by Paul Jordan
Solutrean artefacts.
Magdalenian harpoons.
The Upper Palaeolithic people were making better tools out of their better-exploited raw materials, they were hunting better and enjoying more complex social relations (and they were also, as their bones show us, living longer and suffering a bit less physical trauma in the course of their lives). The houses built by Gravettian people in Eastern Europe, where there were no caves in which to take up residence, not only attest to the superior technical skills of their builders but also point to increasing social differentiation. Huts built of mammoth bones at the site of Kostienki on the Don river show a progression from communal arrangements with shared storage pits to concentration of storage in one hut bigger than all the rest, as though chiefs and/or medicine men were rising to power in a more hierarchically organized society. (It was probably the salmon runs of the local rivers that supported the wealth of such societies – fishing was never much of a Middle Palaeolithic accomplishment.) The hearth arrangements of the Upper Palaeolithic people, whether in the huts of the east or caves of the west, show a clear advance over Mousterian efforts, with more built structures including ventilating flues.
With the graves of all these Upper Palaeolithic peoples we sometimes find ourselves faced with obvious grave-goods of incontestable ideological intent. Some individuals at least were being buried in communal interments, like the one at the Crô-Magnon site, and in all their finery, with personal adornments that they wore in life or were treated to in death. At Dolni-Věstonice in Moravia, and dating to about 27,000 BP, a triple burial of two men and a crippled girl is disposed in a manner irresistibly suggestive of sex and murder: one of the males was buried arms linked with the spinally deformed girl, while the other – who had been pierced through the hip with a wooden spear (and may have been wearing a sort of painted wooden mask) – was laid out with his hands at the pubic area of the girl where red ochre was liberally splashed around. Well, there was nothing like this in the Middle Palaeolithic. . . . We can think up any number of stories to account for such a burial (including respectable ones like death in childbirth followed by distraught husband’s revenge on the attendant medicine man and own suicide) without any hope of knowing what really happened and what it all means; what we do know is that with scenes like this we are certainly faced with the all-too-human in some form or another, in a way absolutely not seen in earlier times. These were people like ourselves, engaged in complex and problematic behaviour with a heavy dose of imagination and symbolism.
It is the art of the Upper Palaeolithic people that so decisively separates them from all that had gone before. Before 30,000 BP at the Chauvet cave in France Aurignacian artists created cave paintings as good as any to come over the next fifteen thousand years or so at famous places like Altamira in Spain or Lascaux near les Eyzies; one of the Chauvet paintings features a half-man and half-bison figure; from the Höhlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany comes, with equal antiquity, the astonishing figure of a lion-headed human being in mammoth ivory. Sites like these stand at the start of a long line of archaeological finds of ice age art in Europe that mark a total break with Lower and Middle Palaeolithic products. (Important claims of equally old or perhaps even slightly older artistic efforts have been made for Africa and Australia, but the west European Upper Palaeolithic art – evidently created in a rich world of relatively easy living, ice age notwithstanding – remains the most varied and vivid of the palaeolithic productions.) There really is no Middle Palaeolithic art: only scratched lines here and there and lumps of ochre. Upper Palaeolithic art is abundant and sophisticated, from detailed engravings on cave walls or pieces of bone to polychrome paintings of amazingly well-observed naturalism, with sex symbols and apparently abstract motifs, and a positive cult, widespread across Europe, of small female statuary in stone, bone, ivory and even fired clay, at whose potential meanings we can only guess. (Everything to do with sex would, of course, have been vastly altered by the inauguration of the modern mind – the sexual, previously conducted like so much else on automatic pilot, would have become the erotic with the conscious application of imagination, to make the most colossal impact on all aspects of behaviour.) Even the most representational of art is, of course, already a symbolic enterprise, but there is in the Upper Palaeolithic art – though we cannot always discern the intent of much of it – an unmistakable extra component of symbolism and magic, with evident reference to themes like sexuality, fertility, hunting prowess and shamanism. And there is a strong possibility that music was a feature of Upper Palaeolithic life: a very debatable bone ‘flute’ is reported from a Mousterian context in Slovenia whose holes are most likely only the effects of animal teeth, but a very flute-like object comes from an Aurignacian site in south-west France, 10 cm long with four holes on one side and two on the other, staggered as though for fingers and thumb, that can certainly be played as a flute to this day. Later on in the Upper Palaeolithic there are several bone recorders and even a picture showing a figure playing a bowed instrument. The people who created all these things, from statuettes to wall paintings to musical instruments, plainly had minds like our own, capable of imaginative insight and symbolic representation – and, by the same token, former people like the Neanderthalers who achieved none of these things cannot possibly have had minds anything like ours, even when they were housed in brains bigger than our own.
The venus of Willendorf, Austria.
Invisible in the archaeological record, except in indirect ways, is any evidence for the language capacity of the moderns of the Upper Palaeolithic. Some bone scraps carry markings that have, probably very plausibly, been interpreted as numerical notation, perhaps hunting tallies or even moon-phase records, but there was to be no writing of any sort until long after the ice age world had passed away – not until, in fact, the agricultural revolution had progressed to wealthy and settled living with developed social and economic stratification some five-and-a-half thousand years ago. Indirectly, the graves, houses, sophisticated tools and above all the art do tell us that elaborate language with high symbolic content must have been employed by the moderns who made the Upper Palaeolithic – and, certainly, their skull and jaw anatomy confirms their capacity to form fully all the sounds that languages use today. At what point grammatically sophisticated language came into use is hard to say; the Klasies River Mouth moderns, certainly the Skhul and Qafzeh people, are quite likely to have been capable of it (unless some later rewiring of the brain brought about full language capacity along with an all-round mental enhancement at some time after 90,000 BP). But it is tempting to relate the development of the modern sort of language use to about the same time as the development of the complex panoply of Aurignacian tools, on the assumption that a parallel process of thought between the logical and conceptual steps of toolmaking and of sentence building was always in place from the earliest days of toolmaking. In a rough and ready way, we might expect Oldowan tools to go with something little better than a sort of vocalized chimpanzee signing, Acheulian axes to accompany the use of rudimentary and limited expressions, Middle Palaeolithic tools to indicate a little greater complexity and flexibility and the innovations and variety of Upper Palaeolithic products to be matched by the habitual use of grammatically complicated and imaginative speech. (But it is salutary to note that the moderns of Australia, to whom belong the world’s oldest known cremation burials at about 25,000 BP and some of its earliest art, perhaps before 30,000, achieved their modernity of behaviour to the accompaniment of a not even Middle Palaeolithic stone toolmaking tradition.)
By modern language, we mean to emphasize the availability of complicated tense arrangements like the pluperfect or moods like the subjunctive, and imaginative rehearsals in the mind’s eye like metaphor and analogy. All these things come naturally to human children, who only need exposure to language use around them and at them to pick them up quite effortlessly, as though their brains come ready wired for language use. It is possible that the developm
ent of complex language and brain improvement went hand in hand under the pressure of natural selection to promote a phase of very rapid evolution among the early moderns of Africa and the Levant; those with better capacity for complex speech (and therefore with better thinking minds) enjoyed such clear survival benefits over their duller fellows, in their own tribes or outside, that they prospered and bred, spread their genes abroad and extended their domain. It may be that the long period of coexistence between Neanderthalers and early moderns in the Middle East only came to an end when the early moderns alone evolved the fully modern mental capacity that facilitates complex thought and speech. Once that capacity was in place, there was no stopping the moderns, who took the opportunity of the climatic amelioration of about 40,000 BP to penetrate into Europe. (They appear to have started their spread towards the Far East at an even earlier time, perhaps from the Horn of Africa rather than the Levantine region, reaching Australasia by possibly as early as 60,000 BP. It is hard to believe that these feats too were not accompanied by fully modern language use.)
It is tempting to think that language use all by itself might have forced the evolution of greater mental powers along the lines sketched above, when natural selection favoured the complex speakers (and thinkers) over the rest. But there are a number of reasons to doubt that conclusion. Although complex thought is apt to seem impossible to us without complex language to give shape to it, as though the words themselves foster the ideas, it remains a fact that not only not-yet-educated children but also some natural-born idiots (otherwise terribly limited in their mental possibilities) display a well-developed capacity to wield complex grammatical construction, if only for the most part in the interests of uttering fluent nonsense. Conversely, some stroke victims apparently remain fully capable of thought formulation while losing all ability to express thought in words, which just will not come. It looks as though language use, even with complex grammar, is at base a rather limited and technical capacity of the brain, inherent in almost every one of us however disadvantaged in terms of physiology or education: a capacity, moreover, with a long development in the course of human evolution since faint beginnings in the times of Homo habilis. It must have been some other change in the minds of the first moderns that enabled them to use language much more symbolically, alongside the rest of their startling ideological advances that are made manifest in their graves, their houses, their adornments, their art and their magic. With the flowering of imagination and symbolic thought that made ideology a reality for the first time in the history of humankind, the phenomenon of cultural evolution was initiated. Culture has been well described as a second system of inheritance, to go alongside genetic descent from one generation to the next, with its own unique method of transmission by language, symbol and example, so that culture can spread quickly between genetically unrelated individuals and even whole peoples, sometimes at astonishing rates and intensities. We owe to culture all the real glories of humanity – music, art and literature – and also its worst excesses – racial, political and religious fantasies.
We have seen that a big part of mental enhancement began with the primates (as with other social animals) as an aid to self-promotion in the context of group living. The brightest and best of primate intelligence is of a social character, concerned with the favourable negotiation of social encounters in the group. The second-guessing of other individuals’ moods and intentions in the light of one’s own (as a basis for action to one’s advantage) is among the most humanlike of the behaviour traits we spot in the chimpanzees; to the sort of vegetative general intelligence that all living creatures show to some degree in adaptation to their environments, the top primates have added an unusual degree of social intelligence. It is their hallmark, and much of the archaeological record of that exceptional primate, the human being, can be read as witness to the growth of social intelligence over several millions of years of brain expansion, with enlarging group sizes, standardization of tool types, communal life around cave hearths, survival in harsh environments, support for the aged and infirm, burial of the dead, extended ranges of raw material transport and long-distance exchange. Developing social intelligence was no doubt accompanied by the development of language use, but it was very likely language of an almost exclusively social application, to groom and persuade and deceive. It is not at all impossible that such social language became, well before the emergence of the moderns, quite grammatically sophisticated with the power to handle past and future and ‘what if?’. But it would not have embraced much in the way of non-interpersonal activity, not even the socially conducted businesses of hunting and toolmaking which remained separate mental domains of natural history lore and technical procedure, not subject to the fruitful scrutiny of social intelligence but rather going along in an unconscious, automatic pilot mode. The painfully slow progress of food gathering strategies and tool technologies and the virtual absence of evidence for symbolic behaviour until the end of Middle Palaeolithic times are all pointers to the compartmentalizing of the mind – until the Upper Palaeolithic era. A form of consciousness, to us bafflingly limited to the social scene, was very likely evolved from habilis, perhaps even Australopithecine, times onwards; toolmaking, plant gathering and hunting were carried on rather like sleepwalking, or like the way we drive to work without much consciousness of the journey at the time and even less memory of it afterwards. But whereas we can will ourselves into vivid consciousness of everything we do and retain memory of it all afterwards (if we really want to, if it means something to us, if we’re under fifty), it seems certain that our pre-modern ancestors can only have been much less conscious at the time of all their doings outside the social sphere and altogether more oblivious afterwards.
The trick of the moderns was to acquire integrated minds, where the subtle intelligence evolved for social interactions could be brought to bear on so many more aspects of their lives. Social intelligence became general intelligence again, vastly superior – thanks to millions of years of refinement as social intelligence – to what we have called the vegetative general intelligence of lower forms of life. Social language became general language, able to be extended to the whole world of the senses and of human action. Procedures that had formerly been undertaken on automatic pilot were now open to conscious reflection. Not surprisingly, everything brought into a consciousness previously devoted to social conduct was invested with a heavy dose of anthropomorphizing: the natural thing to do was to imagine everything in terms of human feelings and human instincts to action. Animals, especially perhaps animals of the hunt, were credited with human reactions and intentions and a kinship was felt with them that has been expressed, among recent hunter-gatherer peoples, as totemism: we recall the man-bison and man-lion from the earliest phase of Upper Palaeolithic art. This anthropomorphizing was extended almost certainly to all sorts of living and inanimate things, as has also been the way with recent foragers. (The putative Neanderthal cult of the bear is worth recalling at this point, as it does look very much like a tentative manifestation of the anthropomorphizing tendency in a pre-modern human species, possibly to be explained by the rather blatantly humanoid appearance of bears that even the Neanderthalers could not miss.)
In the moderns the anthropomorphizing tendency ran riot, as it does with us to this day: the firm habit of reading all the world outside ourselves, and not just the other people in it, as somehow like ourselves, to be cajoled, threatened, deceived, manipulated, placated to our best advantage. The human mind has been rightly credited with ‘a passion for analogy’, for seeing similarities and relationships in different parts and aspects of the world at large and basing actions upon these perceived analogies, often with fruitful and useful outcome. This passion for analogy is an extension of the anthropomorphizing tendency where we see everything in the world in human terms and therefore potentially akin. The uses of the passion for analogy range from, say, practicalities like the avoidance of poisonous plants, on the plausible grounds of one such plant�
�s similarity to another, to exalted achievements like mathematics and science, though the awkward philosophical fact remains that no two or more pieces of space-time can ever really be said to be ‘the same’ and, indeed, space-time as a whole really has no discrete pieces to be compared. For all that, practically speaking, we can all see that our capacity for imaginative analogizing has been immensely useful to the human race in so many ways, with its ready appreciation of relationships among the phenomena we face in our lives and its speedy devising of ways to exploit every sort of situation; we have also to acknowledge that it can equally be appallingly misleading as every sort of political and religious irrationality rests on passionately misapprehended ‘analogies’. The mental ability to analogize and in general to bring many facets of experience into consciousness must depend on workings of the neocortical part of the brain in which data and memories can be brought together without much reference back into the older and more primitively operating regions of the brain – so it looks likely that it must have been some crucial reorganization of the neocortex and its internal pathways that made possible the emergence of the moderns’ minds and patterns of behaviour. As to what the seemingly presidential consciousness of the modern human mind really is, which feels as though it spends its waking hours knowing and deciding everything we do (being our very self, we might say), nobody has ever come up with anything very enlightening to say about it beyond noting the usefulness in Darwinian terms of such an executive self as coordinator and arbiter of all the neural circuitry that busies itself with every aspect of our interaction with the world. Even so, it is hard to see why ‘we’ have to know consciously that the coordination and arbitration is going on, but each of us does know it, and what ‘we’ are, in reality, is that knowing. Beyond that, the problem of consciousness (if such it be) is a philosophical hall of mirrors and some thinkers have concluded that in the nature of things, consciousness can get no further with thinking about itself. We leave the topic with a reminder that our consciousness is in any case a constantly changing thing (which, moreover, shuts down for hours every day) and that our conviction of our own existences as fixed selves can easily be suspected of an illusory nature.
