Pandora's Seed

by Spencer Wells

  After twenty-five years of working at the House of Artists, Feilacher dismisses Navratil’s notion that all insane people are artists; he believes that the incidence of artistic talent is the same among the inhabitants of mental institutions as it is in the outside world. “As an artist myself,” he told me, “I see them as colleagues”—people who, although certainly psychologically lacking in some ways, clearly have a gift that deserves to be shared with the rest of the world. Feilacher also told me that although he finds much of Navratil’s thinking simplistic, schizophrenics do possess an interesting trait: “What you can see is a return to roots—by this I mean a return to childhood.” But what is it about this childlike state that engenders art? Children, of course, feel compelled to draw, to mold clay, to fold paper; the raw artistic process rises from deep within their own psyches. But why?

  The art created by Walla and the other members of the house has come to be called “outsider art,” or art brut, to use the term originally coined by Dubuffet. This type of art is produced by people unschooled in a particular artistic genre, and it is often considered to be part of the primitivist movement. If, goes this school of thought, art has become so corrupted by formal movements, trendiness, and marketing, then it is only by returning to the work of “primitive” cultures, children, and the insane that we can gain some sense of the purity of artistic expression.

  In keeping with this “purity,” the artists at Gugging are not very interested in the work of other artists. A Swiss television crew making a documentary on the house once took a group of them to a local museum to see how they would react to the art there, but they ignored the paintings on the walls. “The most interesting place in the museum was the coffee shop,” Feilacher told me, laughing. The best art to them is their own, and they live wrapped up in worlds of their own imagining. How can such people create beautiful artistic works when they are largely unschooled in the intricacies of art history, style, technique—the preconditions to being a proper artist, according to most art teachers? And what drives them to create in the first place?

  I came away from Gugging with an insight into the raw creative process and a desire to understand more about what impels us to take images from the world around us—or from inside our own heads—and re-create them in two- or three-dimensional representations. Did prehistoric, untrained artists—like the residents of the house—create art out of a compulsion? Perhaps. But assuming that human behavior is adaptive, it’s very difficult to explain the existence of art for art’s sake. After all, you aren’t going to bring down many gazelles or outrun a pack of wolves by painting a picture of one on the wall of a cave. What does art—even less refined art, such as that produced tens of thousands of years ago—reveal about the inner working of our minds and the dawn of human consciousness? For this we’ll need to take a short detour through modern molecular genetics, en route to the African savannas of 70,000 years ago.

  A SPEECH IMPEDIMENT

  In 1996, a group of physicians at the Institute for Child Health in London approached Tony Monaco, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University, with an interesting case study. The physicians had been studying a group of relatives that, to preserve their privacy, they called “the KE family,” a family of Pakistani origin with an inherited speech impediment. Members of the family going back three generations lacked the ability to articulate words because they could not control the necessary movements in the lower half of their faces. They also had problems with grammar and generally couldn’t make themselves understood to outsiders.

  Interested, Professor Monaco and his team conducted what is known as a “genome scan”—an analysis of hundreds of variable locations in the genomes of KE family members with and without the speech disorder. The idea was that if a particular set of these variable markers tagging a specific genomic region was consistently found in the affected family members but not in the unaffected relatives, it would be likely that the genetic change that led to the disorder would be found somewhere in that part of the genome. After a year of painstaking work, they found a region on chromosome 7 that was associated with the speech defect. The problem was, there were around seventy known genes in the region, and narrowing down which one was responsible would not be easy.

  Then they got a stroke of good luck. Independently, a physician in Oxford encountered an unrelated child with a speech disorder that sounded suspiciously similar to what had been described in the KE family. This individual, known as CS, was analyzed by Monaco’s team. The results revealed that this patient had a chromosomal rearrangement known as a translocation, where one part of a chromosome is cut and spliced into another chromosome. When this happens and the break point is in the middle of a gene, the function of the gene can be disrupted. The gene that was disrupted in CS, known as FOXP2, was also mutated in the KE family. This was the first time that a change in a single gene had been shown to have an effect on speech, and the publication of this discovery in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2001 received enormous fanfare. At last, said some journalists, the “language gene” had been discovered.

  FOXP2 stands for Forkhead box protein P2, and it is a member of a class of proteins known as transcription factors. The proteins interact with the DNA in such a way that they turn other genes on and off—they are like the “molecular coaches” of the genome, substituting players and calling the shots in the game of genomic function. It is because of their effects on the way many other genes are turned on or off that changes in these transcription factors can have complex effects on one’s physical and mental characteristics. This helps to explain why mutations in this single gene can affect something as complex as speech and grammar, which were previously thought to be controlled by hundreds of genes. Because of this central role it plays in gene regulation, FOXP2 has been highly conserved in evolution; very similar forms are found in chimpanzees and mice. Interestingly, when the gene is mutated in mice they exhibit signs of a speech disorder, producing improper vocalizations as babies. While mice clearly don’t have the sort of complex spoken language that humans do, the result suggests that a similar function has been preserved during over 70 million years of evolution.

  The FOXP2 results immediately raised the question of whether changes in its structure could have been one of the key biological changes that allowed our human ancestors to develop speech. The extent to which other hominids—australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals—were capable of communicating with one another has been one of the most hotly debated subjects in physical anthropology. Most researchers believe that the earliest species, the australopithecines, had rudimentary language skills, not unlike those of chimpanzees. As the brain enlarged during evolution, first in Homo habilis and then even more so in Homo erectus, language skills probably became more complex. By the time of the Neanderthals, who split from the lineage leading to Homo sapiens around 500,000 years ago, it’s thought that spoken language had appeared. This is supported by a wonderfully preserved 60,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton from Kebara Cave in Israel that has an intact hyoid bone. The hyoid is the delicate bone in your throat that provides the structure for the Adam’s apple, and it helps us to modulate spoken sounds. The fact that Neanderthals had a hyoid bone similar to humans’ suggests that they, too, may have been capable of complex speech. But what did their FOXP2 gene look like—did they have the genetic capacity for language as well?

  Unfortunately, there are no living Neanderthals to sample, or finding the answer would be easy. In some cases, though, it’s possible to analyze DNA from long-dead specimens. The field of ancient DNA research is to genetics what high-stakes poker is to gambling: there are high risks, but also high rewards. DNA is not a terribly stable molecule, and it usually degrades soon after death. Because of this, most attempts to extract DNA from ancient remains end in failure. Yet in extremely rare cases, it is possible to obtain intact DNA from specimens that are even tens of thousands of years old. This is typically possible only when the sample h
as been preserved in cold, dry conditions—such as those in European caves. And it is just such a cave that has yielded DNA from a very rare specimen indeed.

  Vindija Cave, in northern Croatia, has been studied by archaeologists for over a century. It contains hominid remains ranging in age from 25,000 to 45,000 years old—a very important period in European prehistory. It was during this time that Neanderthals were replaced by modern migrants recently arrived from Africa via the Middle East. The deepest—and thus the oldest—layers in the cave contain only Neanderthal material, while the layers at the top are composed entirely of modern human remains. One of the Neanderthal bones from the deeper layers yielded intact DNA, and employing the painstaking methodology necessary to tease results from ancient DNA, scientists managed to slowly assemble the sequence of the FOXP2 gene. The publication of this result by Svante Pääbo and his team in October 2007 shocked many who had taken the earlier FOXP2 results as evidence that just a few changes in this gene could have led to fully modern language. The Neanderthal specimen had the human form of the gene!

  The reason this came as such a shock was that an analysis of FOXP2 carried out by Pääbo’s group five years earlier had suggested that the human form had arisen much more recently. There are only two differences between the amino acid sequences—the protein building blocks encoded by the gene—of the FOXP2 genes in humans and chimpanzees. Only two differences, out of the 715 amino acids in the protein, even though humans and chimps last shared a common ancestor around 5 million years ago. Moreover, from the genetic patterns seen in human populations, Pääbo and his group concluded that these changes had appeared within only the past 200,000 years. This result suggested that modern humans alone were defined by the unique FOXP2 sequence that conferred language abilities. The newly obtained Neanderthal sequence, though, showed the earlier interpretation to be wrong. The evidence from FOXP2 was that our distant hominid cousins had also had the capacity for spoken language. What did it mean—had Neanderthals really spoken the way we do?

  The answer is almost certainly no. Our burly cousins were very similar to modern humans in most ways, yet in several key characteristics they were quite different. As I mentioned before, the Neanderthal and modern human lineages appear to have split from each other around 500,000 years ago, based on their levels of DNA divergence. Around this time, the ancestors of the Neanderthals, likely belonging to a species known as Homo heidelbergensis, left Africa and moved into Europe, while our ancestors stayed in Africa. Over time H. heidelbergensis evolved into H. neanderthalensis, a species whose heavyset bodies were wonderfully adapted to the cold climate of Europe. Fully Neanderthal physical characteristics appeared around 150,000 years ago, and these bulkier hominids later expanded their range into western and central Asia during the last ice age. For around 100,000 years they were the masters of the continent. Then we appeared on the scene, starting with an African exodus between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago. We entered Europe around 35,000 years ago, and within a few thousand years of our appearance on the scene, the Neanderthals were extinct. The reasons are still hotly debated, but a consensus is beginning to form.

  Thirty-five thousand years ago, the world was in the firm grip of the last ice age. In fact, there was a strong cooling trend around that time that caused the forested landscape of Europe to be replaced by open grassland and tundra. Neanderthals, with their simple technology and emphasis on brute-force methods of hunting, would have been at a disadvantage in such an environment. Their hunting methods worked fairly well in wooded countryside, where they could hide and pounce on prey at close range, but they faltered in a more open landscape. Conversely, the larger group sizes, highly social hunting structure, and more sophisticated tools of modern humans gave them a strong advantage when hunting in open land. Relative to the comparatively sophisticated newcomers, Neanderthals were yesterday’s news.

  What gave modern humans such an advantage? Clearly, two factors were working in our favor in Europe: climate change and social sophistication. But while climate change was beyond our control (unlike today), the highly social nature of modern humans was determined by internal forces. What was it that made us such social beings, and when did this change occur? It was certainly after we diverged from Neanderthals, but when was it, and what caused it?

  Deciphering what this change was is perhaps the one research topic in anthropology that will win its discoverer a Nobel Prize (or at least it should). For decades researchers have been debating this key change on the road to making our species fully modern, and there are many theories. All seek to explain the remarkable transformation in human social behavior manifested through an enormous change in toolmaking styles at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period, or the Late Stone Age, as it is called in African prehistory. Around 60,000 years ago, tools start to become much more finely crafted, and there is evidence for the use of bone in shaping extremely fine spear points—something that no hominid had done before. Beginning around that same time, there is also evidence for an expansion in population, which led to the settlement of the world outside of Africa. Only 40,000 years later Homo sapiens, a species that had been limited to Africa during the first 150,000 years of its time on earth, had expanded to nearly every habitable location on the globe, settling Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas in only around fifteen hundred human generations.

  I discussed this global march in The Journey of Man and therefore won’t revisit it in detail here. Suffice it to say, it’s a story of endurance and ingenuity writ large—The Odyssey of our species. As we moved from our homeland in tropical Africa into environments as diverse as the mountains of central Asia, the valleys and caves of southwestern Europe, the tundra of Siberia, and the jungles of Amazonia, we adapted in many ways to the new geographies. No primate species had ever been able to expand its range to such an extent, and we were the master of all we surveyed. Consummate hunters, with highly adapted tools and advanced hunting skills, we made short shrift of the Neanderthals in Europe. But what gave us such a huge advantage compared to every species that had come before on the hominid line?

  A better brain, it turns out—the triumphant march of humans across the globe was preceded by a march of neurons inside our skulls. An average human brain is around 1,400 cubic centimeters, while our earliest hominid ancestors, living around 4 million years ago, appear to have had apelike brains of around 500 cubic centimeters. Despite this, they walked upright—an adaptation to life on the tropical African savanna, where reducing the surface area exposed to sunlight, seeing farther, and moving more efficiently would have been favored. The earliest members of our own genus, Homo habilis at 2.4 million years ago and Homo erectus at around 1.8 million years ago, had brains on the order of 750 and 1,000 cubic centimeters, respectively. Along each step in this progression the tools became more sophisticated, archaeological evidence for the increasing encephalization occurring under the hood. Then things get a bit strange. The average Neanderthal, it turns out, had a brain of around 1,500 cubic centimeters—larger than our own, on average. Why then, you might be wondering, didn’t the Neanderthals, armed with large brains, hyoid bones, and a humanlike version of FOXP2, manage to fight off the Homo sapiens onslaught in Europe?

  Clearly, size isn’t everything—it’s how you use it that counts. The Neanderthals were indeed more sophisticated than their ancestors with smaller brains, and were actually quite successful for their time. And their FOXP2 sequence and hyoid bones hint at a capacity for language. What seems likely, though, is that if they could talk, they didn’t have much to say. Neanderthals were probably pretty boring. And the reason we know this is that they didn’t have art, which made its appearance only in the past 70,000 years, and then only in our species.

  Think about it: we are not the only species capable of communicating, although most communication occurs in ways that don’t involve speech. Every creature, from corals capable of distinguishing between “me” and “you” on the basis of chemical cues, to dogs sending nonverbal sign
als to each other to reinforce their social hierarchy, to frogs that sing in the darkness of a tropical forest to locate their mates—all are communicating, transmitting understandable signals to one another. We’re not even the only species capable of verbal communication; those same frogs, as well as birds and whales, “talk” to each other. But what do they say? Clearly quite a bit that is necessary for their survival and reproductive success, which is how their communication systems evolved in the first place. A deaf meerkat, unable to hear his colony-mate on sentry duty signaling at the approach of a predator, would be unlikely to live long enough to leave offspring. Communication is not uniquely human by any means.

  But humans are not created equal; there is tremendous variation in our innate abilities. Most of us are capable of basic “human” tasks—learning a language, solving rudimentary problems, making simple tools, and so on—but there is a range of variation for all of these traits. Think of Picasso or Einstein, Shakespeare or da Vinci. Not all of us can create extraordinary art or design complex machines, but we can make use of the insights of others, because of our sophisticated social structure. The transmission of ideas in modern human populations is unprecedented in evolutionary history. The Homo sapiens archaeological record is, in effect, a story of one innovation triumphing over another, the march of ever-better mousetraps through time and across space. The Upper Paleolithic population expansion was the result of such innovation, when we developed the adaptable mind that would allow us to take on the challenges of a global empire.