Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The consensus now among palaeontologists and archaeologists is that, prior to about 60,000–40,000 years ago, archaic H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis did not show symbolic behaviour and had a fairly limited capacity to plan ahead. Paul Mellars, of Cambridge, distinguishes three major changes at the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic. There was first a distinct shift in stone technology – in the Middle Palaeolithic ‘tools do not appear to have been produced with clearly defined preconceived “mental templates” about the final, overall form of the finished tools’, whereas in contrast the Upper Palaeolithic tools, the fifth kind, besides being smaller and better controlled, are far more standardised, their shapes conforming to ‘clearly preconceived morphological “norms”.’³⁸ Mellars also distinguished a change in bone technology, from the use of random fragments to the shaping of bone. And, third, from unstructured to highly structured – even rectangular – settlements. He argues that all this amounted almost to a ‘culture’ with ‘norms’ of behaviour. By and large, he says, these changes reflect the growth of long-term planning, strategic behaviour on the part of early humans of this period, in which individuals are anticipating behaviour in the future.³⁹ He says that he does not think this could have been accomplished without language.

Other palaeontologists believe that the emergence of complicated tool-making is, in brain terms, analogous to speech and that the two activities emerged at the same time. In modern experiments, for example, James Steele and his colleagues found that, on average, 301 strikes were needed to form Acheulian biface hand-axes (the third kind, associated with H. erectus), taking 24 minutes. Such a sequence, they argue, is like constructing sentences, and they point out that damage to Broca’s area in the brain results in impairment to both language and hand and arm gestures.⁴⁰ Language is considered more fully in the next chapter.

The period we have been covering, say 400,000–50,000 years ago, has been identified by Merlin Donald, professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Toronto, as possibly the most momentous stage in history. Donald has identified four stages in the development of the modern mind, involving three transitions. The first mode he calls ‘episodic’ thinking, as is shown in the great apes. Their behaviour, he says, consists of short-term responses to the environment; their lives are lived ‘entirely in the present’, as a series of concrete episodes, with a memory for specific events in a specific context.⁴¹ The second form of thinking/behaving, typified by H. erectus, is ‘mimetic’. For Donald, the world of H. erectus is qualitatively different from all that went before and this is what makes it so important. Erectus lived in a ‘society where cooperation and social coordination of action were central to the species’ survival strategy’.⁴² Without language, Erectus nonetheless slowly developed a culture based on mimetics – intentional mime and imitation, facial expression, mimicry of sounds, gestures etc. This was a qualitative change, says Donald, because it allowed for intentionality, creativity, reference, co-ordination and, perhaps above all, pedagogy, the acculturation of the young. It was a momentous change also because minds/individuals were no longer isolated. ‘Even highly sophisticated animals, such as apes, have no choice but to approach the world solipsistically because they cannot share ideas and thoughts in any detail. Each ape learns only what it learns for itself. Every generation starts afresh because the old die with their wisdom sealed forever in their brains . . . There are no shortcuts for an isolated mind.’⁴³ Even so, mimesis was slow – it probably took Erectus half a million years to domesticate fire and three-quarters of a million to adapt to the cold.⁴⁴ But Donald is in no doubt that many cultural artefacts had been produced by Erectus before language and the next transition, to ‘mythic’ thinking, which necessitates language. The shift to mimesis was the great divide in history, Donald says – it was, as he puts it, ‘The Great Hominid escape from the nervous system.’⁴⁵ The later transitions are considered below.