Observations placeholder
Bruce Chatwin - Songlines - from Australopithecus to man
Identifier
021745
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Any major ‘software’ – spirit and function - changes have to be accompanied by ‘hardware’ changes to support the new functions. Most indigenous peoples see the world evolving spiritually and functionally and the change of form then follows n from this.
The evolutionary change that produced the current Age of Man, provided the software of speech, reasoning, intellect, creative ability and imagination. This had to be accompanied by some quite dramatic ‘hardware’/form changes. Man had to stand on two legs [to leave his hands free], for example and a new processor was needed to handle this new software [a different brain].
All this points to design and well thought out pre-meditated design and analysis of what was required. This also means that the mutations which produced the new hardware sub-assembly cannot be put down to pure chance. Despite the fact there is currently opposition to the idea that life is designed, there is considerable evidence that it was. As the mystics say, there is a ‘Creator’.
A description of the experience
Bruce Chatwin – Songlines
In passing from Australopithecus to man I had a sense of something startling and new. Not only does the brain increase in size by almost half, but also in shape. The parietal and temporal regions – the seats of sensory intelligence and learning – are transformed and become far more complex. Broca’s Area, a region known to be inseparable from speech co-ordination, makes its first appearance. The membranes thicken, the synapses multiply, as do the veins and arteries which irrigate the brain with blood. Inside the mouth too, there are major architectural changes, especially in the alveolar region, where the tongue hits the palate …. It is hard to see what these changes are about unless they are for language.
The subsequent stages of human evolution through Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens do not in his [professor Yves Coppen] view warrant the status of separate species. Rather they should be seen as transformation of the original model Homo Habilis........
Species, on the whole, are conservative and resistant to change. They will go on and on like partners in a shaky marriage making minor adjustments here and there until they reach a bursting point beyond which they cannot cope. In a climate catastrophe, with its habitat fragmenting all around, a small breeding community may get hived off from its fellows and stranded in an isolated pocket, usually at the far end of its associated range, where it must transform itself or die out.
The ‘jump’ from one species to the next, when it does come, comes quickly and cleanly. Suddenly the new arrivals no longer reply to old mating calls. In fact, once these isolating mechanisms take hold, there can be no genetic backsliding, no loss of new features, no going back. Sometimes the new species, invigorated by the change may recognise its former haunts and replaces its predecessors.
The process of ‘jumping’ in isolation has been called ‘allopatric speciation’ and explains why, whereas biologists find countless variations within a species – in body size or pigmentation – no one has ever found an intermediate form between one species and the next...
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Between 3.2 and 2.6 million years ago, there occurred a sharp plunge in world temperatures known as the First Northern Glaciation, in that the North Polar Ice cap for the first time froze. This caused a huge change in the vegetation in, for example, Africa. Up and down the Great Rift valley, the woodlands were swept away and replaced by open steppe, or wilderness of sand and gravel patchy grass and thorn bushes