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The Origins of Our Species

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that Frederick Engels' 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" constitutes a correct and prescient materialist account of human origins, one that has been vindicated by subsequent palaeontological discoveries — including the 2005 find of Kenyanthropus platyops. The central claim is that labour, not the autonomous development of the brain or intelligence, drove the decisive transition from ape to human. Bipedalism preceded brain enlargement; tool-use and speech developed in dialectical unity, not as separate stages; and the entire process was shaped by material conditions — climatic shifts, habitat change, and the demands of subsistence — not by idealist notions of a preordained march toward intelligence. The article positions Engels' analysis as a dialectical materialist corrective to the idealist and gradualist orthodoxies that dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on Engels' dialectical materialism as developed in The Dialectics of Nature, specifically his insistence that qualitative leaps arise from quantitative changes and that the whole organism develops in unity with its environment. The article deploys the concept of labour as the mediating activity through which humans transformed nature and, in doing so, transformed themselves — a position that distinguishes Engels from both vulgar Darwinism and idealist accounts of human exceptionalism. The theoretical tradition invoked is that of historical materialism extended into natural history: the claim that the same dialectical laws governing social development also operate in biological evolution. The article also engages with the punctuated equilibrium theory of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, presenting it as a modern vindication of Engels' rejection of smooth gradualism. This places the argument within the Marxist tradition's long-standing effort to defend a materialist monism against both mechanical reductionism and idealist dualism.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was published in 2005, a moment when new fossil discoveries — Kenyanthropus platyops (3.5 million years old, flat-faced, small-brained, bipedal) and ongoing work on Australopithecines — were complicating the linear, progressive narratives of human evolution that had dominated popular and scientific discourse. The article intervenes in a conjuncture where the "bushy" model of human evolution (multiple contemporaneous hominid lineages) was gaining acceptance, and where the idealist assumption that brain enlargement drove bipedalism was being empirically overturned. Politically, the article connects to the broader Marxist project of defending a materialist worldview against the resurgence of religious creationism and intelligent design, which were gaining political traction in the United States and elsewhere in the early 2000s. The article also implicitly challenges the bourgeois ideological framing of human nature as fixed, individualistic, and driven by innate intelligence — a framing that underpins neoliberal justifications of inequality. By grounding human sociality and cooperation in the material necessities of labour and tool-use, the article provides a scientific foundation for the Marxist insistence that human nature is historically produced and transformable.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is a relatively short popular exposition and does not develop several lines of argument that are pursued elsewhere in the IDOM corpus and broader Marxist tradition:

  • The relationship between Engels' essay and Darwin's The Descent of Man is asserted but not explored in depth. A fuller treatment can be found in IDOM articles on Darwin and Marxism, and in Charles Woolfson's The Labour Theory of Culture (cited in the article).
  • The article does not address the question of whether the dialectics of nature is a legitimate extension of Marx's method or a positivist deviation — a debate within Marxism that has been taken up in IDOM pieces on Engels and on the relationship between Marxism and science.
  • The political implications of human evolution — particularly the argument that cooperation and social labour are as "natural" as competition — are gestured at but not developed. This connects to IDOM's broader critique of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which is treated in other articles and in Against the Stream episodes.
  • The article does not engage with the question of when and how class society emerged from earlier communal forms, which is the subject of Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and of subsequent Marxist anthropology.

Connections

  • Engels, Frederick. "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" (1876) — the foundational text the article explicates.
  • Woolfson, Charles. The Labour Theory of Culture (1982) — a detailed Marxist treatment of human evolution cited in the article.
  • Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin (1977) — provides the concept of punctuated equilibrium and the endorsement of Engels.
  • Leakey, Richard and Lewin, Roger. The Sixth Extinction (1995) — source for the ecological account of bipedalism.
  • Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man (1871) — the Darwinian framework Engels was responding to.
  • IDOM articles on dialectical materialism and science — for the broader defence of Engels' method.
  • Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) — for the extension of the labour theory of human origins into social organisation.

Key Quotes

  1. "Labour is the source of all wealth, the economists assert. It is this — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is also infinitely more than this. It is the primary basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself."

  2. "Upright posture is only the consequence of higher development of the brain", wrote the embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer. Fossil evidence would soon provide the "missing link", or so it was thought. However, the accumulation of fossil evidence confirmed Engels' thesis. The Australopithecines walked upright but had small brains!

  3. "First comes labour", states Engels, "after it, and then side by side with it articulate speech — these were the two essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its similarity to the former is far larger and more perfect."

  4. "All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain", wrote Engels. "Men became accustomed to explain their actions from their thoughts, instead of from their needs... And so there arose in the course of time that idealistic outlook on the world, which has dominated men's minds."

  5. "It is clear that the evolutionary tree is far bushier than at first appeared. While the human lineage split from that of the African apes some 5-10 million years ago, this new evidence suggests possible new lines from which humans evolved. It shows a far greater diversification of human evolution prior to the emergence of the Homo genus."

  6. "The hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour."