EVENTS
STOQ 2009 – THE STOQ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
«BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. Facts and Theories»
Abstracts of the Lectures:
Fiorenzo Facchini, University of Bologna, Italy
Paleocultural Approach in Hominization and Possible Philosophical Implications
The man behaviour is characterized by culture. Many Authors associate the concept of culture with the artistic and spiritual manifestations and with the language which are recognized in Homo sapiens of the last 100.000 years. This way of thinking reflects a narrow concept of culture. In fact also the products of technology, when they show a planning character and denote a symbolic capacity, reveal abstractive mind and therefore a reflected thinking capacity which certainly indicates that the human threshold has been reached.
The application of the concept of culture can meet problems in identifying man at his origins. Current taxonomy refers many species to genus Homo, but it can not be adopted as a criterion to recognize man.
A skeletal remain attributed to the genus Homo out of its anatomic features, does not necessarily imply that it represents man in a phylosophical sense, that is to say a thinking man. But when we happen to meet skeletal remains, which are connected with products showing systematic and innovative works, man presence can be suggested, whatever morphological and evolutive level the remain is to be referred to.
What distinguishes human technology from non-human one (as it occurs with Apes and Australopithecus) is the complexity of the actions by which the instrument was performed and even more the capacity to improve and innovate the technique (Bergson) and the significance assumed by products in the life context (Ries, Deacon).
Instrumental culture reveals a symbolism which we suggested to call functional, distinguishing it from the symbolism expressed in language (social symbolism) and from the spiritual symbolism represented by artistic and religious expressions, not connected with subsistence strategies.
On the phenomenological level culture reveals discontinuity compared with non-human Hominids, whatever the reason and kind of this discontinuity may be. Dobzhansky suggests an evolutive transcendence with the appearance of man. On recognizind such discontinuity, even in the most simple technology, it becomes difficult to identify the first human forms in the real sense of the world.
Time after time cultural manifestations become more meaningful and therefore human attribution turns easier. But attitude towards culture can be recognized even out of its simplest expressions, starting from pebble culture.
Identifying the evolutive level in which to put the human threshold in the process of hominization interests palaeanthropology more than philosophical and theological investigation, which affirm a qualitative difference, that is the spiritual dimension, between non human and humans. The same must be said about possible biological and social implications of the contemporary presence of human and non human hominids referred to Homo genus.
On the philosophical field the gradualness of cultural manifestations bears the problem of the "ontological leap" due to man appearance, as John Paul II observed. If on the phenomenological field the discontinuity requires a long time to be observed, on the philosophical level the discontinuity must be radical, whatever its cultural expressions are, because the spiritual soul can not come out of living matter. There can not be any forms of intermediate psychism that are only partially human, as Maritain remarked.
Another implication regards the achievement of human level, which can have interested a population and since then all their descendents up the present humanity.After having reached the human threshold in the hominization process, man presence continues further in time with the generation of every human being who represents an ontological discontinuity with respect to animals.
The obscurity in representing the appearance of the spiritual dimension is similar to what happen in the ontogenesis of every man.
The beginning of human form happened inside time, but the project of God is outside the time. We can assume that the project of God Creator includes at a certain moment of the evolutive process a corporeity enriched by the spirit, not in the sense of an entity which is added to another one, almost placed on or beside it, but which exists inside the other one, as and when wanted by God, in the similar way that happen in the human ontogenesis.
The creation of the spirit is outside the empirical evidences and can be reached on the philosophical level whether for the human phylogenesis or the ontogenesis.
The exact moment when the hominid becomes aware of itself can not be represented by methods of science or by our imagination. Cultural manifestations can not demonstrate the moment of the achievement of the human threshold, but only if the threshold can be considered reached.
