Lone Survivors (22 page)

Some of the beautifully made Still Bay tools from Blombos Cave.

The most famous engraved ocher plaque from Blombos Cave.

75,000-year-old Middle Stone Age bone tools from Blombos Cave.

Tick shells that were strung as jewelry from Blombos Cave.

One of the most recent ideas to interpret the cave art of Ice Age Europe combines data from evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology with the evidence of shamanism in contemporary hunter-gatherers. The word
shaman
derives from the Tungus language of Siberia, and these individuals (popularly called
witch doctors
) supposedly possess special powers, giving them access to the spirit world through altered states of consciousness. These altered states may be generated by hallucinogenic plants (for example, in the Shoshone of Wyoming) or by trances induced through pain, deprivation, or (in the San of southern Africa) repetitive rhythmic chanting and dance. Once in the spirit world, shamans often feel they can fly, or travel underground or through water, and they might encounter normal or mythical animals, strange landscapes, ancestors, or gods. They may then transmit messages from the spirit world, foretell the future, or heal the sick. Through their perceived powers, shamans often perform crucial roles in initiation rites and religious ceremonies.

David Lewis-Williams argued that the deep caves of Europe were special places where Cro-Magnon shamans could interact with the spirit world, where the cave walls acted as membranes, and the shape of rocks and crevices signaled the presence of spirit animals or portals between the normal and spirit worlds. The art was thus an expression of altered consciousness, sometimes experienced by groups and at other times by solitary shamans. Just as shamans are crucial members of present-day hunter-gatherer societies, they and their artistic output would have served to represent and even fashion the social and religious systems of the Cro-Magnons. For Lewis-Williams, their artistic imagery reflected the conflicts and hierarchies that were emerging in human societies for the first time. He argued that the roots of such art lie in the fact that
Homo sapiens
may be the only species to remember its dreams (he suggests that Neanderthals probably could not), and in Europe, the presence of the last Neanderthals perhaps triggered cave art as an expression of Cro-Magnon distinctiveness and identity. According to Lewis-Williams, long after the last Neanderthals had gone, the art continued as a deeply entrenched religious system, which reflected the Cro-Magnon societies of which it had become a vital part. Certainly if they were linked to specific religious beliefs, the 25,000-year longevity of the traditions of cave painting and the production of statuettes puts any recent belief systems that we can reliably date far in the shade.

Thus it is likely that some of the deep decorated caves of Europe were used for initiation ceremonies. Perhaps youngsters were even starved or drugged and then taken long distances through a dark cave, to be suddenly confronted with powerful images under torch or lamp light. The experience could have been reinforced by the overwhelming accompaniment of chanting, incense, and drumming; there is evidence that some decorated cave chambers in France and Spain were chosen for their acoustic, as well as their artistic, potential. The even earlier presence of symbolic modern human burials 100,000 years ago implies that burial rituals had already developed by then, and, as we saw, it is possible that the 160,000-year-old Herto skulls were curated, with the child's skull shaped and used as a drinking cup during ceremonies.

All of this indicates that rituals continued to evolve because they enhanced the well-being and survival of individuals and groups. By accumulating the memories of those individuals and the bands to which they belonged, “group memories” could also develop, storing shared information about the tribe and its history. Brain scan studies have shown that areas concerned with working memory (memories not of facts and data but of actions and behaviors) and with behavioral inhibition are both activated during rituals, and the growing importance of rituals to modern humans probably served to reinforce and enhance working memory, mental focus, and the inhibition of “antisocial” (in this context “antiritual”) actions (that is, ones that would interfere with, or negate the social purpose of, the ritual). By providing a unifying structure beyond individual or subgroup needs, rituals provided a way to direct group behavior, defuse rivalries and tensions, and allow channeled and controlled interactions with potentially hostile neighboring tribes, as long as those tribes understood and abided by the language and etiquette of the ritual concerned—hence replacing suspicion and hostility with trust. Such interactions would have been particularly important for trade, in times of stress (for example, drought), or when sexual partners were needed beyond the tribe.

Once we get to about 40,000 years ago, we can certainly infer the existence of rituals and ceremonies to mark the death of individuals, including multiple burials or special treatment of the dead. Around that date two people were interred separately at Lake Mungo in southeastern Australia: a woman was cremated at high temperature and another adult (sex uncertain) was buried stretched out and with a covering of hematite pigment (perhaps originally on the skin or on some covering material such as hide or bark). Ten thousand years later, far across the inhabited world, the Gravettians started burying their dead with red ocher and elaborate grave goods over an area ranging from Wales in the west (Paviland) to Sungir in Russia. A number of their burials were multiple, and some were extraordinarily rich. As mentioned earlier, at Sungir two children, a boy and girl, were interred head to head, accompanied by hematite, long spears made from heat-treated mammoth ivory, ivory carvings, hundreds of pierced arctic fox canines, and some ten thousand ivory beads that must have been sewn on to their perished fur clothing. The spears probably took weeks to make and the beads many months in total, so these children were highly valued by their group, even in death. And a recent discovery, although not fully published yet, may push the evidence for such behavior back even farther. At a cave in the Tsodilo Hills (Botswana), it's claimed by Sheila Coulson and colleagues that about 70,000 years ago, a six-meter-long rock was shaped to enhance its resemblance to the head of a snake, and the contents of the cave supposedly reflected its long-term use for ceremonies during the Middle Stone Age.

This brings us to the critical question of religion and belief systems, to which rituals are often closely linked. It seems likely that a sense of guilt for social infringements (for example, stealing from a neighbor, hitting a defenseless person who had done no harm) had evolved in early humans, since what appears to be a sense of shame can be programmed into social animals such as dogs and some primates. But only humans have a sense of sin—an infraction not against a person but against a divinely sanctioned law. The law in question may relate to hurting another (for example, adultery or murder) or infringing a religiously enforced code of behavior (for example, combing the hair during a thunderstorm for the Semang peoples of Malaysia or eating pork).

So what could have begun this process of separation from the natural world, and the belief in the supernatural? In
The Descent of Man
, Darwin discussed how his dog barked every time the wind caught a parasol, perhaps because in its confusion it imagined there must be an agent (invisible to the dog) that was causing the movement. Darwin added that such imaginings could have been the source of an early belief in spiritual agencies. Thus the mind-reading abilities we discussed earlier, combined with the human understanding of cause and effect, so essential for activities like toolmaking and hunting, might lie at the root of spiritual beliefs, as argued by both Robin Dunbar and the anatomist Lewis Wolpert. Unexplained phenomena such as lightning, environmental crises, and human illness must have causes, so perhaps invisible spirit forces were at work—as Darwin put it, ones with “the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections they themselves experienced.” In particular, once self-awareness had evolved, belief in an afterlife could soon have followed, allowing the mystery of death to be addressed and dealt with—the essence of those who had loved us and looked after us during our lives would surely live on to look after us after they died.

I mentioned shamanism earlier in relation to Lewis-Williams's interpretations of European cave art, and his suggestion that modern humans may be the only species that can remember its dreams, hence providing the imaginative basis for spirit worlds to which humans may gain privileged access. He and others have argued that shamanism is an ancient form of religion, perhaps the very oldest, with an antiquity going back to the African Middle Stone Age at least. In both San and Paleolithic art there are representations of therianthropes (human–animal chimeras—the centaurs of Greek mythology, for example), and in recent depictions these often relate to “soul flights,” where the shaman's soul leaves the body during a trance and merges with or is possessed by a spiritually powerful animal. The trances may be brought on by repetitive chanting, dancing, or drumming, by sensory deprivation or sensory overload—for example, through eating, drinking, or smoking hallucinogenic plant compounds. In evolutionary terms, the benefits to the shaman may be obvious—high status and possibly privileged access to group resources or sexual partners—but what are the advantages to the group and the other individuals within it? This brings us to the tricky question of why spiritual beliefs evolved in the first place, and why they seem to have such a hold on humanity, despite occasional and largely unsuccessful attempts to cast them off.

For some, religious beliefs are a pathology—a mass delusion—or they are akin to a virus that perpetuates itself via information imprinted by adults on impressionable young minds. Others argue that spiritual beliefs evolved because they were useful to those who possessed them, and endowed survival on those individuals and their close relatives. Data show that human feelings such as depression, pessimism, and anxiety are handicaps to health and longevity, so religious beliefs that alleviated those “symptoms” could certainly have been favored. Humans do seem to be preprogrammed for religious beliefs, readily taking these onboard, however irrational they may seem to nonbelievers or those of different faiths—and this seems to be as true for adult converts as it is for religiously groomed children. There is disputed evidence that people with strong religious convictions tend to be healthier, live longer, have more surviving children, and are even somewhat wealthier than nonbelievers. If that was true in the past, selection would have favored those with religious beliefs, as long as the benefits outweighed the costs. (Religions or sects that demanded complete sexual abstinence or castration of male followers have understandably not thrived!)