Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The advent of art is so sudden (in palaeontological terms), and so widespread, that many scientists think it must reflect an important change in the development of early man’s mental state. It is, as Steven Mithen puts it, ‘when the final major re-design of the mind took place’.⁵³ Once again there was a time lag, between the appearance of anatomically modern humans, around 150,000–100,000 years ago, and the creative explosion, at 60,000–40,000 years ago. One explanation is the climate. As the glaciers expanded and retreated, the available game changed in response, and a greater variety of equipment was needed. Also needed was a record of the animals available and their seasonal movement. Perhaps this is, again, too neat. A second – and more controversial – climatic explanation is that the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano at 71,000 years ago led to a worldwide volcanic winter, lasting ten thousand years and drastically reducing both the human and animal population. This would have been followed by a period of severe competition for resources, resulting in rapid development among very disparate groups, fuelling innovation. Another explanation for the ‘creative explosion’ derives from the art itself. In north-eastern Spain and south-western France (but not elsewhere) much is contained in highly inaccessible caves, where the superimposition of one image over another implies that these subterranean niches and crevices were returned to time and again – over centuries, over thousands of years. The suspicion is, therefore, that cave art is in fact to be understood as writing as much as art, a secret and sacred recording of the animals which early man relied upon for food. (This is an idea supported by the fact that many contemporary tribes who create rock paintings have no word for art in their language.⁵⁴) The cave paintings and engravings were in effect a record, possibly of what animals were in the area, when, in what numbers, and showed what routes they followed. These records, which may have been kept outside to begin with, would have been transferred to inaccessible places partly out of concerns for security – so rivals would never find them – and partly out of ritual. The animals may have been worshipped – because life depended on them and their abundance – and reflect what early man knew about their movements, a record, in effect, of his ability to plan ahead. The caves may also have been ritual temples, chosen not only for inaccessibility but because they were thought to be in some sense gateways to and from the underworld. According to the French prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, the cave art of Europe comprises a ‘single ideological system’, a ‘religion of the caves’.⁵⁵

Year before present

Figure 1: The chronology of early cognitive skills

[Source: Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World, London: Constable, 2003, page 123]

There are two important questions to be asked of this art. Why, in the first place, did it emerge ‘fully formed’, as it were, why was there no primitive version? And what does it mean? One reason it emerged ‘fully formed’ may simply be that early versions were produced on perishable materials, which have been lost. Steven Mithen, however, has a ‘deeper’ reason for why this art emerged fully formed. He believes that the three different types of intelligence that evolved in man’s primitive brain – the natural history intelligence, the technical intelligence, and the social intelligence – finally came together some time between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, to form the modern brain as we know it. Indeed, he says that the very fact that early art shows so much technical skill, and is so full of emotive power, is itself the strongest argument for this latest restructuring of the mind. This is speculative, of course; there is no other evidence to support Mithen’s view.