The Botanic Age

 The Botanic Age; Planting the Seeds of Human Evolution, by Dean Falk

Paleontologists and so on have tended to assume that early hominins evolved into the Stone Age, and that the development of stone tools (by males) is what sets us apart from the other great apes.  Falk and others have started proposing that our evolutionary path went through another, earlier stage that just didn't leave a lot of obvious traces behind -- a Botanic Age during which hominins used plant matter as their primary tools and which moved much of our evolution into humans.  Since the clues are hardly ever physical, they must be found in evolution, behavior, and psychology.                                                                                    

Because!  Other large apes -- chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans -- weave basket-nests in trees every night to sleep in.  They're very good at it.  Clearly, they use branches and vines, etc. as tools, and our hominin ancestors would have done too.  But over time, we moved out of the trees and onto the ground, and we developed walking feet and less hair.  How did that transition work?  A lot of it would have had to do with mothers and babies; if babies started not to be able to cling like chimp infants do, and we spent less time (but still some) in trees, how to keep babies safe?  Probably mothers made slings -- modified tree basket beds to wear.

They also theorize that language development had a lot to do with mothers and babies, and may have started as reassuring communications between them as babies spent a bit less time physically attached to their mothers.  Possibly the reason that baby talk is so deeply ingrained in our programming is that it really was the proto-language that developed into language for all?  Is language the thing that sparked the difference, not so much tool use?

Finally, there is a nice section on weaving technology, which obviously has its roots in great ape nest-building.  Weaving would have evolved with hominins, going from baby slings to carrying slings/bags and from branches to vines to, eventually, fiber twists, rope, and string.  Which makes it about the oldest technology we have aside from poking sticks -- a pre-human technology.  Well how cool is that?

This was a really neat read and I enjoyed the information.  Falk puts lots of pieces together to make a coherent narrative and never loses sight of putting them all together afterward.