The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional - Hardcover

Fuentes, Agustín

 
9781101983942: The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101983949 ISBN 13: 9781101983942
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth?
 
Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight. Agustín Fuentes argues that your child's finger painting comes essentially from the same place as creativity in hunting and gathering millions of years ago, and throughout history in making war and peace, in intimate relationships, in shaping the planet, in our communities, and in all of art, religion, and even science. It requires imagination and collaboration. Every poet has her muse; every engineer, an architect; every politician, a constituency. The manner of the collaborations varies widely, but successful collaboration is inseparable from imagination, and it brought us everything from knives and hot meals to iPhones and interstellar spacecraft.

Weaving fascinating stories of our ancient ancestors' creativity, Fuentes finds the patterns that match modern behavior in humans and animals. This key quality has propelled the evolutionary development of our bodies, minds, and cultures, both for good and for bad. It's not the drive to reproduce; nor competition for mates, or resources, or power; nor our propensity for caring for one another that have separated us out from all other creatures.

As Fuentes concludes, to make something lasting and useful today you need to understand the nature of your collaboration with others, what imagination can and can't accomplish, and, finally, just how completely our creativity is responsible for the world we live in. Agustín Fuentes's resounding multimillion-year perspective will inspire readers—and spark all kinds of creativity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Agustín Fuentes, during more than two decades of research, has published more than one hundred academic articles and book chapters. He has chased monkeys, apes, and humans in the jungles and cities of Asia, the mountains of Morocco, and the streets of Gibraltar. He’s explored the lives of our evolutionary ancestors and examined people’s daily routines across the globe. He is a professor and the chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology and a National Geographic Explorer. His perspectives and research have been covered in The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and on NPR. He lives in Indiana.

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1

Creative Primates

I was under the immense banyan tree in the central plaza of the Padangtegal monkey forest in Bali, Indonesia. I'd been here for months watching a few groups of macaque monkeys, immersing myself in their society. A small group of macaque monkeys sprinted up into the trees and the terraced hillside above the main temple. The dominant troop meandered in to take their place. Teardrop, an adult female so named for a white birthmark in the shape of a tear just below her left eye, trailed by about thirty feet from any other monkey. She always traveled apart from the rest of the group. I didn't give her much thought. My attention switched to Arnold, the dominant male, and Short-tail, the alpha female, who teamed up to take a cluster of papaya leaves and a prized half coconut from two low-ranking males. I looked down and again noticed Teardrop, who now sat only ten feet away from me, staring at a leaf on the ground and nonchalantly scratching her side. I turned to scan the plaza to get an idea of the groups' spread; the males, females, and young formed small clusters like little families. I felt a gentle pressure on my right leg. Teardrop was now right next to me, her left hand on my thigh. Over the next few minutes she calmly leaned into me. We did not look at each other, nor did we move, for about ten minutes. Then she got up, looked around, cast a sideways glance at me, and walked away.

I discovered in time that Teardrop was unable to have offspring, and as such she was never able to work herself into any of the clusters of females and young that made up the social core of the macaque group. But she did, on occasion, sidle up next to humans and lean into them. Teardrop, like all monkeys, needed physical and social contact to live, and like all monkeys she occasionally got socially creative to satisfy those needs. After all, there were plenty of these other large-bodied, relatively hairless, seemingly willing primates with whom to score a bit of contact time. She had a problem, and she figured out a novel way to solve it.

Teardrop is a primate and so are we. As such we share the trait of social creativity-a prime component of our evolutionary success. In order to understand the human story, the grand narrative of our creative journey, we need to recognize that we (humans, that is) are mammals and members of a specific mammalian order (Primates). We are also members of a specific subset of primates called anthropoids (monkeys, apes, and humans), as well as a specific subset of anthropoids called hominoids (apes and humans). Humans are members of a specific subset of the hominoids called the hominins, which are humans, our ancestors, and a set of extinct humanlike beings.

Envision the history of life on this planet as a gigantic branching bush with millions of branches, twigs, and leaves. Those leaves and twigs closest to one another are close evolutionary relatives. As such, we do share a branch with Teardrop, but our respective twigs split off in different directions 25 to 30 million years ago. So, whatever commonalities we have with all monkeys are shared traits that were present in the original branch from which both of our lines (the twigs) arose. If we look to our closest primate relatives, the African apes (gorillas and chimpanzees), our lineages split off from a common ancestor about 7 to 10 million years ago, so we might expect even more similarities between us and the apes than between us and the monkeys. In any case, before getting to what is distinctive about humans, we need to know what it is about us that's not distinctively human, but rather distinctively primate.

As Teardrop, in her way, demonstrated for me, social relationships are at the heart of monkey and ape societies. Getting along, touching, and spending time with their relatives, friends, and potential mates are the main things these primates do. Sound familiar? The social landscape is the key factor in any primate society. It is made up more or less of hierarchal relationships, friendships, aggressive behavior, and sex.

Imagine yourself in the midst of one of the groups of macaque monkeys in the Padangtegal monkey forest in Bali, but this time we are watching the female named Short-tail, so named because she had only the nub of a tail. For a species called long-tailed macaques, one might think not having a tail would be a problem, even a disability. It wasn't. Short-tail was the highest-ranked female in a troop of nearly eighty monkeys-the opposite of Teardrop. She would swagger through the forest and temple grounds surrounded by her daughters, granddaughters, and even great-granddaughters. Other females would move out of her way or grimace in submission when she came near. Her favorite daughters and their friends would hand her their infants to hold and groom, she had access to the best foods, and she always took center stage when fights between her group and other groups in the area broke out. She often even led the charge, outpacing the big males in her tenacity for defending the group's space.

Male long-tailed macaques are 50 percent larger than females, with huge fangs (canine teeth, to be exact) that can shred flesh very effectively, so in most cases these males easily dominate females in any one-on-one conflict. But the females that make it to high rank are never in one-on-one contexts-they are savvier than that. Short-tail had a whole cohort of relatives nearby and ready to defend her. This meant that the high-ranking males, instead of trying to dominate her, would seek her out and groom her and hang out with her, especially when they needed a favor.

Social Hierarchies Aren't Hierarchies

Throw a banana on the ground between two monkeys, and nine times out of ten they won't both charge for it. Rather, one will look quickly at the other and back away, ceding the banana without a fight.

Understanding where you fit in the hierarchy, who is more or less dominant than you, helps primates navigate their daily lives. In a group with a set of well-defined dominant relationships, there's little doubt about who gets access to the better food, sleeping sites, grooming partners, potential mates, and so on. When relations are less well-defined, there might be one or two "top dogs" (or top monkeys), and most in the group are on more or less equal footing. In any case, primate hierarchies are neither strict nor static-dominance relationships are negotiated with friends and foes. Mostly it takes only a quick look at the other to determine who is in the more powerful position. This flexibility reflects a primate knack for creative social solutions.

Primates change dominance ranks and roles throughout their lives, and each primate species has a different pattern through which individuals gain dominance or compete for resources. Young individuals have to learn these patterns as they mature. These patterns develop via direct fights, accumulating supporters, and manipulating one's opponents. Once dominance relationships are developed in this way, they gain some stability but nevertheless remain mutable.

The local Balinese called one particularly vicious and aggressive male macaque Saddam, a reference to the Iraqi dictator (this was back in the late 1990s). My colleagues and I called him M1. He was the sole fully adult male in the smallest of...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101983949
ISBN 13 
9781101983942
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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