In the opening scene of DC Comics’ Final Crisis no. 1 (2008), Grant Morrison wrote a new origin story for Anthro, the cave boy superhero character first introduced in 1968. Morrison also characterized this “secret origin” of Anthro as an “aboriginal genesis of superheroism itself,” as I discussed in my earlier post “Behold the Super-Hominid.”
Anthro is shown the secret of fire by the “New God” Metron. He then wields it like a superpower to fend off an invading tribe and protect his people. Anthro thus becomes the first superhero.
At the end of the issue, we see Anthro at a campfire where he roasts a game animal at sunrise (evoking “the dawn of man”). Fire is a multi-functional superpower that can be used to produce and provide as well as protect. He is surrounded by an array of tools: a bow and arrows, a water gourd, and a mortar and pestle. This is the first time we have seen these tools in the story, so Anthro may have invented them after his encounter with Metron.
In DC lore, Anthro is known as “the First Boy,” because he is the first Homo sapiens: an evolutionary advance beyond his Neanderthal parents. In Morrison’s story, Anthro’s discovery of fire him sets him apart from his more primitive forebears. (Morrison recognized that current paleoanthropology says that Homo erectus—not Homo sapiens—probably first developed the use of fire, but reasonably pleaded poetic license.)
The Strong Fire
At the end of Anthro’s story, Morrison puts another spin on what the First Boy’s “discovery of fire” really meant.
In the final scene of the final issue of Final Crisis, we see an elderly Anthro tending his campfire and then walking into a cave with a torch. The narrative captions read:
“Some time later, when Old Man has finished refreshing the stories one final time at the Holy Ground… he comes to rest.
He thinks of the Shining One and the burning bush in the long-ago now. Fire lights his eyes.
Old Man has carried the strong fire from place to place, learning all its urgent lessons. He has made with his hands things first glimpsed in its swift and subtle heart. Where new thoughts are born in a furnace.”
Thus, the “fire of the gods” that Anthro received from his mountaintop encounter with Metron was not just a physical flame. He wasn’t just inspired to invent manmade fire. The superpower he gained was invention itself: the ability to make “with his hands things first glimpsed in” his own imagination, “where new thoughts are born in a furnace.” That is is why he was depicted surrounded by inventions at the end of issue one.
This, interestingly enough, does jibe with current paleoanthropology.
As science writer Matt Ridley argued in his 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, what distinguishes Homo sapiens from our hominid predecessors is our propensity to innovate; to deliberately change the way we do things; to improve our technologies, our lifestyles, our habits in general.
Fire is an apt metaphor for that propensity to innovate, because the creation of the new always entails a disruption (or purging) of the old: i.e., creative destruction.
Stagnation Is Standard
Ridley told of how, the “Boxgrove hominids” (members of Homo heidelbergensis) used the same design of hand axe over one million years and across three continents.
“During those million years,” Ridley pointed out. “their brains grew in size by about one-third. Here’s the startling thing. The bodies and brains of the creatures that made Acheulean hand axes changed faster than their tools.”
Ridley continued:
“Bizarre as this may sound, in evolutionary terms it is quite normal. Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range. Natural selection is a conservative force. It spends more of its time keeping species the same than changing them. Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different. (…) There is constant ferment of change within the species’ genes as it adapts to its parasites and they to it. But there is little progressive alteration of the organism. Evolutionary change happens largely by the replacement of species by daughter species, not by the changing of habits in species. What is surprising about the human story is not the mind-bogglingly tedious stasis of the Acheulean hand axe, but that the stasis came to an end.”
The Super-Species
What brought that toolkit stagnation to an end was us: Homo sapiens, or as Ridley aptly calls us Homo dynamicus. As Ridley wrote:
“Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it.”
The dawn of man was the dawn of discovery, the dawn of the dynamic.
For the Boxgrove hominids, the Acheulean hand axe was state-of-the-art for a million years. We Homo dynamicus specimens swap our handheld supercomputers (aka, “phones”) for more capable models every 2-5 years.
Our inborn capacity to imagine, to invent, to create, to reform our habits, and in general to make things better is our superpower, our divine spark, our heavenly fire, our gift from God that makes us distinctively human. To fulfill our human potential, let us graciously accept that gift and heroically use that superpower.