Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Richard Klein, professor of anthropological sciences at Stanford University in California, offers a different theory. He believes that humanity’s cultural revolution began with one or more genetic mutations that ‘transformed the ability to communicate’.⁵⁶ Professor Klein argues that ‘a suite of language and creativity genes, perhaps as few as ten or as many as 1,000, developed as a result of random mutation’, giving rise to a new pattern of human culture. He cites as an example the gene FOXP2, which was discovered in 2001 among the fifteen members of a large London family (the ‘KE’ family), three generations of which have severe speech and language impediments. Researchers have since shown that the human version of this gene differs by only three molecules, out of 715, from the version carried by mice, and by just two molecules from the version carried by chimpanzees. The German researchers who identified the mutation say that it occurred about 200,000 years ago and spread rapidly, in 500–1,000 human generations, or 10,000–20,000 years. ‘A sweep that rapid indicates to biologists that the new version of the gene must have conferred a significant evolutionary advantage on the human ancestors lucky enough to inherit it.’⁵⁷ Another explanation of the cultural explosion arises from demography. Until around 70,000 years ago, the population density of humanity was fairly thin. We know this because the main animals used as food were both adults of the species and examples of species that took a long time to mature (tortoises, for example). After that, there was a switch to deer etc., which replaced themselves more quickly. This increased competition may well have stimulated both new forms of hand-axe and the efflorescence of art, to be understood as secret records of game movements.⁵⁸ There was also a switch to marine foods at this time.

The gradualists say this is all illusion, that art and other symbolic behaviour was developing for perhaps 100,000 to 250,000 years before the apparent ‘explosion’ but has either perished or is still waiting to be found. This, they say, explains why the art is ‘fully formed’ in the European caves – there had been generations for techniques to improve. They also point out that art appeared in Australia fully formed as soon as early humans arrived there. It stands to reason, on this account, that the ability to produce such art had already evolved before the migrants left Africa.⁵⁹

The meaning of the art is more complex. Between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago we see a huge number of developments – not just the striking cave paintings of Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet that have become famous, but the first production of items for personal decoration such as beads, pendants and perforated animal teeth, carved ivories which have the body of a man and the head of different animals, such as lion and bison, and scores of V-shaped signs etched on rocks. There is little doubt among palaeontologists that these images are intentional, conveying information of one kind or another. Among contemporary Australian tribes, for example, a simple circle can – in different circumstances – be held to represent a fire, a mountain, a campsite, waterholes, women’s breasts, or eggs. So it may never prove possible to recover completely the meaning of ancient art. Yet we can decipher in a broad sense the idea of art as stored information.⁶⁰ Many of the new bone and antler tools found in the Upper Palaeolithic are decorated and John Pfeiffer has called these, together with the cave paintings, ‘tribal encyclopaedias’. The basic fact to remember, perhaps (since nothing is certain in this field), is that most Palaeolithic art was created in the last ice age, when environmental conditions were extremely harsh. Therefore the art must, at least in part, have been a response to this, which should help us understand its meaning.⁶¹ We may draw some inference, for example, from the fact that, while many animals were painted in profile, so far as their bodies were concerned, their hooves were painted full on, which suggests that the shape of the hooves was being memorised for later, or being used to instruct children.⁶² Even today, among the Wopkaimin hunter-gatherers of New Guinea, they display the bones of the animals they catch against the rear wall of their houses – with the remains arranged as a ‘map’ so as to aid the recall of animal behaviour.⁶³