You’re Human!
Do You Know What That Means?

by Robert Ingraham

[Print version of this article]

PART TWO OF A SERIES

In this second installment we shall examine some of the frauds and misconceptions about the origins of the human species, as well as the galaxy-influenced crises which confronted early Man. We shall return to the subject of human progress in Part 3. Part 1 of this series may be found here.

II.—In the Beginning

June 30—Lyndon LaRouche, practically alone, has revived Plato’s approach to examining the human identity. Throughout his lifetime, he has fought again and again, in the fields of economics, physics, and music, to provoke in people a recognition of what it means to be human, to investigate the relationship of human consciousness with the lawful anti-entropic nature of our developing universe. This is where we need to begin our present discussion.

This is not easy for people. Society tells you—daily, in numerous ways—that you are an animal, and that the only things which are real are what you can touch, feel, see, hear or smell with your senses. Many people rebel against this moral and intellectual straitjacket. They know there is something more noble to their existence—but they don’t know how to grasp it, to articulate it.

What LaRouche has insisted, is that the human species is a productive species—that each human individual can contribute to a better future, and that this is manifested in the creation of new technologies and new scientific breakthroughs, as well as in contributions to the classical arts. It is also LaRouche who has insisted that the development of the power of mind is the only legitimate source of actual wealth, i.e., the physical and cognitive advancement of humanity. All of human progress has been born through human acts of discovery. This is called human productivity.

This is where we begin our search for the origins and upward progress of human civilization.

The first verifiable evidence of what can conclusively be described as human culture is dated to about two million years ago (mya). This evidence does not lie in bone structure, DNA analysis, or similar paleontological data. It is to be found in the use of fire. It is with the appearance of the controlled use of fire for heating, cooking and other purposes that the presence of human beings is established irrefutably.

Fire is not a primitive tool; it is a discovery. Its mastery was a mental action whereby individual man learned not only how to create fire, but to deploy fire. This self-conscious and deliberate use of fire was an intervention into nature, one which initiated a transformation of the organization of the biosphere. It was the beginning of mankind’s active noëtic role in the galaxy. At the same time, it unleashed a leap in humanity’s productive power, uplifting our species and advancing human culture.

This is where human civilization begins.

Dispensing with Fraud

Before we go any further, we must first take out the smelly garbage which stinks up this entire field of enquiry. This begins with dumping the hoax known as “anthropology,” a “discipline” that has been based almost entirely on works of fiction, ever since the sex-crazed Margaret Mead fabricated her stories about the Samoans. Controlled for more than a century from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, the entire corpus of 20th and 21st century anthropological works belongs in the trash can.[fn_1]

The next monumental fraud to deal with is the obsession by paleontologists and archeologists to define what they call “anatomically modern humans.” This is what is taught in universities, and this is where the research money goes. The axiomatic demand of these professions has been to insist that the investigation into the emergence and development of the human species must be approached solely through the study of the human anatomy.

Simply put, these “scientists” do not comprehend what it is they are studying. They study human history as if they were examining the chronology of an animal species, and they demand that the development of the human species must be understood as entirely a physical biological evolution. But what defines human beings is cognition!—not their bone structure. The human species developed through the advancement of cognitive intervention. What no one in the academic world will recognize is that the human race is not a physically-determined species. We are not part of the Animal Kingdom.

These wizards of academia have devised an extremely elaborate lattice to give different names and classifications to what they call “pre-human” creatures (all members of the genus Homo). These include names such as H. habilis, H. antecessor, H. ergaster, H. rudolfensis—and many more—all alleged “ancestors” of modern-day humans. All of this is based entirely on the study of bones.

Flow charts and arrows are drawn, comparing one bone to its alleged successor bone, thus defining a progression of “species.” Careers have been made, and volumes written, based on very fragmentary evidence of fossil remains. These analyses all utilize a Euclidian mathematical methodology, and their findings resemble a computer print-out of inanimate data. In truth, the linear methods employed are identical to earlier efforts to find the “missing link”—the approach which led to the dupery known as the Piltdown Hoax.[fn_2] It appears that these “professionals” have completely missed the point of James Weldon Johnson’s Dem Bones.

There is also the case of what paleontologists label “archaic” humans, i.e., those individuals who “co-existed” for a time with Homo sapiens, including H. neanderthalensis and H. denisova. Most paleontologists insist that these people were not really human, and, again, these assertions are based entirely on anatomical differences with “modern humans,” as if bones, or hair, or teeth determine what a human being is. Yet, it has been established that both Neanderthals and Denisovan Man utilized fire, built hearths, buried their dead, and therefore possessed language. In 2018, etchings and drawings in three Spanish caves were positively dated to 62,000 B.C., at a time before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe, thus establishing that what are labeled as “Neanderthals” possessed highly developed powers of cognitive imagination.[fn_3]

This is all human culture! There is only one human species, a species which emerged as a self-aware expression of the cognitive living principle which is embedded in all of creation. The only legitimate issue to consider is the ongoing staggering advancement of human civilization, but to investigate the origin and development of the human race from that standpoint would require inquiry into the taboo subject of intangible human noëtics.

The same axiomatic fixation on bones and anatomy comes up again in the study of Homo erectus, who scientists claim was the immediate “proto-human” predecessor of Homo sapiens, living from 2 mya to about 300,000 B.C. Again, it is insisted that H. erectus was “not human,” and again, this is based on the skeletal differences with “anatomically modern humans.”

But! If we define the self-conscious presence of creative Mind—not bones—as evidence of human existence, an entirely different picture emerges.

Fire & Cognition

The earliest, as yet discovered, evidence for the human use of fire is dated to 1.5 mya, at the Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, where scientists discovered a massive cavern near the edge of the Kalahari Desert with evidence of both fire and cooked animal bones. Chinese scientists have also positively identified the use of controlled fire at the archaeological site of Xihoudu in Shanxi Province, dated 1.27 mya, and excavations in Israel suggest not only controlled fire but the construction of hearths. This is all within the era of H. erectus dominance.

Every living creature, other than man, hates and fears fire. It terrifies them. Yet as far back as 1.5 mya, human beings embraced fire as a means for survival during the brutal reality of the Quaternary glaciations. They went further, and learned to master its use for heating, cooking, and ultimately ceramics, metallurgy and the beginnings of physical chemistry. Man began to create his own environment, a human-directed environment. The use of fire, and its later improved use through the development of charcoal, and then coal, revolutionized man’s relationship with the biosphere and the galaxy, as new inventions and discoveries vastly expanded the productive power of our species. This all flowed from human creativity. This is the Elephant in the Bed which no one deigns to see.

What the empiricists—and modern purveyors of information theory—insist upon is that there is no human mind; there is merely the physical brain, one which is biologically determined, and one which they view as essentially an organic version of a linear digital computer (After all, can’t a computer beat a human being at chess?). What none of the atheistic materialists can answer, however, is the source of human creativity. This leads them into enraged outbursts against metaphysics, which they attack as “not-science.” Yet it is precisely the metaphysics of Leibniz, Kepler and Cusa which is the true physics, for it explores the unseen non-material lawful principles which govern our universe. The human mind is the minimum of that maximum. The mind is not merely the physical brain. It is the cognitive soul of the human individual, acting in harmony with agapic creative universal principles.

The Challenge to Survive

Over the span of the last 2 million years, the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy have continued to evolve and change, all participants in an interwoven celestial dance. All of this greatly affected life on earth. The precise nature of these galactic processes is not yet understood, and research in this field is hampered by the hegemonic materialist Newtonian outlook. What is clear, however, is that the consequences of these transformations—over thousands of millennia—posed an ongoing threat to the survival of the human species. Tens of thousands of animal and plant species became extinct. Many animals, stronger and more agile than humans, vanished. The record presented immediately below gives some indication of the enormity of the challenge to human survival. Yet, the human species survived and ultimately flourished.

The beginnings of human civilization emerged during the early years of what is called the geological Pleistocene Epoch, a subdivision of our current Quaternary Period. The Quaternary Period, which is now about 21/2 million years old, is defined as an ongoing ice age, one characterized by the advance and retreat of glacial formations. These processes have resulted in dramatic increases and decreases in both global sea levels and temperature, as well as formidable changes in the planet’s biosphere. It didn’t just get a little hotter or colder. Average temperatures could drop 10 to 15 degrees Celsius within five years, and the topography could go from alpine forest to Siberian tundra (or vice-versa) within decades.

During these two million-plus years, many other “natural” catastrophes are known to have taken place. There were several eruptions of “super-volcanoes” (the most powerful volcanic eruptions, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index [VEI] of 8), including in New Zealand, Argentina, and Wyoming. These were catastrophic events far beyond the explosive power of anything we have experienced in recorded history. There were also major galactic events, such as the Geminga supernova in 340,000 B.C. Astrophysicists hypothesize that the dazzling radiation from Geminga could have destroyed more than 20 percent of the earth’s high-altitude ozone layer. Another supernova, Vela, exploded sometime between 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. About 800 light-years away, Vela is what is called a “near earth supernova,” and is closer to Earth than any other human-era supernova event. At maximum light it would have out-shone the full moon. The radiation from this event would have affected humans—and the entire biosphere—worldwide.

In 780,000 B.C., the most recent, long-lasting magnetic pole reversal occurred and evidence indicates that there have also been more recent and more temporary magnetic pole reversals. North/South reversals of the earth’s magnetic field are very interesting events whose causes and effects are still not fully understood. What is known is that the drawn-out process of a shift in the magnetic pole from north to south (or vice-versa) can take many years, during which the magnetic field of the earth may be significantly weakened. This could result in a sharp increase in solar radiation entering the atmosphere.

During the last glacial period there were two more super-volcano eruptions: at Lake Toba, Indonesia about 72,000 B.C., and the 24,500 B.C. Oruanui eruption in New Zealand. The Toba eruption deposited an ash layer approximately 15 centimeters thick over the entirety of South Asia, and as far away as the Arabian Sea; it is credited by some with creating a world-wide “volcanic winter.” A number of scientists have even posited that its effects created what they term a “bottleneck in human evolution.”

Current evidence indicates that this still-ongoing 2 million year ice-age has proceeded through 100,000-year cycles, consisting of roughly 90,000-year periods of advanced glaciation, interspersed with warmer 10,000 to 15,000-year interglacials. It is possible that these cycles are related to changes in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, as posited by the Serbian astronomer Milutin Milanković. All of recorded human history has taken place within our current interglacial (Holocene) period, which is now approximately 11,000 years old.

Since the written record of human history goes back fewer than 10,000 years, people tend not to think in terms of 100,000-year cycles, or cosmic or volcanic events that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yet all of these things occurred, and the impact on the earth’s biosphere and all living creatures was severe. This continual advance and retreat of the glaciers, the change in sea levels, climate, solar and cosmic radiation, ocean currents, topography, and vegetation had a profound effect on all animal and plant life on earth. Tens of thousands of plant and animal species died off, including the vast majority of non-African mega-fauna (large mammals). In many areas, all of the dominant plant and animal species became extinct, and this process has continued into our current Holocene Epoch.

Yet, the human species survived, advanced, colonized three continents, and increased in numbers.

To be continued.

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