Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  The presence of a sign begs the question of its reliability: its conformity, that is, to the facts it is designed to represent. When we draw attention to an event or issue an alert at, say, the approach of a mastodon or a sabre-toothed tiger or the threat of fire or crack of ice, we detect what we think is real. We represent its reality in words (or gestures or grunts or grimaces or marks scarred on the surface of the world – on a patch of sand, perhaps, or the bark of a tree or the face of a rock). We ‘name’ it, as the first human did in so many myths of how he found his way round the dawning world. According to Genesis, naming was the first thing God did to light, darkness, sky, and sea after creating them. He then delegated the naming of living creatures to Adam. Danger or opportunity seem communicable without conscious intention on the part of an ululating or gesticulating animal. They can be apprehended, for instance, in a sensation or a noise or a pang of pain. In many species, instinct alone transmits awareness of danger between individuals.

  A creature, however, who consciously wants to convey the reality of peril, pain, or pleasure to another has launched a search for truth: for a means, that is, of expressing fact. We can properly ask of the first people, as of the greatest modern philosophical sophisticates, ‘How did they separate truth from falsehood? How did they decide when and whether utterances were true?’

  ‌The Modern Stone Age: Foraging Minds

  If ancient foragers’ symbols resist interpretation, what else can help us detect their thoughts? Material artefacts, first, can yield readings to techniques specialists call ‘cognitive archaeology’. Modern anthropological observations can provide further guidance.

  Of truths uttered in jest, The Flintstones had some of the funniest. The Hanna-Barbera studio’s ‘modern Stone Age family’ capered across the world’s television screens in the early 1960s, reliving in their caves the everyday adventures of modern middle-class America. The concept was fantastic, the stories silly. But the series worked, partly because ‘cave men’ really were like us: with the same kinds of minds and many of the same kinds of thoughts.

  In principle, therefore, there is no reason why people of the hunter-gatherer era should not have had ideas that anticipate our own. Their brains were at least as big, though, as we have seen, brain size and brainpower are only vaguely related. Over the entire history of our species, no evidence of any overall change is discernible, for better or worse, in the skill with which humans think. Maybe there was an era, long before the emergence of Homo sapiens, when life was ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’ and hominids scavenged without leisure for ratiocination; but for hundreds of thousands of years thereafter all our ancestors, as far as we know, were relatively leisured foragers rather than relatively harried, hasty scavengers.19 The artefacts they left are clues to creative minds. From about seventy thousand years ago, and abundantly from about forty thousand years later and onward, art displays a repertoire of symbols that hint at how Ice Age people reimagined what they saw.20 Artworks are documents. If you want to know what people in the past thought, look at their art, even before you look at their writings, because their art literally pictures for us their world as they experienced it.

  In alliance with art, a lot of digs yield material clues to what goes on in the mind. A simple test establishes the possibilities: if you look today at what people eat, how they embellish their bodies, and how they decorate their homes you can draw informed conclusions about their religions, for example, or ethics or their views on society, or politics, or nature. Do they have stuffed hunting trophies mounted on the walls and pelts as hearthrugs? Or do they like chintz and toile, or tapestry and oak mouldings, or tiling and Formica? Do they drive a Lincoln or a Lada? Palaeolithic tastes yield similar clues. For instance, the people who hunted mammoths to extinction on the Ice Age steppes of what is now southern Russia, over twenty thousand years ago, built dome-shaped dwellings of mammoth ivory. On a circular plan, typically twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, the bone-houses seem sublime triumphs of the imagination. The builders took mammoth nature and reconstructed it, humanly reimagined, perhaps to acquire the beasts’ strength or to conjure magic power over them. To see a mammoth and imagine its bones transformed into a dwelling requires a commitment of creativity as dazzling as any innovation later ages came up with. People slept, ate, and enacted routines of family life inside the framework of bones. But no dwelling is purely practical. Your house reflects your ideas about your place in the world.

  Alongside art and cognitive archaeology, comparative anthropology can also yield clues. By providing us with a means of measuring the antiquity of ideas, anthropologists can help interpret the evidence of the art and the other material remains. Strictly speaking, just as there are no primitive minds, there are no primitive peoples: we have all been on the planet for equally long; all our ancestors evolved into something recognizably human an equally long time ago. Some people, however, do, in one sense, have more primitive thoughts than others – not necessarily more retarded or more simplistic or more superstitious thoughts, or thoughts cruder or inferior or less abstract: just thoughts that first occurred earlier. Determinedly conservative societies, resistant to change, in close touch with their earliest traditions, are most likely to preserve their oldest thoughts. To check or explain the evidence of archaeological finds, we can use the practices and beliefs of the most consistently retrospective, most successfully conservative societies that survive in today’s world: those that still live by hunting and gathering.

  Of course, the fact that hunter-gatherer peoples today have certain ideas does not mean that people of similar culture anticipated them tens or scores or hundreds of thousands of years ago. But it raises the possibility. It helps make the archaeology intelligible. Broadly speaking, the more widely diffused an idea is, the older it is likely to be, because people communicated or carried it when they traded or migrated from elsewhere. The precept is not infallible, because, as we know from the wildfire of globalization in our own times, late ideas can spread by contagion, along with hamburgers ‘leaping’ from St Louis to Beijing, or IT initiatives from Silicon Valley to the Sunda Strait. We know a lot about how ideas spread in recent history, in the course of the worldwide transmission of culture by world-girdling technologies. We can identify the global popularity of jazz or jeans or soccer or coffee as the result of relatively recent events. But when we meet universal features of culture that predate well-documented periods, we can be fairly sure that they originated before Homo sapiens dispersed out of Africa and were transmitted by the migrants who peopled most of the world between about 15,000 and 100,000 years ago.

  ‌Cold Cases: Environment and Evidence of Ice Age Ideas

  The migrations in question happened roughly during the last great ice age – a time from which enough symbolic notation and material clues survive, and for which modern anthropological observations are sufficiently applicable, for us to attempt to reconstruct a lot of thinking, sometimes in spectacular detail.

  We need to know what made it conducive to creativity, and why a cold climate seems to have been mentally bracing. We can link the emergence of Homo sapiens with a cool period at about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Dispersal over an unprecedented swathe of the globe, from about 100,000 years ago, coincided with glaciation in the northern hemisphere as far south as the present lower courses of the Missouri and Ohio and deep into what are now the British Isles. Ice covered Scandinavia. About twenty thousand years ago, most of the rest of Europe was tundra or taiga. In central Eurasia, tundra reached almost to the present latitudes of the Black Sea. Steppes licked the shores of the Mediterranean. In the New World, tundra and taiga extended to where Virginia is today.

  While ice crept over the world, migrants from humankind’s East African ‘cradle’ carried artefacts we can associate with thoughts and sensibilities similar to our own: jewels made of shells; slabs of ochre incised with patterns. In Blombos Cave in South Africa, where migrants from East Africa were settling at the time, there are remnants of shell
crucibles and spatulas for mixing pigments.21 Of the same period are objects of art too delicate to be of much practical use: fragments of meticulously engraved ostrich eggshells, with geometric designs, from the Diepkloof rock shelter, 180 kilometres north of Cape Town. At about the same time, at Rhino Cave in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, decorators of spearheads ground pigments and collected colourful stones from many miles away. That people who made such objects had a ‘theory of mind’ – consciousness of their own consciousness – is a proposition that is hard to resist in the presence of so much evidence of imaginations so creative and so constructive. They had the mental equipment necessary to be able to reimagine themselves.22 Otherwise, they would have remained, like most other surviving simians, in the environment in which their ancestors evolved, or in contiguous and broadly similar biomes, or in adjoining spaces where circumstances – such as conflict or predation or climate change – forced them to adapt. The arrivals at Blombos Cave did something far more inventive: they overleapt unfamiliar environments, as if able to anticipate changed circumstances. They saw a new world ahead of them and edged or strode towards it.

  The cold they endured may not seem propitious to leisure – nowadays we associate cold with numbing effects, energy deficiencies, and demanding labour – but we have to rethink our image of the Ice Age and appreciate that, for people who experienced it, it was a productive time that supported specialized elites and plenty of inventive thinking and creative work.23 Cold really suited some people. For hunters in the vast tundra that covered much of Eurasia, the edge of the ice was the best place to be: they could live off the slaughtered carcasses of big mammals that had adapted by efficiently storing their own body fat. Dietary fat has acquired a bad reputation, but for most of history, most people eagerly sought it. Animal fat is the world’s most energy-giving source of food. It yields on average three times as much calorific reward per unit of bulk as any other form of intake. There were humanly exploitable small animals in parts of the tundra: easily trapped Arctic hare, for instance, or creatures vulnerable to the bows and arrows that appeared about twenty thousand years ago. More commonly, however, hunters of the Ice Age favoured big, fat species that could provide nourishment for many mouths over the long periods during which cold temperatures kept dead flesh fresh. Gregarious animals, such as mammoths and Arctic moose, oxen, and deer, were especially easy to garner. Hunters could kill them in large numbers by driving them over cliffs or into bogs or lakes.24 For the killers, while stocks lasted, the result was a fat bonanza, achieved with a relatively modest expenditure of effort.

  On average they were better nourished than most later populations. Daily, in some Ice Age communities, people ate about two kilograms of food. They absorbed five times the average intake of vitamin C of a US citizen today by gathering relatively large amounts of fruit and roots, though they did not neglect such starchy grains as they could get, ingesting plenty of ascorbic acid from animal organ meats and blood. High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure, unequalled in most subsequent societies, meant people had time to observe nature and think about what they saw.

  Aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual choices reflected preferences in food. For Ice Age artists, fat was beautiful. At nearly thirty thousand years of age the Venus of Willendorf is one of the world’s oldest artworks: a small, chubby carving of a bodacious female, named for the place in Germany where she was found. Rival classifiers have called her a goddess, or a ruler, or, because she looks as if she could be pregnant, a fertility-conjuring device. Her slightly more recent lookalike, however, the Venus of Laussel, who was carved in relief on a cave wall in France, perhaps about twenty-five thousand years ago, evidently got fat the way most of us do: by enjoying herself and indulging her fancy. She looks out from the cave wall, raising a horn – literally, a cornucopia, presumably full of food or drink.

  In the depths of the Ice Age, a resourceful way of life took shape. Twenty to thirty thousand years ago cave painters crawled through twisting tunnels to work in secret under glimmering torchlight in deep caverns. They strained on laboriously erected scaffolding to fit their compositions to the contours of the rock. Their palette bore only three or four kinds of mud and dye. Their brushes were of twig and twine and bone and hair. Yet they drew freely and firmly, observing their subjects shrewdly, capturing them sensitively, and making the animals’ looks and litheness spring to the mind. A mature tradition in practised, specialized hands produced these images. The result, according to Picasso and many other sensitive and well-informed modern beholders, was art unsurpassed in any later age.25 Carvings of the same era – including realistic ivory sculptures in the round – are equally accomplished. Thirty-thousand-year-old horses from Vogelherd in southern Germany, for instance, arch their necks elegantly. In Brassempouy in France a portrait of a neatly coiffured beauty, from about five thousand years later, shows off her almond eyes, tip-tilted nose, and dimpled chin. In the same period creatures of the hunt were carved on cave walls or engraved on tools. A kiln twenty-seven thousand years old at Věstonice in the Czech Republic fired clay models of bears, dogs, and women. Other art, no doubt, in other places has faded from exposed rock faces on which it was painted, or perished with the bodies or hides on which it was daubed, or vanished with the wind from the dust in which it was scratched.

  The function of Ice Age art is and probably always will be a subject of unresolved debate. But it surely told stories, accompanied rituals, and summoned magic. In some cave paintings animals’ pictures were repeatedly scored or punctured, as if in symbolic sacrifice. Some look as if they were hunters’ mnemonics: the artists’ stock of images features the shapes of hooves, the spoor of the beasts, their seasonal habits and favoured foods. Footprints and handprints, denting sand or earth, may have been early sources of inspiration, for stencilling and hand-printing were commonplace Ice Age techniques. Handprints speckle cave walls, as if reaching for magic hidden in the rock. Stencils, twenty thousand years old, of human hands and tools fade today from a rock face in Kenniff, Australia. Yet the aesthetic effect, which communicates across the ages, transcends practical function. This was not, perhaps, art for art’s sake, but it was surely art: a new kind of power, which, ever since, has been able to awaken spirits, capture imaginations, inspire actions, represent ideas, and mirror or challenge society.26

  ‌Distrusting the Senses: Undermining Dumb Materialism

  The sources the artists have left us open windows into two kinds of thinking: religious and political. Take religion first. Surprisingly, perhaps, to modern sensibilities, religion starts with scepticism – doubts about the unique reality of matter, or, to put it in today’s argot, about whether what you see is all you get. So we should start with early scepticism before turning, in the rest of this chapter, to ideas that ensued about spirits, magic, witchcraft, totems, mana, gods, and God.

  What were the world’s first sceptics sceptical about? Obviously, the prevailing orthodoxy. Less obviously, that the prevailing orthodoxy was probably materialist and the thinkers who challenged it were those who first entertained speculations about the supernatural. Nowadays, we tend to condemn such speculations as childish or superstitious (as if fairies only inhabit the minds of the fey), especially when they occur in the form of religious thinking that survives from a remote past. Powerful constituencies congratulate themselves on having escaped into science, especially proselytizing atheists, philosophical critics of traditional understandings of ‘consciousness’, neuroscientists dazzled by the chemical and electrical activity in the brain (which some of them mistake for thought), and enthusiasts for ‘artificial intelligence’ who favour a model of mind-as-machine formerly popularized by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century materialists.27 It is smart or, in some scientific vocabularies, ‘bright’,28 to say that the mind is the same thing as the brain, that thoughts are electrochemical discharges, that emotions are neural effects, and that love is, as Denis Diderot said, ‘an intestinal irritation’.29

  Some o
f us, in short, think that it is modern to be materialist. But is it? It is more likely to be the oldest way of seeing the world – a grub’s or reptile’s way, composed of mud and slime, in which what can be sensed absorbs all available attention. Our hominin ancestors were necessarily materialist. Everything they knew was physical. Retinal impressions were their first thoughts. Their emotions started in tremors in the limbs and stirrings of the guts. For creatures with limited imaginations, materialism is common sense. Like disciples of scientism who reject metaphysics, they relied on the evidence of their senses, without recognizing other means to truth, and without realizing that there may be realities we cannot see or touch or hear or taste or smell.

  Surfaces, however, rarely disclose what is within. ‘Truth is in the depths’, as Democritus of Abdera said, late in the fifth century.30 It is impossible to say when an inkling that the senses are delusive first occurred. But it may have been around for at least as long as Homo sapiens: a creature typically concerned to compare experiences and to draw inferences from them is likely, therefore, to notice that one sense contradicts another, that senses accumulate perceptions by trial and error, and that we can never assume that we have reached the end of semblance.31 A large block of balsa wood is surprisingly light; a sliver of mercury proves ungraspable. A refraction is deceptively angular. We mistake shapes at a distance. We succumb to a mirage. A distorted reflection intrigues or appals us. There are sweet poisons, bitter medicines. In extreme form, materialism is unconvincing: science since Einstein has made it hard to leave strictly immaterial forces, such as energy and antimatter, out of our picture of the universe. So maybe the first animists were, in this respect, more up-to-date than modern materialists. Maybe they anticipated current thinking better.