Gilgamesh News

Our old friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu come up in this review of a book that seems to suggest that humans evolved to become less savage:

Until the discovery of DNA's double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, prehistory was entirely the province of paleontologists and archaeologists. "But in the past few years," Nicholas Wade wrote in his 2006 book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (a work praised by Watson himself, among many others), "an extraordinary new archive has become available to those who study human evolution, human nature and history. It is the record encoded in the DNA of the human genome and in the versions of it carried by the world's population."

In the lost history whose DNA-aided recovery Wade chronicles, one of the most interesting chapters covers "gracilization" -- that is, "a worldwide thinning of the human skull" starting around 40,000 years ago. Why was it that, millenniums before the agricultural revolution, our ancestors became progressively lighter-boned and smaller? A crucial clue: The fossil record and contemporary breeding experiments alike confirm that domestication, whether accidental -- as in the evolution of the dog from the wolf -- or deliberate, induces pedomorphism, or the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. "Gracilization . . . occurred because early modern humans were becoming tamer," Wade writes. "And who, exactly, was domesticating them? The answer is obvious: people were domesticating themselves. In each society the violent and aggressive males somehow ended up with a lesser chance of breeding. This process started some 50,000 years ago, and, in [primatologist Richard] Wrangham's view, it is still in full spate."

For a student of ancient mythologies, this reference to human self-domestication -- sine qua non for the sedentary life that began 15,000 years ago -- brings to mind the oldest of all epics, the 5,000-year-old, originally Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh," in which the civilized, city-dwelling title character, though he has much to learn from the wild and hairy Enkidu, finally defeats him. Gilgamesh sleeps with any city woman he chooses, when he chooses. Enkidu makes do in the fields with a single woman, and her a prostitute.

Perhaps the "Epic of Gilgamesh" crystallized memories of the long human self-domestication that Wade writes of, but of equal interest is the possibility that rather than merely recalling the change, this and kindred myths may have contributed to it. If such a literary work were recited repeatedly, honored as supreme truth, taught to the young and this over centuries of time -- if, in short, it were turned into sacred scripture, then could it not create social pressure, then behavioral changes and, finally, over a sufficiently lengthy period, even genetic modification?

The full review, by Jack Miles in the Los Angeles Times, may be found
here.