An Elaboration of the Hockett-Ascher-Endleman Interpretation of “the Human Revolution”

In response to and in elaboration of both the Charles Hockett-Robert Ascher presentation of “The Human Revolution” in Current Anthropology 3 and Robert Endelman's edifying psychoanalytic “Reflections on the Human Revolution” in a recent issue of this journal,2 some correlative notions evolve.

First, a tribute to these scholars, who are able to integrate complex and paradoxical data…the multidimensional origins of human language. The maturation of theories…like individuals…requires an enlarging capacity to reconcile the apparently unreconcilable.

Endleman considers the elements of fixity in the biocultural evolution of man in a summarizing statement of the Hockett-Ascher hypothesis: “… the peculiar historical circumstances of man's evolution from a tree-living primate to a ground-living savanna hunter, had set, once and for all, the peculiar biocultural problems of the species: i.e., infantilization, precocious and polymorphous sexuality, conflict-laden interindividual intimacies and dependencies, communication necessities emerging in language, social control necessities favoring the process of repression, itself intimately tied to the development of language, and hence of the universal problems of culture.” (pp. 22-23)

Quoting and deriving from Norman Brown's hypothesis1 that “formal logic and the law of contradiction are the rules whereby the mind submits to operate under general conditions of repression” and considering that possibly man can eventually “liberate” himself through the very “conflict and tension” provoked by these rules, Endleman concludes with the hope: “May it not be possible … to have a new cultural evolutionism, in which the transforming mechanism in the human potentiality is not intellectual mastery and its repression-based science and technology, but the forces of Eros and a science devoted to its cause, i.e., integrating the insights of the poets and mystics… ?” (p. 24)

If, with Endleman, we can see “deep psychobiological sex differences” as stemm