How Labor Created Man: The Role of Work in Human Evolution

How Labor Created Man: From Ape to Human

The transformation of the ape into the human being was driven above all by labor — the conscious making and use of tools. This is the central argument that Friedrich Engels set out in his essay The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, written as part of his unfinished work Dialectics of Nature. Where earlier thinkers looked to anatomy or intellect alone, Engels showed that it was purposeful, cooperative work that separated humanity from every other animal and set in motion the long development of the hand, the brain, and language.

Labor is more than a physical act in this framework; it is the condition of human existence itself. Everything that surrounds a person — dwelling, furniture, clothing, food — has been created or transformed by human hands. Bread does not fall ready-made from the sky: it is sown on cultivated soil, harvested, threshed, milled, and baked, and each of those steps requires tools that people themselves have made. In this sense human beings live in an artificial environment of their own construction, and it is this productive relationship to nature, rather than any "law of nature," that defines them.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution and Its Limits

Darwin's Discovery of the Laws of Evolution

Charles Darwin discovered the laws governing the evolution of plants and animals and explained why living organisms do not remain fixed but change and develop over time. He demonstrated that lower animals gave rise to higher ones and that the ancestor of the human being was an ape. This was Darwin's great achievement, set out most fully in his Origin of Species, and it laid the scientific foundation on which later materialist thinkers would build.

Why Darwin Could Not Fully Explain the Origin of Man

Even this brilliant scientist could not completely unravel the mystery of how an ape became an altogether different being — a human. Darwin held that the differences between human and ape were not fundamental, that they were roughly of the same order as the differences between an ape and the lower mammals below it.

Darwin's mistaken view of the human being as merely one animal species among others gave reactionaries a pretext to claim that the laws regulating the life of animals apply equally to human society. In a class society, as is well known, all the benefits are enjoyed by an insignificant minority who produce nothing directly but live off the labor of others.

The vast majority of working people, who create untold wealth, endure want, frequently go hungry, fall ill, and die before their time. The cause of this abnormal state of affairs lies in the fact that in class society the means of production — a large part of the land, factories and works, the means of transport and communication, and the banks — belong not to the whole people but to landlords and capitalists.

Under these conditions production serves not the satisfaction of the people's needs but the profit of the capitalists. To justify social inequality the exploiting classes have long invoked religion, which teaches that everything in existence is eternal and unchanging. But religion is not the only instrument used by reaction.

The exploiters press science into the same service, distorting and falsifying it in advance. What follows is one of many examples.

The Anthropoid Ape as Man's Ancestor

The ancestors of both modern anthropoid apes and human beings were tree-dwelling animals whose arboreal way of life turned them into two-legged, two-handed creatures. This is confirmed by the living great apes: when an ape climbs a tree it uses its lower limbs to support the body while the upper limbs grasp the trunk, and it moves through the dense evergreen canopy in a half-erect posture.

Anatomical and Behavioral Characteristics of Anthropoid Apes

The upper limbs of anthropoid apes serve markedly different purposes from the lower ones, functioning in essence as hands as opposed to feet. With their upper limbs apes tear off leaves and fruit, defend themselves against enemies, and hang from branches before making a leap; with their lower limbs they rest on thick boughs, gripping them with the mobile toes of the foot. Ancient fossil anthropoid apes possessed limbs of the same kind, as their skeletal remains confirm, and these creatures therefore constituted a transitional form between animals and man.

Australopithecines and Early Hominids

Fossil discoveries made since Engels wrote have strongly confirmed his account of the ape's transformation into man. In northern India in 1934–1935, the skeletal remains — jaws with teeth — of a highly developed ape, Ramapithecus, standing very close to the human line, were unearthed. Of even greater interest are the fossil finds of extinct ancient apes named australopithecines, meaning "southern apes," the first incomplete skull and part of a lower jaw of a young specimen having been found in South Africa in 1924.

A considerable number of these bones — many skulls, lower jaws, and other skeletal parts — were subsequently recovered, the most recent at the time being found in 1948. The finds show that the australopithecines, of which several species are counted, were large apes that moved on two legs, so that their hands were free from any part in locomotion. The braincase of an australopithecine holds roughly 500 cubic centimetres of brain, and the teeth barely differ from human teeth, the canines being no larger than the rest.

Whether or not this is so is hard to state with certainty. One thing is beyond doubt: the australopithecines were highly developed apes possessing an erect gait. They represent the transitional stage from apes to ape-men, and the latter, as we already know, form the initial stage in the evolution of the human being.

The Decisive Role of Labor in Human Origins

How Tool-Making Transformed the Ape into Man

Tool-making was the decisive act that turned the ape into a human, and it became possible only once the hands were freed from the work of walking. Under the influence of thinning and vanishing forests, ancient apes ceased to live in trees and became ground-dwelling animals. Living in open, treeless places and already possessing legs adapted to half-erect movement, they walked more and more often on two legs — a great advantage, since using only the lower limbs for locomotion released the upper limbs for other ends.

With free hands the further steps were not difficult. Apes on the path of becoming human could defend themselves by hurling stones and sticks, dig larvae and edible roots from the ground with sticks, and smash one stone against another to select a fragment with a sharp point or cutting edge suited to a purpose. Such a fragment is already an artificially made tool, however primitive — the birth of the stone knife and, in time, the stone implements of the Homo erectus phase. The next step was to sharpen a flint chip with another chip and to point a stick with the flint's cutting edge, which is the initial form of labor itself.

With the transition to upright walking and the freeing of the hands from any part in moving the body, our half-animal ancestors resorted to labor ever more often and thereby began to change from animals into people. This road was extremely long — hundreds of thousands of years were needed to travel it — yet once begun, the humanization of the ape did not stop but continued to accelerate until the animal had fully become a human being.

The Correlation of Growth in Biological Development

The development of one part of the body draws other parts along with it, a principle Darwin called the correlation of growth. As the hand grew more skilled through labor and the erect posture became fixed, changes followed in the arm and shoulder, in the balance of the whole skeleton, and above all in the brain and the sense organs. Labor refined the human senses — the touch of the working hand, the eye trained to judge form and distance — so that the human body and its powers of perception are themselves products of the long history of work.

The Development of the Hand Through Labor

The human hand is not only the organ of labor but also its product, perfected across countless generations of use. The differentiation of hands and feet already begun in tree-dwelling apes was carried much further once labor demanded ever finer and more varied movements, until the hand became capable of the delicate operations that produced not only tools but the works of a Raphael, a Thorwaldsen, or a Paganini. The behaviour of even the cleverest apes shows the gulf that labor opened: an ape may use a ready-made object, but it cannot fashion something genuinely new.

The Origin and Development of Human Language

How Labor Gave Rise to Speech

Language arose out of labor and developed alongside it, because cooperative work created the need for people to say something to one another. As emerging humans came together to make tools, hunt, and share the results of their effort, the demand for communication reshaped the vocal apparatus, and the undeveloped larynx slowly transformed to produce one articulate sound after another. Labor and speech thus grew together, each spurring the other and, together, driving the development of the brain.

Comparison of Human and Animal Communication Abilities

No animal communication system approaches human language, because human speech expresses thoughts about things not present and about the future, whereas animal signals convey only immediate states such as fear, hunger, or excitement. Bees, ants, and many birds exchange signals and coordinate their activity, but they cannot combine sounds into new meanings or discuss what does not yet exist. It is precisely the future-oriented, planning character of human labor that human language is built to serve.

Animal Cognition and Language Comprehension

Some animals can be trained to associate human sounds or gestures with rewards, yet this is not the same as understanding language. An ape may learn to respond to spoken commands because it is rewarded with food, always acting in the same monotonous way once the habit has become second nature to it. This capacity for learning is real, but it remains bound to concrete stimuli and reward, never reaching the free, abstract handling of meaning that distinguishes human speech and thought.

The Evolution of Consciousness and Abstract Thinking

Conscious Life Activity as the Human Species-Being

Human labor is conscious and creative, and this conscious life activity is what Karl Marx called the human species-being. Before beginning any task each of us builds a plan of action in the mind and foresees the future result of the work, so that the outcome exists in imagination before it exists in fact. Because labor is planned and social, human beings continually accumulate experience, raise their skill, and pass knowledge from one generation to the next — knowing more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today.

This is why there is a continuous cultural development of humanity, a growth of its material and spiritual wealth and a perfection of the ways of working. Animals, by contrast, produce nothing; they merely consume what they find in nature ready-made, conducting what might be called a purely predatory "economy," and this is true of domestic as well as wild animals.

Critique of Cartesian Dualism and Idealist Anthropology

The materialist account of human origins rejects the idea that mind and consciousness stand apart from the body and from material life, as Cartesian dualism supposes. Consciousness did not descend from outside to animate a physical creature; it arose from the material practice of labor and language within a developing organism. Against idealist views in anthropology, which trace the human being to spirit, thought, or divine act, Marx and Engels insisted that being determines consciousness and not the reverse.

This inversion is what separated Marx's materialism from the idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: where Hegel derived the real world from the movement of the Idea, Marx grounded thought in the actual, laboring life of human beings in society. The essays and manuscripts in which this position is worked out — from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology to The Holy Family — form the foundation of what became known as historical and dialectical materialism.

The Biological Basis of Dialectical Materialism

Engels's essay is significant because it roots dialectical materialism in biology, showing how a qualitatively new being emerged from purely natural processes through the accumulation of quantitative change. The long, gradual humanization of the ape illustrates the dialectical passage from quantity into quality: many small changes in gait, hand, brain, and social cooperation eventually produced a creature different in kind from every animal. Human beings thus separated themselves from nature not by leaving it but by acting upon it, mastering nature through labor while remaining a part of it.

Cultural Versus Genetic Evolution

Once labor and language appeared, human development came to be carried chiefly by culture rather than by genetic change, which is why humanity advances so much faster than any biological species. Knowledge, tools, and techniques are transmitted by teaching and imitation, so that each generation inherits the accumulated experience of all who came before and builds upon it. Modern anthropologists describe this interplay of biological and cultural inheritance as gene-culture coevolution or dual inheritance, but its essential insight — that human beings make themselves through their own social labor — was already present in the work of Marx and Engels.

Communist Societies in the Ancestral Human Commune

The earliest human societies were communal, without private ownership of the means of production and without division into exploiters and exploited. In the ancestral commune, described by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State on the basis of studies of peoples such as the Iroquois, the products of collective labor were shared and social relations rested on cooperation and kinship rather than on property. Only much later, with the growth of a surplus, did private property, classes, slavery, patriarchy, and the state arise, bringing with them the inequality that would eventually be defended by false appeals to the "laws of nature."

The Reactionary Misuse of Darwin's Theory

Applying Animal Laws to Human Society: A False Analogy

It is a false analogy to apply the laws of animal life to human society, because the human being long ago and forever broke away from its animal relatives. Between the human being and all animals there opened a bottomless gulf that nothing can fill and across which no bridge can be thrown to reconnect the two. That gulf is labor — the capacity to make tools and, with their help, to create something new that did not exist before — and it is what makes any attempt to read the struggles of beasts into human society scientifically worthless.

The Theory of the Priest Malthus

Long before Darwin, an English clergyman named Malthus (1766–1834) tried to prove that the want, hunger, and dying-off of working people are due to "natural" causes. In his view people multiply in excessive numbers and nature cannot supply everyone with the necessary means of subsistence, so that competition and a struggle for existence supposedly break out among people. In that struggle the strongest and best adapted are said to triumph while all the "less valuable" are left destitute, and the only remedy Malthus could devise was to advise the working people to breed less.

Darwin's Uncritical Borrowing of Malthus

Darwin uncritically borrowed the theory of Malthus and applied it to plants and animals. According to Darwin's teaching, plants and animals multiply excessively and are forced to compete with one another for territory, for light, warmth, and food, and in this struggle the specimens survive and leave offspring that possess some biological advantage over the others. Learned and unlearned reactionaries hastened to seize on this Malthusian error of Darwin's in order to declare that the struggle for existence is a universal law of both nature and society.

This invented law was used by the learned defenders of capitalism to proclaim the exploiters the victors in the struggle for existence — the better adapted, the "best" — and the working people the "worst," the unfit to survive.

The Barbaric Inventions of the Malthusians

Modern Malthusians are no longer content merely to advise the poor to breed less but demand the physical extermination of all "superfluous" people — that is, the unemployed and, in general, all who are dissatisfied with capitalism and strive to change the existing order and establish a juster social arrangement. In their view the best means of destroying "superfluous" people is to deprive them of medical care and unemployment benefits, to spread epidemics, and above all to make war.

How far the cannibal-Malthusians are capable of going may be judged from a book published in the United States in 1948, which claimed that of the earth's population of 2,250 million only about 900 million could be fed to satiety, while the remaining 1,350 million ought to be exterminated — war being the best means to that end, all the more so since it brings the capitalists enormous profits.

These barbaric inventions have nothing in common with science and contradict the facts. Year by year, as science and technology advance, agriculture and industry yield more and more produce, quite enough to satisfy the needs of the world's population with a surplus to spare; yet under capitalism these means of subsistence do not reach the people who produce them.

The United States is the clearest example. While American capitalists rake in tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, millions of working people are without homes, feed on refuse, fall ill without the means to be treated, and die before their time. Very often the owners douse with kerosene and burn, or dump into the sea, millions of tons of grain, potatoes, coffee, meat, and other products that lie in warehouses and find no buyer.

The capitalists, of course, lose nothing by this, since the cost of the destroyed products is added as a mark-up to the goods that remain and come to market. It turns out that the small buyer pays for the crimes of the capitalists. Such is the fictitious "natural" struggle for existence in human society under capitalism.

It must be said that Darwin himself never thought of drawing reactionary conclusions from the theory of the struggle for existence. Darwin was not only a great scientist but a progressive man who hated exploitation and oppression. Contrary to the falsifiers of his teaching, Darwin declared in his book The Voyage of a Naturalist Round the World that the poverty of some and the excessive wealth of others are by no means a consequence of the laws of nature but depend on the given political order.

Of the American negroes Darwin wrote that they were highly intelligent, industrious, good-natured workers, in many respects superior to the white slave-owners, whom he called "fiends of hell." Slavery he regarded as a phenomenon shameful to human dignity, one for whose abolition it would not be too much to spend a million lives. Darwin himself thus held that the social inequality of people does not flow from any "laws of nature," and that the social life of human beings cannot therefore be likened to the life of beasts.

The Distinction Between Human and Animal Labor

The difference between the human being and the animal lies in labor — in people's ability to make tools and, with those tools, to create something new that did not exist before. Human labor is conscious and creative, whereas everything an animal does is unconscious, driven by instinct and blind impulse. Because our labor is social, no isolated individuals exist who work only for themselves without drawing on the labor of others; whether a pupil goes to school or a worker to a factory, both are engaged in useful social activity, and a great many people work for each of us just as each of us, often without knowing it, does something for the benefit of others.

Some claim that labor is not peculiar to human beings, since even lower animals are capable of working. The stickleback fish builds nests; birds weave plants, sew leaves into bags, and mould their little houses from clay; among insects the bees are the most skilful builders, and among these same insects there exists a strict division of labor between drones, worker bees, and queens.

Countless further examples could be drawn from the lives of animal weavers and tailors, diggers and hydraulic engineers, wax-workers and the rest, yet all this varied activity has nothing in common with human labor. The labor of animals is unconscious activity: animals act instinctively, driven by an unconscious urge.

Turning from animals in general to the cleverest of them — the great apes closest to us — the same limit appears. Recall Mimus, Sultan, and Rafael, whose behaviour reminds many people of human conduct. Mimus learned from people to use a plate, spoon, and fork, to put a pre-knotted napkin round his neck, and to draw his chair up to the table, but he did so only because he was rewarded with food, always acting in the same monotonous way according to a habit that had become his second nature.

Only Sultan, after long fumbling, worked out how to fit one bamboo stick into another; yet had the opening of the stick been narrower than the second stick, Sultan would never have thought of whittling it — that is, he would not have reached the artificial working of the object. In other words, Sultan proved able to use a ready-made object but not to fashion anything new.

Rafael likewise could create nothing new. He used a ready-made pole to move from one raft to another; he opened the tap of a tank and took water into his mouth to put out a fire, but this clever ape did not think to close the tap in order to keep the water in the tank. It follows that those who regard the ape as "almost human," seeing no fundamental difference between human and ape, are mistaken: the ape is an animal, not "almost human," and the contrary claim rests on a failure to grasp the essence of human labor.

If so deep a gulf separates human from ape, how could an animal turn into a fundamentally new being? The answer is given by the teaching first set out by Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the comrade-in-arms of Karl Marx (1818–1883): labor was the impelling force that compelled the ape to become human.

Capitalist Exploitation and the Division of Labor

Capitalist Exploitation and Surplus Value

Under capitalism the worker produces more value than the wages returned to them, and this unpaid surplus value is the source of the capitalist's profit. Marx analysed this mechanism in Capital and in the preparatory Grundrisse, building on the labor theory of value that runs back through classical economics to John Locke, who had grounded property and natural rights in the labor a person mixes with the world. Because the means of production are privately owned, those who work do not receive the full fruit of their labor; the difference is appropriated by those who own but do not produce.

Alienated Labor Under Capitalism

Labor, which is the very essence of the human being, becomes under capitalism a source of misery rather than fulfilment, a condition Marx called alienated or estranged labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Instead of expressing the worker's conscious, creative species-being, work is reduced to a mere means of physical survival, and the worker feels at home only outside of work.

Alienation from the Product of Labor

The product of the worker's labor confronts them as an alien thing, since it belongs to the capitalist and stands over the worker as a hostile power. The more the worker produces, the poorer they become relative to the wealth they create, because that wealth accumulates as the property of another. Commodification obscures this relation, presenting the goods on the market as things with their own value while hiding the human labor and the social relations frozen within them.

Alienation from the Work and Production Process

The worker is estranged from the very act of working, because the labor is imposed, external, and not freely chosen. In the production process the worker does not affirm themselves but denies themselves, and the activity that ought to be the expression of human life becomes forced and hateful — labor as sheer necessity, the opposite of freedom.

Alienation from Self and Fellow Humans

By being cut off from the product and the act of production, the worker is finally estranged from their own human nature and from other people. Conscious life activity, which distinguishes the human species from every animal, is degraded into a mere means to existence, and the relations between people are reshaped into relations of competition and domination. This is the deepest degradation and dehumanization that capitalist labor inflicts.

Craft Labor Versus Factory Labor

Craft labor once allowed a worker to master a whole trade and to plan and complete a finished product, whereas the factory system reduces the worker to a fragment of the process, tending a machine and repeating a single operation. The division of labor that Marx and Engels described in The Communist Manifesto raises productivity enormously, yet it also strips work of its rounded, conscious character and turns the many-sided producer into an appendage of machinery. In this way the very development of technology, under private ownership, deepens the worker's alienation instead of freeing them from toil.

Automation, Cost Reduction, and the Fate of the Worker

Capitalism introduces machinery and automation not to lighten human labor but to cut costs and increase profit, and one immediate effect is to throw workers out of employment. Science and technology, which could shorten the working day and enrich human life, are instead subordinated to the drive for surplus value, so that advances that ought to benefit all become, for the worker, a threat to livelihood. The "superfluous" people the Malthusians would exterminate are precisely those cast aside by this pursuit of cheapness and gain.

Capitalism and Ecological Destruction

The same drive for profit that exploits the worker also plunders nature, disrupting the exchange of matter between human society and the earth. Marx described this as a rift in the metabolism between people and the soil, a "metabolic rift" opened when the products of the land are shipped to distant cities and their nutrients are never returned. The wasteful destruction of grain, meat, and other produce to maintain prices, and the reckless exhaustion of natural resources, show that capitalism treats both labor and nature as things to be used up in the service of accumulation — the very opposite of the conscious mastery over nature that labor was meant to achieve.

Conclusion: Labor as the Foundation of Humanity

Labor is the foundation of humanity: it created the human hand, brain, and language, gave rise to conscious thought, and remains the source of all human wealth and existence. Engels's The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, together with Marx's analysis of alienated labor and surplus value, shows that human beings are not fixed by any "law of nature" but make and remake themselves through their own social work. The task, on this view, is to end the conditions under which labor degrades and impoverishes the worker, and to restore to labor its true character as the free, creative activity that first made us human.