The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

The sheer diversity and not least the presence of so many highly evolved animal
species of the African savannah can be seen as a context to which the human spiritual
archetype, what Steiner called the soul-ancestor of humanity, is particularly drawn.
The African savannah was ripe and fecund for the human spirit. Different aspects of
that spiritual being have come to one-sided expression in a whole range of different
organisms. The more highly evolved, those with the greatest plasticity, have been the
most receptive.
I confess that I find this image grandiose and compelling but I do not fully
understand it. I feel it is telling me something of the nature of the spirit of humanity
that is bigger, more comprehensive, more complex that I can at present imagine. I sat in
a minibus once in the Masai Mara Game Reserve observing another busload of tourists
aiming their cameras at a lioness with cubs, as everyone on my bus was doing. My first
reaction was to try and distance myself, not literally—the lioness was very real! I did not
want to be a part of all this, for reasons the reader can perhaps imagine. At the lodge that
evening, chatting to those same tourists, I came to the conclusion that this is different
than Disneyland or even the Grand Canyon. We are drawn here really because we have
an image of the savannah that resounds deep within us. Every wildlife documentary we
have ever seen has stirred the sleeping savannah dweller within us, not, I think, because
we have ancestral stirrings but because we too instinctively recognize the qualities that
live in that place.
Human-Apes
In a species-rich, diverse and changing environment such as eastern Africa was
between the late Miocene (the period at the end of the earth age, the Pliocene) and the
beginning of the period known as the Pleistocene, which began around 2 mya, it is little
wonder that there was considerable diversity among early hominids. At present there is
no general consensus as to the number of species of early hominid or to their evolutionary
relationships. Essentially paleo-anthropologists recognize at least five main species, each
one of which may have had several subspecies.
Of the earliest known hominids, Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus
anamensis, little is as yet understood, though there are strong indications for bipedal
uprightness. As we saw in the last section, new discoveries have added Kenyanthropos
platyops to the range of species living at the same time as Australopithecus afarensis, best
known from the famous fossil “Lucy” found in Ethiopia. In what follows I describe what
is known about the australopithecines. We know as yet too little about Kenyanthropos to
distinguish them in their lifestyles from australopithecines, so I will assume they were
broadly comparable to their better known cousins. So what follows describes the whole
spectrum of early hominids.
Though the name Australopithecus, which means “southern ape,” may be a
misnomer, reflecting a certain caution on behalf of paleo-anthropologists, neither were
these hominids truly human, despite their upright gait. They were simply near-humans,
a name which has been subsequently given, Paranthropos, to some of the species that
later differentiated in radiations of a regional nature. The name Kenyanthropos makes
it clear that Maeve Leakey, Fred Spoor and Alan Walker, who described the specimen,
are in doubt about “Flatface” belonging to the human line.
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