I first taught Paleolithic art in 2005, and continued teaching it almost every semester until I quite teaching in 2020. By 2010 I had cobbled together out of recent books on the origins of the arts and human cultures generally a serviceable background story for the emergence of visual art. Following Michael Tomasello (2001), I began with some reflection on the communicative abilities of great apes, and treated humans as distinctive in their capacities for pointing, shared attention, group projects, and especially the capacity to teach skills outside of the immediate context of their application; the teaching of skills across generations creates what Tomasello called the ‘ratcheting effect’ where humans could in effect treat a certain level and complexity of technology as given and use it as a basis for further innovations . Adapting Merlin Donald (1993) and Steven Mithen (2007) I considered the evolved capacities for art-making to be those most saliently displayed initially in pantomime and a sort of pre-linguistic, non-segmented group humming, and then in the story-telling in full language with its segmented vocabulary, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. For what characterizes art in its distinctiveness I drew especially from Barry Allen (2008), with a sideways nod to Arthur Danto (1981), for the sense that artistic artifacts are (i) artifacts that are about something, that (ii) they embody (whatever that might mean) their being about something, and (iii) that part of their aboutness is ‘second-order’, in the sense that such reference includes reference to themselves and/or artistic practice and traditions and/or the makers or addressees of the works. Such a background was meant to help explain initially the possibility and nature of the so-called ‘Blombos pebble’, a roughly 80,000 year-old rectangular piece of ochre with one side incised with a bounded mesh of cross-hatchings. The final piece of the explanatory framework is the postulated emergence of the capacity to draw, paint, and sculpt figures, a capacity that effloresces suddenly in southwestern Europe a little over forty thousand years ago (with its contemporaneous emergence discovered in the past decade in Sarawak).
Although there have been further discoveries and considerably more thinking about these points since 2010, something at least roughly like that framework still seems to me plausible and viable. One of the outstanding more recent contributions to this framework was Kim Sterelny’s celebrated book of 2012 The Evolved Apprentice, which argued that a key feature of the transmission of social learning to which Tomasello had drawn attention was the development of apprenticeships, wherein learners could work near masters of techniques of tool-making, hunting, and foraging, thereby acquiring such skills in a secure manner that they could in turn pass on to future learners, and additionally regularly pass on any of their refinements or innovations in those techniques. More recently still Sterelny has joined with the young philosopher Ronald J. Planer to develop Sterelny’s account of social learning in the evolution of human beings into an account of the origin and evolution of human language. Although they discuss the arts are only very briefly, it seems to me that their account suggests potentially important further contributions to our understanding of the origins of the arts, especially music and the visual arts. In what follows I summarize their central argument and then, with an eye to its contribution to understanding the origin of the arts, speculate on ways in which it improves upon some other prominent accounts.
P & S begin with a statement of methodological criteria. An account of the emergence and evolution of human language should start with a plausible description of the communicative capacities of our last common ancestor with the great apes, a description derived from our understanding of the current social formations and communications of chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. P & S renounce the easy route of assuming a sudden genetic mutation wherewith some hominin immediately gained language abilities; likewise they reject the idea that there might be a single explanatory factor, such as sexual selection. Rather, the account should invoke as needed confluences of many factors and be ‘gradualist’, in the sense of assuming that small steps over millions of years resulted in anatomically modern human beings having full language. Guided by the known archeological evidence, the authors construct the sequence of small steps that might have arisen from the evolving needs of hominins in foraging, hunting, reproduction, and defense in changing environments. On this account early hominins possessed certain capacities for directing others’ attention through gestures (especially pointing (p. 99); see also Tomasello (2008)). Gestures could be combined with vocalizations, such as mimicry of animals, and further gestures, such as a stabbing motion, to produce a small advance in communicative abilities. Over millions of years the gestural aspect of communication receded in favor of the vocal aspect. Vocal units stabilized into words, the sequence of which carried significance as a kind of syntax. The evolution of technical skills in working stone, evidenced in the archeological record, shows that hominins developed the ability to bring long and complex sequences of actions under executive control, and did so in ways that were salient to others, not just to the maker. (p. 81) From this emerged ‘proto-languages’, characterized as communicative systems “in which agents produce and understand strings of wordlike terms: terms with displaced reference [that is, reference to items that are not perceptually present to speaker and hearer] and other semantic features of words . . . the sequences are not syntactically organized, or are so only in a very rudimentary way.” (p. 8) P & S think that the passage from proto-language to full language is considerably more difficult to reconstruct and understand than the passage from great ape communicative abilities to proto-language. They suggest that this final transition, although of course involving many factors, was primarily driven by the needs of larger-scale social cooperation, wherein proto-language met other proto-languages and the something like the linguistic development seen in pidgins took place.
Unsurprisingly, the authors’ account is accordingly intricate and difficult to summarize. I note three key features of great interest:
1. The emergence of language is based on gesture: On one recent theory (Mithen (2007) pre-human hominins possessed a kind of holistic proto-language of humming. P & S reject this because it renders the passage to segmented language unintelligible. By contrast, one can readily imagine that early hominins’ gesturing and miming could be regularly associated with distinctive vocalizations; as standardized pantomimed sequences developed and gesture declined in salience, something like communicatively operative, ordered sequences of sheer vocalizations could arise (pp. 96-7 and 126-128).
2. But why would communicative gesture decline in salience? The authors speculate that the key driver was hominins’ developing control of fire and so the emergence of a new social site, the campfire. Along with the concomitant increased social complexity in roles of foraging for fuel and tending the fire, there emerged the lengthening of the day and assembling of groups for hours in semi-darkness. Accordingly gesture became less communicatively effective and the need for ways of non-visual communication increased.
3. As noted above, P & S consider the passage from proto-language to full language especially difficult to explain. (p. 201) They suggest that the key drivers were the anatomically modern humans’ responses to the environmental stresses of global cooling and increased aridity in Africa starting around 190,000 years ago. One central response was to increasingly exploit marine resources for food. This intensified large-scale group territorial identities, as groups needed to defend their limited foraging areas. Accordingly the character of human cooperation changed and with that arose the need for the fuller language of “storytelling, a shared and rich ritual life, gossip, and explicit norms.” (p. 211) In this context P & S make their sole reference to a possible origin of visual art: the intensified exploitation of marine resources and the consequent development of communicative resources for building and sustaining large-group identities “cleanly explains the fact that the earliest unambiguous marks of symbolic behavior—including the much-discussed instances of abstract art—appear at coastal sites.” (ibid.)
I have tried to indicate some of the book’s key points and their interrelations. There is a great deal more of exceptional interest in this highly intelligent book. Although I cannot discuss it here, I cannot resist mentioning Planer’s and Sterelny’s suggestion that another developmental sequence contributing to the emergence of language was one marked by the increasing group sharing of endorphins, from grooming (an endorphin rush for the hominin being groomed) to laughter (sharing the stimulated release of endorphins with a few fellow beings) to music and singing (group sharing). One might speculate that the authors’ discussions might contribute something to understanding the origins of the arts of music, dance, and theater. Very little in the book contributes to the understanding of the origins of visual arts; such contributions would have to consider at least the emergence of decoration and figurative marking and/or matters evidently relevant to these. Still, if nothing else, P’s & S’s proposal and brief development of the hypothesis of the emergence of abstract markings out of the novel needs and interests of foragers’ intensified exploitation of marine resources deserves consideration in any future account of the origins of the visual arts.
References:
Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008)
Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (1993)
Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (2007)
Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny, From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language (2021)
Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice (2012)
Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (2001)
-----The Origins of Human Communication (2008)