"Engels considers three essential features of human evolution: speech, a large brain, and upright posture. He argues that the first step must have been a descent from the trees with subsequent evolution to upright Posture by our ground-dwelling ancestors. 'These apes when moving on level ground began to drop the habit of using their hands and to adopt a more and more erect gait. This was the decisive step in the transition from ape to man.' Upright posture freed the hand for using tools (labour, in Engels' terminology); increased intelligence and speech came later."
^^^^ CB: Chimps make tools and labor. The decisive step in the transition from ape labor to man's( sic) labor is the establishment of culture and kinship systems, by which a given tool once invented didn't have to be reinvented by future generations. As Marx said the distinction between the _labor_ of humans and animals is that humans imagine the task, plan it first. The role of labor and tools in the transition from apes to humans is not that humans put in more labor hours than apes or that apes don't have any tools in their labor. It is that human labor became an ever growing , socially shared accumulation of scientific understanding of hunting and gathering, foraging, avoiding predators, most importantly this was knowledge was shared across many generations. The role of labor, or the unique quality of human labor, was to grow and develop as a social and historical body of knowledge. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
