The origins of literature

The exact form of the first languages is long lost. Writing was not invented until the Neolithic era, and recording equipment even later. The best we can do is look for indirect clues from fossils and social evidence.

The anatomy that made language possible was already present in the first anatomically modern humans 130,000–200,000 years ago. Whereas four-footed animals must breathe in time with their steps, bipedalism allowed us to control our breathing — a prerequisite for speech. We also have a descended larynx, a relatively small and mobile tongue, etc. This does not mean for certain that our species had language from the outset, but it would be remarkable if we had evolved this equipment without using it. It would also be remarkable if that skill had developed in isolation from others, such as symbolic behaviour. Thinking and talking and symbolism evolve together.

The sign

The earliest language was probably mimetic: an imitation of human, animal and natural sounds, but this could never provide the full range of sound and meaning correspondences we needed. Language is mostly arbitrary — “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” — and cannot exist without symbolism. Its users have to agree that certain sounds have a collectively recognised meaning, are a symbolic substitution for things we have experienced.[1] Thus our ancestors may have hissed in imitation whenever they saw and heard a snake. After enough repetitions, the hiss would become symbolic of ‘snake’ even when the snake was not there. Through abstraction they had created a word.

With abstraction, objects and experiences became signs, patterns, symbols. The Russian linguist Valentin Voloshinov, in his classic Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), argued that “any physical body may be perceived as an image”, that is, it may be converted into a ‘sign’.

Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside of itself. In other words, it is a sign.[2]

Signs allow our consciousness to interact with external reality. Voloshinov is right to stress ideology. A naturally occurring object simply exists, whereas a sign, as a human creation, cannot but take on a specific, socially mediated human meaning. “The physical object is converted into a sign. Without ceasing to be a part of material reality, such an object reflects and refracts another reality.” Signs, including words, are mediators that convert our concrete experience into ideological, symbolic forms.

This probably first served as a means to share information about food-gathering and dangers, share cultural behaviours, etc — early humans may have mimed a predator, together with an agreed vocal signal for that predator. And it is more efficient to tell the community where it can find an animal carcass than for individuals or hunting parties to retrace their steps to show others where it is. It became possible to gain knowledge of a thing, via someone else’s report, that one had not experienced oneself, and include this third party experience in one’s own calculations. This was another gain in the efficiency and effectiveness of learned behaviour.

Ernst Fischer said:

All tools of a particular kind, it will be remembered, came out of the first tool of which they were an imitation or copy. The same is true of many other abstractions: the wolf, the apple, etc. Nature is reflected in newly discovered connections. The brain no longer reflects each tool as something unique; nor does it reflect every seashell in that way. A sign has been evolved to cover all tools, all seashells, all objects and living things of the same kind. This process of concentration and classification in language makes it possible to communicate more and more freely concerning the outside world, which man shares with all other men...

Language not only made it possible to coordinate human activity in an intelligent way and to describe and transmit experience and, therefore, to improve working efficiency: it also made it possible to single out objects by attaching particular words to them, thus snatching them out of the protective anonymity of nature and bringing them under man’s control.[3]

Creative language

In combination with an advanced brain, words also created the possibility of creative, for example metaphorical, expression. The explanation of how to find a carcass becomes the story of a kill, with the recreation of emotions, gestures, and what the participants said, and becomes a kill that never actually happened.

Let us recall Marx, who said:

The poorest architect is distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built it in his head. The result was already present at its commencement, in the imagination of the worker, in its ideal form. More than merely working an alteration in the form of nature, he also knowingly works his own purposes into nature; and these purposes are the law determining the ways and means of his activity, so that his will must be adjusted to them.[4]

Using language to recount something that has happened in the past already implies a certain conscious control of one’s own experience. To tell a story means being able to model the entire narrative in one’s mind before one embarks upon it, just as Marx’s architect plans a building. Our dependence upon learned behaviour meant that when we imitated a comrade to make a handaxe, we knew in advance what we were making, having an ‘ideal’ or ‘best’ handaxe in mind as our goal. This allowed our abstraction of experiences and things into concepts and symbols. Here is Voloshinov again:

Signs also are particular, material things; and, as we have seen, any item of nature, technology, or consumption can become a sign, acquiring in the process a meaning that goes beyond its given particularity. A sign does not simply exist as a part of reality — it reflects and refracts another reality. Therefore, it may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth. Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc).[5]

As we developed language, we gave names to things. Thereby we acquired power: partly in a social sense, because we could issue instructions to our fellows and see them acted upon, but also because we could bring the named things under our control. This is another aspect of the humanisation of nature: a named thing has been assigned a place within a structure of human making. There is an ancient belief, probably rooted in this discovery, that by possessing a thing’s or person’s name we gain power over it. The Bible, for example, claims that “in the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), and that God gave Adam the right to assign names to all the living creatures in Creation (Genesis, 2:19). We see here a correspondence with the idea of sympathetic magic — a thing and its name are somehow causally connected, so that controlling the latter through the human power of language gives influence over the thing too.

Human culture is a learned and not an instinctive behaviour. Therefore, we needed an oral means to pass on tribal lore and our attempts to make intellectual sense of what we saw of the world. In an age where we had language but did not yet have writing, we needed help in memorising these huge narratives so that they might be passed to succeeding generations. To this end we developed verbal techniques like alliteration and rhyme, simile and metaphor, drawing not only upon the powerful effect of symbols upon the imagination but upon the characteristics of words themselves to make them more vivid, more memorable — a unity of both form and content. This is how, in time, simple accounts, stories and folklore evolved into the powerful myths of oral literature. The earliest literature was a communal inheritance, compiled and modified over many years by a succession of storytellers [6]. The sense of shared myths and stories would also have helped bond the social group. These were the beginnings of literature.

As society developed, new abstractions, new words, were introduced. There was no word for ‘painting’ until we had acquired the skill, just as nobody thirty years ago would know what you meant by the ‘internet’. The increasing complexity and diversity of our experience led to increasing complexity and diversity in our signs.

It is likely that language was so important that it actually became (partially) genetic. Chomsky famously proposed, as we have mentioned before, that we are pre-programmed to absorb linguistic structures — what he called ‘universal grammar’.

Gustave Doré’s image of the Tower of Babel, ‘The Confusion of Tongues’.

Of course, each language is culturally specific. Human communities that had no contact with one another developed private sets of symbols that were understood to them, and to neighbours, but not to people thousands of miles away. Different communities had different environmental experiences — prey animals, weather, local materials, and so on — and thus developed signs completely unknown to others. Thus, despite our common humanity and ability to communicate mimetically (such as miming hunger or fear), we don’t understand each other’s languages, because these are arbitrary and abstract.

Marxism makes a very important assumption in its theory of language: it believes that these abstractions refer in a meaningful way to aspects of objective reality, even though this relationship is complex. This places it at odds with structuralism and postmodernism, which argue that consciousness and ideology are themselves the product of language. In the postmodern view, we can never escape the web of discourses to an objective truth (as Jacques Derrida put it, “There is nothing outside the text”). This is a debate that we will explore another time.

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[1] The uniformity of all living humans — their DNA differences are minor and limited to physical appearance — means we can communicate with one another even when we do not share a language. Of course there is regional variation in how particular gestures are understood. But we can all communicate basic human needs and feelings mimetically. We all have the same ‘species-being’ in common, despite the huge variety in our personal experiences.
[2] Valentin Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, (1929). A part of the intellectual flowering that followed the Russian Revolution, Voloshinov was associated with the circle around Mikhail Bakhtin. The link is to a couple of extracts rather than the full text, which is apparently still in copyright.
[3] Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (1959).
[4] Marx, from ‘The Labour-Process And The Process Of Producing Surplus-Value’ from Capital, vol. 1 (1867).
[5] Voloshinov, op. cit.
[6] For this interpretation of oral literature we are indebted to the early twentieth-century scholar Milman Parry, whose particular study was the Homeric poems. Some bourgeois theorists dislike the social conception of art because they want art to be rooted in the individual. But only very late in human history did it become customary for literature to be the work of individuals and have authorial names attached to them.

The development of the aesthetic sense

We have touched upon the idea that our technology demonstrated, over many thousands of years, a developing aesthetic sense. Where does this come from?

Creative labour is the result of human action to work upon the materials of nature towards our own purposes. Art and culture arose from this and must be understood not in terms of absolutes but of social and historical conditions. We have examined Sánchez Vázquez’s argument that labour is the humanisation of nature:

Labour is thus not only the creation of useful objects that satisfy specific human needs, but also the art of objectifying or moulding human goals, ideas, or feelings in and through material, concrete-sensuous objects. In this capacity to realise ‘essential powers’ — to produce material objects that express the human essence — resides the human potential to create objects, such as works of art, that elevate the capacity for expression and confirmation that is already present in the products of labour. [1]

In this article we shall explore in more detail how humans discovered the creative, spiritual labour specific to art, a discovery essential to the emergence of Paleolithic art at least 40,000 years ago.

‘Making alike’

“Fancy,” wrote V. Gordon Childe, “cannot work in a vacuum. What it creates must be like something already known.”[2] A crucial part of the experimentation that led to human technology is the concept of ‘making alike’.

We have already discussed how culture is a learned, not a genetic behaviour. This makes imitation, or mimesis, extremely important. To preserve our specifically human skills in controlling fire, making tools and so on, we had to carefully imitate previous generations so that their innovations were not lost.

Our technology was originally acquired simply through trial and error, because we were curious, playful beings that were always trying out new things. Of course, we are not unique in our curiosity — we share it with chimpanzees, for example. But the human imagination enables us to take control of what our curiosity shows us: to consider before we act, to pause in midstream and compare what we are doing to what we know has been achieved by others or is made possible by the properties of the materials involved.

Early humans will have picked up a stone and noticed that its edge could be used for cutting or pounding. Eventually they began to associate particular kinds of stone with such purposes, to compare stones with each another, and take note when one form proved more effective than another at a given task. After a while we realised that we did not need to wait until we happened upon the right stone — we could shape one ourselves. In doing this we imitated a form we had found in nature. Ernst Fischer, whose Necessity of Art includes an interesting Marxist discussion of humans’ early development, wrote:

Man made a second tool resemble the first and by so doing produced a new, equally useful and equally valuable tool. Thus ‘making alike’ grants man a power over objects. A stone which was previously useless acquires value because it can be made like a tool and so recruited into man’s service. [3]

Fischer’s analysis flows into a discussion of the proposed ‘magical’ purpose of Paleolithic art, about which we must be sceptical. Nonetheless, his argument stands that by copying, for example, naturally occurring flints to create axe-heads, then copying those axe-heads to make more axe-heads, humans won control over nature and learned to value imitation.

Our ancestors may have seen the benefits of imitation as a strange power, and this was not entirely fanciful. Imitation, and the powers opened up by it, created immense technological and cultural possibilities. Bows, spears and spear-throwers gave us the power to bring down a gazelle — something our scavenger ancestors could never have done. By introducing rhythm into language we created chants that made hard work easier, and poetic sound patterns helped us — when writing did not yet exist — to remember long ancestral stories. Drumming and dancing stirred the body and mind before a hunt. Our creations really did enhance our abilities.

The imitation of nature spread to other aspects of our lives to increase our ability to change and control them. While we scrawled shapes on walls, drew around our hands, and so on, we discovered a relationship between a created image and a real, living thing. Through a long process, there emerged an aesthetic based upon similarity and imitation. It was the desire to create an image of an animal that gave birth to painting; it was the recreation of an animal or human form that gave us sculpture. In the products of our labour, we could go beyond mere imitation and infuse those products with meaning. Here is Fischer again:

By his work, man transforms the world like a magician: a piece of wood, a bone, a flint is fashioned to resemble a model and thereby transformed into that very model; material objects are transformed into signs, names and concepts; man himself is transformed from an animal into a man.[4]

Early humans probably mimed animals in order to communicate information about them. With the acquisition of full consciousness, such mimes could become symbolic, integrating our knowledge of human and animal to create a mixture of both: the mimer could temporarily ‘become’ the animal.

Mimesis is therefore the probable basis of dance, storytelling and theatre. Our shared human experience meant that the miming or re-presenting of actions would be understood by an audience. Once we were able to mime a single event, which would have had an obvious instructional use, we could mime several in sequence, and thus build a narrative, rather like building a sentence. When combined with symbolisation, we had the structure, built upon shared experience, which was the basis for complex, imaginative storytelling, and assisted our development of language.

Utilitarian and spiritual need

We have asserted that “through production we give our human or species character a concrete, sensual form, affirming it in external objects we can see and touch.” This does not yet suffice to explain art as a particular form of human labour.

All the products of our labour are creative, in the very straightforward sense that we are making an object. There is therefore a certain overlap between what is art and what is not [5]. A car for example is a practical object: its purpose is to get us from A to B. At the same time, we may hear someone praise their car as ‘a work of art’. And indeed, we can see that the car has been invested with aesthetic qualities as well as practical — it has been painted a bright colour and polished to a shiny finish. These qualities are irrelevant to its dominant, utilitarian purpose. Other qualities may be more ambiguous: a car may have a graceful design which also serves to make it more aerodynamic. The difference between art and other labour derives from the tension between utilitarian and spiritual [6] functions. Let’s return to Sánchez Vázquez:

The usefulness of a work of art is determined not by its capacity to satisfy a determinate human need, but by its capacity to satisfy the general need that man feels to humanise everything he comes in contact with… Art is the creation of objects that essentially satisfy only spiritual needs; that is, these objects are distant not only from direct, physical, immediate needs, but also from the practical needs that are satisfied by the products of labour.

We can see from this that labour predates art. Labour was at first dedicated to strictly utilitarian tasks. It took thousands of years for humans to create — through the mastering of natural properties and of an aesthetic sense — the conditions in which art could be created.

Magdalenian spearthrower made of reindeer antler. Spearthrowers are designed to make a spear fly faster. However the artist has decorated it with a carving of a bison licking itself, even though it cannot have made the object any more effective. From the Flickr account of mharrsch.

Kant amongst others alleged a contradiction between art and work, and this idea persists as a common dichotomy — work is seen as strictly pragmatic, art is seen as free and creative. It is more correct to see labour as an activity by which humans express their powers and exert control over materials found in nature, with art as one particular form of it. If we see work as an unpleasant and arduous necessity and art as a pleasant ‘pastime’, it is because we live under the alienating conditions of capitalist society, where most of us depend for a living upon labour that is out of our direct control or even our full understanding [7].

All human creations, including art, must satisfy some sort of need, or we would not make them. Art satisfies, though not exclusively, a spiritual need.

Spiritual utility, which is specifically human, is already present within the narrow framework of the material utility of the products of labour: art in effect does no more than express fully and freely, and in an adequate form, the spiritual content that is already present in a limited way in the products of human labour. [8]

Human productivity must reach a certain level before works of art can be created, simply to provide the materials, the technical skills and the leisure time that are required. Labour and human consciousness must also have achieved a certain level of complexity before the separation of utilitarian and spiritual value becomes possible. For this reason, labour predates art and makes it possible. When art bloomed magnificently in the Upper Paleolithic, it resulted from humans spending hundreds of thousands of years exerting their powers over nature, testing its properties, and unlocking their own consciousness. Our very first tools were very crude — stones we picked up from the ground — but as we practised their manufacture we unlocked a range of powers. Sánchez Vázquez continues:

When man had at his disposal an instrument as subtle, as humanised, as the burin, capable of responding to the most delicate and precise movements of the hand, the conditions were ripe for him to trace the prodigious figures of wild animals found in the caves of Altamira, or to shape small statues such as the Aurignacian Venus of Lespugue. But the development of tools was not enough: the prehistoric artist had to know and recognise the natural qualities of objects — their colour, weight, proportions, hardness, volume, etc — so that he could effectively use them to endow objects with qualities that are not found in nature, with what we today call aesthetic properties.

Through our improvements in tool production, we discovered which properties were most effective for achieving certain ends, and engaged in a search for ever more perfect forms. Our satisfaction in contemplating these more perfect forms and knowing we had achieved them was the first step towards aesthetic pleasure.

Already in the Lower Paleolithic, with the appearance of symmetrical handaxes, we arguably see a sense of aesthetics at work. We also see rocks being chosen for colours and forms that people found attractive. These rocks were sometimes transported at great distances even when other rocks were more readily to hand. The likelihood is that aesthetic characteristics were first ‘discovered’ because they had a practical function, and only later was their aesthetic character pursued for its own sake. A hunter might make a tally of his or her kills by making notches on a stick; or, as archaeologist Paul Bahn writes:

For example, much of the simplest decoration of ‘tools’ and weapons, such as incisions near the base, was probably intended to strengthen the adherence to the shaft and to improve the user’s grip...[9]

Like Fischer, Sánchez Vázquez places great emphasis on the role of hunting magic, i.e. that Paleolithic people believed in a practical correspondence of images with reality. Modern scholarship suggests his emphasis is misplaced. It does not however invalidate the general argument, as he does not propose magic as the origin of art. To be precise:

Magic could make use of art because man, thanks to his labour, had already created the conditions necessary for going beyond the practical demands of the useful object, thus giving rise to the beautiful useful object, and then to the fundamentally and primarily beautiful object [my italics].

Once we had conceived the idea of incisions — or engravings, or other decorations — we could make them independently of the practical task they once performed. Thus spiritual labour was able to acquire some autonomy from utilitarian requirements, and humans became aware of themselves as creative beings, finding pleasure and self-affirmation in art.

The aesthetic is uniquely human

We have already discussed the difference between animal and human senses — the first operate under immediate need with no distance opened up between the subject and the object. Humans by contrast affirm their human nature by objectifying themselves, recognising themselves as separate from the external world. By creating human objects we celebrate our uniquely human power to act upon natural material and alter it according to our will. Our discovery of new qualities in objects helped to enrich our senses, and because of this, humans are sensuous beings. Sánchez Vázquez explains (his quotation is from Marx):

The aesthetic sensibility springs from this human process of affirmation. The aesthetic sense appears when human sensibility has been enriched to such a point that objects are, primarily and essentially, human reality, ‘reality of the essential human powers’… Man creates aesthetic objects by structuring raw materials to endow them with a human expressiveness they do not in themselves possess…

Thus humans unlock the aesthetic potential of natural materials, potential which exists only for us and which assists our humanisation of our environment. Only through human action does nature become beautiful.

But natural beauty is not arbitrary or capricious: it requires a material substratum, a particular structuring of sensuous, natural properties, without whose support there would be no human, social, or aesthetic meaning.

This needs some clarification. The aesthetic has nothing to do with an ideal — a perfect universal state, as in Plato, or in innate material properties such as the ‘golden ratio’ or Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’. Just as a handaxe has no use-value whatsoever without a human to wield it, there is no innate beauty in nature independent of human senses. The aesthetic is an act of the human senses based upon a dialectical relationship with nature. It is not based not upon any particular absolute property in nature’s raw materials — colourful rocks, tactile fur, or whatever you like — nor is it based upon any particular biological fact in humans — a ‘beauty gene’, for example.

It is one thing to talk of the objectivity of the marble with which a statue is made — a physical objectivity which implies an independence from all subjects — and another thing to talk of the objectivity of the statue as an aesthetic reality, whose form and content do not exist outside social man. The aesthetic embraces the physical condition of the statue without being reduced to it.

This may seem counter-intuitive: surely we find a rainbow more ‘beautiful’ than a pile of animal droppings? Surely then our response must depend upon some intrinsic qualities in the material? Yet as soon as we attempt to find the aesthetic in the natural properties of objects, we meet a problem, namely that different humans at different times find different natural properties ‘aesthetic’. Convention may indeed claim, because of the particular historical development of such preconceptions, that rainbows are more ‘aesthetic’ than animal droppings — yet Piero Manzoni and Chris Ofili have both made art using excrement, and Andres Serrano used his own urine for his photograph ‘Piss Christ’. We do often find qualities such as colour, shininess, softness and so on aesthetically pleasing — something we will explore when we look at aesthetic cognition — but aesthetic qualities cannot be reduced to that. Something more is brought into play.

The problem disappears if these formal elements are seen as functions of a spiritual content… This allows us to conclude that unless objects, and therefore their formal elements, are humanised, charged with a spiritual content, they cannot be called beautiful… Mere physical reality must be transcended, transformed, humanised, if it is to have an aesthetic value.

Materials all have innate properties of form, colour, mass and so on, and a work of art cannot exist without materials in which to concretise a human content in sensuous form. This is part of the dialectic of art. But aesthetic value is an entirely human response. Max Raphael used stone as an example: early Egyptian sculpture stressed the heaviness and rigidity of stone to emphasise a transcendent and autocratic content; Gothic architecture by contrast tries to negate these properties entirely to create an illusion of immateriality; and Greek sculpture tries to render fleshiness and the subtle modelling of the stone’s surface [10]. All use stone, but stone’s innate properties are invested with different aesthetic values depending upon the creative intentions of the artist.

All our labour is creative, but art is creative labour at its highest level, for it satisfies the human need for self-objectification without being limited by narrow utilitarian purposes — in it we see human skill, imagination, intellect and feeling at its most profound, sensuous and unfettered.

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[1] Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Art and Society (1965). All subsequent quotes from Sánchez Vázquez are taken from this work.
[2] V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936).
[3] Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (1959).
[4] Ibid.
[5] The Indo-European root of our English word ‘art’ implies something that has been ‘arranged’ through the purposive action of an agent, or later, ‘something made by humans rather than nature’ — hence we derive the word ‘artificial’. Only in the eighteenth century did the word ‘art’ come to refer specifically to aesthetics.
[6] By ‘spiritual’ Marxists do not refer to anything religious or mystical, rather to humans’ emotional and intellectual life.
[7] Art, although it is seriously affected by alienation, cannot itself be alienated, for art by its nature affirms our humanity — we cannot create art objects if we are completely alienated from that humanity. We shall discuss alienation in detail in later articles.
[8] Sánchez Vázquez, op cit.
[9] Paul Bahn, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art (1997).
[10] Max Raphael, ‘Toward an Empirical Theory of Art’, The Demands of Art (1968).

Paleolithic art, part 2: The Human Revolution

There seem to have been two main spurts of growth in the human brain, the first associated with Homo habilis 2–1.5 million years ago, and the second 500,000–200,000 years ago. Another major change in humankind is traditionally dated at around 40,000 years ago during the transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic: it was then that unequivocal works of art appeared for the first time, along with the technological impetus that would take us towards agriculture and civilisation. It is a matter of dispute how far biological change was involved in what was clearly an extraordinary cultural phenomenon.

Some prehistorians argue the existence of a ‘Human Revolution’ because of the flowering of culture at this time — it has been described as an ‘explosion’ or ‘big bang’. Instead of the laborious creep of evolutionary change, the main dynamic in human development became one of rapid cultural innovation. In the words of the anthropologist Randall White, “It is not an exaggeration to state that just a few square metres at certain Aurignacian sites have yielded more representational objects than are known for the entire planet in the period before 40,000 years ago.” [1] Besides unambiguous representational art, the archaeological record provides us with many new features: tools made of bone and ivory, tools made of multiple parts, abstract symbolism, body decoration such as beads and pendants, sculpture, musical instruments and ritual burial (itself in turn implying religious beliefs). Not only did tools become more complex and specialised — giving us the bow and harpoon — but so did hunting, with fish and bird bones appearing at prehistoric sites for the first time. There was more regional diversification, and humans emigrated from Africa, including crossing the seas to new territories like Australia. All this is hugely exciting, because such behaviour shows these humans were just like ourselves.

The achievement was the greater for taking place at the end of the Pleistocene era, when the last glacial period or Ice Age made the environment particularly harsh. In addition, the Toba catastrophe theory suggests that the human population, following a massive volcanic explosion around 77,000 years ago, may have been on the brink of extinction. The almost identical DNA shared by all living humans has prompted some scientists to suggest we are all related to a single African population of a few thousand — perhaps, at that time, the only surviving humans on earth.

Was there a revolution?

The idea of a ‘Human Revolution’ is not accepted by all prehistorians. The innovations of Homo sapiens, the critics contend, were not a sudden ‘revolution’ but developed incrementally since our emergence around 200,000 years ago in Africa; the appearance of advanced tools and art only seemed sudden because of the inconsistency of the evidence and a huge emphasis upon European sites such as Lascaux. As we discussed in the previous article, finds in Africa — such as those in the Blombos cave — imply that modern human behaviour appeared thousands of years before the more celebrated European cave paintings, making art twice as old as previously thought.

These are very strong arguments, but do not prove wrong the theory that a kind of revolution took place.

Firstly, although there is no doubt that our species originated in Africa, the current material record is relatively small and inconsistent. We have already mentioned the finds at Blombos Cave in South Africa. The Klasies River Mouth Cave produced evidence of occupation by Homo sapiens possibly 125,000 years ago, including notched bones and pieces of red ochre, a soft stone that can be used to make paint; archaeologists believe it was used for body painting, which is suggestive of the use of symbolism. Although evidence of the use of symbolism does exist, these are isolated finds and we should be careful not to construe them as evidence of fully-developed artistic activity. It is one thing to say that humans were capable of notching, incising and piercing objects before 40,000 years ago — there must have been some period of development before the appearance of fully-formed, sophisticated works of art. It is quite another to say that they had developed an artistic culture. What we seem to be looking at is sporadic flarings of a new kind of behaviour: at Blombos, for example, the two blocks of ochre that had symbolic incisions lay among 8000 other pieces. Of course, this may simply be a matter of what has been preserved and found. But the scraps of evidence that we have do not remotely compare to the many thousands of artifacts that appear later and provide clear evidence of highly-developed symbolic, cultural systems.

Another problem is the speed and scale of the change. Out of a species history spanning 3 million years, civilisation has existed for just 5000, yet in that time we have travelled from handaxes to personal computers, from the wheel to international space stations. By contrast, the Acheulian technology lasted a million years with barely any changes at all. It is obvious that something extraordinary had happened to Homo sapiens which we have seen in no other species, human or otherwise. At what rate this developed over the course of existence of Homo sapiens is still open for debate, but there is still no denying a dramatic qualitative change in the behaviour and skills of our species.

It is instructive, as always, to enlist dialectics. Art could only be produced by the new consciousness unique to Homo sapiens, which was an innovation. But recall the image of the spiral: all new forms contain within them the old forms that created them. The new form is a return, upon a higher level. The modern mind grew out of intelligences that had already existed for many thousands of years, giving us technical, social and linguistic powers (whether or not one believes that each forms a separate ‘module’ in the brain). It was both a continuation of those powers and a qualitative step beyond them: the final evolutionary leap to modern humans. If this was more gradual than the ‘big bang’ that has sometimes been claimed, it is still relatively fast by the sluggish standards of evolution.

So I would argue that from a Marxist viewpoint the ‘Human Revolution’ is still valid, provided it is redefined as a general human development (containing contradictions and complexities that are still poorly understood) rather than a sudden cultural explosion in Europe 40,000 years ago.

What happened?

The idea of the ‘Human Revolution’ of course begs the question of what precisely happened to turn Homo sapiens into modern, self-aware and cultured humans. Anatomically-modern Homo sapiens seems to have appeared about 200,000 years ago, according to DNA estimates and to fossil evidence from the Omo river in Ethiopia. Yet stone tools created by members of this species in the Levant are the same as those of Neanderthals in the same region. How do we explain the gap between our species’ first appearance and the flowering of our consciousness and art — a delay of many thousands of years? The gap up until the agricultural or Neolithic revolution, which inaugurates a wave of technical and cultural innovations that have shaped human society ever since, adds another 10,000 years again. We cannot explain art, religion and symbolism by a change in our genes. There were no changes in body morphology or brain capacity in that time, and humans alive today share essentially the same genotype as those who dispersed from Africa 60,000 years ago. The potential for our fully developed humanity must be already present in the genome.

This is the problem that Colin Renfrew has termed the ‘sapient paradox’: or ‘the time gap between genotype and take-off’ [2]. Solving it is one of the great tasks of modern archaeology, for it is in this transformation, and with it the rise of art, that the real Human Revolution lies.

At the moment, we don’t know for sure what happened. But there are of course a few theories.

Firstly let us return to Steven Mithen, who argues that what differentiated modern humans from Neanderthals was their acquisition of ‘cognitive fluidity’ — that is, that the barriers came down between the various areas of intelligence. A key result of this was that we started to think in very new and creative ways. For example we could think of nature, including landscapes and animals, as if it were a social being.

Give a child a kitten and she will believe it has a mind like her own: anthropomorphising appears to be compulsive. Give a child a doll and she will start talking to it, feeding it and changing its nappy. That inert lump of moulded plastic never smiles at her, but she seems to use the same mental process for interacting with it as she uses for interacting with real people.[3]

Homo sapiens can mix areas of knowledge at will using the imagination. We can invest rocks and trees with sentience, conceive of people flying (like birds), walking on water (like pondskaters), living forever (like stones). Such fluidity made possible works like the half-human, half-lion figurine from Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, or the horned human image from the cave at Trois-Frères. Mithen argues that Neanderthals could never have anthropomorphised animals in this way — they would not have understood stories that required us to believe, say, in talking animals, because they could not get past the fact that animals cannot talk. He speculates that at some point, the different chapels in the metaphorical ‘cathedral’ of our minds connected not just to a general intelligence but also to each other, possibly through a kind of ‘superchapel’ or clearing house:

Now in this clearing house all kinds of mischief can occur. Ideas from different modules, and those which have no home to go to, can get together in some peculiar ways. For instance, knowledge about dogs can get mixed up with knowledge about physical objects and with knowledge about beliefs and desires, so that when a child is given a toy dog — an inert lump of stuffed material — he or she makes it behave like a dog, while also giving it human-like beliefs, desires and intentions.[4]

In Mithen’s opinion, the motor for the creation of cognitive fluidity was language. Once language had appeared, it could draw upon not just social intelligence but every kind, creating connections in the mind between the different chapels of the cathedral. Links from each area of intelligence to every other area would be the final step to modern human consciousness, producing a cultural explosion.

Language could be seen as the ultimate human tool. Language assisted the expansion both of our society and of our consciousness: it may be that certain forms of thought are simply not possible until words and images have been created through which to imagine them. Abstractions, named and ordered, helped us to assimilate and integrate the mass of our social and material knowledge.

A cultural explosion would not have been the ‘intended’ outcome of this evolutionary change. Art, like religion, was in this view made possible by it, and appeared as a side effect — what the scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin described as ‘spandrels’.[5]

Although Mithen’s conception of human consciousness is interesting, the problem with the ‘modular’ view of the mind is that there is no neuroscientific evidence that such modularity exists. It is also unclear what genetic process would be able to pull down the barriers between modules.

An alternative and more recent view to Mithen’s comes from Randall White (cited earlier), who has proposed that humans may have had “the neurological hardware for representational thought” long before they learned to practise it:

There is a distinction to be drawn here, between the neurological capacity for a particular kind of action and the actual performance of it. For example, no one doubts the capacity of the Cro-Magnons of late Ice Age Europe to plant and harvest crops. The fact that they did not do so requires explanations that are purely ecological and cultural in nature. Likewise, the frequently noted inability (until taught) of non-Western peoples to read photographs shown to them by Western anthropologists is not to be understood as a lack of neurological capacity. Rather, it is based on the absence of a social, cultural, technological, and historical context for understanding and applying the visual logic of photography.[6]

White argues that the emergence of art must have had some adaptive value in the context of 40,000 years ago. “There is little room in an evolutionary view for art as a divinely inspired struggle to create beautiful or novel forms.” Rather than being caused by a biological change, it arose out of the encounter between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in Eurasia [7]. Long established in the region and very well adapted to its cold climate, the Neanderthals must have been difficult competition, and cultural skills such as symbolic representation may have given Homo sapiens the adaptive advantage they needed. It allowed brand new ways of thinking and of organising; it made possible highly complex social structures and identities (communicated for example through body painting or adornment); and it coincided with a revolutionary period of technological innovation that must have been connected with new, creative ways of thinking.

Once humans gave themselves the power to manipulate form in transposing it from its original context into stone, paint, or ivory, the cultural capacity for human creativity mushroomed. The transfer of qualities from one context to another is an essential part of the construction of metaphors. It is perhaps not surprising then... that among the earliest known images are imaginary creatures, part human, part animal, that reconfigure nature in human terms.

White’s solution may simply offer us a different route to cognitive fluidity, with competition with the Neanderthals, rather than language, as the driving force.

White shares common ground with probably the most important contemporary framework, set out by, amongst others, Colin Renfrew in Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind. Renfrew argues that the ‘speciation’ phase of Homo sapiens, i.e. the period in which the genotype was established, must have effectively ended by 60,000 years ago, when we spread from Africa. All our subsequent developments in consciousness, with the emergence of art, religion, symbolism etc, must then belong to a ‘tectonic’ phase that is culturally determined.

What I shall suggest is that it was most certainly the shared ideas, concepts and conventions that developed in [human] groups, and which became specific to each trajectory of development, that guided and conditioned further innovations. These shared conventions, the ‘institutional facts’... shaped the way that these groups, and the individuals who comprised them, interacted with each other and the world. This interaction with the world, this material engagement, involves not only those people themselves but also their encounter with the physical properties of the material world. It is in this process of material engagement that the origins of growth and change are to be understood.[8]

We shall return to some of Renfrew’s ideas when we examine the origins of symbolism. He offers a materialist framework for the study of human creativity which, with its emphasis on humans’ material engagement with the physical world, offers no contradiction with Marxism. His view that it was culture that led to our species’ ‘take-off’, rather than any genetic process, is my view the most compelling, and it is one we will return to again (see for example our discussion of human nature).

Other theories exist, of course. One contends that the small population of Homo sapiens from which all modern humans are descended was living in perilous conditions, and only the most ingenious survived. Another (proposed by Richard Klein) contends that the leap was down to a genetic mutation. The fact is that the causes and course of the Human Revolution remain uncertain. In my view, however, it is evident that some kind of ‘revolution’ did occur.

Conclusion

Anatomically and cognitively modern humanity has existed for a very short time — perhaps 60,000 years — during which the species has barely changed. The study of our evolution, however, never stands still. The origins of modern human beings remain the subject of an immense amount of research and discussion. One of the most important fields of inquiry today is the development of a cognitive archaeology — to combine what we know from the material remains of previous ages with empirical study of the modern brain to reconstruct the evolution of the human mind. This process has to draw upon sociology, anthropology, neuroscience and other disciplines, and how these different processes interact.

Cognitive archaeology therefore must be both materialist and dialectical. The relevance of Marxism to contemporary science is clear.

It is not my intention to claim a particular position for Marxism as a whole on the Human Revolution, nor to try and give its stamp of approval to the theories of Steven Mithen, Randall White or others (even if I had the authority to do so). Archaeology has come far enough for us to know that what seems obvious today may be thrown into doubt by a new find tomorrow, or that long-standing controversies sometimes are solved. There is no Marxist magic wand that can conjure up a correct answer through theory alone. Our interest is in seeking materialist explanations of the origins of art and culture, and Marxism will continue to embrace the latest scientific thought upon what makes us human beings.

 

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[1] Randall White, Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (2003).
[2] Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (2007). In the same book, Renfrew opposes the idea of a ‘Human Revolution’ arguing with some justification that the evidence is partial and localised. I would respond that the Human Revolution can only be understood in very broad terms.
[3] Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (1996).
[4] ibid. The theory that language is responsible for triggering our creativity is also supported by, for example, Jared Diamond in his book The Third Chimpanzee (2006).
[5] See Gould and Lewontin’s paper, The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm (1979).
[6] Randall White, op. cit.
[7] White supports the theory of a ‘human revolution’, and is sceptical about the existence of significant symbolic activity prior to modern humans’ arrival in Eurasia.
[8] Renfrew, op. cit.

Paleolithic art, part 1: The road towards art

Art is one of humanity’s most fundamental activities — the earliest works of art predate some of our most basic skills, such as pottery and weaving — and there is good reason to suppose that it was only created in full-blown form, with some possible exceptions, by behaviourally modern Homo sapiens.

When we discuss prehistoric art, we need to be clear what we mean. ‘Prehistory’ does not have fixed dates. It refers to the vast body of human experience that predates the keeping of records, which depend upon written language and are acquired at different times in different cultures, if at all — for some societies ‘prehistory’ in the literal sense extends well into the industrial era. It is worth noting that until very recently, religious notions of where humans came from obscured our awareness of our ancient past. As Colin Renfrew put it, “Two centuries ago, prehistory did not exist... the very notion of ‘prehistory’, in the sense of a broad stretch of time going back before the dawn of written history, had not been formulated.”[1]

The era populated by our early human ancestors and ourselves up until the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago is known as the Old Stone Age or Paleolithic (from the Greek paleos ‘old’ and lithos ‘stone’). No precise dividing line exists between true art and the activities that preceded it, but the first unequivocal works of art appear somewhere in the transition from Middle to Upper Paleolithic, the latter dating roughly from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Writing, and with it history, arose in the wake of the agricultural revolution, which I will discuss in later articles. We should not let such labels disguise how real trends overlap and develop unevenly. But the labels are useful because, based upon our current knowledge, they refer to distinct stages in social development.

Around 50,000 years ago, there was a migration of modern humans out of Africa. By 30,000 years ago they had replaced every other human species, and by 20,000 years ago they had spread to every continent except Antarctica. This period coincides with an explosion of cultural activity, which included all the principal creative skills — painting, engraving, sculpture, jewellery, music, even ceramics and textiles. This flowering was accompanied by important technological innovations too, suggesting that these advances were connected.

The earliest alleged art objects and Neanderthal culture

The oldest ever object relevant to our topic is the three million year-old Makapansgat pebble from South Africa, a stone whose natural wearing has given it the resemblance of a crude human face — it was found far from any natural source, which has suggested to some that it may have been carried off by an australopithecine who appreciated its symbolic force. An alleged sculpture found near Tan-Tan in Morocco, made of quartzite and painted with red ochre, has been dated as between 300,000 to 500,000 years old. A similar artifact made of volcanic tuff was found at the Golan Heights in Syria. Both bear a very vague resemblance to female figures, and marks left by carving mean they have been claimed to be art objects. If it were true, they would be the oldest known works of art in the world.

The artifact found at the Berekhat Ram site on the Golan Heights, claimed by some to be a crude female figurine

A fragment of elephant tibia found at Bilzingsleben in Germany, and dated to around 350–400,000 years ago, bears two sets of incised parallel lines, which have been alleged to be symbolic in purpose. In 1999 a team excavating in a cave in South Africa found a piece of ochre, carved with a criss-cross pattern, and some beads that seem to have been pierced to be worn as jewellery. These finds date to about 77,000 years ago.

To investigate further, let us take an example from relatively recent history.

From our first appearance to 28,000 years ago, Homo sapiens shared the world with Homo neanderthalensis, or the Neanderthals, who occupied an area from northern Europe to Iran. (There were also populations of Homo erectus in Asia.) Despite their apeish popular image, Neanderthals were an accomplished people who made tools and even buried their dead. Their brain was slightly larger than ours, and their use of the Levallois method to create stone flakes — which even modern archaeology students find hard to master — proves that they were able tool-makers. They were very well adapted to the brutal environment of ice age Europe.

Some prehistorians, for example Desmond Collins in his 1976 book The Human Revolution, suggested that Neanderthals simply evolved into modern humans, through interbreeding or neoteny. Only from 1997 did the study of mitochondrial DNA prove that we were separate species that had diverged around 5–600,000 years ago. Rather than representing a new evolutionary future, the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe about 40,000 years ago — the last time different human species shared the Earth — meant the Neanderthals’ doom. This was probably not down to violence: the two species seem to have co-existed for 10,000 years. Nor was it due to the Neanderthals’ lack of success as a species, given that their span of existence of at least 200,000 years exceeds our own so far. A popular traditional view is that they were less well adapted than the competition, who could think, communicate and organise better than they could.[2] This may be mere self-flattery by our species — diseases introduced to the isolated Neanderthal groups by extensive new Homo sapiens populations might be all the explanation we need.

Neanderthals were less developed than ourselves in key respects (the successful extraction of their DNA locates them somewhere between chimps and Homo sapiens). There is no evidence of ritual attached to their burials, such as the placing of items with the bodies, which calls into question their capacity for symbolism; they seem only to have used stone and wood for their tools, although bone was abundantly available and their tool-making skill is beyond question; and there is no unequivocal evidence that they used body ornamentation. For many years it was assumed they were completely without art.

The latter issue was complicated in 2003 with the discovery of an apparent piece of sculpture. Known as the Mask of la Roche-Cotard, it is an estimated 35,000 years old. Other possible art objects include a flute, carved from the bone of a cave bear, and items of jewellery, not to mention other items that seem to have been collected because of unusual colour or form. Was this another instance of the traditional barrier between Homo sapiens and other species being torn down?

Alleged Neanderthal flute, found at the Divje Babe site in Slovenia

There is no reason in principle why Neanderthals should not have developed some degree of aesthetic consciousness. It is possible that Neanderthals had language, which like art requires the grasp of symbolic communication. Even chimpanzees show graphical intelligence, and Neanderthals were much more advanced than chimpanzees. But as we have seen with our study of ape painting, there is a difference between this and true artistic sensibility. The ‘Mask’ is a highly contentious object. It is a 10cm piece of flint with a second piece of flint pushed through it, with signs of carving that seems to create a very crude impression of a face. Some very extravagant claims have been made for this object. Paul Bahn was probably premature when he declared that the Mask “should finally nail the lie that Neanderthals had no art”. Created when Homo sapiens was already co-existing in Europe, the Mask might have been created by them, and acquired by a curious Neanderthal. The item may have had some other purpose, or be part of another object, or be a piece of experimentation that did not resemble a face at all in its maker’s eyes. The facial resemblance may be entirely in our minds — another example of our irrepressible anthropomorphising. We don’t know, and for that reason should err on the side of caution. Likewise, the existence of a ‘flute’ is disputed — the holes in the bone may just be tooth marks; the ornaments seem only to have been made after contact with the culture of Homo sapiens.

Even if Neanderthals did produce symbolic, aesthetic objects without the intervention of their more cognitively advanced cousins, such objects are rare at Neanderthal sites. This is probably down to various causes. One of the most significant may be that Neanderthals lived in lower population densities and had much less communication between groups, depriving them of the social networks that made symbolic communication advantageous. At best, Neanderthal art was sporadic, never as widespread and consistent as our own. “The great problem with all the Neanderthal art,” said archaeologist Clive Gamble, “is that they are one-offs.”[3]

In his book The Prehistory of the Mind, the archaeologist Steven Mithen draws upon evolutionary psychology [4] to propose that the mind is divided into several broad areas of intelligence: social, natural history, technological, and linguistic. Each is a specialised domain handling a particular aspect of behaviour. There is little reason to doubt that Neanderthals had social behaviours comparable to our own, and they clearly did not lack technological skills. This makes their paucity of art more puzzling:

We have seen that Early Humans were regularly imposing form on to their stone artifacts. Handaxes and Levallois flakes required the extraction of objects of a preconceived form from nodules of stone. In view of such technical intelligence, the failure to make three-dimensional objects of art cannot reflect difficulties in conceiving of objects ‘within’ a block of stone or ivory, or the mental planning and dexterity to ‘extract’ them. The cognitive processes located in the domain of technical intelligence used for making stone artifacts appear to have been sufficient to produce a figurine from an ivory tusk. But they were not used for such ends.[5]

Mithen argues that the difference in Neanderthals’ achievements and ours lies in the architecture of the mind. Drawing an analogy with a cathedral, he suggests that for Neanderthals, as for all early humans, each area of intelligence was a separate chapel. A nave of general intelligence connected to each, but the individual chapels were barred from the others (we shall return to this idea in the next post). Mithen’s theory could explain why Neanderthals seem to have lacked the imaginative thinking required for works of true art. Over 200,000 years of existence, their technology, known as the Mousterian, showed no advances whatsoever.

An exception came about 35–30,000 years ago in the period known as the Châtelperronian, which sees an overlap between Neanderthal objects and those of Homo sapiens in the form of jewellery and more advanced tools. Such finds may be seen as the emergence of a more advanced sensibility in the Neanderthals, right at the end of their existence. But that this new technology should appear at the same time as the Cro-Magnons (early Homo sapiens) [6] are spreading into the same habitat is perhaps no coincidence. It is possible that Neanderthals’ alleged aesthetic objects were copied or acquired through their contacts with Homo sapiens and that they did not fully understand the symbolic nature of these objects. There is no escaping the poverty of claimed Neanderthal art objects compared to the magnificence of modern humans’ painting and sculpture: on current evidence, even if we accept objects like the Mask as authentic pieces of art, the Neanderthals became extinct without having developed a culture remotely comparable to Homo sapiens’. Well-preserved Neanderthal sites have been excavated which offer thousands of artifacts and yet nothing in the way of art.

Fresh evidence may one day prove that early humans did in fact produce true art. I should point out that this would pose no problem to Marxist theory. There is no ‘official’ Marxist position upon whether they did so (my own scepticism is based upon the inadequacy of the evidence, not upon the demands of a dogma). It would simply mean that another human species had succeeded, to whatever extent, in following the same path as ourselves. The early humans’ extinction implies however that they were at some disadvantage compared to their competitors. It is very likely they had not made the same leap to full imaginative intelligence (‘cognitive fluidity’, in Mithen’s language) that enabled Homo sapiens to colonise the world.

It is not unreasonable to believe that early human minds were significantly different to, and less advanced than, our own: the gaps in their production suggest they did not have our imagination or inventiveness. The Makapansgat pebble is clearly just a found object, and the Bilzingsleben markings might not be aesthetic or symbolic in intent. There is not enough contextual evidence that these objects are more than just anomalies whose resemblance to art is coincidental. The supposed figurines of Berekhat Ram and Tan-Tan are pieces of rock with evidence of having been modified by tools — to claim them as pieces of sculpture is extremely questionable. The most we can say of these or or the Mask of La Roche-Cotard is that they are proto-art — crude, early strivings at art, which their makers perhaps barely understood themselves — and true art remains the preserve of Homo sapiens.

The engraved piece of ochre found in Blombos cave. Photo: Henning

The Blombos ochre is an intriguing find because, although we can only speculate on the meaning of its engraved pattern, it is clearly a pattern and thus a symbolic object — beads, and other forms of bodily adornment, are also signs of symbolic behaviour. Bone tools and pierced shells from other African sites (e.g. Ethiopia and the Congo) date back to a similar time. What this evidence implies is that modern human beings may have developed earlier than was previously believed. The Cro-Magnons for example, who occupied Europe around 40,000 years ago, may have already formed their modern human skills — hut-building, cave painting, weaving — before they arrived in Europe. This timescale does not seem inconsistent with the date of migration to Australia 50,000 years ago, which itself will have required skills beyond the ability of early humans.

This brings us to the dawn of art — and to the possibility of a ‘human revolution’.

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[1] Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (2007). The study of prehistory experienced two great forward leaps in the 20th century: radiometric dating, of which radiocarbon dating is the best-known method, and the analysis of DNA.
[2] There are various theories to explain Neanderthals’ demise, including the effect of climate change.
[3] Cited in Jonathan Amos, ‘Neanderthal “face” found in Loire’, BBC website (December 2003).
[4] Mithen draws for example upon the work of Jerry Fodor, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, who propose ‘modules’ for specific areas of intelligence. Evolutionary psychology contends that the mind must have evolved through adaptation, just like other species characteristics. It is sometimes accused of genetic determinism and has been used to justify reactionary ideas, but whether or not it is taken down this path depends, like many fields of inquiry, upon its practitioners — any theory, including Marxism, may be made reductive. As Stephen Jay Gould, who has been critical of evolutionary psychology, noted: “Humans are animals and the mind evolved; therefore, all curious people must support the quest for an evolutionary psychology” (from his article ‘Darwinian Fundamentalism’, 1997).
[5] Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (1996).
[6] The term ‘Cro-Magnon’ is a general term used to describe the earliest modern Homo sapiens population in Europe. The name derives from the Cro-Magnon rock shelter site at Les Eyzies in France, where the first fossil remains were found in 1868.

The acquisition of language

The very earliest human societies did not have a system of writing. Instead they relied on a tradition of oral literature [1] in which they recited and sang stories. In a pre-literate age, oral storytelling was a way to preserve knowledge, history and culture, a method which survived the invention of writing and provided the basis of the epics attributed to Homer, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Finnish Kalevala, etc.

To understand the roots of literature, of course, we need to understand the roots of language.

How we developed language

Language is unique to humans. It evolved only in ourselves, in only one way (which we are still trying to figure out).

Like many species, our primate cousins use all manner of grunts, calls and other noises to communicate with one another, often accompanied with gestures and other body language. These convey a variety of meanings understood by the whole group: to raise an alarm about an approaching predator, threaten a rival, announce the discovery of food, indicate contentment, etc. The earliest humans must have used a similar system of communication. The Finnish researcher Lea Leinonen even found that people could recognise the emotional content of calls made by macaque monkeys, suggesting that we have a common ‘primate inheritance’ in how we communicate emotion vocally.

The great apes, however, have a limited range of vocal behaviour even compared to other primates such as geladas [2], and birds are more vocally gifted than any mammal. The roots of language in primate communication are interesting, but there is a tremendous qualitative gulf between language and all other known forms of animal communication. This is not simply a matter of greater complexity. As the neuroscientist and anthropologist Terrence Deacon has pointed out [3], there are no ‘simple’ languages used by other species; however sophisticated animal communication gets, no animal other than humans uses words. The real key difference is that unlike us, they never developed symbolic communication.

The origins of language in human beings lie in our evolution through labour.

Just as tools developed dialectically with our brains and hands, toolmaking assisted our acquisition of language — language may itself be seen as a kind of tool. The more we explored our environment, acquired power over it, and entered new relationships with it, the more our communication needed to embrace new concepts. The comparatively rudimentary communication used by animals to signal alarm, threat, and so on was no longer adequate. The process was summarised by Engels:

The mastery over nature, which begins with the development of the hand, with labour, widened man’s horizon at every new advance. He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown, properties of natural objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society closer together by multiplying cases of mutual support, joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to one another. Necessity created the organ; the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound after another.[4]

Engels observes that some other animals have the capacity for speech — most famously the parrot — but:

The little that even the most highly-developed animals need to communicate to one another can be communicated even without the aid of articulate speech.[5]

Animals’ ability to acquire language was studied by researchers at Columbia University from 1973 when they brought up a chimpanzee, from birth, with a human family. Mischievously named after Noam Chomsky, Nim Chimpsky was treated like a human child and picked up 150 characters of sign language. But despite spending four years in this environment, he did not develop any advanced language skills. The experiment seemed to confirm Chomsky’s belief that human language behaviour was too complex to learn from the environment alone: the linguist also needed a human linguistic intelligence, able to absorb language into a pre-programmed structure.

In the 1990s, researchers at Georgia State University revealed that a bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) named Kanzi was capable, remarkably, of understanding spoken English. In addition, they claimed he could create sentences — in other words, had grammar. Using symbols, Kanzi created two-word combinations which, the researchers argued, tended to place an action word before an object word. He would therefore say ‘hide ball’ rather than ‘ball hide’. What the researchers could not overcome was that Kanzi’s linguistic skills approximated to those of a child of two, and only a vast amount of human intervention got him even to that stage. Like Nim Chimpsky, Kanzi showed general intelligence and cleverness, but no evidence of an ability to use language beyond the most basic level. Given that chimps do not possess language or even the physical equipment for it, this should surprise nobody.

Many animals have developed means of communication which are much more sophisticated than Engels and his contemporaries would have assumed. This doesn’t stop us concluding that language, like labour, is a human characteristic: even though Kanzi shows us that there is no cast iron dividing line. Language would not have been possible without certain biological changes such as the descension of our larynx, which extended the vocal tract and enabled us to make much more complex sounds than, for example, our great ape cousins (we make most of our vocal sounds by contracting the laryngeal muscles). This was partly aided by our upright stance. Also, our dietary trend away from chomping plants towards meat-eating gave us smaller teeth and jaws that affected the shape and capability of our mouths, lips and vocal tract. But biology on its own explains little. Humans are not the only species to have a descended larynx — we share this feature with, for example, lions, deer and some aquatic mammals. It was the extension of our consciousness through labour that introduced to us new relationships that could not be adequately communicated using the vocabulary of primate sounds, and demanded something different.

These processes, like all processes, interact with one another and develop side by side. Engels again:

First comes labour, after it, and then side by side with it, articulate speech — these were the two most essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man, which for all its similarity to the former is far larger and more perfect... The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement, gave an ever-renewed impulse to the further development of both labour and speech.[6]

Toolmaking — the creation of human-made objects — taught us abstraction: the more we made objects with characteristics so similar that they shared a function, we discovered the need for a name, not just for, say, an individual spear, but for ‘spears’ in general. Thus we created an abstract category of ‘spears’ that united many objects with similar characteristics. Humans had managed to turn objects into concepts. This followed from the separation of human beings from nature: we learned to translate ourselves and our works into abstract terms.

At some point we probably began to break up our utterances, in which a single cry or call represented an entire message, into constituent parts. Instead of a call for ‘big eland’, we might have split the concepts of ‘big’ and ‘eland’, and then been able to combine those elements with other separate elements. According to archaeologist Steven Mithen, this meant we could “create an infinite array of new utterances. This is the emergence of compositionality, the feature that makes language so much more powerful than any other communication system.”[7]

The social character of language

The new level of communication helped us to develop our social organisation by sharing experience and improving technique. At the same time, language is itself social in origin. Neither aspect ‘caused’ the other, instead they developed in combination. Language is inevitably social in character, because humans are a social species. Marx and Engels understood this:

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men... Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.[8]

Primates are unusual in that they live in tightly-knit groups. This helped to provide protection against predators much more formidable than ourselves. The more group members there on watching for predators, the greater is the chance they can be avoided, and the more help there is on hand to drive them away. For primates that are starting to eat or even hunt meat, it is also to their advantage to have several hunting parties searching simultaneously to increase the chance of success — once the big meat package is found, it can be shared amongst all the group’s members.

Group living was a positive adaptation, but it introduced new complexities, such as the need for hierarchies and alliances to regulate internal competition over food. As the size of human social groups grew over the millennia, so too did the complexity of social behaviour. All primates use vocalisations to communicate a variety of signals, but language, propelled by particular human needs, took this to an unprecedented level. A sobering aspect of the descension of the larynx is that the lower tracheal opening makes it easier for us to choke upon food. That we were prepared to trade this potentially fatal problem against language tells us a great deal about how important it was to us.[9]

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has estimated that the number of people of whom we could have social knowledge grew from 50 per group six million years ago to 150 for early Homo sapiens. He argued that primates place great social importance upon grooming as a means of building alliances and gaining social information [10]. As group sizes increased, the amount of time needed to groom effectively became untenable. Language was the replacement — instead of limiting our communication to when we tidied each other’s dirt and parasites, we shared social information in a much more efficient way, without needing social contact with the people under discussion. Group size, brain size and language ability all increased as we evolved. Homo sapiens communities may also have experienced greater differentiation in roles, exchange with other groups, and other more complex social needs that encouraged language.

It is very difficult to fix a date for the first use of language because there is no way for it to be preserved. It cannot be less than 195,000 years ago, the age of our first fossil evidence for anatomically modern humans. The genetic leap seen in Homo habilis 2 million years ago may already indicate a vocal ability beyond that of other primates, and this ability will have increased with subsequent evolution. True language may first have been possible in a rudimentary form as long ago as Homo erectus. In Neanderthals the vocal tract, hyoid bone and other indicators were present, making language likely. Given the genetic similarity of all Homo sapiens, from 60,000 years ago to today, and the universality of language to all human populations, it is hard to see how language would not have been one of the faculties that our ancestors took with them from Africa before they dispersed across the world.

Nonetheless, the clear qualitative difference between early and modern human minds makes the question of how gradually or suddenly language was acquired, and how it relates to the rise of art and culture, a matter of ongoing debate. Some archaeologists have proposed that there was a ‘human revolution’ of art and culture around 40,000 years ago, and it would be astonishing if we had not had language at that time. This timescale for the first appearance of art dates it considerably later than the likely first appearance of language. Recent evidence from Africa has led some archaeologists to suggest that the ‘revolution’ might have started much earlier, begging speculation on whether the two are related, but evidence for consistent symbolic activity dating further back than 40,000 years is slight.

Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, which claims that the capacity to learn language is to some degree innate to all (modern) human beings, has yet to be proved. An alternative to Chomsky’s theory has been put forward by Terrence Deacon [11]. Children have such a gift for acquiring language that it seems it must be innate, but Deacon argues that children’s predisposition is of a different sort. Just as computer scientists developed Graphical User Interfaces such as Microsoft Windows to make intimidating computers easier for the general public to use, so language has adapted to the natural biases of human learning. The reason animals can be trained to perform spectacular ‘tricks’ is that the human trainers select from among the animal’s natural repertoire of behaviours and simply encourage them. Languages are very changeable and evolved spontaneously, not by design — those that can be quickly learned by children by conforming to their expectations will tend to be passed on more than those that are difficult. The elements universal to all languages, writes Deacon, actually arose independently in each language, which may seem hard to believe until one thinks of each language adapting to the same, universal set of human biases. These biases — such as the neurological bias that generates similar colour terms across all societies — may be very weak, but over many millennia of evolution their cumulative effect becomes determining. So language is acquired via a social evolutionary process, not a rigid pre-programmed structure.

Additional support for the case against Chomsky’s idea has been outlined by the anthropologist John Hawks:

There are strong evolutionary reasons to doubt the existence of a Universal Grammar. In short, no single language uses all (or even most) of the rules included in Universal Grammar. So the phenotype (behavioural expression) of nearly all the people in any human population must not include many of those rules. If this is true there is certainly no way that natural selection (which can operate only on phenotypes) could result in Universal Grammar being included in most people’s brains.[12]

It remains possible that a kind of common template for language did develop, given the profound importance of language for our evolution and social organisation. But this would not mean that language may be seen mechanically or biologically. Such a view makes language autonomous and genetic, denied its link to real life and to its human, creative character. That language has a social character is so obvious it should scarcely need saying, as the very purpose of language is communication between people. Bourgeois linguists sometimes however try to make language a self-contained system independent of society. Such an approach fails to prioritise real language as it is spoken by real people.

Language in fact is subject to change — in its words, grammar, etc — and the origin of this change cannot be understood without a social and historical context. The Marxist view was summarised neatly by Marnie Holborow: “Language arises from the social demands and needs of the material world and also, through human cooperation and activity, contributes to the transformation of that world. It is then itself transformed as human society changes.”[13] Or in Deacon’s words, “Language is a social phenomenon. To consider it in purely formal, psychological or neurobiological terms is to strip away its reason for being.”

Language is not inevitable

To finish, it is important to note that it would be wrong to see language as the pinnacle of an inevitable evolutionary process towards more complex, higher forms of communication. It is tempting to try to apply this ‘progressive’ aspect of the dialectic to the sweep of evolution, but to do so is inappropriate. Evolution is about organisms finding a best fit to their environment, and most living things have never ‘progressed’ beyond a single cell. It is simply that at one point in our development, language happened to help our species fill a particular evolutionary niche. As Deacon puts it, “the niche was just there, and was eventually filled.”[14]

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[1] Given that ‘literature’ implies writing, the term is an oxymoron, but we do not have a better one. One possibility would be Pio Zirimu’s term ‘orature’.
[2] See for example Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[3] Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Human Brain (1997).
[4] Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (2005).
[8] Marx and Engels, from ‘Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks’ in The German Ideology (1845).
[9] A contrary view has been put forward by British palaeontologist Margaret Clegg, who found by studying medical records that death by choking on food is extremely rare. Mentioned by Mithen, ibid.
[10] Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1997).
[11] Terrence Deacon, op. cit.
[12] John Hawks, ‘Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species’ (Jan 2005).
[13] Marnie Holborow, ‘Putting the Social Back Into Language’, adapted 2006 from a chapter of her book The Politics of English (1996). Holborow’s essay is a good short introduction to the Marxist theory of language.
[14] Terrence Deacon, op. cit.

The origins of art, part 4: The humanisation of nature

A decisive consequence of our evolution through labour was that we learned to objectify ourselves as human beings.

For primitive humans, nature must have seemed particularly immense, dangerous and frightening. Our human skills — constructing shelters, social organisation through language, making tools — helped us to bring nature to an increasing extent under our control and thereby improve our standard of life. But these unique capacities brought with them a curse unique to Homo sapiens: they introduced into us a dual nature. Instead of being instinctively a part of nature, as animals are, our self-consciousness separated us from it; as we are creatures of nature, we therefore also became separated from ourselves. The Biblical myth of the Fall — Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden — may express this fundamental human experience.

To put it differently, we realised that we are a subject and that the external world is an object.

Lenin summed up a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy when he observed,

Matter is a philosophical category designating the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.[1]

The objective world existed before humans, and would continue to exist were we to disappear — the human subjective consciousness is itself ultimately nothing but a process of matter. Marxism is not only materialist, however, but dialectical and historical, and applies materialism in the context of the development of society. Human consciousness therefore is not a passive reflection of reality but a participant in it, and subject to change — as seen in the process of evolution itself.

We shall explore Lenin’s ‘reflection’ theory another time. For now, we can simply observe that art does not reflect an abstract, never-changing ideal [2] but is part of a dialectical relationship between a human subject and an objective world. As we perceive the objective world, we reinforce our own existence as a subject that is in a relationship with it. We are separated from nature, but we are also part of it.

For animals, the external world is a fact that cannot be changed. Humans however can reflect upon their actions before they perform them. Instead of building a home according to instinct, like termites, we can plan it in the greatest detail before a stone is laid. When we could foresee the effects of particular actions, we became aware of new relationships that we were previously blind to: not least that by using tools and reason we could act to change nature. Here is Marx:

The operations carried out by a spider resemble those of a weaver, and many a human architect is put to shame by the bee in the construction of its wax cells. However, the poorest architect is distinguished from the best of bees by the fact that before he builds a cell in wax, he has built it in his head. The result was already present at its commencement, in the imagination of the worker, in its ideal form. More than merely working an alteration in the form of nature, he also knowingly works his own purposes into nature; and these purposes are the law determining the ways and means of his activity, so that his will must be adjusted to them.[3]

Animals simply use nature, by existing — humans make it their servant.

Other creatures have better eyesight, a better sense of smell, sharper hearing. But in combination with our human brain we can extract more meaning from our senses than animals can. Marx said in the 1844 Manuscripts:

It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc... Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form — in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being.[4]

Human senses are not immediate like animal senses, but are governed by a human consciousness. Engels later concurred when he wrote:

Hand in hand with the development of the brain went the development of its most immediate instruments — the senses. Just as the gradual development of speech is inevitably accompanied by a corresponding refinement of the organ of hearing, so the development of the brain as a whole is accompanied by a refinement of all the senses. The eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the eagle.[5]

Human beings, who are only human because they have learned to be creative, i.e. to make objects, perceive through their senses an external, objective reality. In this reality we objectify ourselves. “The eye,” for example, “has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object — an object made by man for man” (Marx). As we became more human through our interaction with nature, we in turn made nature more human. After human manipulation, a stone formed by centuries of volcanic processes becomes a spearhead, or a statuette. These are objects that can never be produced by nature on its own. Humans’ products are created in response to needs, but through them we also invest nature and its materials with a human character: we externalise ourselves through our objects.

Here is Marx again:

The objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs — essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers.[6]

In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes of our Gattungswesen or ‘species-being’, the collective nature or essence of every human being. This includes a number of drives — the need for food, shelter, sex and so on. It also includes the desire for personal development and fulfilment, for the complete realisation of our powers as human beings.

Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species — both his own and those of other things — his object, but also — and this is simply another way of saying the same thing — because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being.

Through our labour, creative human beings fill the world with our objects, in which are concretised all our powers and contradictions. This humanisation helps us restore some of the harmony with the world that we have lost through the dualisation of our own nature. Art and work are commonly perceived as opposites, but both are a creative process by which we objectify our humanity and see it reflected back to us. This has often been recognised by artists. Cézanne wrote: “The landscape is reflected within me, becomes human, becomes conceivable.”

Paleolithic handprint from the cave at Pech-Merle, France.

Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, whose book of essays Art and Society contains an outstanding discussion of the humanisation of nature, offers this formulation: “Labour is thus not only the creation of useful objects that satisfy specific human needs, but also the art of objectifying or moulding human goals, ideas or feelings in and through material, concrete-sensuous objects.”[7] We do not here mean only physical objects in a crude sense — the argument applies not just to, say, an image painted on canvas or carved from stone but a dance, a song, or other externalised form.

This is one of the most essential concepts in Marxist aesthetics: through production we give our human ‘essence’ a concrete, sensual form, affirming it in external objects we can see and touch.

As humans began to express their power over the material world by creating objects, they were taking the first steps towards art. However, all our labour is creative. To understand art as a particular form of labour, we need to discuss the difference between utilitarian and spiritual value, of which more in a later article.

Such is the strength of our ‘humanising’ of external reality that we project human feelings onto phenomena with which they have nothing to do. The inkblots of Rorscharch illustrate our extraordinary ability to project human meaning onto random forms. The Paleolithic people who blow-painted their handprints onto cave walls had in part the same motivation as the adolescents who scratch their names on park benches.

The attempt to affect objective reality to our benefit has been a profound part of our evolution; in addition, our objects give ordered, external expression to the complex sum of our human intellect, abilities and emotions. Thus it is no wonder that art gives us such satisfaction, as it is an affirmation of our humanity. The English socialist William Morris wrote:

The Socialist claims art as a necessity of human life which society has no right to withhold from any one of the citizens; and he claims also that in order that this claim may be established people shall have every opportunity of taking to the work which each is best fitted for; not only that there may be the least possible waste of human effort, but also that that effort may be exercised pleasurably. For I must here repeat what I have often had to say, that the pleasurable exercise of our energies is at once the source of all art and the cause of all happiness: that is to say, it is the end of life.[8]

Nature threatens us; hunger in our bellies degrades us. As we were freed from immediate animal wants, and developed human senses that helped us give nature a meaning in human terms, we affirmed ourselves through our actions in relation to nature. The more conscious we became of sensuous, spiritual aesthetic qualities, the more possible it became to make objects in which these qualities were more prominent than utilitarian ones. This is the origin of art.

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[1] Lenin, from Chapter Two of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). This essay was Lenin’s answer to the positivism advocated by the likes of Mach and Bogdanov, and is an advanced study of materialism. In his Philosophical Notebooks, Lenin later took his dialectical materialism further with his 1914 notes on Hegel’s The Science of Logic. There have been attempts to argue that he broke from his materialism of 1909 because it was supposedly non-dialectical, but these do not stand up to investigation — in the Notebooks Lenin enriches the earlier work rather than refutes it.
[2] We shall discuss idealism in greater depth when we examine aesthetics and the concept of ‘beauty’.
[3] Marx, from ‘The Labour-Process And The Process Of Producing Surplus-Value’ from Capital, vol. 1 (1867).
[4] Marx, third manuscript, ‘Private Property and Communism’ from The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
[5] Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876).
[6] Marx, op. cit.
[7] Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez: Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (1965, English transl. 1973).
[8] From Morris’s article ‘The Socialist Ideal – Art’ (New Review, January 1891).