Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Some may feel that this speculation has been taken as far as it can go, the more so as other scholars have recently emphasised the levels of disagreement in this area. For example, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who specialises in linguistics, argues that language began ‘two to four million years ago’, and Robin Dunbar attracted a great deal of interest in the mid-1990s with his theory that speech developed from grooming in chimpanzees. In effect, sounds allowed early humans to ‘groom’ more than one person at a time.⁵⁰

No less intriguing and controversial than the emergence of language is the emergence of consciousness. The two were presumably related but, according to Richard Alexander, a zoologist from the University of Michigan, the key factor here would have been the development of early humans’ social intelligence. We have seen that one consequence of bipedalism was an increase in the division of labour between males and females, leading to the nuclear family. This in itself, say some palaeontologists, might have been enough to stimulate an awareness of human differences, between men and women and between self and not-self, at the least a rudimentary form of consciousness. Then, as humans came to live in larger groups, co-operating with each other and competing against other groups, the appreciation of human differences would have been all-important in developing a sense of self, and the prediction of the future – what other groups might do in certain circumstances – would have highlighted the present and how it should be organised. The recognition of kin would also have been significant in evolving a sense of self, as would the development of techniques of deception in one’s own self-interest.⁵¹ Alexander believes that these two factors – self/not-self and present/future – were the basis not just of consciousness but of morality (the rules by which we live) and that the scenario-building (as he puts it) which was required helped to evolve such social/intellectual activities as humour, art, music, myth, religion, drama and literature.⁵² It would have also been the basis for primitive politics.⁵³ This is another field where speculation is running ahead of the evidence.

Merlin Donald, mentioned in the last chapter, has a different view. It will be recalled that, for him, the first two modes of thought were ‘episodic’ (in apes), and ‘mimetic’ (in H. erectus). His second transition, to the third mode, was to ‘mythic’ thought. To begin with, he says (and this is based on an analysis of present-day ‘stone age’ tribes), language was first used to create conceptual models of the universe, grand unifying syntheses, as individual and group self-consciousness emerged with language. Language may eventually have been used in many other ways, he says, but this was its first use and purpose.⁵⁴

For Donald, the final transition was to theoretic thinking or culture. This is shown in the inventions and artefacts that suggest the existence of apparently analytic thought skills that contain germinal elements ‘leading to later theoretic developments’.⁵⁵ Examples he gives include fired ceramics at 25,000 BP, boomerangs at 15,000 BP, needles, tailored clothing, the bow and arrow, lunar records, rope, bricks at about 12,000 BP – and of course the domestication of plants and animals.⁵⁶ The final phase in the demythologising of thought came with the development of natural philosophy, or science, in classical Greece.

Many of the discoveries described above are piecemeal and fragmentary. Nevertheless, taken together they show the gradual development of rudimentary ideas, when and (in some cases) where they were first tried out. It is a picture full of gaps but in recent years some palaeontologists and archaeologists have begun to build a synthesis. Inevitably, this too involves speculation.

One aspect of this synthesis is to say that ‘civilisation’, which has traditionally been held to develop in western Asia around 5,000 years ago, can now be held to have begun much earlier. Many researchers have noticed that in the Upper Palaeolithic there are regional variations in stone tools – as if local ‘cultures’ were developing.⁵⁷ Cave art, Venus figurines, the existence of grinding stones at 47,000 BP and textiles at 20,000+ BP, together with various forms of notation, in fact amount to civilisation, they say.