Several million years ago there appeared the bipedal Australopithecus, who was clearly distinguishable from other anthropoids. Walking upright allowed their brain to develop and provided freedom of motion to both their hands and arms. The australopithecines were already using stone tools. Among our ancestors, they were the first prehominids.
According to Robert Broom, however, there also lived a different species of bipedal creature known as Paranthropus, who appeared one million years after Australopithecus. It seems that Australopithecus and Paranthropus coexisted for nearly one million years. For some reason, however, Paranthropus died out rapidly thereafter. The surviving Australopithecus continued to evolve and finally achieved the status of Homo, the same as man, under the name of Homo erectus some five hundred thousand years ago.
What were the major reasons that one of these two similar species of ape-men perished while the other was given a chance to evolve? Excavated fossils reveal that the difference between the two was mainly the following: first, Paranthropus was considerably larger than Australopithecus; and second, the skull and jaw of Paranthropus were well developed, resembling those of a gorilla.
In terms of this first point, Australopithecus also changed over time and eventually came to grow nearly as large as Paranthropus, which suggests that the latter’s robust size was not necessarily a handicap. As for the second point, to assume that Paranthropus represented a lower life-form based simply on their gorilla-like appearance would be to fall into the trap of personification. Such characterization refers strictly to their anatomical features, as for example the well-developed jaw muscles and large molars. These features merely signify that Paranthropus was herbivorous.
Strangely enough, however, the gorillas that appear in horror stories and science fiction are routinely depicted with bared fangs and fresh blood dripping from their mouths. This is a good example of how self-centered man is regarding the notions of evolution and advancement. It is man himself, not the gorilla, who prefers eating meat. Among all primates, in fact, only man is a meat eater. If one views meat eating as a sign of a savage, lower life-form and plant eating as more refined and noble, then the beast dripping fresh blood from his mouth would be none other than man himself. Creatures with a gorilla-like appearance might in fact be considerably more gentle and noble.
According to the general criteria for primates, in fact, it would be difficult to see Paranthropus’s herbivorous appearance as regressive. Indeed, the fact that they walked upright reveals that they had unmistakably evolved. If anything, we can see signs of partial regression in the jaw and molars of australopithecines as a result of their sudden modification as meat eaters.
If we were to distinguish these two creatures on the basis of legitimacy and heresy, then the extinct Paranthropus would be the legitimate descendant from primitive anthropoids, while our ancestral Australopithecus would represent a grievous heresy in its taste for raw flesh, which was something unknown to its brethren.
One finds the term “lone monkey.” While this expression carries a ring of authenticity and otherworldliness, it actually refers to an outcast monkey that has been forced out of its tribe. Just as for man prison is in and of itself punishment, so too do confinement and isolation cause the greatest neuroses in monkeys. In terms of the instinct for tribal formation, there appears to be no real difference between the descendants of carnivores and herbivores.
Nevertheless, a considerable difference must be said to exist in the character or substance of these tribes. The carnivorous Australopithecus preyed on animals and so must have naturally formed small groups that were extremely mobile. In contrast, the herbivorous Paranthropus must have been more settled, forming groups that were as large as could possibly be sustained by available resources in order to maintain and protect their territory. Since group structure becomes more complex with greater size, the gorilla-like Paranthropus was perhaps also slightly more advanced in terms of socialization.
And yet Paranthropus died out. For one million years it changed little while living in the bounteous forest and simply disappeared from history. How did that happen? It is not a particularly pleasant image, but there is no proof to suggest that it did not finally end up in the stomachs of our ancestors the australopithecines. It is worth imagining what would have happened had these two groups come across each other. One would view the other simply as a nuisance to be chased away, while the other would react as if spotting an unexpected meal. Clearly the contest would be over from the very beginning.
(In the case of animals of similar size and shape, of course, carnivores are not necessarily stronger than herbivores. The latter can use their superior teamwork to resist the former’s aggression. Also, ape-men who walked upright were already using stone tools. These tools were certainly much more valuable when used to confront wild beasts than to pick fruit and dig up tree roots. As hunters, australopithecines would have more readily learned the skills necessary for using stone tools, and this would have stimulated the cerebral cortex, allowing them to outwit their enemies and develop into skillful and dangerous tacticians.)
In order to avoid misunderstanding, however, let me state that I am not generalizing this example of Paranthropus’s defeat in order to claim that man’s true nature lies in the destruction of peace through violence and the conquest of sociality by brutality. Rather, I am simply emphasizing the fact of our ancestor’s canines in contrast to the molars of Paranthropus as an antidote to a glaringly humanist prejudice, in which, for example, the use of the name “Killer Gorilla” for the play villains in pro wrestling is met with little skepticism. In order for the ape-man Australopithecus to radically evolve into primitive man in the form of Homo erectus, in fact, he had to discover fire as well as use stone tools. I suspect that this discovery of fire was used less to improve the flavor of meat than to overcome the greatest difficulty of meat eating, that is, its rapid spoilage. When it became possible to preserve meat, even our hunters were permitted a brief respite. They escaped the fate of carnivorous animals—those eternal wanderers—and were able to enjoy the convenience and leisure that are part of a settled existence. Such an existence allowed them to develop traps, and the need for large amounts of prey hastened the unification and expansion of the group. Rules governing exchange and distribution were necessarily created, and a form of socialization incompatible with the nature of hunters—which for this reason alone, perhaps, was much more fluid and conscious than that of the spontaneous Paranthropus—came to be promoted.
Actually, fossil evidence clearly points to the remarkable evolution and transformation of Australopithecus in comparison with Paranthropus, which barely changed over one million years. Elements that facilitated change and evolution (e.g., a diverse gene pool) might have existed intrinsically in this heretical group, which abruptly broke with the primate tradition of a plant-based diet that had continued for tens of millions of years. An open history always prepares the way for diversity over uniformity, mobility over fixity, progress over conservatism, and heresy over legitimacy. History simply closes the curtain on any futile order or refuge. When the final Paranthropus thus perished on the outskirts of a warm and blessed forest, our heretical sons were, in the form of Homo erectus, already expanding their hunting range to everywhere in the world outside of the glaciers.
It wasn’t simply sociality and nonviolence that disappeared together with Paranthropus; an excessively conservative society that knew only a fixed or settled existence died out as well. Only the heretical group that developed out of that society would embark upon the radical advance toward human history. It is precisely this heresy and instinct for mobility that have so deeply inscribed themselves on our hearts, and these may be the passport to the future.
With a few exceptions, however, what seems to resonate in the hearts of people in both East and West is the phrase or concept of “mother earth.” Pygmies, who are experts at hunting, apparently even now scorn and disdain the nearby black farmers, but no one bothers about this. It’s quite natural. Farmers have enjoyed a long history of agriculture, which might be only a fraction of the time represented by the age of Homo erectus but still numbers over five thousand years, which is dazzling on the scale of experience. The native myth that views farmers as the foundation of society has imbued man’s heart to the core.
In this world, fixity is consistently seen as a virtue or commandment. Solidarity and collaboration are indispensable, and so when the comparatively tolerant concept of law as existing within a certain territory is directed outside it, its brutality comes to be exposed without compunction. Even in the case of primitive agricultural peoples, “The fundamental rule, that peace within the community must be upheld, does not always permit the law of equivalent retribution, a lex talionis (‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’)—often not even in the most serious of all crimes, murder within the group. … [There occurs] a duel of the conflicting parties, which, however, never ends in death.”1 Nevertheless, immediate death awaited those who crossed borders without permission. Such was the undisguised nature of farmer mentality, which stood in contrast to those herding peoples who made zealous use of the death penalty, since these latter had no real consciousness of borders and lacked any kind of punishment for border incursions. Such fixed morality was handed down in Japan even in the Edo period, to cite a more familiar example. Itinerant craftsmen were regarded as the very lowest form of life, while drifters and vagrants were treated as criminals. There even existed the punishment of “exile,” all of which suggests that the abandonment of a fixed or settled life was tantamount to relinquishing one’s right to live.
Can one thus say that the passport of heresy has already exceeded its statute of limitations and lost its validity? Are we to believe that now, when the earth is everywhere divided by disparate territories in the form of states, mankind has finally completed its journey and reached the Promised Land? Is it the case that heresy and mobility have already played their part, and all that awaits us now is to return to the pre-Paranthropus repose of the gorilla?
Unfortunately, I cannot agree with these sentiments. It is impossible for me to so tamely accept the validity of “mother earth,” since this notion may yet turn out to be counterfeit. Regionalism, hatred of cities, arguments against standardized language, advocates of folk stories, prefectural associations, restaurants specializing in regional cuisine, dialectology research groups, patriotic education, and finally a “Festival Plaza” considered so important as to be made part of the World’s Fair: these are all ultraideological brigades that gather to defend “mother earth” while waving around them a slightly orthodox coat of arms. These brigades even attempt to poke their nose into the principles of literature, inquiring into the presence of a work’s umbilical cord. It seems to me, however, that an umbilical cord helps to determine only whether something is born live or hatched from an egg.
In the case of primitive agricultural peoples, I can certainly imagine the reason and necessity behind the appeal to “mother earth.” The fixed existence of these peoples was a result of their own choosing. Yet that choice was also a battle, one which was no doubt fought both externally and internally. It is an often-reported fact that the nomadic underdeveloped tribes that still exist today despise farming. While traveling around Slovakia, I heard of Gypsies who were offered splendid apartments and guaranteed steady employment and yet repeatedly tried to flee, much to the consternation of government officials. The transition from migrancy to a settled existence is perhaps not as easy as we, who are already settled, might imagine. The roaming nature of hunting peoples was not something passive, as for example a necessary means to obtain food. Rather, it represented a basic way of life that had become so normalized that other forms of behavior simply could not be imagined. Just as we fear such eternal wandering, seeing it as a kind of “death,” so too do hunting peoples presumably conceive of a fixed or settled existence in the same terms.
Yet some of these people have overcome that fear and settled down. Various theories have been put forth explaining their reasons behind that decision, but no one knows exactly. A “three-stage theory,” in which mankind progressively developed from hunting to animal husbandry to agriculture, was accepted as common sense from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century. Yet this theory was gradually discredited on the basis of subsequent empirical research. Numerous cases began to reveal that migratory peoples display a surprisingly strong psychological resistance to settling down. It seems that the error of the classical “three-stage theory” lay in measuring the inner lives of migratory peoples strictly on the basis of those peoples whose lives were more fixed or settled. It is hardly the case that hunting peoples would immediately transform themselves into agricultural peoples if they could simply learn how to farm.
Julius E. Lips has proposed the following theory concerning this point. Hunting peoples did not begin their transition to a fixed existence as a result of the discovery of agricultural techniques, as is traditionally believed. Rather, as Lips argues, certain preexisting conditions for such fixed existence were already present, and these allowed for the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry. Lips also introduces the concept of harvest peoples to refer to the intermediate stage leading to a fixed existence. Harvest peoples were a group situated between hunting and agriculture: they neither cultivated fields in the manner of agricultural peoples nor immediately consumed food in the fashion of hunters and gatherers, but rather made provisions against shortage by storing food for a period of time. When harvesting food that is to be stored rather than eaten immediately, one becomes more concerned about land that can be used for large-scale harvesting. Next there is a need for storage sites. Stability of existence was accompanied by an increase in family size as well as the organization of group work required for large-scale harvesting. Furthermore, in order to guarantee possession of the harvested areas, there was a strengthening of tribal unity. All these things gradually led to a deepening attachment to the land. As Lips argues, only the final step of planting seeds remained in order to complete the transformation into agricultural peoples, but these harvest peoples had already internally prepared the way for a fixed existence.
I accept this theory. By virtue of eating meat, our ancestral australopithecines split from the settled primates and journeyed off as eternal wanderers toward a much more unknown history. At the same time, they did not simply wander out of the dark forest or plains and become bloodthirsty beasts. When, as I have mentioned, it became possible to preserve meat through the invention of fire, these most powerful hunters, armed with secondary fangs in the form of stone tools, were forced to cooperate with several tribes in order to obtain larger prey. Although they had once been destroyers of society, australopithecines now found themselves again on the road to socialization. Yet this was not the closed society that had previously existed in the age of herbivorous primates but rather a divisional reorganization that was bound together by a clear consciousness of purpose. Measured strictly on the basis of its associative force, such a society was perhaps more fragile than the social bonds found in monkey tribes. What was crucial, however, was that this society was open, flexible, and based on conscious choice. While there is no evidence to support this, I wonder if such a process of secondary social formation was not also the process in which language was first formed.
Such socialization required a high level of intelligence in that it expanded the possibilities of hunting by provisionally adopting and utilizing a fixity of existence that was essentially contradictory to the hunting instinct. The balance between the nomadic instinct and the desire for fixity was dictated strictly by the amount of food needed to be stored and the length of time required for storage. Even during the Ice Age, when many animals died off, only mankind evolved and increased in number. This was due not simply to man’s expertise in hunting but also to the fact that freezing conditions provided him with an opportunity to preserve meat for longer periods.
I thus agree with Lips’s theory that the “harvest peoples” were a radical springboard in the history of mankind. Dried edible plants—such as grains and potatoes—can be preserved much longer than cooked meat, but they are unsuitable for immediate consumption. They require such advanced processing techniques as being ground into flour or boiled with water. Once these techniques are mastered, however, the ability to preserve food is dramatically increased. It would hardly be surprising if the balance between mobility and fixity were at some point reversed. Yet these harvest peoples did not then abandon the heresy of Australopithecus to return to the orthodoxy of Paranthropus. Such a reversal would be only that, a reversal, signifying nothing beyond itself. No matter how much the signal of fixity as transmitted by the brain overrides the rhythm of mobility as beaten out by the heart, it is still the heart that supplies blood to the brain. If the heart stops beating, then all cerebral activity must cease.
As the primitive farmers stood motionless on the rich soil and rested their plows, murmuring the words “mother earth” and fighting the violent tension within them, they must have gazed out at the distant horizon feeling both dread and longing for those elements of the “father” that lay beyond.
Several years ago I saw an interesting western film from the United States. I have forgotten the title, but it was not the typical plot in which cowboys battle the Indians. Rather, it added a new wrinkle in focusing on the actual practice of frontier economics: several pioneer farmers appear one day among a group of cowboys who have already settled down, and these white people with different interests clash with one another over the land. Naturally the cowboys were all dashing and clever, with very open views about the land. In contrast, the farmers were stubborn and provincial, thinking about the land in an extremely egotistical and possessive manner. The farmers also seemed to have a slightly better grasp of economics. A kind of Romeo and Juliet–styled romance appeared as well, but the film was mainly about the fundamental difference between U.S. law and the perception of law out West. It was an undeniable fact that national law, as it pertained to the land, was on the side of the much more narrow-minded farmers. The cowboys were defeated by justice, since the farmers had already paid for and registered the land. The drama did not end there, however, as an unforeseen catastrophe had duly been prepared. When the farmers dug their spades into the sweeping pasture land and turned it into long, furrowed rows, there intervened a natural justice that exceeded even the justice set forth by national law. The roots of the grass that covered nearly the entire expanse of the land were ripped out, resulting in the rapid desertification of the plain. The farmers could only stand dumbfounded among the blowing clouds of dust, as if frozen in place.
Although the film was of course made in the twentieth century, this frontier drama of conflict has been repeated in one form or another for thousands of years, since the first primitive farmers stood on “mother earth” and gazed off beyond the distant horizon. For medieval farmers, however, this drama appeared in the form of severe inner turmoil. They were forced to worry about preventing the desertion of family and companions while also protecting themselves from the lure of the horizon. No doubt they reassured themselves of the virtues of a fixed existence by speaking of the blessings of “mother earth” and contrasting these with the hardships of wandering. Finally they developed within themselves the specter of fear, convinced that what lay beyond the horizon was a land of ghosts and demons.
Turning the page of history, however, one discovers that the merely spectral ghosts and demons that lay beyond the horizon began to show themselves in the form of actually existing enemies.
For example, one finds the nomadic Altai peoples from the frontiers of China, the Scythians from the frontiers of Mesopotamia, and the Germanic peoples from the frontiers of the Roman Empire. I cite these examples with little regard to their historical eras, but what I am trying to problematize here is the general law of the frontier—that is, the broad dynamics of how frontiers were formed as well as how the opposition between mobility and fixity played out in the context of their formation—and so I would like to tentatively ignore the question of chronology.
Now when, where, and how did nomadic peoples first appear? We have already mentioned that the three-stage theory of “hunting to animal husbandry to agriculture” is factually inaccurate. In order to consider animals that could be consumed directly as livestock to be consumed indirectly, storage had to be conceptualized in such a way that was psychologically and materially possible. A surplus of feed and water was itself proof of an advanced stage of agriculture. These nomadic peoples must have focused a great deal on their livestock, as they were able to recover in their fixed existence the flavor of meat that had initially been lost when adapting themselves to this new way of life. At the same time, however, an inevitable contradiction exists between animal husbandry and agriculture regarding the use of land. Were there any ideas about how to increase the number of livestock without sacrificing available farmland? The grazing of animals outside of farmland perhaps emerged as a new technique designed to resolve that contradiction. The division of labor then followed, with people specializing in animal husbandry. Increases in the number of livestock led to an expanded radius for nomadic activities. Here we can see the birth of a secondary type of migratory peoples.
Initially, however, these new migratory peoples almost certainly did not have antagonistic relations with farmers. Herders must have been regarded as members of the same community, a kind of detached force of farmers. Yet at a certain point in time these two groups for some reason severed relations, gradually forming societies that were independent of one another. I do not know what that reason was, but such separation was a general phenomenon, so it must have been quite common. If I were to let my imagination run, I would say for example that agricultural society had reached a certain stage of development and begun establishing class divisions. The principle of rule in agricultural society operates strictly on the basis of private ownership of land, and this would not apply to nomadic peoples who abandon farmland. Even if these nomadic peoples rejected servitude and proclaimed their independence due to a sense of conflict over economic interests, the agricultural nobility would probably not have done more than reinforced territorial boundaries and erected a wall of law between the two groups. Separation from the nomads, the formation of the frontier, and the establishment of borders: it seems that these three events took place in virtually parallel fashion.
Hence nomadic peoples were also antiterritorial heretics whose emergence coincided with the territorial claims of agricultural peoples (the statelike formation of fixed existence).
For a time, no doubt, these two groups sullenly and reluctantly continued trading with each other. Although they certainly were not poor, the nomadic peoples were unable to support themselves due to the simplicity of their products and thus were forced to rely on trade with agricultural society. For its own part, agricultural society in its conservatism had no reason to refuse trade with the nomadic peoples, providing that its borders were kept inviolate.
But this situation would suddenly change around 1000 B.C. when the nomadic peoples of the plains of central Asia developed the skill to ride horses. With this skill, their status underwent a drastic change. The expanded radius of their activities led to greater tribal organization as well as significant advances in their capacity to domesticate animals: they could no longer be ignored as a social entity. For example, it seems that by 800 B.C. the nomadic Scythians had already abandoned the tribal system and adopted a state system ruled by a king. (A nomadic state, however, contains no borders. The area where today its horses run free is, in other words, a territory. Depending upon how one defines the concept, this area should perhaps not be called a state. At the same time, it might well be the case that accepting the state and the presence of borders as equivalent is itself one of the blind spots inherent to a form of thinking based on fixed existence.) Horse riding also led to increased military power. Superb mobility combined with the tactic of shooting arrows from horseback transformed the nomadic peoples as a whole into a fearsome army. The first nomadic empire of Scythia was no exception as it held sway from the plains of southern Russia to all of eastern Europe, and the famed “Scythian metal implements” excavated throughout the Eurasian continent are widely believed to be tributes taken from Greek colonial cities. Thereafter a series of powerful cavalries appeared one after the other, laying waste to all areas from China in the east to the heart of Europe in the west. Nomadic empires reached their peak in the thirteenth century with the Mongolian empire of Genghis Khan but were displaced from history in both name and substance when thirty thousand Tekke Turkmen warriors, who were descendants of the last nomadic emperor, Nader Shah (assassinated in 1747), were defeated by a Russian army equipped with cannons and machine guns. Thus we see that the drama between migratory and more settled peoples ceaselessly continued on the frontier as recently as one hundred years ago.
In the twentieth century, however, frontiers no longer exist. With the exception of the South Pole, the earth has everywhere come to be divided by fixed states, and beyond their borders lay only other, similar fixed states. Have all hearts now lost the need for migrant, mobile rhythms? Does not even one awkward person remain who finds himself confused by the fact that his heart beats out of rhythm?
They stagger and roam about throughout the year with their friends. They eat and drink outside, and appear to lack homes to which to return. They do have their own territory, however, and one knows where to find people through word of mouth. They enjoy fighting and quickly form cliques, but they will run for their lives if they lose and aren’t ashamed to flee. While they are particular about matters of personal interest, they lack all etiquette. Upon receiving gifts or earning money, the young people who are still active will take the best share for themselves, leaving what remains to the old dotards. Above all else, this is a world in which the strong rule. They will unblinkingly take for themselves the women who have only recently been widowed, even if these women were married to men from their own families.
I am not referring here to the fūten-zoku hippies in Shinjuku, nor am I exaggerating the character of contemporary youths. In fact, these lines, which I have slightly reworked, are taken from a passage about the Xiongnu peoples in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.
The Xiongnu were the first great Altaic nomadic peoples. They appeared around 300 B.C. from the highlands of Mongolia: their presence in the east forced Emperor Qin Shi Huang to build the Great Wall, while in the west they controlled half of Turkistan. The Xiongnu, according to one theory, were of the same tribe as the infamous Huns, who in A.D. 400 descended on Hungary from the Russian plains and later threatened Papal Rome, making people’s blood run cold.
In any case, I found Sima Qian’s introduction of these Altaic nomads to be extremely suggestive. Simply by omitting proper nouns, hunting terminology, and the names of livestock, the passage was suddenly transformed into a critique of contemporary customs. The fūten-zoku hippies who roam around Shinjuku might just be the reincarnation of the Xiongnu. That seems plausible enough to me. I’m not quite sure about chasing rainbows rather than livestock, but they very much resemble a migratory people in terms of ignoring social boundaries and wandering about. If this is the case, however, can we then say that the frontier that properly exists outside borders has actually moved to the center of the city? This is hardly surprising and indeed quite likely. If one thinks about it, cities have long possessed something of the inner frontier about them; they are the preferred hideout for runaways and criminals. Even in the case of donuts, for example, inside and outside are connected by a surface that is perfectly continuous. By running toward the outside, one will eventually come roundabout and end up on the inside.
However, this is not to say that I expect from these fūten-zoku hippies a historically transformative type of heresy. The naïve era in which one could accomplish something merely by posing as the simple antithesis of fixed existence is now long gone. Even if we were to bring back Genghis Khan and place him in the center of all the hustle and bustle of Shinjuku, he would at best end up as a purchasing director of redeemable prizes at a pachinko parlor. And in the case of mountain guerillas, who are experts in mobility, there is absolutely no chance of victory without first building ties with farmers, the very symbol of fixed existence.
Even during the period of the Mongol Empire, when their invincible cavalry from the plains swept with gale force across the continent, these nomadic peoples left behind them nothing but death and destruction. For all their brilliant victories on the battlefield, their influence on history was surprisingly minor. But perhaps that is simply the fate of those who reject a fixed existence. Ruins of the destroyed castles still remain in the kingdoms they conquered, and yet the nomads themselves, victorious, disappeared without leaving behind even a single tent.
And yet it seems that even these horse-riding warriors bent on destruction accomplished one major feat that no one else had ever achieved: they never built borders in the areas they occupied. Unlike the occupations on the part of fixed states, these nomadic peoples did not see the need to redraw borders; rather they allowed the destroyed borders to remain destroyed. Those peoples living a settled existence had hitherto believed that the borders of their land marked the ends of the earth, but now the real horizon suddenly appeared before them, stretching off infinitely into the distance. Long convinced that the time and space within their borders had existed and flowed on the basis of laws that were strictly unique to that area, they now discovered that the same time flowed outside. This discovery must have been a thoroughly shocking experience, outweighing even the trading of goods and the exchange of knowledge.
The nomadic peoples acquired victory and treasure, whereas those settled peoples obtained defeat and the knowledge of time. With the concept of time, the settled peoples took the first half step toward universality and, as the chains that had previously bound them to spatial particularity gradually loosened, then took another half step toward universality in feeling love for this same time that was now certainly flowing in other worlds.
Today in the metropolises in which we live, this shared sense of time has already become quite commonplace, perhaps because the simultaneous resonance permeating all space in the form of the two world wars still echoes among us. It seems that even the fūten-zoku hippies have quickly befriended the U.S. war deserters who fled to Shinjuku. When students in cities around the world take concerted action, no one is surprised by this spatial contingency. This is because everyone at some point has unconsciously acquired a sense of contemporaneity. Borders in their overdevelopment appear to have hatched the eggs of the frontier within their own internal space.