The Human Revolution

THE HUMAN REVOLUTION* By CHARLES F. HOCKETT and ROBERT ASCHER This essay attempts to set forth the story of the emergence of the first humans from their prehuman ancestors. A special feature is that we have tried to incorporate the various steps and stages of the evolution of language into the total picture. The term "revolution" in our title is not intended to be flamboyant. A revolution is a relatively sudden set of changes that yield a state of af fairs from which a return to the situation just before the revolution is virtually impossible. This seems to be the sense of the word intended by V. Gordon Childe when he speaks of the "Neolithic Revolution" and of the "Urban Revolution" [i]. But these two revolutions were experienced by our fully human ancestors. The second could not have occurred had it not been for the first. The first could not have taken place had it not been for an even earlier extremely drastic set of changes that turned non humans into humans. These drastic changes, as we shall see, may have required a good many millions of years ; yet they can validly be regarded as "sudden" in view of the tens of millions of years of mammalian history that preceded them. For the reconstruction of human evolution we have evidence of two