In an extremely superficial attempt to discredit the materialist view of the origin of the human species, it is often stated that humans are not the only animals to “use tools”. This argument is completely hollow. While many animals (not only monkeys and chimpanzees, but even some birds and insects) may be said to use “tools” for certain activities, these are limited to whatever natural materials they find to hand – sticks, stones etc. Moreover, such use either consists of accidental activity, as when a monkey throws a stick to dislodge fruit from a tree, or limited actions, which may be highly complex but are entirely the result of genetic conditioning and instinct. The actions are always the same. There is no question of intelligent planning, foresight or creativity, except to a very limited degree in the higher species of mammals, but the most advanced of the apes have nothing resembling the productive activity of even the most primitive hominids.

The essential point is not that humans “use tools”. It is the fact that humans are the only animals that make tools, and not as an isolated or accidental activity, but as the essential condition for their existence upon which everything else depends. Thus, although from a genetic point of view humans and chimpanzees are almost identical, and the behaviour of these animals in some respects appears remarkably “human”, the most intelligent chimpanzee is quite incapable of making even the most rudimentary stone tools produced by Homo erectus, a creature standing on the evolutionary threshold of humanity.

In his most recent book, The Origin of Humankind, Richard Leakey, makes this point:

Chimpanzees are adept tool users, and use sticks to harvest termites, leaves as sponges, and stones to crack nuts. But – so far, at any rate – no chimpanzee in the wild has ever been seen to manufacture a stone tool. Humans began producing sharp edged tools 2.5 million years ago by hitting two stones together, thus beginning a trail of technological activity that highlights human prehistory.[33]

Compare these lines to what Engels wrote in 1876:

Many monkeys use their hands to build nests for themselves in the trees or even, like the Chimpanzee, to construct roofs between the branches for protection against the weather. With their hands they seize hold of clubs to defend themselves against enemies, or bombard the latter with fruits and stones. In captivity, they carry out with their hands a number of simple operations copied from human beings. But it is just here that one sees how great is the gulf between the undeveloped hand of even the most anthropoid of apes and the human hand that has been highly perfected by the labour of hundreds of thousands of years. The number and general arrangement of the bones and muscles are the same in both; but the hand of the lowest savage can perform hundreds of operations that no monkey’s hand can imitate. No simian hand has ever fashioned even the crudest stone knife.[34]

Nicholas Toth has spent many years attempting to reconstruct the methods by which early humans produced tools, and has come to the conclusion that even the most basic processes of flaking stone requires not only considerable care and manual dexterity, but also a degree of foresight and planning.

To work efficiently, the stone knapper has to choose a rock of the correct shape, bearing the correct angle at which to strike; and the striking motion itself requires great practice in order to deliver the appropriate amount of force in the right place. ‘It seems clear that early tool-making proto-humans had a good intuitive sense of the fundamentals of working stone, ‘ Toth wrote in a paper in 1985. ‘There’s no question that the earliest toolmakers possessed a mental capacity beyond that of apes,’ he recently told me. ‘Toolmaking requires a coordination of significant motor and cognitive skills’.[35]

There is a close correlation between the hand, the brain, and all the other organs of the body. The part of the brain connected with the hands is vastly greater than that which is connected with any other part of the body. Darwin already grasped the fact that the development of certain parts of the organism are linked with the development of other parts which apparently have no relation to them. He called this phenomenon the law of the correlation of growth. The development of manual dexterity through labour provided the stimulus for a rapid development of the brain.

The development of humankind was not an accident, but the result of necessity. The upright stance of early hominids was necessary to allow them to move freely on the savannah in search of food. The head had to be positioned at the top of the body in order to detect the presence of predators, as we see in some other savannah-dwelling animals, such as the meerkat. Limited food sources created the necessity to gather and transport, which was the driving force for the development of the hand.

Apes were not built to walk on two legs and do so rather clumsily. The anatomy of even the earliest hominids reveal a bone structure clearly adapted to upright walking. The upright posture has severe disadvantages in many respects. It is impossible to run as fast on two legs as on four. In many ways, bipedalism is an unnatural posture, which explains the prevalence of back pains that have plagued the human animal from the cave to the present. The great advantage of bipedalism is that it freed the hands for labour. This was humanity’s great leap forward. Labour is, together with nature, the source of all wealth. But, as Engels points out, it is infinitely more than this:

It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say: labour created man himself.

The development of the hand through labour is closely connected to the development of the body as a whole.

Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, by inheritance of the thus acquired special development of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bone as well, and by the ever-renewed employment of these inherited improvements in new, more and more complicated operations, has the human hand attained the high degree of perfection that has enabled it to conjure into being the pictures of Raphael, the statues of Thorwaldsen, the music of Paganini.

But the hand did not exist by itself. It was only one member of an entire, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, benefited also the whole body it served.[36]

The same thing applies to language. Even though apes are capable of producing a range of sounds and gestures that may be seen as a kind of embryonic “language”, all attempts to teach them to talk have ended in failure. Language, as Engels explains, is a product of collective production, and can only arise in a species the life-activity of which depends exclusively on co-operation in order to produce tools, a complex process which must be consciously learnt and passed on from one generation to the next. On this, Noam Chomsky remarks:

Anyone concerned with the study of human nature and human capacities must somehow come to grips with the fact that all normal humans acquire language, whereas acquisition of even its barest rudiments is quite beyond the capacities of an otherwise intelligent ape.

In recent times, it has become customary to try to show that language is not peculiar to humans. While there is no doubt that systems of communication exist among animals, it is entirely incorrect to describe this as language. Human speech arises from human society and human co-operative productive activity, and is qualitatively different to any other system of communication in the animal world, even the most complex.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. If this is so, it is quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human language from more primitive systems of communication that appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity.

And again:

As far as we know, possession of human language is associated with a specific type of mental organisation, not simply a higher degree of intelligence. There seems to be no substance to the view that human language is simply a more complex instance of something to be found elsewhere in the animal world. This poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true ’emergence’ – the appearance of a qualitative different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organisation[37]

The rapid expanse in brain size brought additional problems, especially in relation to childbirth. Whereas a newborn ape has a brain size of 200 cubic centimetres – about half that of an adult – that of a human baby (385 cubic centimetres) is only about a quarter of the size of the adult human brain (about 1350 cubic centimetres). The form of the human pelvis, adapted to walking in an upright position limits the size of the pelvic opening. Thus, all human babies are born “prematurely”, as a result of the large brain and the restrictions imposed by the biological engineering of bipedalism.

The complete helplessness of the newborn human baby is evident in comparison with any other species of higher mammals. It has been suggested by Barry Bogin, a biologist at the University of Michigan, that the slow rate of bodily growth in human infants, as compared to apes, is connected with the long time needed to absorb the complex rules and techniques of human society. Even the difference in body size between children and adults helps to establish a teacher-pupil relationship, where the young learn from the old, whereas among the apes rapid growth soon leads to physical rivalry. When the long process of learning is complete, the body catches up with a sudden leap in growth during adolescence.

“Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws – that is, culture. The social milieu in which helpless infants are cared for and older children are educated is much more characteristic of humans than it is of apes.” (Leakey)[38]

  1. Leakey, R. The Origin of Humankind, p. 36.

  2. Engels, F. The Dialectics of Nature, pp. 229-30.

  3. Leakey, R. op. cit., p. 38.

  4. Engels, F. The Dialectics of Nature, pp. 228 and 230-1.

  5. Chomsky, N. Language and Mind, pp. 66-7 and 70.

  6. Leakey, R. op. cit., p. 45.