Before a division of labor

About 7 million years ago, so very long ago that it is hard to conceive, a new kind of animal—our ancient ancestors—began to move across the African wilderness in a new way. We began walking on two feet. Hominids we have been called. The great apes—chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas—continued on as knuckle walkers or tree swingers, using four feet most of the time to get around on land or in trees.

Walking on two feet was a liberating change for us. We could walk or run longer distances. Walking on two feet freed up our hands to hold and manipulate objects in a multitude of ways. We could, among many other things, dig up root vegetables lying under the ground’s surface. Standing tall, we could use our hands to reach higher and to use our eyes to see distant objects better in the open African grasslands, the so-called savanna that was dotted with stands of trees and bushes often laden with fruits.

With these new and improved abilities, we were moving in the direction of becoming modern humans, but we remained quite apelike in appearance. Our brains were large compared to almost all other animals, but still relatively small compared to us as modern humans. Our chins remained sloped backwards rather than projecting forward. Our eyebrows were big and bulging from our skills. Our foreheads were still sloped backwards, not yet globular as they re today. Our bodies remained covered with fur or hair, which would mostly disappear over time.

At these very early times, we lived in close-knit nomadic packs numbering from 5 to 25 individuals, roaming through the African wilderness in search of food. Everyone in the pack stayed together almost all the time. We had no possessions. All we had were our naked bodies—with heads, torsos, arms, hands, legs, and feet—which were sufficient for us to roam, gather, eat with, and reproduce, as all other animals do. We were vegetarians, even vegans, using our bare hands to pick food from shrubs and other plants and eating it raw. Wild fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and even insects were our basic diet. We occasionally ate meat by scavenging for the carcasses of animals already killed by other creatures. We probably even killed a few smaller animals ourselves with well-aimed stones. But these scavenging and hunting efforts were haphazard and infrequent. Fruits and vegetables were hands down the mainstay of our very early diet.

The wilderness suited us well. We had familiar routes and food sites as we roamed over a large area. When we depleted the available food in one spot, which may have been in as little as a day or two, we moved to a new location. The time it took to gather our food was not extensive—perhaps five hours a day including travel time, some have conjectured—and considerable time was left for leisure. We likely sat together, probably in a circle, and engaged in boisterous social activity at regular intervals, but our language was probably little more than hoots, hollers, and warning vocalizations. Perhaps quite simple forms of singing, dancing, and story-telling occurred at this time: continuous hoots, hollers, jumping, and gestures, soon according to a steady beat. Chimpanzees in the wild have been seen “dancing” as they watch a forest fire or hear thunder. Were these early hominid behaviors the first “musical”? We will never know with certainty. More social activity happened when we met up occasionally with other nomadic packs or several of them at a time in a sort of festival. With them, we sometimes swapped members, primarily to secure mates for unmated members of a pack. Thus, we avoided incest.

We lived in this way as vegetarian bipeds for 4 or 5 million years. Most significantly for our purposes here, we had no division of labor at this very ancient time. A division of labor involves differentiation of skills between people. It involves taking objects from the environment—one person doing one task on them, another person doing a different task on them, and so on—and passing the objects along from worker to the next worker, and onward, if necessary, to complete the object. In a division of labor, we share. Only by allowing another person to take and hold and work on a product that we have worked on, and often vice versa, do we both benefit in the end. This passing-along of work objects is the essence of sharing, whether it is only between one man and one woman, or from one worker to the next worker and onward.

None of this sharing, however, happened very, very long ago. Like most other animals, in our very-long-ago pre-human days, we had no skill differentiation, no passing-along of objects we have worked on to another individual, no sharing. Everyone except the youngest members of the pack had grown up to have all the same foraging skills used for our survival: to select and pick fruits and vegetables from plants or dig them out of the ground, and to peel them, crush them, or crack them open. We did not need help from others. We gathered our food as individuals and ate only what we had gathered as individuals. Moreover, we ate our food immediately at the foraging site—no saving for the future. No sharing. Perhaps mothers shared some food bits with their very young children-in-arms. But by the time children were weaned from mother’s milk, sometime around age four, they had learned to gather and eat plant food simply by observing what we adults were doing. Hunting and sharing of food were yet to come. And when they did, a momentous change took place in our mode of survival.

The advent of Homo, the toolmaker

From 7 million years ago until perhaps as recently as 2.3 million years ago, then, we did not have a division of labor. We survived individually. Of course, both mating and breastfeeding occurred in those days, and these acts were, indeed, true divisions of labor, but of a distinct nature. They were biological capacities or “skills.” They involved differentiation of the sexes in their innate “skills,” and, like other divisions of labor, they involved passing-along of objects—sperm and milk. But these divisions of labor were built into our bodies and into the bodies of other mammals for a far longer period on the evolutionary timeline. Mammals arose over 150 million years ago. So these biological divisions of labor had lasted for many millions of years before we acquired a division of labor that involves environmental objects. In other words, other mammals besides us have sexual reproduction and nursing of infants, but with a few very limited exceptions, no other animals have worked upon environmental objects and shared them with other members of their species. And none has gone so far as we have gone to manipulate and share environmental objects in a way that would soon become unimaginably complex.

Thus, well before the end of our 7 million years living as bipeds in nomadic packs eating only fruits and vegetables, a significant change took place in our survival mode. No later than 2.3 million years ago and almost certainly further into the past, one of our early ancestors invented a tool, the first tool that we recognize clearly in the archaeological record: a stone tool. This first stone tool has been recognized by archaeologists as marking a new branch on the evolutionary tree: the genus Homo, meaning “male human” or just “human.” Homo includes such now-extinct species as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo ergaster and Homo neanderthalensis, among others. And it includes us, Homo sapiens. All these earlier species—before sapiens—looked more apelike than we do today, especially in the head: smaller brains, prominent brows, flat noses, protruding jaws and teeth. But their bodies from the neck down were almost modern. Living from at least 2.3 million years ago until about 150,000 years ago, all these less-than-modern species that preceded sapiens nevertheless qualified as humans—Homo—because they were, like sapiens, inventors of tools and toolmakers.

The first less-than-modern humans in the genus Homo were labeled Homo habilis, meaning “handy man” or “handy human,” a very fitting name for the species we consider to have been the first toolmakers and, thus, the first true humans. Those first stone tools made by habilis roughly 2.3 million years ago were simply flakes, pieces of stone broken off a larger, easily fractured stone by striking another stone against it. The resulting flakes had sharp edges that could be put to many cutting uses, but their principal use was probably cutting through tough animal skin to reach the meat on an animal carcass and cutting the meat from skin and bone. These flakes were the first knives, a primary tool—even the primary tool—throughout our human history.

What is distinctive about all tools and all human technology, even these simple flakes, is that they require forethought, planning ahead, being purposive, doing one activity in order to achieve a future goal. Before tools, we just confronted the wilderness around us, took its fruits directly with our hands, and consumed these fruits immediately, all using the “tools” of our hands, legs, eyes, and brains built into our physiology very long ago.

Soon after the invention of flakes came choppers. [IMAGES OR DRAWINGS OF FLAKES AND CHOPPERS.] As habilis, we realized that the stone core from which the flakes were being taken could itself be shaped by flaking to create a stone with a sharp-cutting edge, one that would fit in the hand. Like the flakes, it was undoubtedly also a multi-use tool serving to harvest edible plants, cut and crush plant stems and leaves, crack open nuts, and as we began to hunt, to remove meat and cut it up. These first stone tools of habilis—flakes and choppers—were very crude, but they were useful and lasted as our only stone tools throughout habilis’s entire time on earth, which was almost a million years. Yes, for almost a million years, we lived with crude flakes and choppers with little variation in how we made them or used them.

But we don’t know that habilis was the first toolmaker. Habilis may have been the first to make tools of stone, which have permanence against the ravages of nature and need only to be discovered today under layers of earth. But perhaps yet further back in history, we made tools of other materials: wood, bone, and antler. We might speculate that the initial killing tool of early hominid species—before Homo habilis—may well have been a natural, unmodified stone of just the right size, hurled at small animals. But even that natural stone would require a modicum of forethought to be picked up and thrown at a small creature in order to kill it and eat it.

Very likely, the next tool was the first tool to be altered by us, a small branch broken off a tree and further broken or shaped into a stabbing stick for killing. After wooden sticks might have been tools of bone or antler, sharpened and used as stabbing tools. These tools would have decayed and disappeared. With no remaining evidence of earlier tools, then, stone tools are our first evidence of tools being shaped and fashioned from the environment, and we have dubbed their makers Homo habilis.

Hunting as opposed to scavenging is the deliberate seeking of animals to kill for food, and very occasional hunting likely began with the use of natural stones and sharpened wooden sticks, bones, and antlers, long before habilis invented stone flakes and choppers. This timing makes sense because the flakes and choppers of habilis do not seem fitted to be killing tools. Cutting and chopping, yes, but not killing, which usually required sharp points. The first “toolkit” of Homo habilis, then, might have included a pointed stick of wood, bone, or antler, combined with stone flakes and a stone chopper. More serious hunting had thus become possible, meat would become desired, and our way of life would change dramatically. 

The first division of labor

Hunting, by its nature, had to take place quietly, away from any gathering of people, and it required the ability to run rapidly. The task of hunting, therefore, fell to the men and older boys since small children would have made noise and interfered with women’s mobility. As a consequence, hunting separated the men from the women and young children for periods of time. The very beginnings of father-goes-to-work and mother-stays-at-home happened right here, so very long ago, just when a division of labor—a sexual one—first began.

Thus, the very first division of labor in humans, however part-time it was, began when we invented tools for killing animals. (Note: The word invented is used here because these early tools were in every sense unique and new objects crafted out of the raw materials of nature, however simple they appear to us today.) With the beginning of hunting, the skills of the men in procuring meat became somewhat different from the skills of the women in gathering fruits and vegetables. At first, excursions to hunt occurred very intermittently. The men brought their occasional catch back to a campsite while the women steadily gathered fruits and vegetables, and brought their gatherings back a campsite. The women’s gatherings were the bulk of the pack’s food. The campsite thus first developed at this time, a place to meet after being separated. At the campsite, sharing began as meat from the men was passed to the women and children and as fruits and vegetables from the women were passed to the men and older boys. We ate, then, in a group, not spread out at a gathering site, working alone. This campsite exchange, this sharing of food, in fact, became very important, the only way for the high-calorie, highly nutritious, and very delicious meat to get to the women and children and for the essential nutrients of plant food to get to the men and older boys.

This first division of labor was sexual, and it meshed with our physiologically built-in reproductive and nursing divisions of labor. It was, be it noted, a manipulation of environmental objects—wild animals killed for meat, wild fruits and vegetables harvested—all brought back to a campsite and passed along from one person to another, which qualify it as the kind of division of labor we are focusing on.

At first, the takings from hunting were small and unpredictable. Men still gathered plant foods along with the women, although not quite as often. Nevertheless, when we adopted tools and especially stone tools, what hunting we did, combined with gathering, yielded slightly more food and slightly more higher-calorie food. That slightly better food supply meant that the calorie-needy hominid brain grew ever so slightly in size and the nomadic pack grew ever so slightly in numbers. Slightly more food also allowed the pack to stay in one location a bit longer. These small changes, which began by the time of Homo habilis, increased ever so slowly over the course of the next almost-a-million years during habilis’s existence on this earth.

This advent of Homo and the beginning of a division of labor were just the start of a process of change. Over a span of 2 million years, habilis was followed by Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo ergaster, and Homo neanderthalensis, and other early Homo species, not necessarily in a direct line of descent, but with much overlap among the species over their respective long years of existence. These early species were followed by what is termed “archaic Homo sapiens”—who appeared around 400 thousand years ago with a virtually modern brain in size but still with the remaining apelike features of a thick skull, prominent brow ridges, and lack of a prominent chin. Finally, around 200-300 thousands years ago, fully modern Homo sapiens appeared.

[Insert CHART OF HOMO TIMELINE and PHOTOS OF VARIOUS HOMO HEADS]

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