hunter-gatherers

Warning Signs: How Early Humans First Began to Paint Animals

Figurative art may derive from Neanderthal hand prints and the hunter’s keen eye for perceiving animals.

Visual culture – and the associated forms of symbolic communication, are regarded by palaeo-anthropologists as perhaps the defining characteristic of the behaviour of Homo sapiens. One of the great mysteries of archaeology is why figurative art, in the form of the stunningly naturalistic animal depictions, appeared relatively suddenly around 37,000 years ago in the form of small sculpted objects and drawings and engravings on cave and rock shelter walls.

Since the discovery and authentication of such Palaeolithic art more than a century ago, theories have abounded as to what this meant to its Ice Age hunter-gatherer creators. But theories often say more about modern preconceptions regarding the function of art – how can we tell if we’re on the right track to understanding the remote and alien societies that created the first images?

In a radical new approach to the issue, we applied recent findings from visual neuroscience, perceptual psychology and the archaeology of cave art, that begin to make sense of the intriguing representations and forward what we hope can be tested scientifically.

Hands down

The first clue to their provenance came from the ancient hand marks (positive prints and negative stencils), which predate the earliest animal depictions by a considerable period. Recent dating shows that they were created by Neanderthals more than 64,000 years ago. The second clue came from the widespread inclusion of natural cave features – such as ledges and cracks – as parts of animal depictions. The final clue relates to the environment in which Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, along with other predators, were stalking the large herbivores – such as bison, deer and horses – that formed their prey and which often lay hidden in camouflage in the tundra environment.

We argue that hand marks initially supplied the idea to archaic humans that a graphic mark could act as a representation, however basic it was. This was a beginning of sorts – but how could hand marks give rise to the more complex animal depictions? We needed to be able to explain how that gap was bridged.

Seeing the unseen

Fortunately, the way hunters relate to the environment has changed little since early times in that they remain acutely sensitive to particular animal contours. So much so, that in challenging lighting situations – and where prey might be well camouflaged – the hunter becomes hypersensitive to such features.

In such ambiguous circumstances, it’s better to “see” an animal when it’s not there – to mistake a rock for a bear – than not see it. Such better-safe-than-sorry hair-trigger cues are cognitive adaptations that promote survival. In dangerous conditions, the human visual system becomes increasingly aroused and is even more easily triggered into accepting the slightest cue as an animal.

In short, we are preconditioned to interpret ambiguous shapes as animals. Recent evidence from visual neuroscience shows that when individuals are conditioned to see particular objects – faces, say – they are more likely to see them in ambiguous patterns. Upper Palaeolithic hunters conditioned themselves due to the need to detect animals, but this effect was reinforced by the suggestive features of the caves.

Caves are full of suggestive cues. They are dangerous places, often inhabited by predators, thereby stimulating increased arousal levels. Hunters entering the caves with an overactive visual system will have regularly “mistaken” the natural cave features for animals. The cave walls also simulated the outdoor environment, where hunters regularly had to be able to spot their prey in camouflage.

All the hunter needed to do to “complete” a depiction was to add one or two graphic marks to the suggestive natural features based on the visual imagery in their “mind’s eye”. A typical example of this can be seen at Chauvet cave where two giant deer (Megaloceros) are depicted by complementing the natural wall fissures (highlighted in brown) with lines (highlighted in black) painted onto the cave wall to complete the animal outlines. This potentially explains how the very first representational depictions arose.

Corroborating evidence

We’ve tried to combine our respective expertise in visual psychology and Palaeolithic art and, unlike many other theories, our approach is open to refutation. For example, if someone finds depictions of animals or similar that predate the first hand marks, this would overturn our main proposition. Similarly, if earlier figurative depictions come to light that do not derive from natural features, this would also challenge our theory.

But as we were making the final touches to our academic paper, valuable corroborative evidence came to light supporting the theory. Namely, the dating of a negative hand stencil and a geometric mark from the Monte Castillo cave art complex in Spain dating to a minimum of 64,000 years ago and almost certainly made by Neanderthals.

When later humans entered the same caves and saw these, the Neanderthals may literally have “handed on” to our own species the notion that a graphic mark could act as a figurative representation. Thanks to the primed visual system of the later hunter-gatherers – and the suggestive environment of the caves – it was Homo sapiens who took the final step creating the first complex figurative representations, with all the ramifications that followed for art and culture.

Derek Hodgson, Research Associate, University of York and Paul Pettitt, Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why Do We Tell Stories?

Story-telling manages to achieve coordination in social behaviour as well as promote cooperation, thereby performing an important adaptive role in human societies.

The Sun and the Moon: An Agta story about cooperation and equality between men and women. Credit: The Conversation/Paulo Sayeg/author provided

From gathering around the campfire sharing tales to binge watching the latest Netflix series, humans are, and have always been, inveterate producers and consumers of stories.

But why do we spend hours listening to and telling stories, often of exploits that never even happened? Clearly, from an evolutionary standpoint, this is time and effort that could be better spent foraging, reproducing or simply doing nothing to save energy.

Perhaps the human proclivity for storytelling is merely a byproduct of our evolved psychology– a series of inputs which manipulate and titillate our cognitive machinery. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker fittingly refers to this as “evolutionary cheesecake”. But given the ubiquity of storytelling, it may perform an important adaptive role in human societies.

In a new study on hunter-gatherer societies, published in Nature Communications, my colleagues and I propose that storytelling may function as a mechanism to disseminate knowledge by broadcasting social norms to coordinate social behaviour and promote cooperation.

The type of knowledge in question is “meta-knowledge”– information about other people’s knowledge. This is, in fact, required for any society to function. For instance, it is not enough for people to know that they should drive on a certain side of the road, they also need to know that others possess that same knowledge. Stories may therefore act to ensure that all members of the group know, and consequently abide by, the “rules of the game” in a given society.

Moralising gods and organised religion may perform a similar function in post-agricultural populations by organising behaviour and promoting cooperation. However, these are often absent in hunter-gatherer societies, despite these groups being highly cooperative. We therefore proposed that hunter-gatherer storytelling may perform a comparable function to moralising gods in such societies.

Moral tales

To explore this idea, in collaboration with Agta Aid, we collected four stories among the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population with a high level of social and gender egalitarianism. Each story was aimed at regulating social behaviour by broadcasting how to act in different social situations.

One story, ‘The sun and the moon’, clearly communicated norms of sex equality and cooperation. “There is a dispute between the sun (male) and the moon (female) to illuminate the sky. After a fight, where the moon proves to be as strong as the sun, they agree in sharing the duty – one during the day and the other during the night.”

We also looked at narratives from other hunter-gatherer societies from Southeast Asia and Africa, and discovered similar themes. Of 89 stories, around 70% concerned social behaviour, in terms of food-sharing, marriage, hunting and interactions with in-laws or members of other groups.

These stories also possessed a moral dimension, by either rewarding norm-followers or punishing norm-breakers. This is clearly evident in an Andamanese story demonstrating the consequences of not sharing food.

Boost to cooperation

Camp elder telling stories. Credit: The Conversation/Author provided

Given that hunter-gatherer stories overwhelmingly contain social content, we next explored whether storytelling does in fact promote cooperation. Nearly 300 Agta, from 18 separate camps, were asked to name the best storytellers. To assess cooperation, individuals were also asked to play a simple resource allocation game where players were given a number of tokens (representing rice) and asked to distribute these between themselves and their camp mates.

Overall, levels of cooperation were higher in camps with a greater proportion of skilled storytellers, consistent with storytellers coordinating social behaviour and in turn promoting cooperation. This suggests that storytelling may perform a beneficial group-level function, but it does not explain why individuals would invest so much time and energy in becoming a skilled storyteller. If there is no benefit to being a storyteller, then why not invest this effort in other fitness-enhancing activities?

However, storytellers appear to be rewarded for their services to the community. Skilled storytellers were preferred social partners, both in terms of being selected as a future camp mate and receiving resources from others in the cooperative game. Despite the fact that food-sharing is an everyday occurrence in Agta society, skilled storytellers were even more preferred than skilled foragers.

Consistent with this increased social support, skilled Agta storytellers were found to have increased reproductive success relative to unskilled storytellers, with an average additional 0.5 living offspring.

Even in modern, Western society skilled storytellers – ranging from novelists and artists to actors and stand-up comicshave a high social status. There is even some evidence that successful male visual artists (a form of modern-day storyteller) have more sexual partners than unsuccessful visual artists.

Humans have evolved the capacity to create and believe in stories. Narratives can also transcend the “here and now” by introducing individuals to situations beyond their everyday experience, which may increase empathy and perspective-taking towards others, including strangers. These features may have evolved in hunter-gatherer societies as precursors to more elaborate forms of narrative fiction.

Such narratives include moralising gods, organised religion, nation states and other ideologies found in post-agricultural societies. Some are crucial parts of societies today, functioning to bond individuals into cohesive and cooperative communities. It’s fascinating to think that they could have all started with a humble story around the campfire.

Daniel Smith is a PhD candidate in Anthropology, UCL.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Crosstalk: Understanding Counterintuitive Science Needs a Culture of Rigorous Scepticism

For most organisms, it can be very beneficial from the point of view of their survival to form an opinion on something purely with respect to possible or apparent intent, and without trying to understand any science behind it.

For most organisms, it can be very beneficial from the point of view of their survival to form an opinion on something purely with respect to possible or apparent intent, and without trying to understand any science behind it.

The Thinker in The Gates of Hell at the Musée Rodin, Paris. Credit: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

We’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.
–E.O. Wilson

Last month, we had explored the persistence of pseudoscience in an ultramodern world being built on a science and technology overdrive. To a society as a whole, the implications of a population that is educated, and yet resistant to science (especially when it goes against their beliefs) can be considerable. Yet sometimes, we all know that even if science has shown beyond all reasonable doubt that a certain phenomenon is a certain way, and we are trained to use the scientific method, that phenomenon can be hard to believe it.

All of us, at some level, hold on to beliefs that are demonstrably false based on accumulating evidence. Perhaps there is a belief in anecdotal medical treatments which fail all scrutiny, or in ghosts, demons, monsters and angels, or astrology and divination. There is also an inclination to disbelieve processes that mountains of evidence hold to be true. This could be anything like the earth being flat and revolving around the sun, or natural selection, climate change and more. This is because our perceptions say that it is wrong. We are wired to see the apparent, and “seeing is believing”, as the cliché goes. In part, this is because of how our brains are built, and how we have evolved as organisms.

Palaeolithic brains for the space age

This wiring is very deep within us, and starts very early in life. The resistance is not merely limited to viewing some science suspiciously, but for many new ideas that challenge what is apparent. It begins very early in life, with what kids know and learn either by observation and mimicry, or active instruction. Children, even babies, “know” a lot by learning things themselves through observation. They know that solid objects will fall to the ground, for example, or that people have different emotions. Now suppose a child knows that any unsupported object will fall to the ground, it is difficult for this child to imagine or comprehend that the world is round. That is because they have observed that things will always fall off round objects. At a young age, a child cannot comprehend relative scales of the earth (and themselves), and relate it to the concept of gravity. It is just as counter intuitive at that age for a child to believe that a larger object will not fall faster than a smaller object of the same mass, when dropped from the same height. Many of us see that it takes many years for children to be able to accurately draw out the earth as a rounded globe. In essence, people reject scientific ideas because it appears to be counter-intuitive.

A level of resistance to science comes from cultural factors. In every culture, some information is specifically asserted or defined. For example, the resistance to understanding evolution is prominent in some parts of America, in certain religious groups. This is because it has been specifically asserted otherwise. Not everyone is qualified to study or understand all scientific principles of a subject (like string theory). Therefore, it’s typical for people to believe in what they are told by people they trust. Interestingly, many studies now show that children do the same thing, and will only believe things that are told to them by people they trust. These could be parents, teachers or peers. More importantly, when some data or explanation is contradicting when coming from different sources, children will believe an explanation provided by the people they trust and not the data itself.

All these early beliefs and actions continue throughout our lives. For many people who do not believe in something, they may have no clue about it, and cannot explain the basic concepts of the thing they don’t believe in. The disbelief is not based on any objective evaluation of facts but because of the sources they trust. These trusted sources have helped that group, community or organism survive and persist over time, and therefore their reasoning cannot be wrong. Logically, these sources should be the experts in that field. This is what adults are expected to do and yet we remain in constant conflict today with science because the sources we trust often do not have an (or are not capable of having an) understanding of the science.

In many ways, all of this comes down to us having brains wired for the Stone Age while we live in the Space Age.

Against ingrained beliefs to understand science

Much of our disbelief and resistance to counterintuitive scientific concepts, such as evolution through natural selection, is because of natural selection. For most organisms, it can be very beneficial from the point of view of their survival to form an opinion on something purely with respect to possible or apparent intent, and without trying to understand any science behind it. Let’s say you encounter a snarling lion on the road. Concluding that the lion wants to eat you and taking evasive measures is more likely to lead to your survival than sitting and observing the nature of the lion, counting its teeth, deducing if it is hungry/angry/deranged or not, or if it is snarling because it has a thorn in its foot, and so on.

This is why we have evolved with a wiring that instructs us to avoid snarling lions. This kind of selection does not require active thinking but can be strongly selected for in organisms with just single cells and no brain. Let’s take a soil dwelling bacteria that requires, say, a fruit, to grow. If the supply of the fruit dwindles, the best bet for the bacteria is to switch to survival mode and build resources to help it survive. So it might switch on all the genes and machinery in order to do so. But it might be entirely possible that in a certain region, and certain time, there will be plentiful supply of fruit for the bacteria that will come a day or two later. We might be able to say exactly when and how that will be today, but the bacteria are better off banking on a survival strategy than trying to figure out if food will be available in the immediate future.

Humans today are no longer just the hunter-gatherers of old, banking solely on collective tribal lore and bet-hedging strategies based on cultural traditions to survive. Our unmatched abilities to match patterns, recall past events, build collective memories and manufacture tools have resulted in both technological revolutions as well as a startling awareness of science that is as strikingly counter-intuitive as it is stunning. Today, our understanding of the natural world can no longer come from inductive inference and by relying on tribal instincts born of millennia of natural selection.

What we call ‘human civilisation’ itself only spans a few thousand years. This is a mere moment of pause during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and not even the blink of an eye in the scale of life’s evolution. Instead, we have to rely on that other human ability, to connect distant dots by recognising patterns, and removing what appears obvious. Indeed, all of this helped us develop the scientific method. For this method to thrive, science can no longer thrive in isolated silos. We need societies that foster this process of creativity, which means that societies that tolerate dissent, encourage rigorous debates and testing of ideas that flow freely, along with providing sufficient resources, will be best poised to transform our futures. And all along, we need to suppress the strong forces of our palaeolithic side to do so.

Sunil Laxman is a scientist at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, where his research group studies how cells function and communicate with each other. He has a keen interest in the history and process of science, and how science influences society.