1952: Ducksin College Papers in Natural Philosophy
No. XVII—Michaelmas Term—A Reticulate Reading of Human Emergence: Toward a Non‑Linear Account of Origins That Retains the Evidence and Suspects the Story
By E. Percival Druksel, M.A. (Oxon.), F.R.S., Fellow of Ducksin College
Read before the College Philosophical Society in the Senior Combination Room, 23rd October 1952, at 8.15 p.m. Precis of discussion appended.
Prefatory Caveat
Any model of human origins is, among other indiscretions, a story about what counts as human. The decision is taken in advance and then hustled out of sight, like a disagreeable aunt at a wedding. That it should be so is perhaps inevitable; that we should pretend otherwise is merely ill‑bred.
The present paper will not repair this breach of manners. Its more modest aim is to keep the initial decision visible while proceeding as though it were not fatal. The model proposed—Reticulate Emergence—declines to treat humanity as a single lineage and prefers to regard it as a condition: one that assembled itself, repeatedly and at varying speeds, across populations that were genetically continuous, cognitively uneven, and metaphysically irritable.
I. Statement of the Model
The familiar diagram of descent—that arboreal confection in which one well‑behaved trunk rises through time while lesser branches accept their position—has acquired the air of a constitutional monarch: impressive, decorative, and largely fictional. It presumes what it ought to examine, namely that there exists a primary line of becoming to which others contribute merely in the margins.
The reticulate model proposes a different geometry. Picture, if you will, not a tree but a net: strands crossing and re‑crossing, some robust, some frayed, none singly bearing the weight of the whole. Several regional populations of the genus Homo, all descended from earlier forms, exchange genes and, more disastrously, ideas. Certain combinations of traits—anatomical, behavioural, symbolic—recur with increasing frequency. Where the mesh is dense enough, we obtain what the present author is willing, for working purposes, to call “human.”
This is not to deny that one may still draw a tree. It is only to observe that, under conditions of contact, the tree begins to behave suspiciously like a net that has taken etiquette lessons.
As Professor G. B. Thwistle remarked in his unfortunately titled On the Hermeneutics of Fossil Dust (Leeds, 1949): “When ancestry becomes a tangle, the gentleman will straighten his diagram, never his mind.”
II. Methods
(Being an Account of Procedures Sufficiently Respectable to Invite Funding)
Data Sources.
The present inquiry draws upon:
Comparative genomical summaries, as then circulated in mimeographed form amongst the more excitable laboratories of the Continent.
Cranial endocasts and associated curiosities preserved in the Ducksin College Museum of Comparative Anatomy (collection unnumbered, dust considerable).
Archaeological reports, many of them written in the style of minor adventure fiction.
Ethnographic accounts of cosmological schemes, with particular attention to vertical imagery.
Operational Definitions.
“Symbolic capacity”: the disposition to treat what is absent as relevant and to behave in consequence.
“Vertical metaphysics”: any cosmological arrangement in which height or depth is taken as an index of significance, whether moral, causal, or culinary.
These definitions, however unsatisfactory, are at least symmetrical in their vagueness.
Limitations.
Preservation bias: stone survives better than gossip.
Sampling bias: expeditions favour climates compatible with deck‑chairs.
Narrative bias: investigators prefer stories they can tell without notes.
Ethical Statement.
No surviving populations were knowingly reclassified as sub‑human during this research. All conjectures concerning the dead have been conducted in accordance with the Ducksin Statute on Posthumous Courtesy (1941), which enjoins Fellows to “speak no worse of the departed than they would of one another.”
III. Genetic Evidence: Retained and Re‑Read
Modern genomes, where inspected, reveal fragments of at least three archaic populations entangled within them, together with one or more politely denominated “ghost” contributors. The orthodox narrative casts this as a tree with lateral transfers: a primary lineage emerging in Africa, receiving local infusions on its way to global dominion. The map remains hierarchical: a central trunk with adventurous twigs.
The reticulate model retains the evidence but inverts the manners. Instead of a principal species absorbing provincial supplements, we behold a mesh in which several archaic populations deposit overlapping “packages” of adaptation. None is the author; all are complicit. Certain immune variants, certain alterations in respiration, even shifts in sleep and sensitivity: these do not appear as detached curiosities, but as strands tugging the net into its eventual shape.
Sir Ronald Clamp, in Genomes and Gentlemen (London, 1951), limned the situation with more frankness than tact: “Introgression is what we call ancestry when it makes the club list uncomfortable.”
Iv. Fossil Continuity Without a Single Thread
The fossil record from roughly four hundred to one hundred thousand years before the present resembles one of those undergraduate essays in which every paragraph gesticulates towards a conclusion that never quite arrives. Faces with some modern traits, others obstinately archaic; tiny brains with curiously modern wrists; robust frames engaged in perhaps unnecessarily delicate practices.
The multi-regional enthusiasts solve this by declaring all forms one sprawling species. The recent‑African purists, meanwhile, consign most of them to the footnotes. Both approaches are narratively efficient. Both offend the evidence.
Under the reticulate model there is no single morphological target at which evolution was patiently aiming, as at a dartboard. There were multiple assemblages of traits, converging upon overlapping but not identical solutions to the problem of being an anxious primate. Some configurations fizzled, others persisted, a few collided and recombined. What the textbooks hail as a march is better apprehended as an untidy convergence, seen through too narrow a keyhole.
V. Symbolic Cognition: Composite Fire
The most recalcitrant feature of our story is not bone but behaviour: the sporadic appearance of marks, ornaments, and objects whose only evident utility is to mean something. The record offers beads, pigments, figurines, and the disconcerting suspicion that someone, somewhere, believed in a future audience.
Two explanations currently enjoy tenure. The first declares that a single genetic event—a mutation in some obliging locus—produced the modern mind like a light switched on. The second supposes that symbolic capacity was long present but rarely expressed until social conditions made it fashionable.
The reticulate model offers a more parsimonious impertinence. Symbolic cognition is not a lone faculty but a kit:
– Recursive articulation.
– Reference to absent things.
– Deliberate marking.
– Shared attention to what is not there.
The capacity to place oneself in times not yet or no longer.
Each of these may have arisen to different degrees in different populations; each leaves a different kind of archaeological whisper. Only when enough strands coincided—through interbreeding, imitation, or some ungentle combination of both—did they reinforce one another into a system that could not easily be undone.
Dr. Janet Loon‑Rogers wrote, with arresting literalness, in The Semiotics of Smoke (Hull, 1946): “The first symbol was the fire that continued to matter when it had gone out.” She meant it poetically. The reticulate view is unkind enough to take her at her word.
VI. Vertical Metaphysics: An Architecture of Mind
It is a universal curiosity that when men tire of discussing property they turn to discussing levels. Heaven above, hell below; ancestors underneath the floor, higher beings in the rafters; ladders, mountains, trees, and institutional staircases, all solemnly traversed by priests and professors. Physiologists content themselves with noting that we are upright animals aware of gravity. The explanation is correct and banal.
The more interesting observation is that vertical cosmology reveals minds that have learned to treat time as a dimension open to manipulation. To place the dead “beneath” is to rehearse the past as a spatial stratum; to swear that gods reside “above” is to project authority into an inaccessible tier. The axis mundi, whether tree or tower, is the diagrammatic expression of a brain that thinks in layers and wishes causation to follow suit.
The reticulate model predicts—in its mild, apologetic way—that such vertical schemes crystallise only once the symbolic kit is sufficiently assembled. Before that, we may have fear, ritual, and even gossip, but not quite the suave invention of “up” as better and “down” as worse.
Ducksin itself obeys the principle with exemplary candour. The College Library, housing the least consulted volumes, occupies the highest storey; the kitchens, origin of all meaningful action, lie deep and fragrant below.
VII. The Narrative Problem As Structural Feature
No account of origins can be considered complete if it omits a theory of why such accounts are desired at all. The standard evolutionary romance—single origin, gradual improvement, ultimate triumph—is charmingly circular: it is a story told by a symbol‑using animal about the miracle of having become a symbol‑using animal. The narrator kneels, as it were, before his own vocal cords.
The reticulate framework does not pretend to escape this loop. Instead, it treats the compulsion to draw lines—trunks, timelines, syllabuses—as part of the data. Linear narrative is the strategy a net employs when asked to describe itself without alarming the bursar. It compresses; it omits lateral connections; it sacrifices failed experiments and inconvenient cousins to maintain an orderly procession. A net is difficult to remember. A tree can be recited.
H. Moreton, in his engagingly credulous Ghosts Before Genes (Cambridge, 1950), remarked that “the first function of myth is to make time walk single file.” Science, for all its indignation, often marches in the same corridor.
VIII. The Device Problem
Any species capable of modelling its origins will, by the ordinary vices of self‑interest, prefer models that ennoble current arrangements. The “tree” is therefore not a neutral illustration but an administrative device. It presents hierarchy as botany. Roots are silent and safely buried; branches know their station; the crown enjoys dignity untroubled by the knowledge that it is only the most recent accident.
The net is, politically speaking, an embarrassment. It implies mutual dependence, distributed responsibility, and a lack of distinguished ancestors. Little wonder that it appears rarely in official brochures. The reticulate model is thus not merely a biological proposal but a small act of bureaucratic indecorum.
IX. What the Model Cannot Do
(With Reluctantly Honest Footnotes)
The framework cannot identify “the first human,” for the same reason that one cannot say which knot was first in a net woven by several impatient hands. The question offends the geometry.
It cannot be overthrown by a single fossil. This is not a virtue. It is simply a consequence of the model’s diagnostic intention. The reticulate scheme does not aspire, in the strict sense, to be correct; it aspires to reveal the assumptions smuggled into correctness by more linear narratives. To that end, its predictions are deliberately soft and opportunely hedged, because experience shows that the human mind makes hard predictions chiefly when it wishes to feel safe.
Two testable, and therefore vulgar, consequences may be admitted under protest:
Partial symbolic anatomies. If symbolic capacities assembled combinatorially, then future analyses of archaic cranial architecture ought to disclose mosaics: traces of recursive planning without full linguistic elaboration here; preferential attention to absence without elaborate analogy there.
Hybrid metaphysics. One should expect early instances of vertical cosmology to appear disproportionately in regions where populations met and mingled; it is in such hybrid zones that a mind, suddenly aware of alternative ways to be, may find it useful to arrange them on a ladder.
Should these expectations fail, the framework may have to concede fewer jokes and more hypotheses. It will resist.
X. Post‑Lecture Discussion (Excerpt From the Minutes)
The Warden in the Chair. Attendance sparse but combative. Sherry indifferent.
Dr. P—— (Classics) inquired whether the speaker proposed to render the genealogies of Genesis “reticulate,” and if so, whether the College Chapel had been consulted.
Professor S—— (Engineering) objected that a model not readily expressible as a flow diagram could scarcely be considered scientific.
Miss H—— (History) ventured that the notion of the tree as an “administrative device” was “unhelpfully accurate.”
The Author replied that he claimed only that the net better resembled the evidence, and that if the Almighty had intended linearity He would never have permitted committee minutes.
The vote of thanks was carried nem. con., one Fellow abstaining on theological grounds.
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