CHAPTER 1

ORIGINS

The origin of the human mind is as lost as a grain of sand in the Sahara.It is impossible to say precisely when the psychological ingredients ofmodern human minds made their entry into the world because mindsdo not leave fossils that can be dated and interpreted by scientists. Today, wecan examine the living organ of the mind—the human brain—as it perceives,thinks, remembers, and imagines by means of the recently invented tools ofneuroimaging. Ancestral brains, on the other hand, turned to dust long ago,whether their owners once lived thousands, tens of thousands, or hundredsof thousands of years in the past. All that remain now are portions of theskull that once housed a human mind, or the bones of the legs that enabledupright walking, or the hands that enabled the crafting of tools or visual artistry.Although no one knows for certain when the modern human mind firstappeared, archeologists point to abundant evidence of its activity dating fromforty thousand to ten thousand years ago in the Upper Paleolithic or LateStone Age. By then, the mind within us was at work in the world creatingancient art of unmistakably human origin.

In the south of France, not far from Cahors, in the Midi-Pyrénées region, isa cave called Pech Merle. My visit there in the summer of 2005 was promptedby the chance to see prehistoric cave paintings created by early modernhumans. At first appearances, the cave at Pech Merle was indistinguishablefrom those limestone caves carved by water in the valley of the MississippiRiver back home in St. Louis. The crucial difference appeared only deep in thecave, far from the entrance, when the tour guide shined his flashlight on a walladorned with hauntingly beautiful images of human hands and spotted horses.These and many other images in the cave were created by human beings inthe Upper Paleolithic era of prehistory. Using carbon 14 dating, archeologistsestimate the age of the spotted horse at about 24,640 years old.

Because of the location of the painting in Pech Merle, it can be inferredthat the artist or artists had specific memory abilities well known in contemporarycognitive neuroscience. The artist responsible for the spotted horseshad to retrieve an image of a horse from long-term memory and maintain itin a temporary store referred to as working memory. By comparing a visual-spatialrepresentation in working memory with the image unfolding on thecave wall, the artist would have been able to create an accurate representation.Because the work was done deep in the cave, the model for the drawing wasnot present in visual sight. Indeed, the artist had to work from some kind oftorch light to even see the creation underway. Conceivably, the artist mighthave been recollecting a specific horse seen at some point in the past, using acapacity for mental travel back in time, or it may have been a more generalmemory of the concept rather than a specific instance. Alternatively, perhapsthe artist was simply imagining a horse that could have differed from anyspecific horse ever before encountered. Cognitive anthropologists have in factwondered whether the images were a product of the hallucinogenic imageryof a shaman. Although it had been thought by biologists that wild, pre-domestichorses had only coats of black or bay, the spotted pattern found in theimages of Pech Merle in fact were painted from memory rather than fantasy.The genes responsible for the spotted-leopard pattern found in some modernhorses were also identified in DNA samples of horse remains in WesternEurope dated to the Pleistocene, the geological epoch ending ten thousandyears ago, just prior to the Holocene epoch of today. The same pattern was notfound in Asian samples from the Pleistocene, suggesting that all horse colorsobserved in Paleolithic art in fact were found in the prehistoric horse populationswhere the caves were located.

The artwork of the Upper Paleolithic provides vivid evidence of a modernhuman mind. It indicates that modern humans were living in Europe by fortythousand years ago, although they likely originated earlier in Africa, as willbe discussed later in the chapter. The makers of the cave paintings and carvedfigurines were fellow members of Homo sapiens just like us today. Archeologistshave discovered thousands of pieces of Paleolithic art rendered on limestonecave walls as well as small objects of stone, bone, antler, and ivory that areassociated with the fossils of human remains. Although such artwork has beenfound in several parts of the world, the most intensively investigated and well-knowncollection comes from southwestern Europe. In the cave at Lascaux insouthern France alone, for example, more than fifteen hundred images adornthe walls. Animals are a frequent subject matter, but images of humans, andanthropomorphic-type images that combine parts of an animal (e.g., antlers)with a human figure, are also common. Abstractions in the form of geometricsigns are also observable. Unmistakably, the creators of these works werecapable of using visual symbols to represent ideas.

During the Upper Paleolithic, there is clear evidence of an explosion ofcultural creativity. Besides the cave paintings and sculptures, archeologistsdocument an increased sophistication in tool making and weaponry, and awide variety of body adornments. This explosion of Upper Paleolithic culturehas been referred to as a "human revolution" or the "dawn of human culture"or "a great leap forward" as a way of highlighting the discontinuity with theartifacts produced by earlier members of the hominid lineage. For example,neither Homo neanderthalis nor Homo erectus left artifacts comparable in theirsophistication, variety, and sheer number as those created by Homo sapiens.Scholars disagree as to whether the change to the modern mind was as suddenas implied by the concept of "a great leap forward" or instead reflected agradual accumulation of...