Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (25 page)

For over a hundred thousand years the first of our kind lived this way, resembling you and me physically, and perhaps in many ways emotionally, but apparently not mentally. It was as if the brain had reached regulation size, but hadn’t yet completed all the wiring and biological alchemy needed to summon up a mind that saw the world quite the way we do. This has been a gnarly problem for scientists because you cannot fathom the minds of creatures with whom you haven’t the luxury of sitting down and talking.

Around seventy–two thousand years ago, on December 27 in the Human Evolutionary Calendar, we begin to see the evidence of a change in what might have been a hotbed of rapid human, intellectual development—those coastal cave communities of South Africa where, according to Curtis Marean, small
Homo sapiens
communities found themselves within a gnat’s eyelash of total annihilation.

At Blombos Cave the evidence tells us that a small handful of
Homo sapiens
were decorating tiny nodules of hematite, a kind of iron rock, with geometric designs, cross–hatchings that may have represented some kind of symbol, still indecipherable to us. In the same cave, but later in time, scientists have also unearthed perforated ornamental shell beads, arguably the first evidence of human–made jewelry. These discoveries were made in the 1990s and early 2000s, but then in 2010 a team of paleoanthropologists reported finding nearly three hundred fragments of decorated ostrich eggs in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter, another South African cave complex. Each shell is sixty thousand years old, and each was painstakingly etched with precise crosshatched designs, proof, the team believes, that the people who made the markings considered them important symbols. If this theory is correct, the cross–hatchings found on rocks twelve thousand years older may be
more than meaningless doodles, as some scientists suspected when they were first found. Did they contain some secret message? Words, perhaps? Or calculations? An early form of sheet music, maybe? Or someone’s grocery tab? Their significance remains elusive, but enticing.

Despite these clues, and some scattered signs that Neanderthals in Europe had attained a semblance of symbolic thinking, the evidence for creativity of the indisputably modern human variety doesn’t begin to appear until around forty thousand years ago, and by then the evidence is both stunning and global. By this time
Homo sapiens
had made their way out of Africa for good and were busily populating Europe, east and south Asia, and making their way through Indonesia clear to northern Australia. There on the rock walls of Australian caves, ancient humans began to paint symbolic figures and animals, having improved, perhaps, on the creative habits of their ancestors from Africa who had found and used ocher or cryptically symbolized their feelings and insights on the shells of ostrich eggs.

Afterward more proof of symbolic thinking begins to surface. Archaeologists have found small but remarkable sculptures, sometimes of penises, but more often of large–breasted, pregnant women carved by talented artists, beginning thirty–five thousand years ago. They call these Venus figurines because they seem to be talismans of fertility, a trait undeniably crucial to a species who certainly found strength in numbers, but whose life spans rarely reached beyond their thirties. Most of the objects are small and portable, custom–made, perhaps, for magically connecting with the mysterious forces of nature. From Western Europe to Siberia anthropologists have found these small sculptures, and along with them figurines of chimeras—half–human, half–animal—all astonishing indications of a mind unlike anything the powers of life had produced in the long course of their 3.8 billion years of existence. Creatures that could not only imagine other worlds, beings, and forces, but express their imaginings, in the hope, somehow, that they could tap the strength of those mysteries.

Some of the most breathtaking art was created by the Leonardos and Michelangelos of their time deep in caves in Lascaux and Chauvet, France, and Altamira, Spain, as the last great ice age began to release its frigid grip on Europe. These images would be the envy of art galleries around the world today, or Madison Avenue marketeers—rich, vibrant, and ingenious. You can almost see them move and ripple in the flickering firelight that once illuminated the cave walls as the
Cro–Magnon artists stood with their palettes of primordial paints and dyes, dabbing the walls, extracting the beasts from their minds and applying their images to the rock. What powerful magic this must have been to the painter and those who witnessed the work. How could any creature imagine such things and then make them appear right before your very eyes? What hidden powers could enable a living thing to consciously and purposefully create beauty out of nothing more than the popping of the synapses in his head?

So far more than 150 caves have been found in Western Europe, primal cathedrals where the walls have been saturated with the conjurings of artist humans showing off the startling fitness of their brains. We can only imagine how revered people like these must have been, made powerful because from their fingers flowed the symbols of the beasts that fed and clothed and killed these itinerant hunters. How out–standing they must have seemed.

The purpose of these paintings remains a mystery. Colored footprints of both children and adults that show up on the floors of some caves signify, for some, that rites of passage were performed here as boys made their transition to manhood, or girls became capable of bearing children. Others seem to have been a kind of play school for ancient human children dabbling in the art of art.

Some have wondered if the images became a way to control the creatures they depicted, or to draw out and drink in their predatory strength. Maybe these were the theaters of their day, where great stories were told of heroes and their exploits, or a place where men hunted, virtually, in a kind of primeval video game, imagining with their paintings the ways they would bring down prey when, at last, the long and punishing winters ended. Strangely, the cave paintings almost never depict a human form, and when they do, the figures are sticklike, as if humans are minor players in a larger drama. Are these the remnants of a creeping epidemic of human creativity, isolated breakouts of beauty? Are they examples of a new kind of mind, self–aware, curious, and brimming with ideas and emotions, that had no choice but to express itself for the pure joy of it, like a child playing with crayons, or a graffiti artist saying, “I’m here! And I matter.”

These settings, perhaps because they are encased in rock and filled with the ghostly work of their artists, feel sacred and magical. It’s easy to imagine ceremonies of some kind taking place within the bowels of the earth accompanied by chants and primeval music. Archaeologists
have found drumsticks, flutes, and a prehistoric instrument called a bull–roarer near the caves of Lascaux. You can hear the rocky acoustics amplifying the chants and music, the drumsticks beating out a steady rhythm accompanied by the eerie thrumming of the bull–roarer, a sound like the breathing of some great sleeping beast, all combining to make a powerful and ancient symphony that moved and bonded the new kind of primates who listened.

Music may be the most ancient of human arts. Chanting and dancing were arguably practiced by tribes of
Homo erectus
over a million and a half years ago, and later by
Homo heidelbergensis
, the common ancestor of both
Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals, seven hundred thousand years ago. Thirty–five thousand years in the past, dancing and music had likely become much more complex than the varieties our more ancient predecessors practiced, a way to entertain and express personal feelings as well as to bond and celebrate.

The importance of dance and music in the human psyche is probably best illustrated by a single startling fact. We are the only primates that can tap our foot or move our body in time with a specific rhythm. It’s wired into us, but not into our chimp or gorilla cousins, which tells us that it is a trait that like language, big toes, and toolmaking evolved sometime over the past seven million years.

It’s difficult to explain why
Homo sapiens
took more than a hundred millennia to show off the creativity that stands as the irrefutable proof that the stock from which you and I sprang had truly arrived, but that hasn’t stopped it from being passionately debated. Some paleoanthropologists argue that an explosion in
Homo sapiens
population seventy thousand years ago eventually generated competition that in turn encouraged innovation. Others believe that there was no “big bang,” no sudden blossoming of human creativity and symbolic thinking at all. Instead we are simply seeing the slow and aggregated results of gradual human progress that finally left behind enough proof in the fossil record that it existed. Others have argued that as the human race grew, creative ideas that had once been conceived but later lost were now picked up and passed along more easily. More of us were around to ensure that great ideas were absorbed, reused, and built upon rather than wiped out when the innovator passed away.

Another possibility exists. Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard
Klein holds that the catalyst for human creativity didn’t happen outside in the real world, but inside our heads—a genetic mutation, or series of them, that transformed the way our brains functioned so that symbolic thought and the creativity it makes possible erupted from our ancestors’ minds like Athena from the head of Zeus. Somewhere, somehow, he believes, the wiring or the chemistry of the brain changed, perhaps subtly, and crossed an invisible threshold that made it possible for us to attach complex meaning to otherwise meaningless pictures, objects, or sounds. Images could represent gods; beads and shells could represent value; shapes could stand in for ideas that anyone who saw them would mutually, and immediately, understand. Sounds could become symbols for words, and symbols could be built into the grammar and syntax that make language the remarkable thing it is.

Once this happened, says Klein, “humanity was transformed from a relatively rare and insignificant large mammal to something like a geologic force.” The mechanisms for this change are unknown. It could be random genetic mutation, or, as University of Cape Town archaeologist John Parkington theorizes, a new kind of diet. Parkington believes it is not a coincidence that the early humans in South Africa who were making jewelry from seashells were also eating large amounts of seafood out of those very shells, and that food was providing the fatty acids that we today know are crucial to brain health and function. The new sources of food, he believes, combined with a more modern cerebral architecture than earlier humans, made these
Homo sapiens
“cognitively aware, faster–wired, faster–brained, smarter,” and their seashell jewelry, art, and technical advances stand as the proof.
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There is evidence that the chemistry of the modern human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of us, operates differently from that of other primates. When scientists in Shanghai, China, compared one hundred chemicals in the brains of humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques, they found that the levels of twenty-four of them were drastically higher in the human prefrontal cortex. It would be interesting to know how these levels would compare to those in the brains of Neanderthals,
Homo ergaster
, or even
Homo sapiens
who lived more than seventy–five thousand years ago, but, of course, none of those specimens exist. Would we find that somehow the brain had leaped chemically forward, allowing us to cross some unknown hormonal Rubicon? The findings indicate that when it comes to glutamate, the main excitatory neurotransmitter
in our brain, we modern humans are in a league all of our own, constantly burning vast reservoirs of it compared with other primates. This may reinforce Parkington’s theory that something has made us “faster–brained.”

As it happens our penchant for inventiveness is also linked to our species–wide predilection for youthfulness. That shouldn’t surprise us. When you look at creativity in action, it bears a close resemblance to a child at play. One of its hallmarks is that concepts, thoughts, words, or objects that don’t normally go together are joined in novel ways and result in something that is useful or arresting or jaw–droppingly beautiful. When these coalitions come together in a eureka! moment, something that once seemed improbable now stands, right there, real and complete.

For children nearly everything in the world is new, and so almost any combination of unfamiliar experiences can result in those moments of discovery. Since so much is unfamiliar in a child’s experience there is enormous room for learning. But as we grow older and experience more, the space for true innovation narrows, and the stakes rise. The creative bar becomes trickier to reach. Startling is tougher to come across. Still, we humans manage to do it every day, day after day. And the reason we do is because, of all the apes, we are the most childlike.

By shifting the time when genes express themselves, and by rearranging brain and hormonal chemistry, neoteny not only transformed the way we look, but the way we act. Cognitive scientist Elizabeth Bates wrote about the power of neoteny and its ability to generate powerful change in 1979, but at the time she didn’t connect it with creativity; she associated it with another benchmark event in human evolution, language. She (and others) believe that a human “language acquisition device” evolved, like nearly everything else in life, by recombining a variety of preexisting capacities into a new configuration. Human language, she argued, was built on the shoulders of “various cognitive and social components that evolved initially in the service of completely different functions … [and] that at some point in history, these ‘old parts’ reached a new quantitative level that permitted qualitatively new interactions, including the emergence of symbols.” Put another way, neoteny helped shift the growth patterns of one or more capacities our ancestors already possessed for interacting with one another and commandeered them for new uses.
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