Page 48 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Ideas & Inventions / Giant leaps

1 Meat sets us apart

Carnivorism
Probably Africa, c2.5 million years ago
Chosen by Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto,
University of Notre Dame

I don’t believe in human progress but traceable to our imagination, which
if you held a pistol to my head and is traceable to anticipation and in an
said I had to come up with something indirect way you can trace it all back Getting involved: Greeks in conversation
of evolutionary advantage to humans, to carnivorism. during the fifth century BC
I would say that among other Nowadays there is a very broad
primates the relatively early car- consensus that carnivorism began 2 The people
nivorism of our hominid ancestors about 2.5 million years ago. We don’t
was of enormous importance. If you know why it happened but I’d
are carnivorous it gives you access to postulate that it was an evolutionary take control
fats and proteins that are not consequence of our lack of other
available in such concentrated form advantages compared with rival
in non-meat food sources. Not only species. The advent
that but although the first hominid Actually we are pretty poorly
carnivores were almost certainly designed animals because we’re
of politics
scavengers, in the very long run slow, lack agility, have only one
meat-eating launched them on the stomach, weak fangs and don’t Greece, seventh century BC
trajectory that led to hunting. have tails. We’re behind in almost
Hunting stimulates the faculties of everything and that’s why we need Chosen by Professor
anticipation because you need to more plentiful abundance of Paul Cartledge,
have the ability to see what isn’t anticipation than other creatures
there, to see what’s behind the next similar to ourselves. University of Cambridge
tree or over the next hill. I believe that
an accidental by-product of this I understand ‘politics’ in the very strict
faculty of anticipation is humanity’s sense, that’s to say taking it from the
super endowment of the imagination. Greek word polis meaning ‘city’, ‘city-
It is our imagination that has given state’ or (best of all) ‘citizen-state’.
humans the capacity to change The ancient Greeks invented the idea
with greater rapidity than other of the citizen and also the idea of citizens
species and the ability to coming together on the basis of some
form a really astonishing sort of political equality to take decisions
range of cultures. The about matters of communal concern.
features of the human We don’t know much about who the early
past which are different politicians were, but we do know that, for
from those of the past of example, in the little city of Dreros on
other animals are Crete there was a public assembly
passing communally binding decisions in
600 BC, so politics must have been
flourishing already.
Without the invention of this citizen
A hominid state and the politics and procedure it
skull from entailed, democracy would be unthink-
around two
million years able. We do our politics very differently
ago, when our today, more in a Roman way, but
ancestors were nevertheless the very idea of the
probably ‘political’ – people coming together and
carnivores taking decisions, not by divine right but
because they are citizens – goes back to
the ancient Greeks.

Felipe Fernández- JOHN READER–SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/ALAMY
Armesto is the Paul Cartledge is the
author of The author of Ancient Greek
World: A History Political Thought in Practice
(Pearson, 2010) (CUP, 2009)

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