The Origin of Humankind (18 page)

The significant changes that occurred with the evolution of the genus
Homo
, in brain size and architecture, social organization, and mode of subsistence, probably also marked the beginning of a change in the level of consciousness. The beginnings of the hunting-and-gathering way of life surely increased the complexity of the social chess our ancestors had to master. Skilled players of the game—those equipped with a more acute mental model, a sharper consciousness—would have enjoyed greater social and reproductive success. This is grist for natural selection, which would have raised consciousness to higher and higher levels. This gradually unfolding consciousness changed us into a new kind of animal. It transformed us into an animal who sets arbitrary standards of behavior based on what is considered to be right and wrong.

Much of this, of course, is speculation. How can we know what happened to our ancestors’ level of consciousness during the past 2.5 million years? How can we pinpoint when it became as we experience it today? The harsh reality anthropologists face is that these questions may be unanswerable. If I have difficulty proving that another human possesses the same level of consciousness I do, and if most biologists balk at trying to determine the degree of consciousness in nonhuman animals, how is one to discern the signs of reflective consciousness in creatures long dead? Consciousness is even less visible in the archeological record than language is. Some human behaviors almost certainly reflect both language and a conscious awareness, such as artistic expression. Others, such as the making of stone tools, may, as we’ve seen, give clues to language but not to consciousness. However, there is one human activity redolent of consciousness that sometimes leaves its mark in the prehistoric record: deliberate burial of the dead.

Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self. Every society has ways in which death is accommodated as part of its mythology and religion. There are myriad ways in which this is done in the modern age, varying from extensive care of the corpse over a long period, perhaps involving moving it from one special location to another after a period of a year or even more, to minimal attention to the body. Sometimes, but not often, the ritual involves burial. Ritual burial in ancient societies would offer the opportunity for the ceremony to become frozen in time, available later for the archeologist to puzzle over.

The first evidence of deliberate burial in human history is a Neanderthal burial not much more than 100,000 years ago. One of the most poignant burials was a little later, some 60,000 years ago, in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq. A mature male was buried at the entrance to a cave; his body had apparently been placed on a bed of flowers of medicinal potential, judging by the pollen that was found in the soil around the fossilized skeleton. Perhaps, some anthropologists have speculated, he was a shaman. Earlier than 100,000 years ago, there is no evidence of any kind of ritual that might betray reflective consciousness. Nor, as noted in
chapter 6
, is there any art. It’s true that the absence of such evidence does not definitively prove the absence of consciousness. But neither can it be adduced in support of consciousness. I would find it surprising, however, if the immediate ancestors of archaic
sapiens
people, late
Homo erectus
, did not have a level of consciousness significantly greater than that of chimpanzees. Their social complexity, large brain size, and probable language skills all point to it.

Neanderthals, as I’ve suggested, and probably other archaic
sapiens
, did have an awareness of death and therefore undoubtedly a highly developed reflective consciousness. But was it of the same luminosity as we experience today? Probably not. The emergence of fully modern language and fully modern consciousness were no doubt linked, each feeding the other. Modern humans became modern when they spoke like us and experienced the self as we do. We surely see evidence of this in the art of Europe and Africa from 35,000 years onward and in the elaborate ritual that accompanied burial in the Upper Paleolithic.

Every human society has an origin myth, the most fundamental story of all. These origin myths well up from the fountainhead of reflective consciousness, the inner voice that seeks explanations for everything. Ever since reflective consciousness burned brightly in the human mind, mythology and religion have been a part of human history. Even in this age of science, they probably will remain so. A common theme of mythology is the attribution of humanlike motives and emotions to nonhuman animals—and even to physical objects and forces, such as mountains and storms. This tendency to anthropomorphize flows naturally from the context in which consciousness evolved. Consciousness is a social tool for understanding the behavior of others by modeling it on one’s own feelings. It is a simple and natural extrapolation to impute these same motives to aspects of the world that are nonhuman but are nonetheless important.

Animals and plants are fundamental to the survival of hunter-gatherers, as are the natural elements, which nurture the environment. Life, as a complex interplay of all these elements, is seen as an interplay of intentional actions, just like the social nexus. It is not surprising, therefore, that animals and physical forces play an important role in the mythology of foraging peoples the world over. The same must have applied in the past.

On my visit to many of the decorated caves in France a decade ago, this thought kept occurring to me. The images I saw before me, some of which were simply sketched, some crafted in detail, were always potent in their impact on my mind but elusive in their meaning. The half human/half animal figures, particularly, challenged my imagination, and left it defeated. I was certain that I was in the presence of elements of an ancient people’s origin myth, but I had no way of seeing it. We know from recent history that the eland has myriad spiritual powers for the San people of southern Africa. But we can only speculate about the role that the horse and the bison played in the spiritual lives of Ice Age Europeans. We know they were powerful, but we have no idea in what way.

Standing before the bison figures in Le Tuc d’Audou bert, I sensed the connectedness of human minds across the millennia: the mind of the sculptors of those figures, and my own mind—the mind of the observer. And I felt the frustration of being distant from the artists’ world, not because we were separated in time but because we were separated by our different cultures. This is one of the paradoxes of
Homo sapiens:
we experience the unity and diversity of a mind shaped by eons of life as hunter-gatherers. We experience its unity in the common possession of an awareness of self and a sense of awe at the miracle of life. And we experience its diversity in the different cultures—expressed in language, customs, and religions—that we create and that create us. We should rejoice at so wondrous a product of evolution.

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