I keep thinking about the difference between pre-human and fully human — between Neanderthal, say, and us — and it’s occurred to me that the most significant distinction may be in terms of conscious control.

This idea grows out of a notion I’ve been toying with for years — that much of evolution has been a process of incremental internalization.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, for example, the hot new trend among primitive life-forms involved the development of bodily organs to take over functions that had previously been left up to the environment. Instead of passively allowing the sea to wash through them, they developed a digestive system that could pull in nutrients and eject the waste and a circulatory system to carry oxygen and nutrients to every cell. As time passed, they added shells or skeletons for stability, limbs for propulsion, and various appendages for grasping.

For higher-order creatures, biological evolution was eventually supplemented by behavioral evolution — but the goal was still to replace chance with control. Instead of depositing their eggs in the sand like a turtle and leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves, they might feed and protect their babies like a dinosaur or mammal. Or they might create a specialized mini-environment to provide greater safety and comfort: a nest, a burrow, or an ant hill.

Among our own human lineage, however, there has been a further step — where taking control becomes a matter not of more advanced instincts but of conscious thought.

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As I was heading off to bed after posting the previous entry, it occurred to me there’s yet another benefit to describing the expansion of modern humans out of Africa as a slow process of settling in to new environments, rather than a frantic race along the shoreline. But to explain why that is, I have to start a few decades back.

Perhaps the most controversial theory of human nature to come out of anthropology in the 1960’s was the so-called killer ape hypothesis. As summarized by Wikipedia, this hypothesis argued that “war and interpersonal aggression was the driving force behind human evolution. … The ancestors of humans were distinguished from other primate species by their greater aggressiveness. Furthermore, according to the theory, this aggression remains within humanity, which retains many murderous instincts.”

These ideas were far from universally accepted by anthropologists, but they took hold of the popular imagination at the end of the decade because they so perfectly fitted the mood of the time. Both liberals who despaired of the human propensity to violence and conservatives who saw “toughness” as a virtue were more than ready to believe that human history had been primarily shaped by aggressiveness and a struggle for dominance.

The opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was an explicit artistic statement of this theory, with its depiction of an apeman being aroused by the black obelisk to the first stirrings of humanity — and immediately using his new-found intelligence to grab a bone that happens to be lying around and start smashing things. From that modest beginning, he quickly proceeds to standing upright, hunting fair-sized animals for food, and brutally murdering a member of a rival band.

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I’ve been trying to figure out why the idea of a flourishing human community in the Middle East some 125,000-80,000 years ago strikes me as such a big deal. And I’ve realized that it has to do with the emerging multiculturalism and creative imagination visions that I’ve been discussing in recent entries.

When I studied archaeology in college in the middle 60’s, Eurocentric attitudes were still taken for granted, and it was assumed almost without question that modern humans had evolved in Europe from Neanderthals some 40,000 years ago and had set out from there to conquer the world.

The only alternative theory — based on the new technique of carbon-14 dating — was that the point of origin might lie in Israel, where skeletons had been found that were too old to date using C14 and which must therefore go back more than 45,000 years. But even that argument was accompanied by a disclaimer that those early Middle Easterners had still been using the same Middle Paleolithic tools as their Neanderthal neighbors and didn’t arrive at the full glory of Upper Paleolithic culture until they reached Europe.

Along with this tendency to put western Europe at the center of the human story went an unfailingly contemptuous attitude towards the rest of the world. Grahame Clarke’s World Prehistory (1961), which was our chief text for the course, states without hesitation that “The Advanced Palaeolithic cultures … were confined to the more northerly parts of the Old World. … Most of Africa, India and southeast Asia were henceforward by-passed by the main currents of creative change throughout the remainder of prehistoric times.”

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It’s been over a year since I turned aside from exploring the Old Stone Age to present what was intended to be a brief discussion of the sequence of historical visions. That side-trip unexpectedly took on a life of its own — but now it’s done and I’m ready to pick up the narrative where I left off.

My final entry in that earlier set concluded with the heretical suggestion that the Great Migration which brought modern humans out of Africa began not around 70,000 to 60,000 years ago, as generally assumed, but much earlier:

Over the last few decades, there has been increasing evidence that early modern humans reached the Middle East around 130,000 years ago, when the ice age prior to the most recent one was coming to an end and a moister climate in what is now the Sinai Desert made such a migration possible.

The climate remained mild for an extended period, until another ice age set in about 75,000 years ago. At that point, modern humans vanished from what is now Israel, being replaced in the fossil record by more cold-adapted Neanderthals. For that reason, those early Middle Easterners are generally written off as an evolutionary side note, irrelevant to the larger human story.

The recent finds of shell beads, however, present a very different picture. They suggest that during the entire interglacial period from 130 to 75 thousand years ago, the people of northern Africa and nearby parts of the Middle East may have formed a single population. …

And in that case, the people who lived in Israel then were not some isolated, backwoods anomaly but part of a vibrant and rapidly evolving human community. … Perhaps those ancient inhabitants of Israel, rather than quietly dying out when the cold weather came, were inspired instead to pull up stakes and set off to the east in search of greener pastures

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In the previous entry, I began exploring the idea that there may have been an evolutionary leap from almost-modern to fully-modern humans as recently as 80,000 years ago, when art and personal ornament first appear in the archaeological record.

A further piece of evidence for this theory is the extremely low genetic diversity of the human population, even today. It was estimated in 2003 that all modern humans are descended from no more than 2000 individuals who lived around 80,000 years ago.

Some scientists argue that this figure may be a bit on the low side, but it seems generally accepted that there was a significant population bottleneck. The reasons for the contraction, however, remain unclear. One possibility is that a natural disaster caused a significant die-back — but there is no geological evidence for such a disaster.

In addition, the bottleneck was immediately followed by the Great Migration, when modern humans spread from Africa throughout the world. That would seem like an odd adventure for a species which had just avoided extinction by the skin of its teeth.

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In recent entries, I have sketched out two different ancient visions of the fundamental principles of existence, which together underlie the beliefs and practices of all archaic societies.

The first of these visions is likely to have grown out of the discovery that natural materials could be altered by means of fire to make them more useful. It emphasizes flux and change and metamorphosis and is closely tied to the mysteries of childbirth and the female body.

The second vision probably began with the elaboration of formal kinship systems that was necessary when humans began to live in social groupings larger than the biological family. In sharp contrast to the first, it emphasizes order, control, and the superseding of natural processes by socially-determined rules and rituals.

The roots of the transformative vision may go back at least 164,000 years, to a time when the earliest modern humans were already engaging in complex alchemical operations. The kinship vision probably began somewhat later, but it was well-established by 80,000 years ago, when archaeological remains first hint at social complexity and long-distance trading networks.

Despite their profound differences, these two visions operate jointly in all present-day archaic societies. Depending on circumstances, either one or the other may predominate. They may be viewed as mutually complementary, as antagonistic, or as some mixture of both. They are often compartmentalized, with the transformative vision being associated with the female sphere and the kinship vision with the male.

Further complicating matters, however, is a third vision which is also present in all archaic societies. That vision involves a belief in things unseen — in spirits, in a long-ago Dreamtime where spirit-people laid down norms for those who came after, and in the possibility of contacting the spirits for guidance through trance or other shamanistic practices.

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A few months ago, I discussed recent findings on the ancient use of fire to produce a kind of glue which was used to attach stone axe heads to wooden handles. Now another early example of the sophisticated use of fire in tool-making has been described — and like the glue, it comes from South Africa and has been dated around 72,000 years ago.

The technique in question involves heat-treating a yellowish stone called silcrete, which is not well-adapted to tool-making, so that it turns a deep, glossy red and is very easily flaked.

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Primate studies suggest that the first modern humans would have lived in small bands of some two dozen individuals in which relationships among the women were central to the structure of the group. The men may have been dominant, but their own status would have been largely dependent on that of their mothers.

At some very early point, however, all that changed. Even the simplest and most archaic present-day societies tend to have bewilderingly complex kinship structures, where every individual is expected to conform to an elaborate set of rules that govern their relationships with every other member of the group.

In these societies, there are not only rigid guidelines for such matters as who can marry whom but even prescriptions for how each individual is to address every other individual, depending on their biological relationship and relative status. Modern vestiges of this sort of system — such as the use of titles and honorifics, or the choice between last name, first name, and nickname — represent only a pale shadow of what it was like at its peak of elaboration.

In addition to participating in a spectrum of socially-defined relationships, each individual in these societies also passes through a series of different statuses in course of their lifetime — child, adult, spouse, parent, elder — generally by means of formal transitions that may involve elaborate and often grueling rites of passage.

Nothing about this extravagant structure of statuses and relationships is hard-wired into the human psyche, and none of it is self-evident. That means it had to be invented at some point by people with an idea of what they were trying to accomplish.

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In my previous post, I suggested that the making of string figures goes back 70,000 years or more and represents both an ancient mode of performance art and a very early exercise in abstract thinking. However, string figures are far more than that. They are also a form of magic.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the mathematician W.W. Rouse Ball delivered a lecture on string figures in which he noted:

Among existing aborigines, it is usually the women who teach the passtime to the children, and in most cases now-a-days the lads and men, though familiar with the methods used, do not of their own accord make designs in the presence of strangers. …

The Eskimo … have a prejudice against boys playing the game for fear it should lead to their getting entangled with harpoon lines, and hold that such figures, if made at all should be constructed in the autumn so as to entangle the sun in the string and delay the advent of the long winter night.

The notion that knotted strings can be used as a form of voodoo to entangle and hold things back is both very old and more widely distributed than string figures themselves. For example, the Scottish ballad “Willie’s Lady” tells of a man whose mother is jealous of her son’s young wife and uses several kinds of binding magic to prevent the girl’s baby from being born. With the aid of a friendly household spirit, Willie manages to learn the secrets of this “vile rank witch” and successfully undoes the binding spells:

O Willie has loosed the nine witch knots
That was amo that ladie’s locks …

And Willie has loosed her left-foot shee,
And letten his ladie be.

And now he’s gotten a bonny young son,
And mickle grace be him upon.

The ballad suggests both the positive and negative sides of what is sometimes known as female magic. In its positive aspect, it has a close association with midwifery and childbirth. But in its negative aspect, it is feared — particularly by men — as “vile” witchcraft that can cause crops to fail to grow and cows to cease giving milk. In both aspects, it is closely bound up with the imagery of knotting and unknotting, binding and releasing.

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Since I started blogging a couple of months ago, I have to some degree just been tossing in whatever catches my eye — but at the same time, my flights of speculation have been far from random. They all orbit around a small number of topics which I find of particular interest, and many of them grow out of a major project that I’ve been working at for many years.

The organizing principle of this project is the notion that human history has been structured by a progression of contending visions of the nature of the universe.

Each of these visions arises out of a unique area of human experience and practical knowledge and gradually acquires greater organization in the form of a theoretical framework that both explains that experience and extrapolates beyond it. Those extrapolations then become a rich source of culture innovation and creativity.

Eventually, though, theory hardens into dogma and vision into ideology. Then new visions arise to challenge and overthrow the old ones and to enjoy their own moment of cultural dominance before they are overthrown in in turn.

Even after being rejected, however, the older visions never vanish entirely. Every one of them leaves residual traces in the form of art and story and other symbolic expressions that are so powerful and archetypal that they continue to be maintained indefinitely.

Thanks to those traces, even the most ancient visions can still be identified and to some extent reconstructed — though with less certainty as you go further back in time. Much of what I’ve written here about prehistory and early civilizations reflects my ongoing attempt to identify the assumptions and theories and mythic elaborations associated with the very earliest visions.

Hardest of all to make out is the starting point, the very first human vision of existence, in part because it seems to predate even the earliest known myths. But there are certain components that can be tentatively assigned to it, working both from archaeology and from those elements in the earliest myths that seem to reflect a state of belief even older than the myths themselves.

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