Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  The names used to describe the enigmatic figure in the Trois Frères grotto—Sorcerer, Horned God, and Animal Master—point to the most obvious interpretation. In the jungles of Amazonia, the deserts of southern Africa and Australia, and the frozen tundra of the north, humans have historically assembled into groups dominated by a central religious figure, the shaman or an equivalent. Western observers, with a modern scientific, desacralized perspective, tend to dismiss such individuals as charlatans, witch doctors, or medicine men. But at the dawning of the human race, they would have been the ones who first attempted to understand the forces of nature and the mind.

  Even without any written or oral commentary to explain the activities carried out in the Stone Age grottoes, we can appreciate that those orchestrating the proceedings in the caves must have been the most sensitive artists, musicians, dreamers, and likely also the group’s principal imbibers of fermented beverages. A woman like the Laussel Venus might have been responsible for making the magic potion that opened up the hidden resources of the human brain, healed disease, and assured a successful hunt. In traditional societies today, women generally take the lead in gathering the fruit, honey, and herbs for alcoholic drinks used to mark burials, deaths, rites of passage, auspicious natural events, and social gatherings; in the Palaeolithic period, perhaps such rituals marked the completion of another cave painting.

  Figure 2. The “Sorcerer,” the “Horned God,” or the “Animal Master” in the so-called Sanctuary of Les Trois Frères grotto in the French Pyrenees, created near the end of the Ice Age, about thirteen thousand years ago. However we describe such shaman-like figures, they were likely the original artistic innovators of humankind, who probably served up the first fermented beverages to their societies. Adapted from drawing by Henri Breuil.

  Other elements of a Stone Age ritual can be cautiously inferred from the artworks and their settings in dark caves. The early French explorers of the caves remarked on their extraordinary acoustic properties, especially the resounding echoes produced when they struck the stalagmites and stalactites with bones. A large group of people (their presence recorded for posterity by fingerprints on the walls) could have produced a symphony of sounds. The Sorcerer, wearing a bird-stag mask, might then have tramped out the rhythms of the music, whether choreographed or impromptu. She might dramatize the goings-on by holding up a special symbol, like the bird silhouette shown mounted on a pole next to what may be a bird-headed shaman on the wall of the cave at Lascaux.

  Bones might also have been pounded together as musical accompaniment for Palaeolithic ritual. At Mezin on the western plains of Ukraine, a house was discovered that was made entirely of mammoth bones, dated to 20,000 B.P. The excavators argued that the ocher-adorned shoulders, skulls, and other bones of the mammoths that were massed together on the floor of the building, along with two ivory rattles, were percussion instruments. They put their theory into practice by forming a band, the Stone Age Orchestra, whose performance was well received but unlikely to have been as impressive as the music made by hammering sounds out on an “organ” of limestone formations inside a cave.

  The red dots, swirling circles, and other designs interspersed with the wild-animal artwork in the caves have also been drawn into the argument for a Palaeolithic shamanistic cult. According to investigators such as David Lewis-Williams, the recurrent motifs represent entoptic phenomena, or optical illusions, of an altered human consciousness. The geometrical interplay of such visual images in our brains can be generated by sensory deprivation, extreme concentration, or repetitive activities like playing music and dancing. But the most direct route to an altered consciousness is a psychoactive drug, and of all the drugs available to early humans, alcohol was far and away the most readily available and best adapted to the human condition. Following its initial stimulatory effects, imbibers would have begun to see visual phenomena and struggled to understand their meaning, possibly culminating in full-scale hallucinations.

  One might question the proposition that early humans found these mind-altering properties a compelling reason to consume alcohol. Yet, all of us, not only mystics, engender visual phenomena and hallucinatory experiences every night in our dreams, and nearly a third of our lives is spent in sleep. We can choose to ignore our dreams or pass them off as the detritus of our waking existence. On occasion, however, they rise up and shake us from sleep in terror. They can inspire us, too, and lead to serendipitous juxtapositions of images and ideas that elucidate the world’s mysteries. For example, the chemist Friedrich August von Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene in a dream: he saw writhing snakes, one of which was biting its own tail and formed a ring. He went to sleep not knowing the answer and woke up with the solution.

  The phantasmagoria of our dreams can be extremely fluid and evocative: we might imagine an animal transformed into a human, see ourselves from the outside as if acting in a play, or experience the sensations of flying or falling into an abyss. The Stone Age murals in their dark caverns thus have strong similarities to dream images that well up in our three-dimensional and often vividly colored fantasies in the dark of night. The deep silence of the grotto, intensified by the effects of an alcoholic beverage, might have nourished the imaginations of sensitive individuals, who then represented their inner and outer worlds in two-dimensional art. The shaman and the community could then act out the essential rituals that would guarantee their welfare in this life and the one to come.

  The Palaeolithic cave paintings, like so many Sistine Chapels, must have been a monumental task in their day, especially when one considers that they were accomplished with extremely limited technology in pitch-black, nearly inaccessible locations. The motivations for devoting so much time and energy to otherworldly activities were probably similar to those of today. The needs of Homo sapiens include social rituals that bring the community together, artwork that symbolizes the workings of the mind and nature, and religious rituals that give human experience meaning and coherence. A fermented beverage or drug can enhance these experiences and stimulate innovative thought. To the people of the Palaeolithic, ceremonial observances, heightened by an alcoholic beverage and other techniques for achieving an altered consciousness, might have been viewed as assuring good health, placating the spirits of invisible ancestors and other spirits, warning of danger, and predicting the future.

  SONG AND DANCE

  We do not know when humans first became preoccupied with the universal concerns of “wine, women, and song”—to which I would add religion, language, dance, and art. There are faint glimmerings of a new kind of symbolic consciousness at around 100,000 B.P. in sub-Saharan Africa, about the same time that our species began its journeys around the globe. At Border Cave and Klasies River Mouth Cave in South Africa, powdered ocher and a perforated shell, presumably strung as a piece of jewelry, suggest that humans were now interested in making themselves attractive, whether to entice a mate, satisfy vanity, or invoke the help of ancestors or gods. One adolescent skeleton at Border Cave was covered in the pigment, a custom that our ancestors likely carried with them to Mount Carmel in Israel (at the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh) and throughout the Old World. Monkeys and apes may groom one another, but they are not known to engage in intentional beautification. If early humans could adopt the practice of personal adornment, then perhaps they were already using arbitrary sounds and gestures to communicate with one another. Certainly, by the time of the European cave paintings, the quantum leap in cognitive and symbolic ability of our species is on full display.

  Early human inventiveness is further reflected in the stone-lined hearths that were used to contain and control fire at Mumbwa Cave in Zambia around 100,000 B.P. This knowledge stood our ancestors in good stead when they spread into the colder regions of the Earth. Intricate bone harpoons from Katanda in the Congo, and carefully wrought microliths—small, sharp flints for specialized use—at Klasies River Mouth Cave were fashioned at a somewhat later period.

  Archaeology cannot,
however, tell us how the brain was changing and adapting as humans entered new, challenging environments. Endocasts, or plaster casts of the inside of ancient hominid and human skulls, suggest that the human cortex was already distinctly modern by 100,000 B.P. Some researchers have discerned evidence of a region referred to in the modern human brain as Broca’s area, the third convolution or gyrus of the inferior frontal lobe on the left side, which is essential for speech and some aspects of music making.

  The acquisition of language processing and speech capabilities required a set of interdependent genetic, biological, and social changes. The upright posture on two legs led to the human larynx’s being positioned lower in the throat, so that a wider range of sounds could be produced. The tongue acquired a larger supply of nerves, as shown by the larger size of the hypoglossal canal in fossil crania. The canals for the thoracic nerves, controlling the contraction of the diaphragm, were also noticeably enlarged, allowing better control of air flow and sound. New modules in the brain, like Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, may have been integrated into or added on to existing brain centers, leading to the development of emotional responsiveness and consciousness. Broca’s area, for instance, contains what are called mirror neurons, which, as the phrase implies, may record any action that we observe, and then call it up again, like a photograph, to imitate it. This facility could have been essential in coordinating the facial and tongue movements necessary for speech. The final step that might have tipped the scales toward language in humans could have been a minor change in the so-called FOXP2 gene. A mutation in this gene, which occurs widely in the animal world, resulted in the fine motor control of the tongue and lips that is essential for speech.

  Language gave us the ability to articulate our ideas. Many of our thoughts are believed to lie below the level of consciousness, as “logical forms,” in the terminology popularized by Noam Chomsky. By bringing these thoughts to the surface—by representing them in a sequence of arbitrary sounds that have been given meaning as words—they are secured in memory and consciousness.

  Music, which shares many brain areas with language comprehension and production, might have been the harbinger of language. Like language, music is hierarchical, highly symbolic, and well adapted to our body forms. By changing the intonation, speed, and emphasis of specific sounds, we can communicate emotions. By tapping our feet or joining in a line dance, we can stir our bodies to action and share a sense of community with fellow humans. It’s readily apparent today that music is much more than “auditory cheesecake,” as the evolutionary biologist Stephen Pinker would have it. From the iPod earplugs sprouting from the heads of commuters to the constant banter about the latest rock star, music is ubiquitous in modern human culture. You might even say that sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll never had it so good.

  If we think about how music affects us personally, we begin to see how central it is to our lives and how it might have become part of the cultural package of our forebears. By combining and ordering individual sounds along an arbitrarily defined tonal scale, early humans might have created the first kind of universal language. Although the significance of rhythmic tones is less precise than that of a language using words, it is in some ways more accessible: music made in one culture can be at least partly understood and appreciated by a person in another culture. As we listen to music, we are consciously and unconsciously trying to intuit its emotional significance, including where it is headed and what it means. As when we are trying to figure out where our lives are going or to predict the future, music arouses emotional centers of our primitive brain, the limbic system.

  Emotion is as crucial to our survival as rational thought. Being happy, sad, afraid, incensed, or nauseated by some food or beverage, person, or circumstance spurs us to different courses of action, often without thinking. Excitement breeds perseverance—we must be on the right track!—but disappointment or frustration signals that we might be headed in the wrong direction and need to modify our approach or stop altogether. Star Trek’s Mr. Spock might have tried to ponder a problem from every angle, but a Palaeolithic hunter or modern homeowner must act more quickly. When a twig cracks in the savannah underbrush, or we hear footsteps close behind us on a dark, deserted street, our emotions mobilize our brains and bodies to evade a perceived danger. It could be a meaningless noise, but by comparing its sound and timbre to others in our memories, we might infer that a lion is ready to leap or a mugger is closing in.

  Apes and chimpanzees, the species most similar to us biologically, are also attuned to music. Gibbons in Southeast Asian rain forests put on a musical show of the first order. In ten of the twelve species, a male and female gibbon pair, who mate for life, engage in a duet that seems intended both to defend their territory and to announce their union. The female’s “great call,” an intricate, rhythmic series of notes, can last between six and eight minutes. It ascends in tempo and pitch as it proceeds. Males do not sing during this monumental performance but follow the female’s performance with a kind of recitative or coda. Males also have their own repertoires of shorter songs that round out the program.

  We can hypothesize at length about the survival advantages of early human emotions, music, and symbolic systems. Of all the animals that we regularly observe, birds perhaps have the most to tell us about the origins and functions of music. As I woke up this morning, in a dense deciduous forest outside Philadelphia, I listened to the lilt and typewriterlike call of the wood thrushes, recently arrived from Central America. Another neotropical migrant, the black-throated blue warbler, gave out its piercing, ascending trill. The resident tufted titmice, not to be outdone, called insistently and monotonously, “Peter, Peter, Peter.” Despite the din, each bird was somehow communicating with others of its own species by using its own kind of music.

  My wife, Doris, who is a bird bander, once worked on a project recording the calls of individual prothonotary warblers in the wetlands of southern New Jersey. In this species, only the males sing during the breeding season. The goal was to see whether individual birds had unique songs. Recording the songs and analyzing their frequencies and timing showed that they do, even if the human ear is oblivious to many of the subtle variations. The young birds apparently take elements from the songs of their elders and improvise a distinctive vocabulary of notes and phrases that then becomes fixed for life. Having recorded the songs, my wife did not even have to use her binoculars to confirm that the same birds returned year after year to the same spot in New Jersey. It was a great delight one morning in April, after months of cold weather, to hear the highly distinctive double call of one bird (called Yellow-Yellow because he was banded with two yellow bands).

  We cannot know what emotions birds are feeling as they sing. There is little doubt, however, that the main purpose of many of their songs is to attract a mate. When a female hears Yellow-Yellow calling, she can be sure that it is a male of her species. His special call and the brilliance of his yellow plumage are guarantees that he is carrying good genes and can compete with any rival in the neighborhood. The peacock’s tail transmits a similar message: in what has been called runaway evolution, a seemingly excessive and burdensome excrescence has become the focus of the mating ritual and is elaborated into an ever more ornate appendage.

  Nature is full of other amazing mating rituals based on timed body movements, or what we often call dance. The sexual foreplay of the silver-washed fritillary butterfly might be described as a ballet. While the female fritillary floats languorously through the air, her partner darts seductively all around her, making fleeting contact at specific points in the ritual. The two then land together, make a final check of their specific scents (pheromones), and mate. Seven distinct aerial maneuvers are required for a successful coupling.

  A NEW SYNTHESIS

  If the emotions and thoughts of early humans in sub-Saharan Africa were likely first conveyed by music and other art forms, then alcoholic beverages can be viewed as nourishing this new symbolic way of life. Indeed
, these widely available beverages might well have served as a principal means—another kind of universal language—for accessing the subconscious recesses of the human brain. I have already observed that musical instruments were probably tools of the trade for shamanic figures. These early mystics might also have been the most avid imbibers of fermented beverages, which induced mind-altering visions and enabled them to perform their many other roles. They would have been the doctors who could prescribe the right herb for an ailment, the priests who invoked the ancestors and other unseen presences, and the overseers of the rituals that guaranteed the success and perpetuation of the community. Their Stone Age ceremonies might have been overtly sexual: the humans depicted in cave art, after our species came out of Africa, are invariably naked or have exaggeratedly large sexual organs (note that the human penis, when engorged, is longer and thicker than that of any other primate, both absolutely and relatively when compared by body size).

  Perhaps most significant, the Palaeolithic shaman’s mantle of office and power had to be passed on to a successor. Because musical and linguistic facility, and even sexual prowess and mystical capacities, often runs in families, the position of the shaman in Palaeolithic society might have been an inherited one. Conscious selection for special traits of musical and artistic ability, mystical absorption, and a capacity for alcoholic beverages would then have been reinforced over time and embedded in our genes.

  This book proposes a new framework for interpreting our biocultural past, based on the latest archaeological and scientific findings. As will become increasingly clear in the following chapters as we travel around the world in search of fermented beverages, economic, utilitarian and environmental arguments, which are much in vogue, can only go so far in explaining who we are and how our species has arrived at where it is today. I contend instead that the driving forces in human development from the Palaeolithic period to the present have been the uniquely human traits of self-consciousness, innovation, the arts and religion, all of which can be heightened and encouraged by the consumption of an alcoholic beverage, with its profound effects on the human brain.