A study that came out this week adds tantalizing new details to the story of how modern humans reached eastern Asia, and I’ve found it particularly intriguing in light of the non-orthodox scenario of human expansion that I’ve been developing in recent entries.

It appears that the sequencing of DNA extracted from a finger-bone found in a cave in Siberia has demonstrated the existence of a previously unknown species of archaic humans. Researchers have dubbed them the Denisovans, after the cave where the bone was discovered, and describe them as the Far Eastern cousins of the Neanderthals, with whom they shared a common ancestor 400,000 years ago.

This study has a number of fascinating implications. For one thing, it overturns the old Eurocentric assumption that eastern Asia was inhabited solely by the relatively primitive and small-brained Homo erectus until the arrival of modern humans.

But the really extraordinary conclusion it reaches is that the first modern humans to arrive in Southeast Asia must have interbred with Denisovans in the same way that modern humans in the Middle East interbred with Neanderthals. The researchers determined that about 5% of the DNA of present-day Melanesians — who inhabit New Guinea and the smaller islands nearby — is of Denisovan origin.

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When I described Julian Assange a few entries back as the living embodiment of the holism vision, I meant it quite literally. It was not intended as a metaphor. That really is how these things appear to work.

We humans may believe we invent the visions — but it might be equally true to say the visions invent us. At every step, they push us to become more fully human, or even larger than human. And they operate as if they have a life and identity of their own, going well beyond anything consciously intended by their makers.

In the course of writing these entries, I’ve repeatedly found myself saying things like “the holism vision did such-and-such” and wondered if I was just using lazy shorthand for “the adherents of the holism vision.” But it doesn’t feel like shorthand. It feels like a truthful description.

If the visions really do possess a kind of autonomous existence, however, that raises the question of how they organize, maintain, and perpetuate themselves.

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In the last two entries of this series, I’ve offered some speculations on the development of the spirit and cosmic order visions during the last ice age. But there is an additional element that needs to be taken into account, and that is the influence of the mysterious entities I have previously described as “shadow visions.”

Like the ordinary visions, the shadow visions appear to come in three forms — scientific, social, and inner experience — and each one is regularly associated with ordinary visions of the same type. But they are clearly distinct from the ordinary visions, with their own premises and their own timetable of development.

In addition, where the ordinary visions are relatively simple and rational — with just a touch of mysticism — the shadow visions are far deeper and more primal. They lack the clear-cut intellectual, philosophical, and moral structures of the ordinary visions but are given instead to propagating a riotous profusion of imaginary beings and realms.

The shadow visions are clearly associated with the dark side of our nature. They can be wild and irrational and may display such negative traits as obsession — particularly sexual obsession — and paranoia. But they also provoke the highest flights of the imagination and are frequently the source of liberating new forms of thought and action.

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If the last ice age did coincide with the earliest and most traumatic “romantic break” — when faith in the transformative-and-kinship partnership was shattered and the dance of the visions truly began — then the period between 70,000 and 10,000 years ago must have witnessed the active development of not only the spirit vision but also a number of other alternatives.

In particular, the successor to the transformative vision — cosmic order — would have been undergoing a burst of intense speculation.

We are all familiar with the cosmic order vision from its final stages, when a conviction that society should reflect the mathematical elegance of the heavens gave rise to the great civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria, India and China, Central America and Peru.

But the earliest intimations of that vision, which must go back almost to the dawn of modern humanity, involved no such grand ambitions. At the very start, there were only a few lonely science geeks who had begun tracking the movements of the sun and moon and were awe-struck by their regularity.

Certain aspects of those observations appear to have been incorporated into the older visions even before cosmic order itself was fully defined. In the transformative vision, the Moon was seen as female because its monthly phases so closely matched the cycle of women’s menstruation. And when the transformative-and-kinship partnership was established, the pairing of Sun and Moon became a central expression of the fundamental male-female duality.

The spirit vision would have been even more closely attuned to the first suggestions of cosmic order. Shamans are often described in archaic societies as traveling to the Moon in trance or as drawing their spiritual energy from the skies.

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The current WikiLeaks hysteria has gotten me looking back at the very first post I did about the “dance of the visions” in September of last year. There I wrote:

When a new vision first emerges from the ruins of its predecessor, it remains for a time on the borders of society, inspiring artists and philosophers but having relatively little impact upon daily life. Only when it has matured sufficiently in both theoretical and practical terms does it step forward to claim a leading role in the culture.

When that happens, everything changes. In a relatively brief but hectic interlude of cascading breakdowns and transformations, the entire society is shaken apart and remade in new terms.

First, the emergent vision challenges the claim to authority of the senior vision in the dominant partnership. That vision is already nearing the end of its useful life and showing increasing signs of rigidity and inability to cope with crisis, so it doesn’t take much to delegitimize it.

I’ve been counting down to lift-off since I did that entry — and I’d say we’ve finally arrived at the “everything changes” point and are about to embark on the “cascading breakdowns and transformations.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

There can be no doubt that at this moment Julian Assange is the living embodiment of the holism vision in its computer-and-internet aspect. The various Pirate Parties have his back. Anonymous vows to avenge him. And no less an authority than John Perry Barlow has tweeted, “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”

There can similarly be no doubt that the democracy vision is already in a state of accelerated collapse. Corporations sneer at its feeble attempts to put limits on their greed. Tea Partiers seriously propose undoing the great democratic achievements of the last 150 years. And even earnest liberals wring their hands and bemoan the breakdown of the social contract.

The utter panic of the world’s nations over the WikiLeaks info-dumps is a measure of their desperation and a sign that the era of democracy-and-chaos is drawing to an end.

But if what I wrote in the more placid times of a year ago is to be taken seriously, this is only the starting-point.

It should get interesting.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on the emerging counterculture can be found here.

A general overview of the areas of interest covered at this blog can be found here.

A chronological listing of all entries at this blog, with brief descriptions, can be found here.

Ever since I started working with the visions, I’ve been wondering how such an elaborate, recurring cycle could have gotten started.

A year ago, I compared the dance of the visions to a Rube Goldberg machine, because it has something of that quality of disparate elements zooming around and banging into one another in ways that trigger new flurries of activity. But unlike Rube Goldberg’s ingenious devices, the cycle of visions is circular and self-sustaining. New visions emerge to take on the roles formerly held by older ones, and the same sequence of events keeps repeating over and over.

In recent entries, I’ve suggested that the three original visions — the transformative, kinship, and spirit visions — might have arisen out of attempts by the first modern humans to reflect upon and systematize their own scientific, social, and inner experiences.

And I’ve speculated that after perhaps a hundred thousand years of gradual development, a desire for even greater systematization might have brought the transformative and kinship visions into a secure intellectual partnership, which was also able to encompass at least part of the spirit vision.

That urge towards systematization may be key. If we assume that the evolutionary leap which produced us modern humans resulted in a raging desire to make sense of the world, it would go a long way towards explaining the creation of the first three visions and the first dominant partnership. It would also indicate why new visions should have continued to appear as new information and new experiences rendered the old ones inadequate.

If that was all there was to it, though, the new visions ought to click into place as smoothly as software upgrades — slide the old one out, slide the new one in, no fuss, no bother. But that isn’t what happens at all.

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Tens of thousands of years have passed since the first cultural visions were deployed, and most components of those early visions have long since been superseded, discarded, and all but forgotten. If it were not for the few archaic peoples who still maintain their ancient kinship systems, for example, we would have no notion of the elaborate social constructs which once governed every detail of our ancestors’ lives.

But certain aspects of those visions have proved far more durable. The practical knowledge of how to chip a stone axe or seek the approval of a potential mother-in-law may have faded, but the philosophical structures established in those long-ago times are still with us.

I suggested some while back that every partnership between two dominant visions gives rise to a philosophical system that integrates elements of both in an intellectually compelling synthesis. This kind of tight integration is particularly apparent in partnerships between a scientific and a social vision, which draw upon the ordered structures that humans build into their societies as a model to explain the natural world.

In the mid-20th century, for example, the emphasis that had always been placed by the democracy vision on “government of laws and not of men” was projected outward onto the cosmos, and the universe came to be seen as ruled by simple scientific laws that were even-handed and allowed of no exceptions.

The equivalent philosophical synthesis of 80,000 years ago appears to have been based on interpreting the natural word as the manifestation of a system of simple dualities, all ultimately arising out of the dichotomy between male and female: hot-cold, dry-wet, day-night, sun-moon, fire-water, and so forth.

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The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has been a beacon of sanity for many of us over the last decade, but since his official Rally to Restore Sanity two weeks ago, some of the luster seems to have worn off.

Last Thursday, Stewart appeared with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to explain why he had concluded the rally by characterizing MSNBC as the liberal equivalent of the far-right wingnuts at Fox News. I didn’t watch the interview, however.

I had been more than a bit disheartened that instead of the rally achieving mythic reconciliation with Stephen Colbert’s simultaneous March to Keep Fear Alive, as I had hoped, it had simply turned Colbert into a cardboard villain and melted him. That unconvincing triumph over the shadow self was what led up to Stewart delivering the plea for civility and moderation that included a false equivalence between MSNBC and Fox.

In the aftermath, I agreed with those who described the rally as no more than an extended episode of The Daily Show — the comedic equivalent of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Or perhaps not even that good, because it seemed as though Stewart had missed a crucial opportunity to take on a larger cultural role and there would be no second chance to get it right with his own Wrath of Khan.

I would discover, however, that Stewart had not merely missed the chance but had actively avoided it.

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As anybody who’s been following this blog will be aware, I’ve been gradually laying out a theory of human history as driven by a succession of differing visions of the nature and meaning of existence.

Each of these visions appears to arise out of a fusion of practical knowledge derived from one area of human experience with intimations of higher oneness underlying the flux and seeming randomness of everyday life. And every vision has its time of burgeoning, then enjoys a period of cultural dominance, and eventually becomes unable to respond to changing circumstances and is discarded.

The three most ancient visions that emerged before modern humans left Africa all drew upon millions of years of practical experience — enhanced by a new capacity for keeping track of fine details — but they were also inspired by a determination to penetrate the underlying structure and meaning of that experience.

In the scientifically-based transformative vision, a growing expertise in modifying stone and plant materials through the alchemical use of fire and water became the basis of a general theory of existence as an unending series of transformations. This philosophical understanding was then extended to encompass the great mysteries of birth and death, growth and decay.

In the socially-based kinship vision, the ability to keep track of not only immediate family members but also more distant cousins was elaborated into a complex set of social rules and relationships that eventually came to govern every aspect of life.

And in the inner experience-based spirit vision, the shamanistic use of trance and dream as a source of knowledge and healing was interpreted as reflecting a spiritual power that pervades all of existence.

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The expansion of modern humans into Europe and central Asia began only about 50,000 years ago, when the last ice age hit a warm patch and people from the Middle East started spreading out in all directions. That makes it relatively simple to reconstruct. But the arrival of modern humans in East Asia goes back considerably further and is a lot harder to figure out.

Some aspects of that story are reasonably clear. It seems well-established, for example, that by 80,000 years ago there were people living in India who were making tools similar to those made by early modern humans in Africa, and both genetics and linguistics suggest that around 70,000 years ago they began moving further east.

The most recent ice age was under way by then, and sea levels had dropped far enough that southeast Asia and the islands of Indonesia were united in a single land mass known to archaeologists as Sunda. Australia and New Guinea were also connected, and it is believed that the present-day Aborigines and Papuans arrived in their present locations, perhaps 60,000 years ago, by traveling down the west coast of Sunda and then doing some fairly modest island-hopping

Both of those peoples have marked physical similarities to early human remains from east Africa and Israel, and a recent study of the DNA of traditional tribes in India found that “several of the Indians studied had two regions of their mitochondrial DNA that were identical to those found in modern day Australian Aboriginal people.”

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