Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  When the idea of using celestial motion as a universal standard of measurement first occurred, it revolutionized the lives of people who applied it. Humans now had a unique way of organizing memory and anticipation, prioritizing tasks, and co-ordinating collaborative endeavours. Ever since, they have used it as the basis for organizing all action and recording all experience. It remained the basis of timekeeping – and therefore of the co-ordination of all collaborative enterprise – until our own times (when we have replaced celestial observations with caesium-atomic timekeeping). It arose, of course, from observation: from awareness that some changes – especially those of the relative positions of celestial bodies – are regular, cyclical, and therefore predictable. The realization that they can be used as a standard against which to measure other such changes transcends observation: it was an act of commonplace genius, which has occurred in all human societies so long ago that – ironically – we are unable to date it.

  The earliest known calendar-like artefact is a flat bone inscribed with a pattern of crescents and circles – suggestive of phases of the moon – about thirty thousand years ago in the Dordogne. Objects with regular incisions have often turned up at Mesolithic sites: but they could be ‘doodles’ or the vestiges of games or rites or ad hoc tallies. Then comes further evidence of calendrical computations: the horizon-marking devices left among megaliths of the fifth millennium bce when people started erecting stones against which the sun cast finger-like shadows, or between which it gleamed towards strange sanctuaries. By mediating with the heavens, rulers became keepers of time. Political ideas are not only about the nature and functions of leaders, but also about how they regulate their followers’ lives. How early can we detect the emergence of political thinking in this sense? The common life of early hominids presumably resembled primate bands, bound by kinship, force, and necessity. What were the first laws that turned them into new kinds of societies, regulated by ideas?

  A working assumption is that a sense of cosmic order inspired early notions about how to organize society. Beneath or within the apparent chaos of nature, a bit of imagination can see an underpinning order. It may not require much thought to notice it. Even bugs, say, or bovines – creatures unpraised for their mental powers – can see connections between facts that are important to them: dead prey and available food, for instance, or the prospect of shelter at the approach of rain or cold.

  Creatures endowed with sufficient memory can get further than bugs and bison. People connect the sporadic instances of order they notice in nature: the regularities, for instance, of the life cycle, the human metabolism, the seasons, and the revolutions of celestial spheres. The scaffolding on which early thinkers erected the idea of an orderly universe was composed of such observations. But awareness of orderly relationships is one thing. It takes a huge mental leap to get to the inference that order is universal. Most of the time, the world looks chaotic. Most events seem random. So imagination played a part in conjuring order. It takes a lively mind to see – as Einstein supposedly said – that ‘God does not play dice.’

  The idea of order is too old to be dated but once it occurred it made the cosmos imaginable. It summoned minds to make efforts to picture the entirety of everything in a single system. The earliest surviving cosmic diagrams – artistic or religious or magical – capture the consequences. A cave face, for instance, in Jaora in Madhya Pradesh, India, shows what the world looked like to the painter: divided among seven regions and circled with evocations of water and air. A four-thousand-year-old Egyptian bowl provides an alternative vision of a zigzag-surrounded world that resembles two pyramids caught between sunrise and sunset.

  The ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun, echoes early descriptions. So, in widespread locations, does rock painting or body art: the Caduveo of the Paraguay valley, for instance, whose image of the world is composed of four distinct and equipollent quarters, paint their faces with quarterings. A four-quartered world also appears on rocks that Dogon goatherds decorate in Mali. When potters in Kongo prepare rites of initiation in their craft, they paint vessels with their images of the cosmos. Without prior notions of cosmic order, arrayed in predictable and therefore perhaps manipulable sequences of cause and effect, it is hard to imagine how magic and oracular divination could have developed.59

  In politics, order can mean different things to different people. But at a minimum we can detect it in all efforts to regulate society – to make people’s behaviour conform to a model or pattern. It is possible to identify social regulations of great antiquity – so widespread that they probably predate the peopling of the world. The earliest are likely, from anthropological evidence, to have been of two kinds: food taboos and incest prohibitions.

  Take food taboos first. Incontestably, they belong in the realm of ideas: humans are not likely to have been instinctively fastidious about food. It is obviously not natural to forgo nutrition. Yet all societies ban foods.

  To help us understand why, the BaTlokwa, a pastoral people of Botswana, present the most instructive case. They forbid an incomparably vast and varied range of foods. No BaTlokwa is allowed aardvark or pork. Locally grown oranges are banned, but not those acquired by trade. Other foods are subject to restrictions according to the age and sex of potential eaters. Only the elderly can have honey, tortoise, and guinea fowl. Pregnancy disqualifies women from enjoying some kinds of beef offal. Some taboos only apply at certain seasons, others only in peculiar conditions, such as when sick children are present. In fieldwork-conversations, BaTlokwa give anthropologists unsystematic explanations, attributing variously to matters of health, hygiene, or taste prohibitions the complexity of which, though extreme, is representative of the range of food taboos worldwide.60 All efforts to rationalize them have failed.

  The classic case is that of the scruples encoded in one of the most famous ancient texts, the Hebrew scriptures. They defy analysis. The creatures on the forbidden list have nothing in common (except, paradoxically, that they are anomalous, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas pointed out, in some methods of classification, including, presumably, those of the ancient Hebrews). The same apparent senselessness makes all other cases intractable to comprehensive analysis. The best-known theories fail: in most known cases the claims of economics and of hygiene – that taboos exist to conserve valuable food-sources or to proscribe harmful substances – simply do not work.61 Rational and material explanations fail because dietary restrictions are essentially suprarational. Meanings ascribed to food are, like all meanings, agreed conventions about usage. Food taboos bind those who respect them and brand those who break them. The rules are not meant to make sense. If they did, outsiders would follow them – but they exist precisely to exclude outsiders and give coherence to the group. Permitted foods feed identity; excluded foods help to define it.62

  In the search for the first social regulations, incest prohibitions are the most likely alternative to food taboos. Every known human society has them, in a variety of forms almost as astonishing as the BaTlokwas’ food-rules: in some cultures siblings can marry, but not cousins. Others allow marriages between cousins, but only across generations. Even where there are no blood ties, prohibitions sometimes apply, as in merely formal relationships between in-laws in canon law.

  If we are to understand how incest prohibitions originated, we therefore have to take into account both their ubiquity and their variety. Mere revulsion – even if it were true that humans commonly feel it – would not, therefore, serve as an adequate explanation. ‘One should try everything once’, the composer Arnold Bax recommended, ‘except incest and folk-dancing.’ Neither activity, however, is abhorrent to everybody. Nor is it convincing to represent discrimination in controlling the sex urge as an instinct evolved to strengthen the species against the supposedly malign effects of inbreeding: in most known cases there are no such effects. Healthy children normally issue from incestuous alliances. Nor were primitive eug
enics responsible: most people in most societies for most of the time have known little and cared less about the supposed genetic virtues of exogamy. Some societies impose prohibitions on remote kin who are unlikely to do badly as breeding stock. Some, on the other hand, authorize alliances of surprisingly close relatives among whom infelicitous genetic effects are more likely: Egyptian royal siblings, for instance; or Lot’s daughters, whose duty was to ‘lie with their father’. First cousins can contract lawful marriages with one another in twenty-six US states, where other forms of incest are prohibited. In contrast to most other Christians, Amish encourage cousins to marry. In some traditional Arabian societies, uncles have the right to claim their nieces as wives.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing in the 1940s, devised the most famous and plausible explanation of the ubiquity and complexity of incest rules. It came to him, he said, as a result of watching how fellow-Frenchmen overcame potential social embarrassment when they had to share a table in a crowded bistro. They exchanged identical glasses of the house wine. Neither luncher gained, in any material sense, from a superficially comical transaction, but, like all apparently disinterested exchanges of gifts, the mutual gesture created a relationship between the parties. From his observation in the bistro Lévi-Strauss developed an argument about incest: societies oblige their constituent families to exchange women. Potentially rival lineages are thereby linked and likely to co-operate. Societies of many families, in consequence, gain coherence and strength. Women are seen as valuable commodities (unhappily, most people in most societies function as commodities, exploitable and negotiable among exploiters), with magical bodies that echo the motions of the heavens and produce babies. Unless forced to exchange them, their menfolk would try to monopolize them. Like food taboos, sex taboos exist not because they make sense in themselves, but because they help build the group. By regulating incest societies became more collaborative, more united, bigger, and stronger. The reason why incest prohibitions are universal is, perhaps, that simple: without them societies would be poorly equipped for survival.63

  ‌Trading Ideas: The First Political Economy

  If people’s first thoughts about regulating society led to taboos on food and sex, what about regulations of relations between societies? Trade is the obvious context in which to look.

  Economists have generally thought of commerce as a nicely calculated system for offloading surplus production. But when trade began, like controls on incest, in exchanges of gifts, it had more to do with ritual needs than with material convenience or mere profit. From archaeological evidence or anthropological inference, the earliest goods exchanged between communities seem to have included fire – which, perhaps because of ritual inhibitions, some peoples have never kindled but have preferred to acquire from outside the group – and ochre, the most widespread ‘must-have’ of Ice Age ritualists. Archaeologists whose predecessors regarded axe-heads of particular patterns or peculiarly knapped flints as evidence of the presence of their producers now recognize that even in the remotest traceable antiquity such artefacts could have been objects of commerce,64 but not, perhaps, as, say, Walmart or Vitol might understand it: early traders exchanged goods for exclusively ritual purposes. As Karl Polanyi, one of the outstanding critics of capitalism, wrote in 1944:

  The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end.65

  Not only are ritual goods part of well-established trading networks, but commerce itself, in much of the world, is practised as if it were a kind of rite.

  In the 1920s anthropologists discovered and disseminated what became their standard example in the Solomon Sea, off eastern New Guinea, where the inhabitants laboriously carried polished shell ornaments and utensils from island to island, following routes hallowed by custom.66 Tradition regulated the terms of payment. The goods existed for no purpose other than to be exchanged. The manufactures hardly varied from place to place in form or substance. Objectively there was no difference in value, except that antique items carried a premium. To each object, however, the system assigned a peculiar character and cost, on a scale apparently arbitrary but universally acknowledged. The ‘Kula’, as the system is called, shows how goods unremarkable for rarity or usefulness can become objects of trade. Globally ranging anthropological work by Mary W. Helms has demonstrated how commonly, in a great range of cultural environments, goods gain value with distance travelled, because they carry symbolic associations with divine horizons or with the sanctification of pilgrimage: the guardianship Hermes exercised over craftsmen, musicians, and athletes, extended to messengers, merchants, and ‘professional boundary-crossers’.67 In a feeble way, modern commercial practices retain some of this primitive aura. In the grocery around the corner from where I live, domestic parmesan is a third of the price of the product imported from Italy: I defy any gourmet to tell the difference once one has sprinkled it over one’s spaghetti – but customers are happy to pay a premium for the added virtue of unquantifiable exoticism. ‘Every man’, wrote Adam Smith, ‘becomes in some measure a merchant.’68 But though we take it for granted, the idea that trade adds value to goods and can be practised for profit has not always been obvious to everybody. There was a time when it seemed a surprising innovation.

  Despite the remoteness and opacity of much of the material, the lesson of this chapter is clear: before the Ice Age was over, some of the world’s best ideas had already sprung into life and modified the world: symbolic communication, the distinction between life and death, the existence of more than a material cosmos, the accessibility of other worlds, spirits, mana, perhaps even God. Political thought had already produced various ways of choosing leaders – including by means of charisma and heredity, as well as prowess – and a range of devices for regulating society, including food- and sex-related taboos, and the ritualized exchange of goods. But what happened when the ice retreated and environments people had treasured disappeared? When global warming resumed, fitfully, between ten and twenty thousand years ago, threatening the familiar comfort of traditional ways of life, how did people respond? What new ideas arose in response or indifference to the changing environment?

  ‌Chapter 3

  Settled Minds

  ‘Civilized’ Thinking

  They felt a draft from inside the rockfall. Eliette Deschamps was thin enough to wriggle through as her fellow-speleologists widened the gap. Seeing a tunnel ahead, she called to Jean-Marie Chauvet and Christian Hillaire to join her. To get an echo, which would give them an idea of the cave’s dimensions, they shouted into the darkness. Vast emptiness swallowed the sound.

  They had stumbled on the biggest cavern ever discovered in the Ardèche in southern France, where caves and corridors honeycomb the limestone. In an adjoining chamber an even more astonishing sight awaited. A bear reared up, painted in red ochre, preserved for who knew how many thousands of years.1

  Chauvet Cave, as they called the find they made in 1994, is one of world’s earliest, best preserved, and most extensive collections of Ice Age art. It houses images some authorities reckon at well over thirty thousand years old.2 On the walls, bison and aurochs storm, horses stampede, reindeer gaze and graze. There are running ibex, brooding rhinoceroses, and creatures that flee the hunt or fall victim to it. Previous scholarship assumed that art ‘evolved’ from early, ‘primitive’ scratchings into the sublime, long-familiar images of the late Ice Age at Lascaux in France; in technique and skill, however, some work at Chauvet is as accomplished as paintings done in similar environments millennia later. Evidence of the comparable antiquity of other artworks, which survive only in traces or fragments in caves as far apart as Spain and Sulawesi, makes the early dating at Chauvet credible. Yet some of the
Chauvet scenes could be transferred, without seeming out of place, to unquestionably later studios in Lascaux, for instance, or Altamira in northern Spain. Had the Lascaux painters seen the work of predecessors at Chauvet, they might have been as astounded as we are by the similarities.

  The Ice Age did not just support material abundance and leisured elites: it also favoured stable societies. If art is the mirror of society, the paintings display startling continuity. At the time, no doubt, such change as there was seemed dynamic. In hindsight, it hardly matches the fever and the fret of modern lives. We seem unable to sustain a fashion in art for ten minutes, let alone ten centuries or ten millennia. Ice Age people were resolutely conservative, valuing their culture too much to change it: on the basis of what we have already seen of the output of their minds, they did not stagnate for want of initiative; they maintained their lifeways and outlooks because they liked things as they were.