The Voyage Out

Anthropologist Marvin Harris, on the failure of homo erectus to make significant innovations in the technology inherited from its homo habilis predecessors despite its possession of a much larger brain:

Now brains are expensive organs to operate. Big brains make big demands on the body’s supply of energy and blood. In a resting human, the brain accounts for 20 percent of metabolic costs. So extra brain cells would be selected against if they did not make some important contribution to survival and reproductive success. If the brain of erectus was not good for making inventions and changing the face of the earth, what was it good for?... It was good for running.
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A bigger brain made it possible for erectus to run in the midday sun, at a time of day when most predators seek shade and water and refrain from the pursuit of game… having extra brain cells, the brain of erectus was less likely to break down while experiencing heat stress during long-distance running.
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When it comes to covering long distances, humans have the capacity to outrun every other animal.

Native peoples studied by anthropologists used this capability to capture prey species by running them down relentlessly, sometimes for several days. Among the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico, for example, “hunting deer consists of chasing the deer for two days – never less than one day. The Tarahumara keeps the deer constantly on the move… [He] chases the deer until the creature falls from exhaustion, often with its hoofs completely worn away.” (Our Kind. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989. 50, 52. Harris quotes from: Devine, John. “The Versatility of Human Locomotion.” American Anthropologist 87: 555.)



September 28, 2008

Minnesota, South Dakota

Ripeness

I am unmoored. I got in the car. I lifted my feet off the ground and was spun loose, careening across the continent. I am like a space ship in orbit. I crest a hill, the world ends, I fall off the edge, the road catches me like gravity. Going eighty miles an hour, I feel as though my size has increased in proportion to my velocity. I want to stand face to face with a wind turbine; I want to run my hand over a field of ripe wheat.

Two trucks full of corn lumber onto the freeway. Threshers labor waist-deep in golden hay. There are vast fields of sunflowers with burnt faces.



September 29, 2008

Wyoming, Utah

Wilderness

Red, veined cliffs cut up from the plains like the flayed shoulder blades of the continent. Evening approaches, and the light begins to purple. The majesty of a line of great, craggy mountains feels always concentrated to particular poignancy when a lone silo is set before it or a few small homesteads are scattered at the mountains’ feet. The water tower, the little house, the barn and leaning fence show so pale against the dark, reared earth. They draw out the loneliness of the scene, serving as a reference point both of physical scale and of the magnitude of nature’s impersonality.




September 30, 2008

Salt Lake City

Perfection

They have built a citadel with an Eden at its center. The streets are laid almost in a perfect grid, and the buildings are pale, clean, and enormous. The peace and cleanliness of the square are tended meticulously. The Temple appears built to suggest no past in which it grappled crudely, ardently with the world to achieve its current perfection. It bears the stateliness that accompanies age but is as though newborn. Certainly it has secrets in its keeping, for the walls are set with windows that are ever curtained, but somehow their mystery is without darkness. It does not thrill and frighten the soul with fire and smoke and blood, as do the rituals of the Catholic Church, but instead imposes, as does the high afternoon sun, with a pureness and whiteness that mute the mind.

In the suburb of West Jordan, a new temple rises from its scaffolding, its sharp steeple reiterating the peaks of the mountains behind it, as though to distill their power and bring it into the light.




October 1, 2008

Utah, Nevada, California

Loneliness

I went out from the city and came to a plain of salt. It was flat, white, round, and perhaps three miles across. I was alone. I walked to the center and stood there under the bare, hot sky and was only myself. I felt a shiver in my chest, not of excitement but of exposure, as of skin come suddenly into contact with the air. As of stepping forth from a dark, curtained recess onto a stage.

It is a reverberation, I thought, of the thrill that pierced a certain ancient ape. He came to the edge of the forest and stared out at the sprawling, grassy plains. He took a step out from the trees, let go the thick trunk – which had curved like the ribs of the sky, holding him safe – and found himself naked under the sun with empty hands. In those fields, he found himself erect, head pounding with blood. His body quivered upright like a pin that was magnetized to the sky and to which was magnetized his own awe.

What was next was doggedness. He began to run. His brain swelled, becoming not more potent but harder for the heat of day to break. He began to defy the sun. He chased prey through light and darkness, across and through the land, and when at last it fell, lunged upon it with shards of rock and tore the flesh from the bones. He was without language and art. He and his kin crouched in the grass, smashed stones together, and devoured raw meat, grunting and barking. But they had already broken time. Through stamina, through long abidance, they had bored through the walls of those cycles that rule the lives of animals and worn a passage into that persistent stream that somewhere, millennia after them, widened into history.

Before we were exquisite, we were relentless. That is how we conquered the savannah. That is how I conquered the American desert. With no fineness of approach, with no keenness of vision, with no grace, I forged across it and ground its dust beneath my tires. The plains of northern Nevada were merciless, confronting me hour by hour with burnt hills and flatlands covered in sagebrush. I saw no antelope, no prairie dogs, no cattle, no birds. Yet I saw everything there was. The ground sprawled from one horizon to another in numbing repetition, in overwhelming clarity. Heat oppressed my brain and impelled it insistently toward mindlessness and sleep. In the mythology of this road trip, Nevada was the part where I died.

Then I returned to life. California rose from the plains in huge, wooded mountains. The sight of trees cast a shadow across my mind that woke me, as a shadow upon one’s eyelids makes one start up and say, “What is that?” Lines of towering evergreens stood close by the highway like walls. The land was once again covered, hidden, full of suggestion. The plains, confounding in their nakedness, had at last fallen back, and what a relief. I was not made to see so far. The mountains took me into their folds, and it was as though an aperture that had opened wide now suddenly contracted.