the art and give it to others.
But when they began to build huts and provide themselves with skins and fire, when one to one was joined for life together, and the chaste delights of constant love were now first felt, and they saw a lovely train of children of their own — then this hardy race first began to soften. For being used to fire, their tender bodies could not bear so well the cold of the open air, and love impaired their strength, and children by their little acts of fondness easily softened the haughty temper of their parents. Then those who lived together began to cultivate a friendship, and agreed not to hurt or injure one another. They undertook the protection of children and women, and declared by signs and broken words that the weaker should be understood as proper objects of compassion. This mutual amity, though it did not prevail among them all, yet the greater and better part kept their faith and lived peaceably together; otherwise the whole race of men had been soon destroyed and the species could never have been preserved to this time.
Cassius:
Martin, thank you for reading that today. Before we get started, I should note that today’s Father’s Day in the United States and we’re missing both Charles and Don, so it’ll just be Martin and I today to go over this section. It’s a little bit actually longer than some of our other selections, but I went ahead with a few more paragraphs because this one’s kind of a history lesson as much or more than it is a philosophy text.
Going back to the beginning of it, I would say that first paragraph, Martin, is reinforcing your observation from the last couple of episodes that he’s not seeing a lot of change within species. He’s talking about how the herbs, the fruits, and the pleasant trees never blended in confusion together — everything produces in its own proper order. As you were reading that, I was thinking that they could affirmatively mix flowers and different types of plants together to get maybe better types of plants. But he’s focusing on how species breed true to their kind.
Martin:
This is the first part of his again rejecting — so that just because there is a lot of variety, it doesn’t mean that everything is possible. He’s thinking that everything was originally born by the earth, so these things are born in some sort of order, and not something like randomly, where things which don’t fit together would then produce something like a chimera that could live. That is what this paragraph mainly rejects — especially what has sometimes been described in those fairy tales since ancient times, that some of that is just not credible enough to have happened.
Cassius:
Let me move on from there. Now turning to line 925 today, talking about how the early men were much heartier than they are today — with larger bones, used to the cold — and they led a life of many rolling years, wandering about like wild beasts.
Martin:
Yeah, and we need to keep in mind this is the human which was produced by the earth. So these were not those born by a previous man, but — from this, of course this whole idea is wrong, but still — it was this idea communicated that the earth apparently first produced the first one of each species. And it happened to produce enough of each species, which were then eventually continued to reproduce. So what he uses there as characterization of those first humans is a speculation — how this very first generation of men lived. It’s not like just one man and one woman, but many of them.
Cassius:
You know, as I’m listening to you and looking at these texts — I’ve just been talking about in the first paragraph how he’s not spending a lot of time talking about change within species, but here he’s actually talking about how there is change within humanity, and that we’re not as strong and hardy as we used to be when we were living out in nature. So I suppose if somebody were looking for change over time, this would be a paragraph that would give some credence to that even within Lucretius.
Martin:
Yeah, but I still don’t interpret this as anticipating Darwin’s evolution. I think these first generations were hardy simply because they were born by a hard earth, and the following generations were born of humans. That means they were born of the seeds inside that first man. And that’s why they were then softer. And the fact that they could no more stand cold and heat as much is explained later because they figured out how to make themselves more comfortable. This is really about what we are accustomed to — because if we get accustomed from early times on, we can stand extreme heat and cold easily, more easily than now that we are relatively pampered by air conditioning and heaters.
Cassius:
Sort of like the stereotype of Russians jumping into ice lakes, and so forth. We have seen pictures of people who acclimate themselves to extremes of heat and cold.
Martin:
Yeah. I read something like this — at least some of the American Indians had the custom to throw young boys into an ice-cold lake, so that they were accustomed from a young age to cold water. And I saw documentation of them going into cold water, even rough waters, later on in life. When I was in British Columbia on one island, there were descriptions about the American Indians living there at the time when the first settlers also lived there. It was described how the sons, when they came back by boat with their father towards the coast, would get off the boat and swim through the sea. And this is quite a rough sea to swim in.
Cassius:
Interesting. And quite cold.
Martin:
Yeah. They were really accustomed to cold and heat better than I would be. I mean, I was interested to swim there at that time as well. But when I saw the wind there, I just didn’t go into the water.
Cassius:
On a subject that’s not entirely unrelated to that — before we started recording today, we were talking about this passage that says they commonly refreshed their bodies with acorns among the oaks. I didn’t get a chance to look it up and see if people can actually digest acorns when eating them. I think you were telling me, Martin, that there was a frozen man found with a bunch of acorns in his stomach?
Martin:
It was not a Neanderthal. He was more recent — definitely before Christ, and he was found in the Alps. If I remember right, he had acorns as his last meal.
Cassius:
That’s interesting. I didn’t think acorns were digestible, but maybe they are. I’ll have to look that up after today, although I don’t plan to start eating them.
Martin:
I guess if you don’t eat them now, we have developed other tastes so that we no more take them. And maybe they promote digestive discomfort or something — which means if we can eat other foods, we would no more take them. But I didn’t read that they are poisonous, so they are certainly edible in some way.
Cassius:
I know the deer like them for some reason. Okay, well, as we get into the text today around line 958, we turn to the part that’s probably of most interest to people as he starts talking about the way they used to live. Line 958 says they had no regard for the common good, and no order among them or the use of laws, and every man seized for his own what fortune gave into his power.
One thing I think we can observe about this is that I don’t think that Lucretius or Epicurus were really romanticizing that state of nature as a good thing. I think most of what I’m reading here is just an observation of what was — as opposed to saying that it was good, or that we should go back to it. Do you get any sense of that, Martin?
Martin:
It’s not really about whether we should go back to that. I don’t think he means it like this. It’s just a factual — what he believes would be a factual statement. Because of course it’s speculation created by starting off from the wrong premise, since the first humans were not produced by the earth. And if you look at some details, some of this makes sense, but some of it just does not.
Cassius:
Okay. So where we’re going here in these next few passages — he’s talking about basically an early society of humans that are much the same as we are today, at least physically, but just without the historical and cultural background that we have. And he’s saying it looks like nature brought them together.
Martin:
Of course, if a new species is produced by the earth instead of by an evolution of ancestors, then of course these humans cannot have anything like cultural education. So he has to explain this as having happened later. But if we consider how this would happen with evolution, then we see that prehistoric man was completely different, or quite different socially, than what he describes here.
From what I read in anthropology, they pretty much guess that the first humans lived much like apes or monkeys in the savannah — in tight-knit communities. It’s assumed that they preserved themselves in a similar way like these apes and monkeys do in the savannah. When they stay in the group, it is such that elderly people tend to fall asleep early, whereas young people stay up much later. So at any time of the night, there are still people awake. Researchers who have observed how this works with animals noticed that at any given time of the night, at least 10% of the clan is awake. So they can immediately wake up if predators are coming. It’s thought that humans had the same way, because we still see today this tendency — when younger, people prefer to stay up late, whereas older people tend to fall asleep early in the night and then wake later and can no more get back to sleep. Because we have the same pattern as observed in those animals, it is assumed that this pattern was formed when the race was first formed, that they lived like that for many thousand years, and this will not change easily with just a few thousand years of subsequent change.
Cassius:
So you’re saying there’s some research or well-founded opinion that as people get older and wake up in the middle of the night, that is part of a protection mechanism?
Martin:
Yes, apparently. At least it fits into this — a kind of rotating watch period. And the main point from this is that these early humans were very social. It’s not that each grabbed for himself — they were really living as a community.
You see many examples of this even today. In Africa, probably a larger percentage than elsewhere, people still live in something closer to this older culture, and that is a very community-based thing. We grow up tending to be rather competitive. With African kids, it tends to be not as extreme. I read a story — I’m not sure this is really proven, but it’s a nice story. When some adults tried to give a reward to the fastest kid, all the kids grabbed each other’s hands and ran together so that they all arrived at the same time, and nobody was singled out as first. They shared it.
That is in contrast to what happens today — we have, as a meanwhile American custom, or I think maybe it was originally Irish or English, this thing in autumn known as Halloween, trick-or-treat. And one foreigner living here in Thailand, he just put a big basket full of sweets outside his door, and then one of the first kids who came just took that whole basket and put it all in his bag and walked away with it. This is completely the opposite of the behavior of those African children.
Cassius:
What would you think the Africans would do instead of taking the whole basket?
Martin:
I would expect they would take a fair share, typically.
Cassius:
I suppose it’d be influenced by whether they arrived as a group, like you were just talking about — then it’d be more likely they would share, as if they arrived singly.
Martin:
Yes, this is also the thing — they would probably come in groups. And then in addition to maybe what I would expect with their regular social behavior, there’s additional social control, because nobody wants to look particularly greedy in front of a friend.
Cassius:
Right. Well, let’s move on to something else that we talked about before we started recording today, which is our passage around paragraph 970. There’s a discussion of how even though they were running around in the night sleeping naked on the ground, he’s also pointing out that they did not run howling around the fields frightened that the day was gone and the sun was set, and they didn’t wander about in darkness. For from their infancy they had been used to observe that there was a regular succession of light and darkness, and therefore they never feared or distrusted that an eternal night could cover the earth or that the light of the sun would never more return.
The reason I wanted to bring that out is it seems to me there might be a foreshadowing here of the development of religion later on — he’s apparently saying that these primitive people were not concerned that the night might come and never leave or that the sun could never return. I’m thinking that eventually speculation about that might be associated with the rise of religion later on. He says but instead what disturbed them was that the wild beasts would destroy them when they were asleep, and I’m thinking that perhaps this is a foreshadowing: although things were not good in those primitive times, at this point we don’t have religion being present among them. We’re going to have that develop as we go forward.
They waited without complaint and lay buried in sleep till the sun with his rosy beams should again spread light over the heavens, because here he’s beginning to make this transition between just talking about them and moving on to where we are today. As the next paragraph comes up he starts talking about that even though the animals were devouring them, they had fewer of them die than we have today when we have thousands who fall in battle at one time and shipwrecks with lots of people killed at the same time.
And then the last part of that paragraph is something I’ve seen much comment on — how he contrasts the fact that in primitive days some might eat something poisonous through ignorance, but today “we study the art and give it to others.” What do you see in that section, Martin?
Martin:
Especially the last one, that is of course interesting. And I think it’s again underestimating those prehistoric humans. They certainly would have known a lot of things. One of my previous bosses, who basically was a jungle boy from Sarawak, told me that a method to find out whether food is good for you or not is to fast for a while, and then have a wide selection of different food available and sample each one. And this gives you a feel for what is good for you and what is not. So there was definitely a lot of built-up knowledge, communicated from generation to generation, on what to eat and what to avoid.
Cassius:
Did you say that you would first fast for a while?
Martin:
Yes.
Cassius:
And what would be the point of that?
Martin:
I don’t know that exactly. He just told me about this method.
Cassius:
And this was referring to some of the more indigenously living people there in Sarawak. I’m not familiar with the location — that’s somewhere near Thailand?
Martin:
Yeah, it’s in Malaysia.
Cassius:
Malaysia, okay. We can just now turn to the final passage today, which is an interesting discussion of the effect of children. I think a lot of people will find this interesting — the sort of mellowing of humans as time went by. People began to taste the sweet delights of constant love, and then they saw a lovely train of children of their own, and the race then began to soften. Love impaired their strength, and children by their little acts of fondness easily softened the haughty temper of their parents.
Martin:
Yeah, again — because the first humans born of the earth would not have had this first.
Cassius:
That’s a good point.
Martin:
But of course, there were no humans like this, so they were all born of parents. But I think rather where this also comes from is that if you look at the development of an individual, then this may be something like what an individual might be — so that once a young man has settled down with a family and his children, then they tend to become more settled than they used to be before.
Cassius:
I definitely think that’s a good way of looking at it. I think that’s why most people would experience life in general — as learning these things as you go forward. And he’s theorizing about the original early life of humans by comparing it to what he can see himself and the way people live around him. It would be natural to take the life of an individual and sort of project it back and compare how it might apply to the life of the species as a whole.
Martin:
Yeah, and then in the end of the paragraph, he basically explains how the social contract originated from this.
Cassius:
Right. “Those who lived together began to cultivate a friendship, and agreed not to hurt or injure one another,” which I think is specifically what Epicurus points out in the Principal Doctrines as the basis for the agreement of justice.
This is probably a very significant paragraph for somebody who wants to analyze Epicurean ethics, because he’s talking here about how nature led humans to undertake the protection of children and women and to declare that the weaker should be understood as proper objects of compassion. And even though everybody did not follow that kind of prescription, yet the greater and better part kept their faith and lived peaceably together. Otherwise, the whole race of men would have been soon destroyed.
So you certainly have to conclude from those observations that he’s thinking that nature guides humans to do that which would have to be understood as something desirable.
Martin:
Yes, and of course, it makes it clear that in a completely materialistic universe where people have their own drive for pleasure and pain, you still get guided towards following the social contract. And you don’t need to put virtue on a pedestal to have this first and derive it from there. It just comes naturally — virtue comes naturally from properly looking at pleasure and pain and how to assure that we get the pleasure.
Cassius:
Yeah, I think you’ve hit on a hugely important point there. This is the derivation of virtue in the Epicurean perspective. It doesn’t come from God, it doesn’t come from ideal forms — it comes from the experience of mankind over time, and the guidance of nature. I want to say “guidance of nature” — I’m not sure whether that’s the best thing to say or not, but to the extent that nature is establishing the way of life of all of the species that it has created, I guess you could say that this is the guidance of nature.
Guidance would be the issue, I guess, because it’s not like nature looked at the situation and intelligently put together a plan. That would be the part that I think would be unacceptable in Epicurean philosophy. But if you take nature as the standard, then that’s what you end up with.
The text that comes to mind immediately is the one about giving thanks to nature — that she’s made what’s necessary easy to get. Giving thanks to nature has always been interesting to consider — it’s also sort of there at the beginning of the book, where Lucretius gives thanks to Venus in the opening. And it’s always an interesting thing to consider what it means to give thanks to something that did not direct any particular action towards you. Most people think of thanks in terms of expressing gratitude to some other intelligent entity, which is not the foundation of what he’s saying here. Most of the time when you give thanks, you’re giving thanks to somebody for doing something for you, and you do it with the knowledge that your thanks is something the other party receives with pleasure.
Martin:
But the bottom line of what you’re saying here is that nature is producing this result of establishing that the species survives, at least in part, through the social contract of agreeing not to hurt each other. Otherwise, the species would not have survived.
Cassius:
Well, why don’t we begin to come to a close for today, then?
Martin:
I would like to add a link here to Plato, because Plato addresses something similar. We see Epicurus put a lot of what he came up with in response to Plato — basically to refute Plato. But in this case, I basically agree a bit with Plato, because he was less speculative on some aspects of prehistoric Greek history than Lucretius and through Lucretius Epicurus has been. Because Plato, at least from what I read about it, didn’t go as far back as the first human produced by the earth. What I found quite interesting was that he was still aware that the Greeks settling into Greece happened hundreds of years before it was written down, and that before they actually did something to write it down, there were basically the shepherd warriors. And he idealizes this — being a warrior or a shepherd, or the combination thereof. He regarded all other manual jobs as lowly, but still put the work of a shepherd as one close to an ideal of what an ideal human could do — because it is in the context of those first settlers of Greece with their warrior-shepherd culture.
Cassius:
Martin, you’ve done here at the end of the podcast what we probably should have done at the very beginning, because you’re exactly right — it seems like it’s always one of the best ways to unwind Epicurus is to contrast him to what Plato had said previously. I’m not well read on Plato’s views of the origin of the human race and so forth. Do you know what book or dialogue that primarily exists within in Plato?
Martin:
I would need to look that up. The thing is, I didn’t read most of this directly from Plato. I caught a few things in the little bit I read directly, but most of what I believe to know about Plato I got from the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, and he addresses Plato a lot. So I got this from a book of Karl Popper on what Plato wrote about the ancient Greeks. But I found it quite interesting — it looked to me quite accurate about the idea of how the settlement of Greece happened. This is impressive because there were no written records at that time, but it was still somehow communicated verbally from generation to generation how the Greeks had lived before.
Cassius:
Interesting. Do you have any understanding of Plato’s position on just the formation of society and so forth — did he or did he not have any statements about this sort of prehistoric period?
Martin:
Yes, he has a lot on this. But I don’t want to go too far or promote Plato or something. I just wanted to put out the aspect that at least on this one point — one way of presenting this prehistory — Plato is more accurate than Epicurus and Lucretius. But that doesn’t mean I agree with Plato’s philosophy. It’s just that there he got one item right where Epicurus and Lucretius were completely off.
Cassius:
Well, why don’t we close today basically with that thought — that we’re finding some interesting material in what we’ve got just right here in front of us, but we probably need to go back and get at least some kind of basic understanding of how this might differ from what Plato had said. Since I didn’t get the time to do that for today, I’ll try to read a little bit more for next week when we have Don and Charles back with us, and maybe we can come back and begin to deal with the bigger picture of how this might differ from or be consistent with what Plato and Aristotle and others might have said about the prehistoric period.
So we’ll continue going on with the text as we have it and see what else we can draw out in comparison next week. Anything else for today, Martin?
Martin:
No, I’ve said everything I wanted to say.
Cassius:
Okay, I think I’ve basically hit it today too. Okay, well, let’s go ahead and close for today then. We’ll be back next week and continue on. So thank you very much, Martin.
Martin:
No, thank you. Bye.
Cassius:
Okay. Bye.