Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (26 page)

If neoteny played a central role in the emergence of language, could it also have played an earlier role in the ingenuity that symbolic thought requires? It’s possible. The timing of the expression of certain genes, including genes that control brain growth, made and makes our long childhoods. It extends the time our brains are pliable and able to bend to our personal experience. But because human neoteny is
so
extreme, it has done even more than that. While it acts most powerfully during our childhood and makes childhood possible, it also extends childlike behavior throughout the long course of our lives. Even in old age, we are more childlike than other primates are in their youth. The brain flexes and muses and creates right up until the end. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old,” the aging playwright George Bernard Shaw once mused, “we grow old because we stop playing.”

This means we are not only children longer, we are childlike longer, and that has made us by far the most creative and adaptable creatures ever. “We are not a computer that follows routines laid down at birth,” Jacob Bronowski once observed. “If we are any kind of machine, then we are a learning machine.”

This is why child’s play and creativity are so deeply linked.
Play
has multiple meanings depending on whether you are an anthropologist, psychologist, parent, or child, but among its hallmarks are the simple joys of pushing boundaries, expanding limits, randomly galumphing around to see what happens just for kicks. Even long–faced philosopher Martin Buber had to admit, “Play is the exultation of the possible.”

At the heart of playing is the strange phenomenon of curiosity. You really can’t have one without the other. One theory about curiosity is that we are all born “infovores,” that we crave new knowledge and experience in something like the way we crave food. It’s a kind of mental and emotional hunger that requires ongoing feeding and satisfaction. Old knowledge doesn’t satisfy our curiosity because it’s familiar; we have “eaten” it before. So how do we know when something is new? Because it surprises us, because it’s different from what we are used to, fresh.

Every creature has an evolved talent for identifying what is surprising or out of the ordinary for one simple reason: it’s central to survival. Those that fail to tune in to the change around them, those that aren’t sensitive to surprise, soon join the legions of species no longer with us. It’s a talent that reaches back hundreds of millions of years.

For modern humans like you and me this makes curiosity a way to gather new information that has survival benefits, but also a process for gathering the building blocks out of which we assemble entirely new experiences and new forms of knowledge. One of the behaviors that makes us different is our affection for playing around randomly, joining this with that or that with another thing with no particular reason except to create more surprises that satisfy our curiosity, which in turn results in still newer experiences, new inventions and insights. Innovation and originality are by–products of our lifelong, childlike love off goofing off!

In some ways, play resembles evolution itself, randomly introducing unpredicted and unpredictable innovations the way random mutation reshapes DNA. When you think about it, adaptation in nature is a kind of learning. Something different comes into the world, and living things adjust genetically. The adjustment is serendipitous, not conscious, but it happens.

Play does something similar. It randomly introduces new experiences to our minds, again and again. We encounter novelty, and when we find it useful or enticing, we make it ours. It literally changes our minds, and therefore us. And since not one of us learns quite the same things, since each of us plays in different ways and is surprised by different experiences, your changes of mind are different from mine, which makes each of us unique. Our view of the world is not entirely distinct, but distinct enough that we ourselves become new and surprising additions to it. This also means that you and I can learn from one another by sharing our differences, a little like the way two parents’ different chromosomes combine to create a genetically unique child. By acquiring new experiences and then sharing them, ideas and originality become sticky and spread from mind to mind.

No matter how long we live, we can’t seem to root the child out of us entirely, joyful in its experimentation, never satisfied, hungry for knowledge, and eager to show it off. When you look at us this way—a lifelong child, with a mind itching to play, and famished for surprise—you can see how the power for creating originality out of random experience, and the ability to share those experiences, could have taken us from a mere ten thousand or so primates seventy–five thousand years ago scrambling back from the abyss of extinction, to seven billion creatures who have not only populated every corner of
the planet, but managed to rocket away from it a few times to orbit and land elsewhere in the solar system. By connecting the surprising experiences and ideas we spawn or stumble across, and then sharing them with one another, we have been able to construct great edifices of new knowledge—Pythagoras’s geometry, Newton’s and Leibniz’s calculus, the wheel, clocks and longbows, the Saturn V rocket and the silicon chip and balalaikas, silk paintings, the telescope, money, sailing ships and steam engines, kissing and language, music of all kinds and toys of every imaginable stripe, chess, baseball, sculpture, and van Gogh’s
Starry Night
—all of it out of the combined, interlocked, unique imaginings of millions of minds shaped by billions of surprises shared in trillions of exchanges to create the chaotic, astonishing, tumultuous stew we call human culture. In this sense, we are a race of continually startled, and startling, creatures.

Once the adaptable nature of such a pliable human brain had been sufficiently honed and wired to make all the improbable internal links needed to connect “new” into still newer creative acts, human culture was guaranteed to evolve at exponential speed.
⁸

However it all happened exactly, clearly something radically different was emerging in the brains and minds of
Homo sapiens
from Europe to Africa to Australia between seventy–five thousand and forty–five thousand years ago. Some sort of cerebral critical mass was frothing. Neoteny had created a nimble, pliant brain that remained flexible throughout life and generated both unique people and unique ideas. We had evolved into born learners, genetically encouraged to seek out and, by some strange neuronal alchemy, devour surprise and transform it into knowledge.

This may be why we, and not Neanderthals, are still around today to wonder where we came from. It may explain why you are at this moment gazing at a page of symbols I have typed that your mind, rather astonishingly and without much seeming effort, translates into thoughts you can understand.

Neanderthals lived faster than we did and they died younger, and possibly therein lies the reason we remain and they don’t. Though they, too, were neotenic and time had also been genetically rearranged for them so that they were born earlier and remained young longer than today’s chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, their childhoods were not as long as ours. This gave their brains less time to shape their personal experience, their ideas, and their personalities
before they began to grow more rigid. And growing more rigid, they may have been a less childlike species, less prone to experiment. That would have made them less adaptable. Perhaps this was also true of the Denisovans, and the Red Deer Cave people of south China, even the “hobbits” of Indonesia. Their minds may have been as sharp, but not as plastic, as those of the
Homo sapiens
who had recently migrated out of Africa. Perhaps they all became more set in their ways sooner; more adult, you might say.

Neanderthal tools, and the little we know of their rituals, indicate they were on the cusp of our brand of symbolic thought, but some pieces, we don’t know how many, didn’t quite fall into place in a way that allowed them to remain among us today. If their language was songlike as Mithen has theorized, they might have expressed the emotions they were feeling, more than the explanations of why they were feeling them. There might have been more passion, less logic, or maybe less of a balance between the two.

We can imagine them as a bright, lyric, almost mystical species, but not a fully symbolic one. Perhaps they lived in a kind of surreal, Daliesque world, less self-aware, not altogether capable of encapsulating the ephemera of the new thoughts their minds conjured into carvings, sculpture, patterns, or images made from strokes of paint. Because that is what symbols do, they translate thoughts and ideas into tight, little packages of meaning for delivery from one mind to another. It is miraculous really.

Maybe the Neanderthals weren’t radically different from us, or less intelligent; they may simply not have been able to play their way into symbol making as complex as the kind we stumbled upon. In particular, perhaps they couldn’t play their way into the most shattering gift of all—spoken language as we know it today, complete with the bells and whistles of grammar and syntax. Perhaps.

Our youthfulness, our propensity for playing with, and juggling and shuffling, surprising experiences and insights continually and in more startling incarnations must have cried out for an invention as elegant as language. When you step back from it, language is something like a piano. Using nothing more than a piano’s eighty–eight keys, a player can express an infinite number of songs, and infinite variations on those songs. With language we can express an infinite variety of thoughts, feelings, ideas, and insights. Before modern language, our ancestors may have been capable of gesture, art, and song with which
to bundle and share the flickerings of their minds, but imagine, how modern language must have supercharged human creativity and the culture that was assembled out of it?

The thing is, while language connected us to one another more closely than ever, it also enabled us to pull off another remarkable feat: it made us aware that we are aware. It may also have made madness possible.
⁹

I am a strange loop
.

—Douglas Hofstadter

If you could shrink down to the size of a molecule and slip into your brain, you would find yourself flying among billions of neurons along great highways of dendrites and axons with streams of chemicals splashing across synaptic gaps and firestorms of electricity arcing all around. At this scale, the real estate of your mind would be vast, planetary in its dimensions, as you rode your molecule–size vehicle. Everywhere commands that make it possible for you to walk, breathe, see, smell, speak, reflect, and imagine would be at work.

Witnessing the weather of your thoughts and feelings like this would be extraordinary, but even from this vantage point, or maybe because of it, you could never imagine that all of the impulses and chemistry blowing up and down the intricate infrastructure around you could possibly
be
you. Yet it is. You are assembled from these nonstop, chaotic processes; the rolled–up, aggregated chemistry and biology through which you are zipping. Stupefying but true.

The bewildering mystery of how this happens is what Douglas Hofstadter hoped to resolve when he penned his landmark book
Gödel, Escher, Bach
. He wanted to figure out, he wrote, “What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle? What is an ‘I’?” It’s an easy question to ask, and we’ve been asking it for as long as we have been around. The answer, though, is just a bit tougher to come by than the asking.

But we can try.

You may have noticed from time to time that when you think, you find that you are talking to yourself; not necessarily out loud, but in your mind. Nearly every waking moment we describe what is going on in our minds to ourselves, like a sports announcer calling a game, remarking on what we see, commenting on our own insights, planning our lives, polling ourselves on what we feel, wondering why this and how that? “God, I’m edgy this morning. This coffee is delicious! Hmmm, rain, better grab the umbrella. That’s an interesting choice in a hat, if you are insane! Don’t forget to get the oil changed and pick up the milk. You know you really have to get better at remembering people’s names.” Our reflections run the gamut from the mundane to the ethereal, occasionally the sublime, but they almost never stop, until we fall asleep.

When you think about how you think about yourself, you are experiencing what psychologists call metaconsciousness, the ability to be aware that you are aware. Though we take it for granted, this capability requires language, and the interesting thing about that is that language requires using symbols that we sound out in our minds so we can understand what we are saying to ourselves. That we can do this is remarkable enough, but doesn’t conversing as we do with ourselves make you wonder, if
you
are doing the talking, then whom are you talking
to
? Or, if you are listening, then who, precisely, is talking? Are we one person or two? Or many? Where does that voice we call “thought” come from? Who is the voice in your head, and how did it get there?

In the 1970s the Princeton psychologist and philosopher Julian Jaynes wrote a fascinating, bestselling book with the rather opaque title
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
. Jaynes’s insights as a philosopher and a psychologist remain respected (he passed away in 1997), but the book was highly controversial. He speculated that consciousness of the kind I just described is an extremely recent evolutionary development. Between 10,000 B.C. and 1000 B.C., he argued, modern humans thought that the voice they heard in their head wasn’t their own, but the voice of a chieftain or demon or god, some very real being outside their own minds. In other words, they didn’t talk to themselves the way we do, they instead believed they were listening to another all–knowing being who was
observing them and their thoughts. Jaynes called this kind of mind bicameral, or two–chambered, one chamber that listened and one that spoke, but neither of which was aware that they were part of the same brain. “[For bicameral humans], volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command,” he wrote, “in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.” As evidence he points to the statues and idols that ancient cultures in Egypt, Sumeria, and Mesoamerica created as the physical symbols of the gods and chiefs that spoke to bicameral humans; the voices. This is the only possible explanation, he argued, for why they were built, and, having been built, why they exerted the enormous influence they clearly did over their cultures.