Wayfinding

by M. R. O'Connor

  NAVIGATION MADE US HUMAN

  In a modern apartment on the north side of Iqaluit, I stood in front of a large contour map scattered with traditional Inuktitut place-names, chewing on caribou jerky whose center was still raw. Next to me was Daniel Taukie, a thirty-seven-year-old hunter from Cape Dorset, a community renowned for its arts on the far western coast of Baffin Island. Taukie pointed to a lake that we were going to travel to that day, about eighteen miles north of where we were standing. In English it is called Crazy Lake; in Inuktitut its name is Tasiluk Lake, meaning odd-shaped and shallow, a lake pretending to be a lake. Taukie was hunting ptarmigan, a white-feathered bird whose smooth, dark-violet flesh is best eaten raw. I was in pursuit of inuksuit (the plural of inuksuk), stones of various sizes and shapes that have been placed upon each other to create a structure. In Inuktitut the word inuksuit means “that which acts in the capacity of a human.” Some are made up of dozens of stones, some have just two or three, and their purposes are diverse—navigation, hunting, or caching meat. It was Solomon Awa who had told me I could find some very old inuksuit near Crazy Lake, and Taukie had volunteered to take me.

  I had met Taukie at Nunavut Arctic College, where he had recently graduated from a two-year training course in wildlife management. Handsome and affable, Taukie is an ardent hunter and an indefatigable source of knowledge about traveling on the land. “That’s what he loves, that’s what he does,” said Jason Carpenter, one of his teachers. “Vacation in Florida? No, he wants to go to this floe edge, he wants to get a seal pup.” Taukie’s particular passion was wolves, but he hunts caribou, walrus, polar bear, and fox. In 2009 he had participated in a bowhead whale hunt in Cape Dorset, the first in the community in a hundred years. The hunters had spotted the whale twenty-five miles offshore, and as the lead harpooner, Taukie had taken the first shot at the fifty-foot whale. Once the whale was dead, it took nearly eight hours to tow it to shore, where some five hundred people gathered to greet the hunters and harvest the animal.

  “For your conscience, I won’t bring a GPS,” Taukie said with a smile. He considered the device a bad way to travel anyway. “You can’t take shortcuts, there’s just one route. Sometimes it doesn’t know a cliff, so I can’t depend on it too much. When I do, it’s on a flat plain or in a whiteout.” As a kid hunting caribou with his father and other community members, it was typical for Taukie to travel four or five hours through the night without any maps or GPS to reach the herds. Today the widespread use of fast snowmobiles coupled with GPS has increased the hunters’ reach, and caribou numbers have crashed in recent years. “Snowmobiles can travel farther than we used to go on a daily basis. We were catching more and more out in places we never used to catch them,” he told me. “I can honestly say I was part of the decline. I was getting five caribou every two weeks.”

  Listening to Taukie’s stories about his travels, I had the impression that much of Baffin Island was his backyard. He told me about a solo journey he once made from Iqaluit to Cape Dorset, a nineteen-and-a-half-hour trip by snowmobile, without sleep, following old trails, some of which he had only heard about. Looking at the map on the wall was for my benefit. We went outside and packed his wooden qamutiik. The sun had been up since three a.m., and the blue sky was so sharp and the air so cold that the land around us seemed to crackle and spark. We put backpacks, a cooler, a shovel, thermoses of hot water, and some bannock under a blue tarp and carefully tucked its edges as though making a bed. We threaded rope through the gaps in the sled’s runners and around the entire bundle and cinched it tight. Taukie wore polarized sunglasses, the shape of which was outlined on his tanned face. He secured an extra five-gallon container of fuel on the sled and slung two rifles around his chest. Then we jumped on the snowmobile and pulled out from behind his apartment building, heading up into the hills and valleys that border Iqaluit to the east, an infinite terrain of rock and snow cast in blinding sunlight, to hunt.

  When did humans lose the biological hardware that allows so many animals to navigate with such precision? Did the hippocampus replace it? As neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum pointed out to me, there’s no fossil record of the hippocampus. We don’t know what it did a hundred thousand years ago. Scientists can only guess at its evolution. But the fact that it is very, very old, at least hundreds of millions of years, is a significant clue. Even birds, which last shared an ancestor with humans 250 million years ago, as well as amphibians, lungfish, and reptiles, have what is called a medial pallium. Similar to the mammalian hippocampal formation in vertebrates, the medial pallium is also involved in spatial tasks in these species, raising the possibility that certain properties of spatial cognition were conserved as organisms diversified and split, while other properties adapted to particular ecologies or selective forces. But despite the profound evolutionary commonalities between humans and other vertebrates and the way the hippocampus relates to cognitive functions of memory and navigation, the question remains: why did we make such a leap in terms of hippocampi’s size and role in our lives? Or as psychologist Daniel Casasanto puts it, “How did foragers become physicists in the eye blink of evolutionary time?” Perhaps it was exactly what Taukie and I were heading out to do—hunt—that contributed to our unique navigation strategies and intelligence, eventually engendering a practice we consider the most human of all: storytelling.

  * * *

  Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud would seem to have little in common. One is a fictional crime detective, the other a physician who founded the field of psychoanalysis. And yet according to the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, Holmes and Freud were remarkably similar in that their work involved the mastery of a particular type of information—what is called conjectural or evidential knowledge. Ginzburg describes this kind of knowledge as the “ability to construct from apparently insignificant data a complex reality that can not be experienced directly.” This data is most often made up of traces from the past; a footprint, an artwork, a fragment of text. In Freud’s work the traces were symptoms observed in his patients; in Holmes’s case the traces were clues gathered from crime scenes.

  In the late nineteenth century, Ginzburg argues, evidential knowledge emerged as an epistemological paradigm that influenced a broad scope of disciplines from art history to medicine to archaeology—and figures like Arthur Conan Doyle and Freud. Despite its influence during this period, Ginzburg believed that its roots were much much older; he argued that it originated in our species’ skill as hunters. In his 1989 book Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Ginzburg writes,

  Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle. He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers.

  For Ginzburg, the hunter, detective, historian, and physician are all part of a sign-reading paradigm. In the hunter’s case, by reading and deciphering tracks, the hunter is able to produce a narrative sequence, and Ginzburg posits that the idea of narration might have originated in a hunting society. “The hunter would have been the first ‘to tell a story’ because he alone was able to read, in the silent, early imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events.”

  Some linguists argue that the first human protolanguage that eventually led to symbolic language might have come from efforts by foragers and hunters to reconstruct a situation or scene for somebody else—the location of an animal or water source, say. In his book More Than Nature Needs, linguist Derek Bickerton described how language could have evolved as a solution to displacement, an ability to describe things that are not physically present and also to coordinate a plan of action. Bickerton calls this particular scenario “confrontational scavenging”—recruitin
g a big enough group of individuals to travel to the site of an animal carcass and drive off animal competitors to get meat. Presumably, spatial descriptions and directional terms were critically important for confrontational scavenging, and so these primordial conversations might have contained a lot of navigational information and created the need for an ever-expanding navigational vocabulary. According to this theory, the birth of language was just the human version of a bee dance. “[T]he notion that the world might consist of nameable objects was literally inconceivable to animal minds,” says Bickerton. “Recruitment for confrontational scavenging forced prehuman minds to accept the notion. When a prehuman who had just discovered a carcass appeared before conspecifics gesturing and making strange sounds and motions, the motive could only be informational: ‘There’s a dead mammoth just over the hill, come help get it!’”

  Scavenging led to chasing animals down and, eventually, trapping them, and traps require a great deal of abstract and complex thought. The British social anthropologist Alfred Gell believed that while chasing animals physically pitted the hunter and animal against one another as equals, the trap created a hierarchy of the hunter over the victim. Traps are designed to take advantage of the animal’s behaviors, they create a “lethal parody of the animal’s Umwelt,” Gell said. A trap is a model of its creator and a model of its prey, embodying a “scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space.” At the cognitive level, traps require a high level of evidential knowledge: understanding the movements, habits, and lives of animals in order to make predictions of their future movements. And traps are powerful signs: “We read in it the mind of its author and the fate of its victim.”

  In the past everyone probably needed some tracking skills for survival; today it is a lost skill practiced by a minority. But you don’t have to have trapped or hunted wolves to realize how profound and ubiquitous the skills of “tracking” are in our everyday lives. Our existence depends on thousands of instances of inference and deduction that allow us to draw conclusions about other people and things, what has happened and what will happen, about causes and consequences. We continually tell ourselves stories and test them against reality. The evidential paradigm described by Ginzburg seems to be at the root of so much human thought.

  I spoke to an evolutionary philosopher, Kim Shaw-Williams, who believes that navigation might have been the original purpose of what he calls “trackways reading” and its role in hunting, tracking, and trapping. Shaw-Williams grew up in the backwoods of northwestern Canada, and he has had an eclectic career, one that has included an ecology degree, possum hunting in the New Zealand wilderness, and working on film sets before enrolling in a PhD program at the University of Victoria in Wellington. It was during this period that his experiences as a young kid trapping animals took on new significance. He recalled an epiphany he had one morning before catching the schoolbus, doing a routine check of trap lines near his house. “There was a light bit of snow the night before, and what happens with rivers in winter is the winds blow up and down, creating a hard crust on the snow, and the animals use them as a highway,” he told me. “I was wandering along the river and saw these tracks, coyotes, foxes, and all these different animals. And I had this eureka moment that before we became human, we were reading these things.” With this thought came the feeling that he was accessing a conduit in consciousness to our ancient ancestors. “It was a real buzz,” he recalled.

  From his home in New Zealand, Shaw-Williams described to me how he now thinks that the ability to read animal tracks was a selective trigger 3.5 to 3 million years ago, spurring the cognitive evolution of our earliest widely accepted hominin ancestors, leading to changes in our lineage’s genetics, morphology, cognition, and behavior. Subsequently, some 2.3 million years ago during the early Pliocene, the human brain started to undergo encephalization, an increase in its relative size, which Shaw-Williams believes was required for storing memories in order to effectively forage. “What the first encephalization was about was socioecological information. The memory for trails, memory for techniques, and being able to navigate between one place and another,” he said. Tracking footprints—of animals or people—helped navigation because this sign essentially constituted trails that could be followed to get from one place to the next, find someone who was lost, or return to the group. These practices brought about dramatic and complex cognitive shifts. “To track, you have to have mental representations of other agents moving through an environment,” he said. “Once we needed to become more efficient at foraging journeys, navigation became a bigger thing. Orienteering, taking an egocentric or allocentric point of view, triangulating them, and keeping track of your journey.”

  Shaw-Williams calls his ideas about evolution and tracking the “social trackways theory.” It suggests that hominids are animals that learned to “read” the tracks of other hominids and animals and eventually infer meaning about events that happened in the past from these symbols. This enabled them to predict future behaviors based on these stories and use them to find one another, avoid predators, and successfully hunt prey. The ability to read tracks eventually led our ancestors to create first their own artificial signs and symbols to mark trails, then signed and spoken languages, and eventually the written word. (What is a book but the trail of words on paper left behind by a wandering mind?) The social trackways theory posits that humans are the only species to have undertaken the visual analysis of patterns of indentations left behind by other people and moving animals, a skill that created a unique cognitive niche: the narrative mind. A tracker imagines being “in the mind and body” of the author of the trackway, and then creates a narrative. To do this, they would need an egocentric self-referentiality and an allocentric sense of another’s point of view. “I have to mentally picture the target animal approaching the whole trap site in the future, essentially by imagining myself to be in the body and mind of the target animal,” said Shaw-Williams. “When setting traps or snares everything is done according to the perceptions and possible mental state of the animal I am imagining I am being while I am setting the trap.” Within these strategies are the origins of characteristics that came to define our species as unique from others: self-projection, role-playing, sophisticated tool use, future planning, and symbolic communication.

  This sequence of cognitive development also describes the birth of autonoetic consciousness, the capacity to be aware of one’s own existence as an entity in time. The word autonoetic comes from the ancient Greek word for “perceptive.” The term is sometimes used in the context of schizophrenia studies; patients who believe that their own thoughts are actually coming from an outside source have autonoetic agnosia. In the 1970s, the influential experimental psychologist Endel Tulving brought attention to autonoetic consciousness when he distinguished episodic memory, the recollection of events of the past, as separate from semantic memory, the conscious access to context-dissociated facts. To Tulving, episodic memory is the glue in a system that allows humans to maintain a coherent sense of identity and self through the conjunction of subjectivity, autonoetic consciousness, and experiences. This episodic memory system allows us to locate ourselves in time, to travel back to the past and forward into the future (what’s known as proscopy or prospection).

  Tulving believes these abilities were what separated humans from animals. “Although common sense endows many animals with the ability to remember their past experiences,” he has written, “as yet there is no evidence that humanlike episodic memory—defined in terms of subjective time, self, and autonoetic awareness—is present in any other species.” It’s not that animals can’t remember the what, where, and when of particular events—the studies of scrub jays discussed in the previous chapter show that they can—it is that these are more likely simple episodic-like abilities, different from the profound autonoetic consciousness that is a hallmark of human cognition. Some other researchers see in the results of recent rat
maze studies enough evidence to question this argument. New Zealand psychologist Michael Corballis now thinks that hippocampal activity in sleeping rats, in which they seem to be replaying but also anticipating future excursions, may prove that mental time travel is present in other animals, and it is only the degree of complexity in humans that is unique. But Tulving argues,

  Lest someone worry about the current political correctness of such an assertion, let me hasten to remind such a person that many behavioral and cognitive capabilities of many non-human species are equally unique to those species: echolocation in bats, electrical sensing in fish and genetically determined navigational capabilities of migratory birds are examples that come quickly to mind, but there are many, many others. Indeed, it is these kinds of abilities—unfathomable by common sense, but very real in fact—that allow one to remain a sceptic about episodic memory in birds and animals: evolution is an exceedingly clever tinkerer who can make its creatures perform spectacular feats without necessarily endowing them with sophisticated powers of conscious awareness.

  According to the trackways reading hypothesis, once tracks became a much-used strategy for navigation, foraging, finding water, remembering routes, and hunting for animals, it led to humans creating rich mental maps of territories and routes based on narrative memory of previous experiences and the experiences of others. Our memory capacities grew, and we amassed more natural history information—the changing seasons, migration patterns for animals, breeding cycles, habitats. Learning all of this took time and energy, potentially extending childhood and juvenility and their periods of neural development. Out of this process emerged a creature that could begin to organize its experiences in space and time, to navigate farther, to build complex maps and sequences in the brain, and, eventually, once they harnessed symbolic communication and then language, to communicate these geographic and biographical narratives to others.