The much more complex cultural forms that we have developed over the last 2 million years or more, however, allow us to consider a significantly wider range of possibilities than are available to mammals more strictly confined to the here and now. Yet this more extensive cultural baggage (if I may speak from the point of view of episodic culture) may also get in the way of our immediate perception of the here and now. The incessant chatter of internal language may prevent us from seeing what is in front of our eyes. Thus some forms of religious practice, such as meditation, are designed to escape as much as possible from complex representations, particularly linguistic representations, in order to attain a “one-pointedness,” to use Zen language, of immediate wordless perception of the here and now. Perhaps when such immediate perception becomes total we can speak of unitive consciousness, which, although it often involves seeing, is always beyond words, and can never be pointed to with words until after the fact.
I don’t want to do more than suggest the possibility that the deepest kind of religious experience is rooted in our most elemental form of mammalian perception. I am aware that mammalian attention, finely honed and subtle though it is, is almost always at the service of utilitarian ends. It is designed to make animals fully present in the here and now so that they can relate more effectively to fellow members of their group, find food and mates, and improve their status in the band, as well as defend themselves from attack. Alert attentiveness is also a valuable asset for humans seeking to fulfill their intentions, including moral intentions that are far more than utilitarian. 4 But the concrete immediacy of a consciousness fully present in the here and now may also be a significant resource for the religious life.
Mimetic Culture
I want to describe at some length what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture, a rather close parallel to enactive representation, because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last 200,000 to 300,000 years.’ As for the starting point, the period between the split in the hominid lineage from the lineage leading to modern chimpanzees, we know little about it except that hominids became bipedal and sometime before 2 million years ago began to make simple stone tools. They may have been more like modern chimpanzees than we are, but we cannot know how much that might be true. We begin to know a lot about the recent past from archaeology and history. But for what human culture was like in most of the last 2 million years, we have little direct evidence and will always have to rely on educated speculation. Even the early development of the culture of our own species-that is, between 200,000 and 50,000 years or so ago remains shrouded in uncertainty, although we have reason to believe that modern rapid language is at least 150,000 years .6
One might challenge the starting point: after all, as close as we may be to the chimpanzees, they too have been evolving for the millions of years since our lineage branched off from theirs. How can we be sure that our ancestors were like the chimpanzees of today? Of course, we can’t, but we do know that rates of evolutionary change vary enormously between species and that many species remain relatively stable over periods of time much longer than the 5 or 6 million years that separate us from the chimpanzees. It is also the case that the chimpanzees are remarkably similar in habitat and behavior to the other great apes that branched off from our common lineage much earlier than the time at which humans and chimpanzees separated.
Our closeness to the chimpanzees (how many times have we heard that “we share over 98 percent of our genes” with them?) has only become more evident as genetic research continues. Already in 1992 Jared Diamond argued that we are “the third chimpanzee” (along with chimpanzees and bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees), although he thought the small genetic difference between us and the other two had enormous consequences? Research reported in 2002 by Derek E. Wildman and colleagues suggests that we share over 99 percent of our genes with the chimpanzees and that “a movement is emerging in the scientific community to recognize the close evolutionary relationship between humans and chimpanzees by placing them in the same genus, which by the rules of zoological nomenclature must be Homo.“8 These authors do not, any more than does Diamond, wish to underestimate the enormous difference between ourselves and our chimpanzee relatives, but they attribute that difference to rapid evolutionary change of the regulatory sequences that control the timing and pattern of genic activity as well as to change in the structures of the proteins encoded in the genes, rather than exclusively to the less than 1 percent of our genes that we do not share with them.
What are some of the changes that made mimetic culture, rudimentary at best among chimpanzees, into an elaborate and complex system in early humans? Significant anatomical changes are clearly involved. Bipedal locomotion goes a long way back, around 4 million years ago, beginning in the earliest hominid genus, Australopithecus. It was obviously an important step, but its adaptive function is in debate and need not detain us here. Ian Tattersall takes the cautious view that the Australopithecines were probably more “bipedal apes,” in their cognitive as well as anatomical qualities, than anything very much like ourselves.10 The descendants of the Australopithecines or other hominid species living at the same time-and we must remember that there were probably many species, most of which died out, rather than one simple genealogical line-began to change in several important respects. Brain size increased, and because large brains require a great deal of energy, a more efficient feeding system developed. That is, fruit, and increasingly meat, replaced leaves as primary foods, consequently allowing a smaller, more efficient gut, and releasing more energy for an ever-larger brain. As the brain increased in size, hominid babies had to be born at earlier stages of their fetal development; otherwise their heads would be too large to pass through the birth canal. Hominid babies began to be born, relative to other primates, “prematurely,” that is, undergoing outside the womb development that in other mammals takes place before birth. The helplessness of these “premature” infants required much longer nurturing before they could look out for themselves.
These changes involving feeding habits and increasing brain size, which are most clearly exhibited in Homo erectus, contributed to a significant change in social organization compared to our primate relatives, probably somewhere between 1 and 2 million years ago, though possibly significantly earlier. A diet increasingly dependent on meat, and infants increasingly in need of prolonged care, led to the formation of relatively stable cooperative ties between a male and a female, or sometimes a male and several females, replacing the primate band dominated by an alpha male. An indication that pair-bonding was replacing single-male dominated bands was that sexual dimorphism-the difference in size and strength between males and females-declined. Robin Dunbar writes, “In mammals, striking sexual dimorphism [such as was still evident among australopithecines] is invariably associated with harem-like mating systems, where a handful of powerful males share all the females between them. The reduced sexual dimorphism in the later hominids, where males are only 10 to 20 percent heavier than females, suggests that females were shared more evenly among males.”” Strong dimorphism, including much larger male than female canine teeth, is linked to conditions where intragroup fighting between males for access to females is intense, so that decreasing dimorphism suggests declining intragroup hostility between males.
But because there is no reason to think that Homo erectus was organized in isolated nuclear families and every reason to think that they required, besides male-female pair-bonding, a high degree of cooperation between males (in hunting and in defense against predators and other human bands) and a high degree of cooperation between females (in childbirth, child care, and gathering), an entirely new level of social organization beyond anything seen in nonhuman primates became necessary. Dunbar has found a strong correlation between increase in the neocortex (the primary area responsible for in
creasing hominid brain size) and group size, a correlation that holds not only for primates but for other mammals as well. His explanation is not that increasing brain size causes larger groups, but that members of larger groups need larger brains to cope with the increasing demands of group life.12 We need to consider why growing social complexity requires increasing cultural complexity, and we can begin by considering the central argument of Dunbar’s book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language.
Dunbar points out that the largest typical group size for our ape relatives, 50 to 55 members, is characteristic of chimpanzees and baboons. By projecting the correlation between size of neocortex and group size to Homo sapiens, he comes up with the number 150, which he finds not only comes pretty close to average group size among hunter-gatherers, but also turns out to be close to the basic unit size in many complex organizations: for example, the company, as the smallest military unit that can stand alone. Having discovered that grooming is perhaps the basic means for the creation of solidarity among primates, he raises the question of whether, given how time-intensive grooming is, it could possibly be effective in groups much larger than 50: “Grooming seems to be the main mechanism for bonding primate groups together. We cannot be sure exactly how it works, but we do know that its frequency increases roughly in proportion to the size of the group: bigger groups seem to require individuals to spend more time servicing their relationships.“13 Given human group size, however, and projecting from primate patterns, we would have to spend 40 percent of our time grooming one another, leaving precious little time for anything else, if grooming were our main source of intragroup solidarity. Is there another, more efficient way that humans could achieve the same end? “The obvious way, of course, is by using language. We do seem to use language in establishing and servicing our relationships. Could it be that language evolved as a kind of vocal grooming to allow us to bond larger groups than was possible using the conventional primate mechanism of physical grooming? 1114
This is an interesting idea, and we will pursue it further below, but if Dunbar means by language, modern rapid language, which is only found in Homo sapiens (and we will see that he doesn’t exclusively mean that), then there is still a huge gap of at least 2 million years between the first members of our genus and ourselves, a period in which, if Dunbar’s projections are correct, group size was gradually increasing from 50 to 150, together with the neocortical increase that we know from fossil evidence was occurring during that period.
I think it can be argued that what was in fact providing the source of solidarity in these early groups was both more and less than what Dunbar suggests. It was less than language in that, although it may have involved much more complex and subtle vocalization than the great apes are capable of, it was still not modern rapid language. Some writers have spoken of “protolanguage,” which is a kind of placeholder about which we can speak hesitantly at best. Nonetheless, a significant increase in the complexity of vocal communication is almost a necessary hypothesis if we do not believe in the sudden appearance of a “language module” of extraordinary complexity as a onetime mutation.15
But it appears that what provided solidarity before the appearance of modern language was also more than language. Donald uses the metaphor of “language piggybacking on culture” to suggest that the appearance of language required the prior development of a complex culture in terms of which the move to language would make sense.” It is the development of mimetic culture over a long period of time that in Donald’s view provided greatly increased cognitive resources including the solidarity that grooming no longer, and language had not yet, provided.
In the midst of so much conjecture, it is perhaps wise to begin our description of mimetic culture with virtually the only hard evidence (excuse the pun) we have for it, namely stone tools. More than 2 million years ago Homo habilis was making simple stone tools, essentially “sharp flakes banged from smallish cobbles using a stone `hammer.“‘17 Chimpanzees have been observed in the wild opportunistically using “tools,” such as a stone to crack nuts, or a stick to get ants out of an anthill, but the deliberate production of even a relatively simple stone tool for future use indicates a cognitive advance beyond even the cleverest chimpanzee. Their relatively simple tools nonetheless allowed Homo erectus to butcher rather large animals, even elephants, quite quickly. Both the manual dexterity and the understanding of the material, such that just the right angle at which one banged one stone against another would produce a sharp chip, suggest considerable cognitive sophistication. What is most important, from the point of view of culture, is that this skill had to be learned, and part of the learning was practice, because it isn’t easy to do it right on the first try. However simple, it was also a skill complex enough that it could not be learned on the fly-it could not be learned opportunistically as needed. The making of such tools had to be planned in advance of their use; the right material was not likely to be at hand at the moment of need. And the skill was difficult enough that it had to be taught. Yet it could be taught mimetically, without language.”
Donald describes mimesis as an increase in conscious control over action that involves four uniquely human abilities: mime, imitation, skill, and gesture.19 Mime, he says, is the imaginative enactment of an event. Although apes have a rudimentary ability to mimic, mime involves acting out a sequence of events as in the pretend play of children, a form of action that breaks with the here-and-now concreteness of episodic action.20 In mime, one can imaginatively act out something that has happened in the past or that one intends to do at a later date. However limited, it allows an escape from the present, a degree of freedom from immediacy. Imitation, in Donald’s terms, involves something much more precise than mime. A child might “pretend to” make a stone tool, having seen an adult make one, but have no idea how to choose the right material or make the exact motions that would produce the necessary chip. Imitation of the actual process would usually involve teaching, and pedagogy emerges for the first time as part of mimetic culture. Skill, as Donald uses the term, involves mime and imitation but moves beyond them. It requires “rehearsal, systematic improvement, and the chaining of mimetic acts into hierarchies.“21 Donald uses the example of learning to play tennis, although Homo habilis was not likely to have played tennis! But learning to play tennis is largely a mimetic skill, though a very complex one if one learns to play well, putting together a number of simple action chains into complex sequences. A skilled tennis player appears to play effortlessly, “instinctively” knowing how to respond to each challenge, but skills that can later be called forth automatically were initially learned slowly and painfully by giving the most exact attention to the learning process. Finally, by gesture Donald wants to describe the way in which humans can call on all three earlier levels of mimesis in order to communicate with others. And it is gesture that originally provided the source of solidarity when group size grew beyond the capacity of grooming to do so, and still, Donald argues, plays an essential role in group bonding.
If we may stay with stone tools for a moment, it is worth mentioning that about 1.5 million years ago a marked improvement occurred with the appearance of the Acheulian hand ax and associated tools, “which were obviously made to a standardized pattern that existed in the toolmakers’ mind before the toolmaking process began.“22 These new tools marked a considerable advance over the simple chips of earlier times. Donald says that they “required expert fashioning; archeologists require months of training and practice to become good at creating Acheulian tools.“23 Tattersall points out that though these new, more advanced stone tools appear in association with Homo ergaster, they do so only after ergaster had been on the scene for 200,000 years. He uses this as an example of the fact that in human evolution anatomical change proceeds, to a degree, independently of cultural change. Technological and other cultural changes survive even though species change, and in some cases follow by long periods the physical development that presumably was the necessary but not
sufficient condition for them.24 There is debate about dating both the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and language, but there are those who believe that the former, with all the brainpower and vocalization equipment needed for full modern language, nonetheless preceded modern language by perhaps tens of thousands of years.
It is easy to become fixated on growing technological sophistication as the key to understanding human evolution-it fits all too well with our penchant toward economic determinism in the understanding of history. But since the cognitive revolution in psychology of the last several decades, it appears that technology is more an indication of increasing cognitive capacity than a primary determinant in its own right, because cognitive capacity is the key to understanding human evolution. Although toolmaking is an important indicator of the emergence of mimetic culture, we need to understand much more about the whole of which toolmaking is a significant part.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 19