New on SAPIENS: Our columnist gideonlasco digs into the origins of a popular story attributed to Margaret Mead about the original sign of civilization.
According to a commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There are many variations of the anecdote, but the general details are similar: To the student’s surprise, Mead replied that the first sign of civilization is a healed human femur—the long bone that connects the hip to the knee.
However, the story immediately aroused skepticism on my part. And the more I dug into it, the more it seemed to fall apart.To start, there is no reliable evidence that Mead said what has been attributed to her.
Some examples from the past seem to be in line with the anecdote, pointing to elaborate human efforts to care for the injured. As SAPIENS columnist Stephen Nash wrote of an ancient Puebloan woman who suffered a fall and received medical care some 800 years ago: “Love and the often inexorable will-to-live can push the human body to do remarkable things, even in the absence of modern painkillers.
More compellingly, recent evidence points to the fact that medical behavior once ascribed to humans may be found in other species. Chimpanzees, for example, have been observed treating the wounds of other community members by applying insects; many other species, from elephants to wolves, have been found to practice some form of self-medication.
What if, instead, we forego this tendency to view our species as special? As paleoanthropologist Paige Madison has written, referencing burial practices among Neanderthals and other hominins: “By letting go of the belief in the uniqueness of our behavior, we might be able to see how our tendency to view ourselves as terribly special alienates us from the rest of our primate family, and indeed from all of evolution.
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