Part II -- Chapter Five

Western Myth and the Precept of Simple Cause:
Reflections on the Emergence of Human Culture and Cognition

Invisible structures...

Myth arises in the confluence of certain structures of preference which are conjoined, in the workings of the collective imagination, with specific modes of being and acting. Human life is unimaginable in the absence of myth and its complex elaborations. The dramatic appearance of ships, off the shores of Hawaii, created certain correspondences with ancient belief which resonated 'mythically' with eighteenth century inhabitants of the island, causing them to receive English sea captain James Cook as their god 'Lono', returned to earth in keeping with a promise of seasonal regeneration⁽¹⁾. Myth guided the traditional Zuni (of the North-American southwest) toward the mysterious 'center' of their social and cultural existence⁽²⁾.

Closer to home, mythic structures underlie the peculiar Western devotion to 'progress', 'scientific objectivity', and the belief that complex phenomena have sources which are 'singular' and 'indivisible' (to anticipate a central theme in the pages which follow).

However, a fact takes our attention which has become a prominent sub-theme of our overall thesis. Mythic precepts, like manifestations of tabu (to which myth sometimes gives rise), remain typically unchallenged in the discourse of a community, binding many of its members to fixed patterns of action in the excitement (and tedium) of their lives. Though they provide the framework for much public discussion (as well as lavish opportunities for communal entertainment and story-telling), the main constituents of the assemblage in the particular instance -- i.e., the elements which might reveal their structural purpose and 'true meaning' -- rarely become available to popular scrutiny. Human community seems to squander its resources in response to directives the sources of which are hidden.

Such structures are explicitly ideological in meaning and social purpose, a fact which is generally ignored; even by historians and others whose business, it seems, should be to strip human conduct of some of its mystery, to examine what really goes on beneath the surface of the collective intent. It seems that the meaning of one's behavior, its rationale and ideological support-structure in the particular instance, is the last thing one cares to think about in a systematic fashion.

Myth -- good and bad...

It is the case, unfortunately, that the lack, at such a fundamental level of awareness, of a capacity for introspection renders the organism vulnerable to mechanisms which kick in by default, and which prove often to be most destructive: myth, in the long haul, may work against the interests of a population. It is prone to create a certain bizarreness in the manner in which the energies of a community are organized and developed. We seem determined to create structures which place our communities at risk, which endanger our very survival. History records a chronic leaning toward behaviors evolutionary biologists would normally term maladaptive, though (like much else) this aspect of human conduct receives little or no attention from scholars and others.⁽³⁾

Structures of mythic, if unknown, origin (and ideological content) caused hungry Tasmanians to ignore the nutritional resources of the sea, which surrounded them in abundance, though they ate the rare (and dwindling) land animals of their island habitat with relish.⁽⁴⁾ Myth caused pre-contact Easter Islanders to remove, down to the last tree, the forest canopy of their earthly paradise, bringing the economy of their small Polynesian community to ruin. This led them, in an apparent frenzy of mis-directed vengeance,⁽⁵⁾ to topple the stone monuments on which their devastated culture seemed to rest.⁽⁶⁾

With the emergence of modern farming (we shall argue in the following) myth, not hunger, has been the principal causative factor in the conversion of vast forests of the earth to fields for the production of 'mono-crops'.

It is the curse of evolutionary process that bad myth often performs well, or appears to perform well, in the short run! Hence its power to defeat potentially beneficial process. However, despite often abundant evidence of internal failure, the inclination of science is to blame the collapse of a population on outside influences, on uncongenial features of the attendant geology, or on abrupt changes in the weather; or on invasion by organisms which prey on its members, or which compete with them for the same resources; though such may be factors of secondary relevance at most in a population's decline and eventual extinction.

The myth of the violent male...

Myth tends to monopolize the spiritual imagination of a people, presenting itself often as religious dogma (to cite the most obvious example), as moral instruction from which the community is supposed to derive comfort; these teachings it struggles to heed despite considerable cost and inconvenience to the collective well-being. Myth may strive to undermine one's sense of belonging, or social connection, which includes, in the wide sense in which these terms ought to be understood, the organism's feeling for 'place', an attachment which is also deeply 'mythic' in origin (and normally beneficial in its long-term effects).

As functional substitutes for these positive affinities and affiliations, myth is often seen to erect surface edifices, the ultimate consequence of which may be a kind of usurpation of genuine political function and allegiance: 'flag', 'country', 'school', to select familiar examples from the collective experience of most moderns. Such structures tend to 'puff up' the imagination (Carl Jung called them 'inflating'); but they tend also to weaken and divide, which is their socially crippling effect.

Such perversions of traditional myth can make a wreckage of tested relationship. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson report an alarming incident, a fight which broke out between two young persons whose sense of personal loyalty (and collective identity) was expropriated and grotesquely transformed in the interest of school rivalry.

In 1960 three close friends from New York went to college in North Carolina on basketball scholarships. All three were first-rate players. They would be separated because two of them had chosen one college and the third another, but they were best buddies. They would still be in the same state. So the three knew they would keep up their old strong ties. What these young men didn't realize at the time, however, was that their two colleges, Duke and the University of North Carolina, maintained a bitter rivalry. Art Heyman went to Duke; Larry Brown and Doug Moe went to North Carolina. And the resulting competition broke up their friendship. By the time they played each other in a freshman game, they were not merely former friends, they were serious enemies. Moe spat at his erstwhile friend Heyman. And by next season, after Brown and Heyman bounced off each other during a game, they squared off in a fight so earnest it took ten police officers to pull them apart.⁽⁷⁾

In their discussion of the sources of the particular 'personal malfunction', Wrangham and Peterson make scant mention of the incendiary social context in which the violence took place, the crucial role played by the 'educational institutions' in whose interests the spirits of the three players were subverted and destroyed. As revealed in the title of their book (and in strict accord with the principles of neo-Darwinian analysis), Wrangham & Peterson see the problem of human violence in the 'innate propensities' of male individuals.

But their proposal is based on a serious misrepresentation. Despite the sly suggestion (revealed in the book's title) that human 'violence' is akin to and somehow explained by the nasty behavior of living 'apes', i.e., a group of animals presumed to be close to the human ancestral lineage, when the authors get down to the business at hand, we find that they limit their attention to only two species of that particular biological family: the chimps and gorillas whose supposedly brutish conduct they depend upon for the development and validation of their main thesis.

To that end they ignore, or treat as a side-issue, the peaceful social behavior of the bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, a species of 'ape' which is found in at least as close proximity to the human evolutionary line as their allegedly 'violent' cousins, an omission which surely has something to say about the mythic agenda of the authors themselves. (The fact that few people have even heard the word 'bonobo', a species known to science for seventy years [and studied in depth], says something about the effectiveness of a cultural tabu which proscribes the very mention of these closest of human kin.⁽⁸⁾)

By contrast, the view developed in the pages you have before you sees the behaviors of Brown and Heyman as the inevitable outcome of bad myth; though such behavior (which I shall consider maladaptive whether exhibited by chimps or their human relatives, by human males or by females, by institutions or individuals) has its roots, as does all mythic structure, in animal biology. (Let us not forget in the meantime: most myth -- good or bad, recognized or ignored -- exists to provide advantage to the sponsoring entities, whether these be individuals in some socially divided context or the community as a whole.)

An annex to neural processing...

Nonetheless, it may be more difficult with humans than perhaps with any other species on earth to say that we are the captives of specific mythic 'programs', the slaves to commands which are somehow 'hard-wired' in the consciousness of our species. The functions of memory and association, on which myth depends, have extended themselves, in the case of the modern human being, far beyond the physical limits of the brain itself and become linked to, and heavily dependent upon, that impressive annex to neural processing we call 'culture'.

Merlin Donald, in his book The Origins of the Modern Mind (1991), cites this curious adjunct to human cognition as the defining characteristic for the last of three evolutionary phases in the emergence of 'mind'. A consequence of the unusual arrangement which Donald calls our attention to is that myth, and the cognitive function it serves, can be significantly altered for good or bad; sometimes with bewildering speed, as humanity has experienced since the beginnings of industrialization in the eighteenth century -- indeed, since the beginnings of agriculture at the end of the last Ice Age. Culture must be viewed as a functional component of human cognitive process, yet one which permits rapid modification and change (wherein lies its special danger to the social well-being).

The ancestral state as present experience...

Mythic precepts provide an enduring framework in the organization of the collective disposition and will. They integrate and provide rationale for the 'why' and 'what' of shared routine. 'Myth' and 'will' emerge as closely related life functions. 'Myth' is revealed in the preference itself, while the presence of 'will' can be regarded as the desire and capacity of the organism to act upon that preference. Meanwhile, mythic preferences have their complementary 'opposites' in the things (ideas/feelings/objects/situations) we shun or regard as 'abominable'.

The structures which appear to urge us positively in a particular direction of thought, action, etc., seem to have their negative counterparts in the same or neighboring region of the cultural imagination. If these elements, too, are the building blocks of myth, then myth must be said to inform all action, negative as well as positive. And if the given example relates plausibly to what goes on in the 'real world', then the primitive clusters of meaning, which drive action in living organisms, are to be considered 'cross-structured' with respect to value. That is, they may be said to constitute a complex mix of diverse and sometimes contradictory preferences (as discussed more extensively in foregoing pages).

Thus it is no longer a simple question of doing what we prefer. Action now involves doing what we want to do despite the fact that the action entails a secondary negative value. I would suggest that severe incongruities in such juxtapositions of value have a tendency to present themselves with great frequency, and/or intensity, in moments of social or environmental crisis. They may provide an adaptive resource for a population of organisms threatened by collapse or severe disjuncture.

A world lost...

Myth provides the sole insight into the way a community of organisms 'thinks', into the quirks and idiosyncrasies which shape its construction of the world. Good or bad, maladaptive or ultimately beneficial, myth is the cumulative reflection of our evolutionary experience in its entirety: the summary of our collective interactions with the world.

Myth gives rise to 'mythology' (among other extensive structures) which is the metaphoric elaboration of its constituent elements on the material of the collective experience. The 'mythology' of a people often acquires a linear-narrative form, presenting itself typically as a kind of 'history', a chronology of events believed to constitute the collective 'past'. Though of great interest, and potentially of great value to science, such elaborated material is not the main focus of the present essay. Archaeologists and anthropologists, who place relatively greater value on fossils and the material record, do occasionally find surface mythology useful, but usually in desperation; or for confirmation of some position established on the basis of other evidence.

Meanwhile, the 'ideology' of a population of organisms, i.e. the primitive elements of preference which underlie all culture-formation, all mythology, all expression of feeling by the sentient organism tends to be ignored by science altogether. This substratum of 'feeling' may be what Steven Mithen, in his book The Prehistory of the Mind: the Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science, London; Thames and Hudson (1996), calls the 'inside' meanings of individual and collective action, a world which is often presumed 'lost' to science because of its remoteness from the locus of inquiry.

(Discussing the visual images of the art of the Upper Paleolithic, Steven Mithen says "Archaeologists are more likely to have success at reconstructing the 'outside' meanings of this art, rather than the 'inside' meanings which require access to the lost mythological world of the pre-historic mind..." [The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, London: Thames and Hudson (1996), p. 159.] Mithen's use of the opposition 'outside/inside' presumes a distinction, in the primitive construction of metaphor, between its 'literal', or everyday, meaning and the layered structure which encompasses a community's complex relation to the past. The matter is most intriguing. For a discussion of my own distinction between the 'external and internal perspective', an opposition which is similar to Mithen's though rather differently contextualized [and certainly different in its presumed social outcomes], see Part Two -- Chapter Six of the present writing.)

An evolutionary perspective...

It occurs to me that the essential elements of myth may derive their meaning from some period of dramatic adjustment in the developing history of a population; or, alternatively framed, from some moment of crisis in its collective biology. It seems to persist, moreover, in an interactive relation to these periods of biological intensity, or uncertainty, if that is what these were/are. This should be of some interest to those who investigate our prior biological states of mind. It would appear to offer us, scientist and poet alike, an opportunity to capture evolutionary process as present experience!

For myth is extensively manifest. It reaches into the hidden domain of the obscure past and seeks to explain its own origins. There it may alter the physical being of the organism in which it assumes residence, the very anatomy which is peculiar to its own experience, life functions, etc. It works change in the very structures which were/are its creator. Seen in this diffuse light, myth and the living organism appear co-evolved. Nor does evolution emerge as the mindless process Western science typically envisions.

The present essay seeks to build, in fact, on the contrary supposition: 'myth', arguably the most distinctive property of natural cognition, presides over both selection and maintenance of the particular evolutionary trajectory. Although the language may be my own, the philosophical territory should certainly be familiar to everyone. In the affirmed relation of 'mind' to the evolutionary 'history', and 'being', of the living organism we detect the abiding presence (and counsel) of Jean Babtiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck!

The stressed world of the simple cell...

Indeed, to the consternation of many in the scientific community the specter of this early 19th century French biologist was evoked a mere decade (or so) ago in work done at the Harvard School of Public Health. Microbiologist John Cairns reported that the simplest of bacterial cells have ways

(1) of evaluating the effects of stressful conditions on survival and

(2) 'choosing' mutations that will benefit them⁽⁹⁾.

Cairns' findings, and challenges to the interpretation he and his group have given them, have been reviewed by Tim Beardsley in "Evolution Evolving", Scientific American (September 1997), pp. 15, 18. Beardsley has pointed out that Darwin and certain aspects of Lamarckian thought are not necessarily in conflict. In line with this drift of thought, I should like to emphasize that the position taken in the present essay in no way opposes 'natural selection'. This powerful principle of evolutionary process can as usefully be seen operating on a 'mindful' as on a 'mindless' nature.

Mind and consciousness...

To be sure, the position adopted here seems complicated by the presumed existence of something which appears forever to resist definition and even verification -- i.e., the property of consciousness. A recent publication by Nobel laureate Francis Crick has addressed this question. Crick is among those troubled by the fact that researchers have devoted little attention to this elusive characteristic of living systems.⁽¹⁰⁾ His book is an introduction to an "astonishing hypothesis" -- namely, that the sum total of human consciousness, our

...joys, ...sorrows, ...memories, ...ambitions, ...sense of personal identity and free will, [is] in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules [emphasis added](p. 3).

But we soon discover that Crick's Astonishing Hypothesis is itself 'little more' than a review of experimental findings in the area of visual perception. He regards the study of vision as preliminary to an examination of 'consciousness' (an idea which, though it has the appearance, on the surface, of being simple-minded, is nonetheless provocative in ways I shall consider in a moment). Crick remains equivocal on the crucial question of whether animals other than humans possess conscious awareness. Empirical science has been bedeviled by this issue since the days of Descartes who, however, managed to avoid the problem altogether by considering non-human nature to be mindless and mechanical in its operation (and therefore wanting in real indications of conscious awareness). The more generous tendency, in the science of today, is to accept consciousness as a property peculiar to biologically advanced systems. In discussing the reptilian brain (ostensibly the old part of the human nervous system), Antonio Damasio asserts that one may

...conceptualize the response selections as an elementary form of decision-making, provided it is clear that it is not an aware self but a set of neural circuits that is doing the deciding. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York; 1994), p. 127.

Yet, there are many who do not share Damasio's apparent belief that the property of consciousness is exhibited by mammals as a group, as reasonable as it may seem on the surface. There are some who would believe Damasio goes too far. These would insist that consciousness, along with its companion feature 'intelligence', makes its debut appearance with modern humans; that conscious awareness is the "quirky invention" (in the inevitably up-beat and re-assuring language of biologist S.J. Gould) of mankind alone⁽¹¹⁾. (Gould's words have found a grateful audience. They are quoted approvingly by Christopher Stringer and Robin McKie (in African Exodus [1996], p. 19) who use his claim to promote their own notion of a singular origin for modern humanity.

I would like to remind readers that the folk wisdom of a much earlier age had no difficulty with the mysterious property of 'consciousness', attributing it (and, indeed, 'mind' itself) quite simply to nature in general. In this view -- some would call it 'primitive' -- conscious awareness was believed to run across the board. In my opinion this position -- the 'traditional' position if you will -- is the far better one philosophically, even (and especially) for the investigator of the present day. It enables us, scientists and poets alike, to view the totality of living nature beneath a single lens. Such a perspective tends to bring better consistency (and better conscience I would maintain) to our understanding of natural process.

Something about 'mind'...

Antonio Damasio sees the responses of brainless organisms as 'undeliberated', providing thus no evidence for the existence of 'mind':

Organisms with a body and no brain, but capable of movement..., preceded and then coexisted with organisms that have both body and brain... Not all actions commanded by a brain are caused by deliberation. On the contrary, it is a fair assumption that most so- called brain-caused actions being taken at this very moment in the world are not deliberated at all. They are simple responses of which a reflex is an example: a stimulus conveyed by one neuron leading another neuron to act... Some organisms have both behavior and cognition. Some have intelligent actions but no mind. No organism seems to have mind but no action. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York; 1994), pp. 89-90.

The only value, in my estimation, of specifically limited views of 'mind' is to set biologically 'advanced' organisms apart, mammals from reptiles, for example (as in the earlier quote from Damasio); or (in the thinking of socio-biologists, assorted evolutionary psychologists, and others) humans from everybody else.

One must inquire, of course, as one must in connection with any assertion of scientific theory or doctrine, whether this distinction serves structures other than myth and ideology. As much as I would like to accept Damasio's eminently reasonable presentation, the notion of 'mind', as a late development in neural biology, merely complicates our understanding of the being and behavior of the living organism, while providing very little in the way of explanatory benefit. Damasio's idea makes a distinction 'for the sake of a distinction'.

Myth -- 'mindless' or 'mindful'...

Be this as it may. If, in the evolutionary perspective, intelligent action can be presumed to precede the emergence of 'mind', then it should be no great theoretical hurdle to see this intelligent (if 'mindless') action as inspired by myth. The impression of paradox may simply underscore a thought which instantly presents itself for consideration: in human biology, as in the formation of culture, myth does appear, at times, to be 'mindless' in the utter obliviousness with which it is typically employed; and in the relentless manner in which it pursues its own purpose. Myth appears to depend, in the typical manifestation, precisely on that lack of 'deliberation' which characterizes reflexive actions of the most primitive kind! It is precisely the 'mindless' character of myth-inspired action which, in the evolutionary perspective, makes this phenomenon so beneficial (and, potentially, so deadly).

Myth in transition...

To bring the discussion to bear on the human evolutionary line and the emergence of human culture specifically: in some early phase in our progress as 'lower' primates -- i.e. as a special class of nocturnal creatures who appear to have inhabited the dark forests of the Eocene -- we seem to have chosen, progressively and collectively, to conduct certain of our affairs during that part of the day in which radiant energy from the sun illuminated the exposed surfaces of the earth⁽¹²⁾. Why this choice was made -- or why the daytime niche was suddenly opened to newcomers -- is a matter for further research or conjecture. Be that as it may, the daylight hours acquired value in association with specific actions. These actions, now newly motivated, acquired a particular mythic dimension. Functions performed during this favored period of the cycle grew, for us, in number and importance, taking in significant actions in addition to the gathering of food: courtship, mating, play, perhaps, activities which entered into complex positive relation, mytho-conceptually, with that time of day. Meanwhile the dark hours of the night became increasingly restricted, relatively speaking, to passive functions, in particular sleep and rest. The passive and the active, as important aspects of the collective disposition, became, in some diurnal mammals, thus functionally (and metaphorically) related to the experience of night and day, an association which persists in life process today and has various expressive modes and guises, all interesting.

The ascendancy of vision...

The selection of daylight hours, as the preferred setting for the performance of a growing assortment of functions, had major implications for the particular class of hominids, whom evolutionary process would select as our biological forebears, as for other descendants of these arboreal innovators. Through the use of new structures of the eye and brain, the so-called 'higher' primate learned to conceptualize⁽¹³⁾ an array of colors which our animal cousins, in the evolutionary isolation of the Island of Madagascar (to take an interesting example from the living record), continue to perceive as shades of grey and black. More fundamentally, however, the transition to diurnal food gathering amounted to an early stage in the ascendancy of vision itself to a position of dominance in the mammalian imagination (a topic I shall discuss again in Part II -- Chapter VI).

Those ancient representations of sensed relationships, whose perceptual intersections (or what presents itself to the choosy visual imagination as distinct 'objects') achieved identity through a combination of sensory inputs (taste, touch, sounds, smells, primarily), yielded by degrees to a reality which was largely visual in its delineation and imaginal reconstruction⁽¹⁴⁾. In the 'mind' of the experiencing and conceptualizing animal, images of diurnal clarity, but relative remoteness from the surface boundary of the perceiving individual's own body, began to suppress the complex (and somehow proximal) sensations of the night.

Meanwhile, the greater dependence on vision in the performance of ordinary functions led, one may assume, to growing discomfort in the performance of those same tasks at times when vision was obstructed or reduced. While still prized as the structural companion of rest and recovery (and limited discursive interaction perhaps), the dark night, in association with other communal undertakings, was increasingly approached with a touch of apprehension⁽¹⁵⁾. Deeply engraved in the region of our brain which knows nothing of the experiential world of a population of animals still to emerge on the evolutionary horizon (our hominid forebears), such primitive structures of attraction and fear, in complex assemblage, and cross-assemblage, with other experience, remain somehow imbedded in the consciousness of humans, still recoverable to the modern human imagination. Assemblages of this general type comprise the very foundations of myth. And the fact that they persist in the collective awareness of our species and kindred species (and this over immense stretches of time) gives us the valuable opportunity to examine evolutionary process, not as a set of inferences about the organism's 'past', but as existing phenomena.

A serial construction of reality...

For reasons having a strong basis in the cultural predispositions of the developing hominid, vision tends to concentrate on the particular object entering its field and to separate this sensed object from its background which, in the moment of the typical visual experience, is degraded. Vision is isolating. The favored object is grasped as existing independently of association. Vision strives to sever peripheral circumstances from the finished construction of the image. It does this through the exercise of focus (which, in late evolutionary process would acquire a strong cultural association with the human male, an important matter we shall reserve for later discussion), i.e. by moving the perceiving organism's attention away from objects which it regards, in the moment of experience, as somehow less important, in order to concentrate his/her attention on others. In other words, vision promotes the examination of the world in serial fashion -- i.e., one thing at a time. It seems likely that vision forms the basis for what many (if not most) humans, through the combined operation of innate structure and what sociologists call acculturation, come to experience as their 'objective reality'. It is not surprising that Francis Crick sees vision as the basis of consciousness. But what does inquiry gain through this revelation? The consciousness Crick speaks of is merely his consciousness, the vision-dominated consciousness of modern humans.

Simplifying, definitive, isolating...

To widen the perspective somewhat, consider briefly how the mind deals with certain pedestrian combinations of non-visual sensation. The smell and sound of the air, its movement on the face as one explores the surface of the ground beneath one's bare feet, to take a cluster of sensory inputs familiar to nearly everyone. Language has difficulty dealing with such complex information for reasons, I would submit, which have mostly to do with the 'cultural needs' the language capacity has evolved to meet⁽¹⁶⁾. (I shall attempt to address this difficult topic more fully in a later context.) The problem appears to be the following: these elements of disparate experience are not easily disengaged, individually, from the larger picture in which they present themselves. They appear to be inherently connected. Their primary meaning exists in their relationships to other objects, and to other events (motivated or not) in that important 'moment of experience'.

The smell of an approaching animal, to take a further example, is not easily separated from the multitude of ambient sensations which tend to accompany it. Nor does it share an identity with the animal itself, which the imagination regards as something distinct from its smell (however importantly it may be connected to its smell). To illustrate further the thing on my mind: the smell of an object can linger for a time after the object is no longer present. (We enter an empty room. Gus must have been here, we say to ourselves. Or we eat an orange and discover that the taste outlasts the tasted.) Not so with a visual image which is somehow bound, in normal human perception at least, to the object itself. (We leave a room. No trace, certainly no visual 'outline' of our presence, is left for the curious to contemplate, though the visual image of something once experienced may continue, for a time, to haunt our memories of events.)

Vision strives to close the relation between the object and its representation. Seemingly external to the organism in the way it is projected on the screen of the imagination (though not, of course, in the scientific understanding which places the image somewhere inside the brain), the image of the visually constructed object merges with its presumed referent in space. They appear as somehow inseparable. The visual image aspires thus to achieve the impossible. Its goal is to inhabit the same cognitive space as the object itself. In seeking to place its construction of the object 'out there', vision may provide the conceptual basis for the human objectification of experience. Vision turns complex metaphor, i.e., a perceived correspondence (or perceived identity of features) between disparate objects or events, into a simpler and decisively symbolic representation. The visual image, as symbol, is simplifying, definitive, alienating.

Smell, by contrast, is no usurper of place and identity. Though it stands apart from the rest of the world, it retains its power to connect. (For Proust, taste and smell were the senses which most powerfully evoked connection.) The smell of an object may be a clue to its location (and character), a basis for informed deduction in our assessment of its position (and standing) in the world, but olfactory input is by no means decisive in the sense in which the word was used above. We detect an odor in the air... and then look around. This is the sequence of physical maneuvers which, in the judgment of the brain (in its supervisory capacity), is proper to the workings of the human sensory apparatus. For humans, the behavior lacks 'marking'.

By immense contrast, dogs and other animals, for whom vision fails to dominate the sensory imagination, succeed in turning this anticipated sequence around. A dog is inclined to validate a visual finding with her nose! She catches sight of you, an action which is tentative for her species in that it merely raises a certain contingent possibility (which she finds attractive); but she rushes forward to smell your hands or face! Smell is where it's at!

Smell creates relationship, whereas vision (in human perception at least) tends to isolate. For humans, the action of seeing tends to be conclusive in itself. To say 'the sight of a deer does not represent the animal itself but is merely an indicator of its presence' (as one might intelligibly say about an animal's smell) might be construed, if grasped at all, as an obscure joke. In accordance with the rules we rely on to construct our preferred version of 'reality', the mere sighting of an object, or event, constitutes an adequate demonstration of its existence. 'Seeing is believing', we say with a conviction which arises from millions of years of evolutionary experience. With the visual confirmation of the object's existence the human senses normally rest their case.

The smell of an object, by contrast, is extensive and accommodating. The associative meaning it develops welcomes new sensory input (we 'look around'), its complex relation to the world being the primary content of its message. Smell is a good measure (in its intensity and purity) of the object's nearness to the perceiver; and, borne by the moving air, it is a rough indicator of the object's whereabouts. It may be the provider of much additional information besides -- an animal's sex, for example -- which is lost to modern humans who are trained by some mix of culture and biology to ignore inputs which vision tells us are peripheral. But the odor signifies the 'deer itself' only by reason of an extended association: i.e., through metaphor.

Vision and the denial of peripheral relation...

The visual symbol is, of course, the denial of metaphor. Though itself physiologically complex (relative to the vastly simpler physical structures associated with other modes of perception), vision tends to suppress the complex relationships which enter its field. 'Normal vision' breaks the world up into constituent elements which it then subjects individually to focused attention.

Helen Neville's research shows that when deaf persons 'sign' -- I am astonished by the implications of her finding -- the part of the brain normally associated with hearing takes over some of the function of the visual cortex! Signing makes extensive demands on peripheral awareness, in that signers focus 'exclusively' on the eyes of the other, not the hands. This suggests, remarkably, that the part of the brain which has been considered to have a mainly auditory 'purpose' may, in the evolutionary reality of the situation, have had a more general function: that is, to make sense of background structure which, as in the case of signing paradoxically, conveys the part of the message considered to be the most significant! In other words, in the case of the hearing individual this part of the brain may be merely adapted to audition, not specific to it. Neville is careful not to draw these conclusions herself, yet they seem implicit in her results.

Researcher William Calvin has suggested that the so-called 'language cortex' served likewise, at some early evolutionary stage, a more generalized function. He suggests that the part of the brain we associate with language may be concerned, more fundamentally, with the planning of novel sequences of various kinds, be these the anticipation of complex syntax and sentences or the type of complex (and instant) sequential planning which is involved in the hurling of projectiles! See Calvin's article "The Emergence of Intelligence" in Scientific American (October 1994).

It may be that language was a crucial accompanying factor in the ascendancy -- finally -- of vision to total dominance over other modes of perception. The simplification of experience, and the dissecting of experiential relationship, which language strives toward in its seemingly obsessive naming of objects in the physical universe (i.e. their linguistic isolation and symbolization⁽¹⁷⁾), appears, first and foremost, to be visually inspired. Frank Banta has observed (personal communication) that the vocabulary of smell and taste is relatively impoverished in Indoeuropean (and probably Pre-Indoeuropean) when we consider the astonishing richness of these languages in their representation of visual detail and in their capacity to make visually based lexical discriminations.⁽¹⁸⁾

A conceptual interlude...

Yesterday I started a fire in the bathhouse stove (a locus of 'spirit' in arctic cultures), access to which, in our particular instance, is from outside. The kindling was beginning, at long last, to burn with no assistance from me. Nevertheless, I chose not to abandon the emerging structure in this still fragile state. I was thus positioned beneath the extensive eaves of the small log building which, with its dovetail corner notches, constitutes the physical structure of our Finnish sauna (see Plate III).⁽¹⁹⁾ Kneeling, like some priest, before the cast iron framing of the open door, I stared for a while into the cold infinity of the firebox...

Plate III

But eventually I began to notice, in the foreground, the erratic behavior of a small flame: momentary hesitations followed by small bursts of confidence. I was attracted, as animals are wont to be, by the ceaseless variation of shape and color which perform for the senses, if we are attentive.

Some of this new fire approached a piece of cedar, timidly at first. Now radiating a little heat (which found its way, unexpectedly, to my arms, folded in front of me, and my face), the weak flame tested lightly the surface of the unfamiliar piece of wood, but found it still too cold. It shuddered and drew back. But then suddenly, though only for the briefest moment, it flared out on all sides, as new fire is wont to do... but then withdrew again, this time rather decisively. Or so it seemed.

For almost as quickly as it had vanished from sight the flame rose again to its former modest stature. Now encouraged, it began to grope its way across a surface which was more uneven, at once more stimulating and more congenial. Still hesitating, it managed to twist and wrap itself around knots and certain other irregularities, trying first this way, then that, venturing forward a bit, then receding -- seemingly unsure of its direction and physical agenda. For though capable of visual displays which instruct (and enormously entertain), it is the case, alas, that fire is blind.

Wood, for its part, has secluded enclaves which hold moisture and pitch, volatile substances of various kinds which comprise the distilled residue of its long experience on earth. This lies dormant in the cellular structure of the material, filling it with tension. Fire, in its blind groping, discovers these hidden deposits, awakens their 'spiritual essence', long forgotten by the world. The surface fiber of the material comes apart with sharp emissions, with no small amount of cracking and popping. For fire provides much more than visual display. It summons the full resources of nature and mind. Fire is a Gesamtkunstwerk which, at moments of climax, manages to engage all the senses. And in the particular case, though the scale was modest, the percussive effects were as only cedar can conjure them. Far more boisterous, with its coarse grain and brittle temper, than the dense hardwoods (which were my steady companions during many decades in the woods), this ancient material brings blind fire to life, but with a certain fury.

Meanwhile, there is the fragrance which never fails to overwhelm. Vaporous pitch floods the olfactory chambers of the head; mixing (in this case) its chemical magic with bursts of smoke from an apparent backdraft. A bad wind, maybe, or a still cold flu, which now belches the particulate matter (which it failed to suck through the roof) into my face. This was a trip, a processing of images which, in the fashion typical of lateral transference, was new but continuously familiar. (In the cross-structuring of metaphor which appears to have characterized the workings of the early human 'mind' the vaporization of a substance invariably produced its essence or spirit. Here etymology, chemistry, poetry all came together. Spirit was the companion of consciousness. It was, indeed, its progenitor. It informed conscious understanding, or mental awareness.⁽²⁰⁾)

A further compounding of images...

While the above perceptions were being assembled and recorded (without my particular 'awareness'), another part of my mind was focused on something quite different, something quite unrelated to the sensory experience described above (and my parallel ruminations). In point of fact, my ability to reconstruct the above, with a completeness which surprises even me, as I consider the whole thing from a position once again removed -- I sit now at my word-processor -- is due, remarkably, to this third sequence of events the details of which are not here recorded... the reader can fabricate a structure proper to his or her own experience (and may, in fact, have been doing precisely that while making his or her way through my text)... Viewed side-by-side, the images are remarkably at variance, yet we judge them to be somehow the same... the consequence, it appears, of some set of 'connections' established in that all-important 'moment of experience', that lonely place in space/time where the 'node-link' structures of the brain are activated. Dr. Crick may have found agreement with the 'romantics' on one crucial point! It is the nervous system which creates poetry on earth, not the 'mind'. It is the body, not the intellect, which shapes primal metaphor.

The details of the unrecorded sequence of parallel images -- the recent events which took my attention while the visual drama was unfolding -- are not especially relevant... the narrative, with its abundance of lateral adjacency, gets more than a little oblique, a bit too much for verbal recall. Present experience revisits the content of old structure... New meanings push themselves into existence. These take us by surprise and bring mental wanderings to a halt.

The expansion of the neocortex...

The capacity to assimilate diverse meaning -- i.e. to conceive superficially disparate moments of experience as the same in some salient respect (or salient combination of respects) -- is immense in humans, greater probabbly than in other species. Moreover, it constitutes the aspect of cognition most distinctly correlated with the phenomenal expansion of the human brain.

There is evidence for a relation between the expansion and subspecialization of the neocortex, and the complexity and unpredictability of environments with which such expansion permits individuals to cope. Antonio Damasio (1994), p. 127.

The developing hominid 'needed', it seems, the large chambers of the brain to hold the stupendous record of its assimilations; it needed adequate 'housing' for the complex structures we employ to compare, evaluate, and re-process a continuously expanding store of information. All this in the direct interest of coherence, to find connection between objects and events and establish, in this simple way, identity with a diverse world. It goes without saying that long-term memory, which Lumsden, Wilson, and others insist is the primary function of the neocortex,⁽²¹⁾ is a big deal with humans. But it is merely the vehicle by which all of the above is accomplished. Like other organisms, we use sensed features of the environment as mnemonic cues which facilitate orientation, which help us to pursue the varied interests of our personal and collective agenda, which enable us to visit (and revisit) locations and geographies we favor for a variety of reasons (and to avoid others). Such systems allow us to hide and retrieve our young; find, store, recover food (and other items); establish sexual (and other discursive) contacts.

Assimilation is the method we employ to make sense of a multi-faceted reality, a means we share with other forms of life. But to an extent unknown in other animals, who tend, relatively speaking, to be locked in fixed relations to given environments (and who often languish if placed in unfamiliar settings), the human being has an astonishing ability to create new identity in the face of new experience and new surroundings; to incorporate, into its conception and awareness of the 'self', the environment in which it newly finds itself. For it is not just a figure of speech to say that the material world, for the human being, is an 'extension of the mind'. External reality functions, for us, as the principal modeling factor in the 'way we think', in the way we construct and evaluate experience. This in addition to its obvious usefulness for the storage of important cultural information.

And if that world changes -- by our own effort or through the intervention of some external agency -- so naturally do we, or at least we attempt to do so. Thus is explained the rapidity of evolutionary process in the developing sapiens whose brain grew (in little more than a million years we are told), from six-hundred cubic centimeters to well over a thousand. The human preference is to affirm the broad features of new surroundings (however these are manifest), to establish mythic connections with these new opportunities for interaction, an array of predispositions other animals share with us moreover. It is in the nature, after all, of 'adaptation'. That is, the organism draws affirmed features of experience into assimilated relation to prior experience and proceeds to utilize these new composite images, with their clear implications of 'greater value', as the material for still further 'clustering' of experiential information which it then seeks to reproduce, successfully and unsuccessfully, in various external and internal ways. But the power to assimilate and to affirm (and to reproduce) is immense, in humans in particular, and remarkably extensive; we possess an astonishing ability to find connection in the ever changing conditions of our earthly existence, even when circumstances come upon us which are not of our own choosing, which are unfamiliar and take us by surprise.

So the human being, through its propensity to form new culture (and thus hasten the acquisition of new biological structure), must be seen as intervening directly in evolutionary process, but in a way which is special in its vast reach (as the neocortex itself is in its physical extent) and does really seem to set us apart from other living organisms, words which we nearly choke on for their presumption, but which may, in fact, have merit.

The 'cause' of it all...

From this rough appraisal of the adaptive scope (and potential) of the cognitive capacity of the emerging species follows a number of issues which need to be addressed. If the phenomenal expansion of the cortical structures of the hominid brain reflects a rapidly increasing capacity for assimilation of new experience (and its mythic 'alignment', or integration, with value) -- and is to be viewed thus as continuous adaptation and not simply 'run-away growth' -- then certain obvious questions arise: what unusual circumstances provided the opportunity for such an astonishing adaptation? And why do these appear to have been encountered by the human evolutionary line alone?

Clearly no single natural event -- no single change in climate, for example (or geology) -- could have driven such an extraordinary adaptation forward through hundreds of thousands of years, though such might have provided an initial impetus. To be sure, natural forces, which drastically alter weather patterns and the topography of a region, have potential evolutionary effects of great magnitude and consequence. The very emergence of the hominid line has been attributed, indirectly at least, to the geological forces which split equatorial Africa into a humid and densely forested center and western region, on the one hand, and a somewhat drier mixture of woodlands and limited 'savanna' in a much smaller eastern section on the other, setting the stage for a major division of higher primates into those who remained 'knuckle-walking', for the most part (as their descendants, the modern apes, continue to be still today), and those who began to exploit the relatively more open spaces between individual trees, and between mosaically distributed stands of forest vegetation, and to move about (some if not much of the time) on two legs. This structural adaptation, seen in causal relation to (and against) the background of the geological events associated with the creation of the Great Rift Valley (which separates much of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique from the rest of equatorial Africa), constitutes the initial episode in a development which some specialists have called the 'East Side Story': the evolutionary backdrop for our first appearance as bipedal 'hominids'⁽²²⁾.

At first consideration it might seem that these natural upheavals, and the resultant alteration of landscape (caused, essentially, by the movement apart of two major 'plates' in the earth's crust), were a direct factor not just in the isolation of the new hominids from their tree-dwelling primate cousins (and in their fuller adaptation to bi-pedal locomotion) but in the subsequent expansion of the brain. The latter adaptation, which would appear to have entailed the incremental acquisition of a stupendous assimilative capacity by the individual, certainly required exposure to a spectrum of sensory experience which was itself continuously shifting and expanding. Thus, the geological and meteorological perturbations (in this period of natural foment) might seem, at first glance, to have provided the necessary external impetus and driving energy for such a far-reaching physiological development in humans.

It is obvious, however, that the time-scale of geological change and the requisite conditions for selective adaptation (of an ongoing and incremental nature) were not well matched in this case. The former process was surely too slow, and significant events too widely spaced, for its effects on the developing consciousness of humans to have amounted to much. The climatic and topographical changes involved were imperceptible, as Lyle convinced us already in the first half of the nineteenth century, because they were spread out over many thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. The diversity of the natural landscape, which would have been necessary to stimulate the cortical expansion of our ancestral brain, could scarcely have been a palpable reality in the experience of our forebears as individuals, or even in the active memories of our communities (though these were, no doubt, becoming prodigious by any previous measure or standard).

It is far more likely that the pressures, which eventually placed our ancestors upon the evolutionary path in question, were largely internal to the organism. Driven by a new affirmation of mobility (supported by the complex physical equipment necessary to act upon such a preference) it seems likely that the human organism itself set the events in motion which would accomplish the physiological change which here concerns us. This it did, I postulate, by managing to widen the effective range of its experience. Making use of its 'newly developed' capacity for bi-pedal locomotion (and inspired anew by the mythic affirmation of mobility), the developing species sought to explore attractive openings in the mosaic landscape with their better prospects for unimpeded ground travel. The expanded geography, within which the emerging human came to move and function on a daily (and eventually seasonal) basis, provided the necessary external input for an expanding brain and consciousness.

The melding of genetic change with cultural history... drove the growth of the brain and the human intellect forward at a rate perhaps unprecedented for any organ in the history of life (Charles Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origins of Mind).

Researchers have claimed, moreover, that the higher latitudes encountered by the rapidly diffusing population (in especially its northern penetrations) would have disclosed a much greater diversity of animals and plants plus a wider range of geological structure. Larger patterns in the distribution and movement of water, always a central issue in animal community, were detected and made productive, in the developing capacity for recognition of detail which included the location of caves and rock shelters. It is likely, moreover, that a wider diversity of plants -- some edible, some not -- would have been encountered and dealt with, in one way or another, in accordance with human needs. Following others, whose work he cites, archaeologist Steven Mithen has suggested that, in Europe, the faunal remains from Pleistocene

...caves and open sites indicate very diverse animal communities. Among the herbivores were mammoth and woolly rhino, bison, deer and horse, reindeer, ibex and chamois. The carnivore element included species that today are only found in very different environments, such as cave bear, hyena, lion and wolf. In general the animal communities appear to have been substantially more diverse than any in the modern world.⁽²³⁾

I suspect, moreover, that an enhanced awareness of the properties of certain natural materials would have enabled our human forbears to invent the means to negotiate, in some efficient if uncomplicated fashion, the streams and rivers to which it was drawn for seasonal or semi-permanent settlement (all without tools essentially); and that the culture these individuals evolved would be significantly littoral in its conceptual inspiration and scope. This would have greatly enriched and compounded the store of images available to the individual sensibility. It must be remembered that homo erectus (in the form of Java Man) in whom the presumed cortical expansion was still in progress, one must assume⁽²⁴⁾, had found his and her way to the southeastern-most reaches of Eurasia by a million years ago at least! It is hard to believe that much (if not most) of the extensive diffusion of this genus out of northeastern Africa into the Far East (and Europe itself) did not occur at the water's edge⁽²⁵⁾.

My own suggestion is that homo erectus (and physical variants of the type) was far more inclined (and better equipped) to travel by water than the archaeological record unfortunately reveals. And, indeed, can be expected to reveal, given the perishable nature of the fibrous materials from which 'water craft' would, of necessity, have been assembled -- through 'manipulation', most likely, i.e., through tying and weaving and/or other methods of joinder which, though sophisticated and technically demanding no doubt, remain invisible in the archaeological record; given the fact, besides, that the shorelines which witnessed these early maritime-related activities became fully submerged at the end of the Pleistocene, along with any explanatory clues to their social context. The additional fact that a significant portion of the 'old world' was colonized by the time 'modern humans' made their initial appearance, makes it necessary, I believe, to posit a respectable level of technical accomplishment on the part of their evolutionary predecessors (though tools per se, whether of stone or less durable materials, may not have been a big deal in the cultural imagination, a question I will return to in another context).

Where maritime technology is concerned, we may assume two chronologically sequential levels of achievement; the first likely provided the means to colonize the extensive shoreline area of the old world (as a springboard, let us assume further, into the interior of Europe and Asia, accomplished likewise through use of water craft); whereas the second, as the archaeological record implies, was clearly sufficient to encourage extensive penetrations of the open sea. It is inconceivable to me that the level of technical sophistication needed to accomplish the latter could have been attained without the foundational experience of the former: the one being, in fact, prima facie evidence for the existence of the other.

We may assume further that this two-stage progression, in the evolving technical capabilities of humans, signifies the presence of two profoundly contrasting cultures, each with its own set of mythic affinities:⁽²⁶⁾ the first being essentially ripuarian and/or littoral in style and having a strong conceptual bonding to the closed environment of forest and woodland -- it should not be difficult to imagine the foregoing, because remnants of this culture have survived into modern times; the second of the two cultures being composed of individuals, anatomically modern specimens to a large (but probably not exclusive) extent, who were tempted by the infinite so to speak: willing to risk crossing the fifty miles, or so, of rolling sea which separated Mojokerto and Sangiran from the continent of Australia. The latter was the maritime equivalent (and precursor) of the Eurasian Culture of the Open which would explore, in the closing millennia of the Pleistocene, the widening corridor at glacier's edge. (These steppe- or plains-based communities would pursue their mythic purpose with the same level of fervor and commitment which led their cultural forebears out to sea. We shall discover that these two cultural formations are different only in the surface disparity of their preferred milieus. They issue from the same mytho-conceptual well-spring, the output of which has been prodigious in the experience of moderns.)

However, all this is not to say that the earlier ancestors of modern humans -- homo habilis > homo erectus > archaic homo sapiens (our rough approximation of the evolutionary sequence in question) -- were continuously 'on the move', and that the expansion of their brains was somehow the consequence of a newly adopted nomadic life-style -- that would come much, much later and would prove to have the interesting contrary effect, I believe, of greatly simplifying human experience (thus laying down additional foundational elements in the building of the Culture of the Open, alluded to at the end of the foregoing paragraph).

I mean merely that 'settled existence', for increasing numbers of the emerging genus, would begin to take place within a frame of reference which was appreciably expanded geographically and very much enriched conceptually. Still an animal of the forest fundamentally, still possessed of the capacity to interact with reciprocal benefit in the forest ecology, the emerging human found a context for relationship and community which embraced much more than the restricted environs of its origin; and would include, in time, the water's edge (and eventually the sea).⁽²⁷⁾ In this proposed scenario the increased diversity of landscape, and widened social and environmental exposures (which came about as the natural consequence of this greater abundance of stimuli), would have provided the necessary physical circumstances for the evolution of the complex mental process we begin to associate with modern human predecessors and the parallel expansion of their brains.

In short, a widening range (and increasing complexity) of experience was the driving mechanism in the progressive enlargement of the animal's brain. Variations on this explanation have appeared ubiquitously (if imperfectly) in the scientific literature, though typical versions tend to emphasize the social effect. In perusing this material we find ourselves, typically, in the exclusive universe of socio-biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and others who see our cognitive 'origins' in the narrow context of interpersonal relations. Nicholas Humphrey of the New School for Social Research has maintained

...that the main reason why humans have so much brainpower is to provide for social intelligence (See 'The New Brain: Nicholas Humphrey on the Neocortex,' www.feedmag.com.)

Humphrey's insight approaches, I believe, the accepted wisdom on this matter. He means, of course, discursive interactions with other members of the particular hominid group; to the exclusion of influences which enhanced interspecific discourse, and interactions with the environment proper, might have exerted on cognitive process in members of the human evolutionary line.

Therefore, I would broaden the scope of this acknowledged 'truism' of contemporary evolutionary biology and include, as probable foundational structure in the formation of 'social intelligence', all discourse in which the developing human may have found him or herself engaged. These would have encompassed discursive contacts with strangers (which evolutionary biologists invariably view as objective and hostile⁽²⁸⁾) as well as with kin. But they would include all interactions with nature, not just exchanges of humans with (and about) other humans. For in the perception of those whose brains were undergoing the extraordinary expansion we speak of, the entire world was suffused with 'soul', i.e., an innate capacity to know and to feel (see Part One -- Chapter One).

But evolutionary psychologists seem to be the last ones to recognize this astonishing capacity of human intelligence and 'mind'. So it is hardly surprising that these same specialists have difficulty with the cortical expansion in question, since an understanding of the latter depends entirely on an appreciation of the former, i.e., on a recognition of the fact that, in human cognition generally, the world is constructed on a social (or animist) model⁽²⁹⁾.

Psychology makes its contribution...

It may be useful, at this point, to explore work in progress on the nature and evolution of cognition in humans. Steven Mithen, whose Prehistory of the Mind was cited earlier, has revealed a detailed proposal which certainly deserves our attention. (It is, indeed, the main thesis of the interesting book in question.) Though not strictly a psychologist by training and previous academic experience, Mithen begins by summarizing current thinking on the architecture of the 'mind', with a view, notably, to establishing a theoretical base for the discussion of our 'origins' as a species.

And, to that end, he draws on his own extensive background as a professional archaeologist. Mithen has recognized, of course, that these two areas of research must be engaged in tandem. The archaeologist naturally holds the key to the material evidence and its interpretation; whereas the task falls to the professional psychologist, academic convention would appear to dictate (now that philosophy has become a scientific irrelevancy), to propose a general framework within which mind and cognition, these most intangible (if most distinctive) properties of human biology, can be thought to have evolved.

Seven in all...

Mithen reviews the early theories of Gerry Fodor, who proposed a division of mental process into (1) independently functioning 'input systems', the receivers and conveyers of sensory information (including language), and (2) what Fodor calls the 'central systems', the locus of cognition proper: i.e., 'reasoning', 'problem solving', the planning and execution of motor strategies, plus other outcomes of the human capacity to experience and to imagine. Noteworthy is the fact that Fodor sees the 'input systems' as 'incapsulated', i.e., they are supposed to lack access, individually, to information gathered by other 'input systems'.

Some theorists see the insularity of Fodor's 'input systems', an eminently reasonable premise within the province of its own designated boundaries, as the key to all cognitive functions. Howard Gardner has developed the concept of 'multiple intelligences' (seven in all), each based in a different region of the brain and each devoted to a distinct category of cognitive activity. Gardner reasons (correctly) that injury, or illness, is often selective in its impairment of brain function. Besides, individuals often show outstanding aptitudes in certain specific areas of thought -- music or math, for example -- and not in others⁽³⁰⁾.

Researchers, who have arrived more recently on the scene, bring this concept to bear on the question of human evolution. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby reason, metaphorically, that the mind is a 'Swiss army knife' consisting of a great number of highly specialized blades, or mental 'modules', each of which is 'content rich' and adapted to a particular human need. They argue that the human brain evolved under the selective pressures of Pleistocene environments and has remained adapted to the way of life these conditions decreed (which is probably incontestable). However, implicit in this view is the 'encapsulation' of the particular cognitive domain: that is, for the time during which the particular module is ostensibly engaged the mind is essentially unaware of the content of other modules. (In this arrangement the most distinctive characteristic in the workings of the mammalian 'imagination', the cognitive process referred to again and again in these pages as the 'cross-structuring of experience', has no place of residence.)

The modularity of mental process...

The 'content richness' of the innate capacity stands in theoretically pertinent contrast to what Noam Chomsky called the 'poverty of the stimulus'. And, indeed, the modular approach, which Cosmides and Tooby would eventually elaborate, owes nearly everything to Chomsky's original line of thought. It was his argument, we may recall, that children can not possibly learn the complex rules of grammar from the limited vocalizations of their parents and others. One must thus posit, for humans, the existence of a 'language acquisition device', or what Cosmides and Tooby would call a 'grammar acquisition module', a universal set of rules which is genetically fixed in the human brain. But there is much, much more to the matter as Cosmides and Tooby view it. In the words of Steven Mithen:

[They] generalize the 'poverty of stimulus' argument to all domains of life. How can a child learn the meaning of facial expressions, or the behavior of physical objects, or how to attribute beliefs and intentions to other people, unless that child was helped by content-rich mental modules dedicated to these tasks (Mithen, p. 44).

However, in assembling the platform from which their theory is launched, Cosmides and Tooby commit an error which Mithen wastes no time calling to our attention. As applied to modern human thought in particular, Mithen believes, their fundamental argument that specific types of problems need specific cognitive solutions is probably mistaken. Cosmides and Tooby hold that the reasoning needed to manage social relationships, to take the example which seems to bring the issue to a head, is qualitatively distinct from the modes of cognition required for manipulating nature and her products. For the extensive range of problems, which the natural environment introduces, something like a 'natural history module' appears to be needed. As summarized by Mithen,

... a girl choosing fruit using the same reasoning devices she uses for choosing a mate is likely to end up with severe stomach ache because she will choose unripe fruit -- fruit which seems to have good muscle tone (Mithen, p. 47).

Fixed alignment with value...

I should like to precede Steven Mithen's critical analysis with some observations of my own. We encounter thought at its humble worst when a girl, looking for something good to eat, must shift gears to avoid the confusion of conceptually overlapping categories. Something is wrong, at bottom, with a theory which assumes, mechanically, that the mundane reality of the situation the girl confronts is too much for her 'general intelligence' (which is incapable, apparently, of accessing directly the visual input of the cones which nature thoughtfully equipped her with to recognize fruit at its tastiest). There are no two ways about it: the mental process, by which such an assessment and understanding of the biological reality is arrived at, is as simple-minded as the thinking it is at pains to describe.

Besides, the approach is counter-intuitive in the extreme. It goes so against the grain of what we know and feel is the case. For it is an intuitively acknowledged characteristic of human perception (and cognition), that the world presents itself as a mixed bag. In its optimal functioning, the human imagination tends to avoid fixed alignments with value. Meaning is eminently cross-structured, a lucky circumstance, we have discovered, in millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. [[Firmness] = [good]] in certain favored combinations of features and [less good]] in others.

And, because rooted in the foundations of one's biology and culture, the human has no problem with experience in its disparate likenesses, though the precise constellation of mytho-conceptual elements is never exactly duplicated as the organism moves from one concrete situation to another. We seek common ground in our interaction with a supposedly 'divided' reality. We reach an accommodation with nature within the enabling framework of metaphor and the necessary confusion of categories which the latter brings to the resources of the human imagination (and which, in the last analysis, may be the functional 'purpose' of the neocortex). Human experience is/was rarely structured in low-grade observance of the systems of category (and exclusion) for which evolutionary psychologists evince partiality.

Additional evidence to the contrary...

The little which is known of modern hunter-gatherers (if the latter can be considered to offer clues to the thought processes of Pleistocene humanity -- and I believe they can) bears out abundantly the 'animist' hypothesis alluded to in the foregoing pages. In general (in the language, once again, of Steven Mithen)

...all modern hunter-gatherers appear to do precisely what [Cosmides and Tooby] say they should not do: they think of their natural world as if it were a social being. They do not use a different 'blade' for thinking about such different entities. (Mithen, p. 48.)

Mithen cites the findings of scientists who have lived with people

...[who follow] a traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle in tropical forests, such as the Mbuti of Zaire... all these groups share a common view of their environment: they conceive of the 'forest as parent', it is a 'giving environment, in the same way as one's close kin are giving'. Similarly the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic 'typically view their world as imbued with human qualities of will and purpose'. Modern hunter-gatherers do not live in landscapes composed merely of animals, plants, rocks and caves. Their landscapes are socially constructed. (Mithen, p. 47.)

And later in the same context:

The overwhelming impression from the descriptions of modern hunter-gatherers is that all domains of their lives are so intimately connected that the notion that they think about these with separate reasoning devices seems implausible (p. 49).

To make essentially the same point, Mithen appeals to the spontaneous reaction of children to forms of popular entertainment:

Now sit with children and watch cartoons on the television. Immediately one enters a world in which > every single rule which could have been imposed on their minds by evolution appears to be violated. You will see talking animals, objects that can change shape and come to life, people that can fly. This surreal world is understood effortlessly by young minds. How could this be if the evolutionary psychologists are correct and the child's mind is composed of content- rich mental modules, reflecting the structure of the real world? Surely, if that is the case, they should be confused, bewildered, terrified by their cartoons? (Mithen, p. 50)

Finally, Mithen draws our attention to what he feels is the strongest argument against the approach of the evolutionary psychologists:

... [they] make a very powerful argument that the mind should be like a Swiss army knife. It should be constituted by multiple, content-rich mental modules, each adapted to solve a specific problem faced by Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. One cannot fault the logic of their argument. I find it compelling. But as soon as we think about Cambridge dons, Australian Aborigines, or young children this idea seems almost absurd. For me it is the human passion for analogy and metaphor [emphasis added] which provides the greatest challenge to Cosmides and Tooby's view of the mind. Simply by being able to invoke the analogy that the mind is like a Swiss army knife, Leda Cosmides appears to be falsifying the claim that is being made (Mithen, p. 50).

A modest proposal...

Before continuing with Mithen's own specific proposals (which return, curiously, to the Swiss jack knife, though Mithen restricts application of the metaphor to pre-modern modes of cognition), allow me to wander a bit further on the evolutionary terrain from which all of this springs. An event as mysterious, to my way of thinking, as the cortical expansion itself is the fact that it ceased at the approximate time when it did. The archaeological record appears to indicate that increasing human encephalization came to an end in the late Pleistocene, as recently as fifty-thousand years ago, the time of the vaunted 'cultural explosion' and, some say, shortly following the appearance of modern language.

To be sure, a continuing selecting factor in the cessation of cortical expansion (and, indeed, its possible reversal) was likely the continuing difficulty bi-pedal females had giving birth to infants with large heads. (This had the evolutionary ramification, with us still today, that our brains are small at birth, in relation to the rest of our body, but continue to grow for a time thereafter at the same rate they did in their foetal state.⁽³¹⁾)

But I want to make an additional suggestion which may seem initially perverse: the same cluster of inchoate variables which induced (or, at least, worked in consort with) the cortical expansion originally⁽³²⁾, may have been the principal factors which brought it to a halt. These were, tentatively postulated, the emergence of modern language with its trenchant simplification of human experience; and, second, the growing importance of a material culture in human relationship and discourse. It should be obvious that with the adduction of these two possible causal factors we move the dialogue onto a plane which is most uncongenial to traditional inquiry, even hostile to certain of its primary assumptions. Let us explore some of the reasons for this extreme incompatibility. The sciences which study these questions assume, without debate of any kind⁽³³⁾, that language and material culture are positive adaptations in human evolution; and the growth of the brain is taken -- likewise without particular argument -- to require an up-beat explanation in the overall evolutionary account. In a set of meta-theoretical constraints, which science does not bother to articulate and defend yet nevertheless accepts, hook, line, and sinker, the features which account for our supposed 'success' as a species are the same as those responsible for our 'success' as individuals: our gift for gab and deception, our impressive ability to assemble material affirmation of our personal existence, our unsurpassed intelligence, our 'big brains'! These are the qualities of the human physiology and character which we employ when we pat ourselves on the collective back.

But an obvious problem lurks in these depictions of evolutionary 'progress'. If such features are truly adaptive, if they are to be considered evidence of 'success' in more than the short-term, then one surely has reason to anticipate that a wider area of the earth will receive benefit from their presence than that described by the mere surface boundary of the individual organism. The simple justification for so assuming is that the continued existence of the latter depends entirely on the state of things outside these surface boundaries. One must posit, in fact, an area of interest which is yet more encompassing than any simple set of specific social relationships. Material nature itself, the discursive milieu within which life ebbs and flows, would appear to be the entity principally affected: community in its largest sense. This raises an issue which should greatly agitate the conscience of science. Are we willing to attribute our 'success' as a species to the very features responsible for the severing of our natural dependencies and the simultaneous destruction of the human habitat? The blatancy of the contradiction should provide sufficient cause to re-think the whole question of evolutionary 'adaptation'.

What science is really about...

But if the expansion of the neocortex (and all the rest) turns out, as a simple matter of scientific fact, to be irrelevant as an indicator of evolutionary success, then why do we bother about its causes. More pertinently, why do we ask why it ceased?

The reason these questions are so important is that good answers may help us to identify, and to expose to the wider perception of the public, the business science is really about in the pursuance of what must be considered a 'quasi-religious' purpose and function. Good answers to these questions will point, I believe, to the path Western culture in general is pursuing, Western science (the only science, it seems, which is worth talking about in this day and age) being indentured to the latter. Thus the objective, which human reason would place at the top of a short list of objectives, is to re-visualize the evolutionary sciences themselves and their mytho-cultural objectives. As a first step in this heuristic endeavor let us continue on the perverse path our narrative struck in the above. Let us turn, just for this one time, some of our most cherished assumptions upside-down. Let us cast language and material culture in a socially mal-adaptive role!

Big brains, fragile culture...

Starting our brief review of these 'reactionary influences' with the latter, noteworthy is the fact that the expansion of the human capacity for memory and association, which had been necessary for the development and maintenance of myth (and a complex mythology eventually), began increasingly to depend upon structures located outside the brain; and as the material culture -- this external adjunct to cognitive process in the human being -- assumed forms which were increasingly permanent, the pressures on the brain itself were lessened accordingly. Put differently, with the emergence of a durable and highly elaborated expression of the collective mythology, the neocortex became functionally less active, and tended, perhaps, even to become diminished in its physical compass.⁽³⁴⁾

An inverse proportion does seem to exist, in this case, between the brain size of the population and the extent of its 'hard' dependencies, its devotion to tools, weapons, crafts, architecture, etc., items which seem to have served important mnemonic needs in the evolution of human cognition; and may, by reason of their emerging prominence in the cultures in question, have relieved the brain of some of its functional burden: namely, that pertaining to the need to assimilate, to store, and to summon to consciousness the complex detail of possibly distant events and relationships (and to re-assemble these from the vantage point of the collective).⁽³⁵⁾ (At this early moment in the evolution of language, reconstruction of the latter was, perhaps, tenseless, revealed moreover within a discursive framework which may have not yet known the 'objective reality' of the third person.) It is perhaps significant that Neanderthal individuals of Ice Age Eurasia, who are believed, as a group, to have possessed the least elaborated (and/or least permanent) material culture (and whose capacity for advanced linguistic expression has been considered minimal), seem to have won the brain race hands down!⁽³⁶⁾

The emergence of symbolic representation...

The erosive effects of language (or enhanced vocalization), on the size of the cortex, may be envisioned in a similar straightforward fashion: that is, the more rigid ordering of the practical rules of perception, which language helped institute and articulate through the extraordinary expansion of its lexical capability⁽³⁷⁾, had the inevitable effect of 'stream-lining' the influx of stimuli to human perceptions, thus stripping experience of much of its lateral complexity. I have in mind the eagerness of language to give 'objective' form to mere points of contact, in a universe of intrinsic relationships, and to bestow upon these isolated intersections a symbolic status. The upshot of what I have interpreted as a gross conceptual simplification is that language was able to mitigate significantly the pressures converging on the associative function of the brain.

So the first priority must be, at least, to consider the possibility that such occurred: that language and an elaborated material culture were the effective instruments by which this most recent phase of increasing encephalization in humans was brought to a close. Such may have been the productive factors in a comprehensive simplification of human experience. Together they may have presided over the transformation of human cognition from a complex system rooted largely in metaphor into one based on symbol. I believe many of the problems of the Upperpalaeolithic 'transition' -- the origins of art and religion among others -- may assume a quite different aspect when viewed in this light.

The cultural-psychological process I referred to in an earlier chapter as the 'objectification of experience' might, in some instances, have been termed its 'symbolization'. However, though brought together in their pursuit of a common mytho-cultural objective, these two aspects of modern human experience (and analysis) remain dissimilar in function. The former denotes the process by which the capacity 'to know', and 'to feel', is denied an entity existing in the reality adjacent to the experiencing organism. Whereas the latter reveals the process (one among many) by which an entity is isolated conceptually, as through its linguistic identification and 'naming', or through the operation of some similar instrument of social and experiential exclusion.

I would propose, as an addendum to the above, that the culture of Native Eurasians (among whom are to be counted the famous Neanderthals) was caught unawares; and would become, eventually, the casualty of the sweeping transformation described in the foregoing passages. Though probably integrated to a high degree (and secure in its own internal sense of relationship), the fragile culture of these supposedly 'besieged' individuals had not equipped them to deal with the adjustments the new mode of consciousness advocated and perhaps necessitated. (Nor were they likely prepared, linguistically [and thus cognitively], for the arrival of tense and the third person, two powerful additional instruments of social exclusion which now appeared, if not simultaneously, at least in tandem, at the horizon of human experience.)

A much later cultural development, but one which hinges on the above transformation of consciousness, is the emergence of socio-political hierarchy, a process (continuing through historical times into the present era) by which the complexity of lateral social relations is progressively jettisoned in favor of a principle of centralized authority. It is surely one of the more puzzling dispensations of the modern social sciences that the first indications of hierarchy in human social relations are advertised, invariably, as the first signs of social 'complexity'. Science, in the service of ideology, accomplishes an ingenious 'sleight-of-hand' by which the complex is rendered simple and the simple becomes complex. This mode of deception is rooted deeply in Western myth and will be elaborated variously as our chapter progresses.

The missing evidence...

There are major gaps, at this point, in the story I wish to relate. To blame, in part, is my own poor grasp of the relevant literature (and research), in the fields principally of archaeology and related disciplines. (It does pay, however, to remind ourselves that the latter, due to the nature of their primary materials, can hardly constitute more than a bridge to the study of human cognition. To accomplish this task in a thorough-going fashion, we need neurologists, psychologists, and probably poets and philosophers to boot.) Moreover, the evidence which comprises the cultural and biological record of human existence in the older Paleolithic, the time-frame in question, is spotty at best. In Europe, the cultural landscape of the earliest period is nearly devoid of interesting evidence, while the scanty material culture of the Mousterian (or Middle Period) -- a few flaked hand-axes, scrapers, ettc. -- is skimpy, to say the least, and associated (to make matters worse) with the lowly Neanderthals, mentioned above, whose primitive technology science has deplored for a hundred years. The skeletal remains of these denigrated individuals are believed, by some, to be sufficiently distinctive in certain features of anatomy (as the artifacts associated with these remains are assumed to be sufficiently 'backward') to warrant their summary exclusion from the human evolutionary line.

That Neanderthals might constitute one among several cultural-biological interfaces with 'modern humanity' is regarded as unacceptable by those who sing the praises of the human evolutionary experience to the popular media. Favored is a quite different reading of the situation which, though not exactly endorsed without reservation among the informed, continues to circulate widely in popular literature on the subject (and may, despite evidence to the contrary and the protests of many working scientists themselves, succeed in maintaining, and perhaps strengthening, its grip on the public imagination): the gist being that 'we' -- i.e., modern humans -- surpassed the Neanderthals with our 'superior technology'.

In the usual presentation, the cultural-technical 'explosion', which is supposed to have occurred in the transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic, was the handy-work of modern humans exclusively who were already well established in Europe by... here there is a certain vagueness in the typical presentation due to the fact that the evidence, as it emerges, does not support the favored construction of the period with its sharp divisions... by forty thousand years before the present, to recite one version of what could be termed the 'mythically correct' chronology. At which point the Neanderthals -- the sole previous inhabitants of the region -- seem to have removed themselves altogether from the surface of the earth (in thoughtful anticipation of the picture the modern evolutionary sciences would form of their demise)... a 'co-incidence' which the myth of modern human origins embraces as evidence of a confrontation -- some kind of physical (or at least cultural) altercation from which 'we' emerged as 'victors'. The scenario is classic in its neo-Darwinian juxtaposition of irreconcilable interests and energies.

But there were 'stragglers', a fact which has caused the evolutionary sciences some trouble. Taking refuge, so the mythic narrative continues, in the peripheral areas of its former habitat, a pitiful vestige of Neanderthal community managed to linger, for a time, at the fringes of meaningful culture, making do with the scanty resources a neglectful nature provided them with. Lacking the cognitive powers to evolve a sophisticated technology on their own, they fumbled around for a while in the backwater of human community, reduced, ignominiously, to 'imitating' the achievements of their intellectually superior cousins.

But the crowning indignity was to follow. The opportunity was denied them to upgrade their meager genetic endowment by interbreeding with those who were anatomically more fortunate. Science was able to 'prove', by means of an impressive new method of DNA analysis, that a biological barrier existed between 'us' and 'them'. (The year in which these breath-taking revelations came to the attention of the news media was 1997.⁽³⁸⁾) The new findings supported the position of those anthropologists who believed the unsurpassed cultural attainment of the modern human being was due to a strictly biological advantage. To these folks Neanderthals were an ill-fated side-branch in the evolutionary experience of hominids, by nature defective⁽³⁹⁾. The press trumpeted the good news to an anxious world: the Neanderthals were a species unto themselves, not yet fully human in their cognitive-behavioral capabilities! The world responded with a stupendous sigh of relief: it appeared the only connection between 'them' and 'us' was temporal-geographical!

But even that tenuous bond was viewed with suspicion. Perhaps the Neanderthals did not live in proximity to humans at all. Due to their unusual physical stature and unique adaptive responses to heat and cold, aridity, ambient moisture, etc., it was suggested that the two populations moved back and forth, in rhythmic oscillation, across the same terrain: always a safe distance from each other, never really touching.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Perhaps the archaeological sites of the Near East, which seemed to imply an intermingling of physically different individuals, were mere 'palimpsests'!⁽⁴¹⁾

Cohesion and continuity...

But let us jump forward (if only for a moment) to examine the material which seems to throw every theory about the Upper Palaeolithic into confusion and doubt. Consider, by way of dramatic contrast with the primitive tool-making of 'native Eurasians',⁽⁴²⁾ the spectacular exhibition of cultural sophistication on the part of a people presumed, without hesitation, to be the 'newcomers'. I refer here to the cave paintings at Lascaux, Alta Mira, Chauvet and elsewhere. These demonstrations of graphic prowess appear to have spanned at least eighteen to twenty thousand years, if dates established for the age of the materials discovered a few years ago at Ardeche continue to be regarded as valid. It may be helpful to consider this remarkable continuity beside certain major developments in the human chronology. The culture responsible for the demonstration of intellectual competence we see here, appears to have endured five or six times longer than the time elapsed since the invention of writing (and the first busy indications of a civilized style in human social organization), three times as long as the total amount of time which has passed since the beginnings of agriculture.

It is astonishing that these wall paintings and engravings, the consummate artistry of which is unequaled in human culture before the Italian Renaissance, have come down to us in such a high state of preservation. Not, apparently, through the intent of the artists themselves but because of the serendipitous circumstances of their chosen locations. The paintings, in the vein somewhat of 'performance art' (a topic I shall review in later portions of this chapter), appear to have had merely a temporary function. The sites appear not to have been much used, or re-visited, by members of the community upon completion of the work, although later generations seemed to have found their way, intentionally or by chance, into these unlighted interior spaces and seem to have inspected (and perhaps enjoyed) the graphic treasures they concealed.

Yet few traces remain of the 'practical' (and no doubt complex) everyday lives of these Ice Age artists. Their domestic culture, in whatever that may have consisted, was apparently as fragile as the communities themselves were enduring. The stylistic homogeneity of this material, executed by many different artists over perhaps a hundred generations, demonstrates a degree of cultural continuity which defeats the imagination of moderns, living, as we do, at such a late stage in the experience of our species, a time when rapid change, dislocation, and social and environmental simplification (working in consort with deep alienation) have so distorted the collective perspective that these adverse effects are seen not as the pathological manifestations they surely are; but are accepted as biological 'givens', even attributed to our 'innate resourcefulness'. The 'biologically favored' organism has its unique 'adaptive ingenuity' to thank for all this.

Illusions and delusions...

In the second week of January 2001, paleoanatomist Leslie Aiello was interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corporation on the topic of brain size and human social organization:

We know that in primates with complicated social organizations, they have large brain sizes. In humans you have a rapid increase in brain size about two million years ago. Then nothing happens for at least 1.5 million years. About a half million years ago the brain begins to increase very rapidly. We think that this recent increase in brain size has everything to do with the evolution of human language [emphasis added] (BBC ONLINE, Friday 12^th of January 2001).

I have provided emphasis in the above to language which, though informal in style (and perhaps not carefully deliberated), reveals the influence of the prevailing mythology on the science Professor Aiello practices and reports on. Though frequently (perhaps usually) inclusive in function, the use of the first person plural (we know... we think...) constitutes, in the special case of the above, an appeal to the authority of a priestly class from which the second person -- the interviewer-listener -- is excluded to all intents and purposes. Despite its casual surface mien the language is imperious and seeks to convey the idea that 'science', the first person of the immediate discourse, is not to be questioned. (However, the appeal to a higher authority may be disingenuous in this case in that the speaking entity has the edge of her own axe to polish: hers, it turns out, is the research these important conclusions are based on. The seminal material in question is Leslie C. Aiello and R. I. M. Dunbar: "Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language," Current Anthropology, Volume 34, Number 2, April 1993, pp. 184-194.)

One of the results alluded to in the quoted passage is the finding that the denser social groupings of developing humanity required, for reasons of time limitations mainly and 'efficiency' of communication, more elaborate mechanisms than the simple body contacts which characterized discursive interactions among the lower primates who were our ancestors. Thus, the emergence of gesture and enhanced vocalization (eventually language) as functional substitutes for physical grooming. We thank Professor Aiello and her colleague for bringing this possible coincidence of evolutionary factors to our attention. Their observations have merit.

However, more is revealed in her words than may be immediately evident. Aiello says that the brainy ones in the world of primates are those with social organizations which are 'complicated'. Behind the surface aura of statistical rigor and method a subtle transference has been effected which has, in fact, little going for it in the way of evidentiary support and justification. (It is, we shall discover, only one among many slippery gambits in the extensive repertory of the evolutionary scientist.) Quietly, and hidden perhaps from the investigators themselves, the notion of 'complexity', as a characterization for a more or less elaborated set of social interactions, takes up a parallel residence alongside the concept of the 'density' of population in a given community and, in fact, tends to replace it in the uncritical imagination, as though the one were the philosophical equivalent of the other. (Aiello's use of the mild pejorative 'complicated' in place of the semantically neutral form 'complex' is, perhaps, a whimsical appeal to popular prejudice which has a kind of war going against the complex reality of natural organization.)

In effect, the social group which is statistically 'numerous' becomes structurally 'complex'. According to this construction, the life of the 'farmer' (or rural 'forager') is simple and 'uncomplicated' while the social interactions of a large city (or prison) are, by contrast, 'rich' and 'varied'.

Now the problem seems to be that the assumption of such an equivalency may be defensible to a certain point in the sequence of events which comprise the actual evolutionary trajectory... but only to that point. In a truly egalitarian social milieu, in which significant functions and relations are laterally extensive, larger numbers will inevitably entail a greater complexity of social texture; so that the quantitative indicator, in the absence of further complicating properties, will correctly imply the presence of the qualitative element in question.

However, at some point all this appears to change. At that point -- the precise moment in which this occurs is a matter for further research and/or speculation -- larger numbers will require the simplification and extensive overhaul of the social apparatus; with the result that the actual 'size' of the group can no longer be considered a good indicator of its level of social complexity and integration. Evidently this state of social re-arrangement (and rectification) is what Aiello and Dunbar have in mind when they write that when groups exceed a particular size it

...becomes increasingly difficult to co-ordinate their members' behaviour through personal contacts alone. At this point they can no longer be egalitarian in their organization but must increasingly develop stratification involving specialized roles relating to social control (1993, p 185).⁽⁴³⁾

However, despite the apparent cogency of the insight, Aiello and colleague have difficulty relating it to the other elements in their tripartite claim regarding human cognitive development: that is, to the matter of increasing encephalization, on the one hand, and to the emergence of complex language on the other (which has a physiological dimension, science reminds us, which is unique to its specific mode of production). Aiello and company would much prefer to consider these matters -- increasing social 'complexity', the emergence of modern language (in association with the elaboration of a material culture), the physiological matter of human brain enlargement -- to be connected aspects of a single evolutionary thrust. (Indeed their theory would appear to require that these be viewed as chronologically integrated events.) However, the brain sizes which these investigators record appear not to jibe, chronologically, with what is otherwise revealed in the archaeological residue. Thus myth leads them to the age-old solution of the frustrated observer of nature: they alter the facts themselves.

The 'two bursts'...

Recall that Aiello (in the BBC interview) makes much of the alleged fact that a 'rapid expansion' of the brain took place at two widely spaced moments in human evolutionary history. Later theorists, who seem to follow Aiello and Dunbar themselves (though the first published reference to this idea seems hard to find), appear to have accepted the essentials of the observation, referring to these moments of 'rapid change' as 'two bursts' (or two major 'spurts'⁽⁴⁴⁾) of brain enlargement separated by over a million years of 'stasis'. It is perhaps correct to say that the conventional 'take' on the issue of human encephalization (and the resultant increase in cognitive capacity) envisions a development in two stages. Its philosophical raison d'etre, or 'explanatory purpose', in the contemporary discourse of the evolutionary sciences, seems obvious enough. The first of these alleged 'moments of rapid expansion' is to be associated, of course, with the emergence of stone technology. (In the absence of much else in the way of archaeological evidence, it does not hurt, reason would seem to dictate, to include here certain strictly behavioral 'improvements': enhanced vocalization, perhaps, and increasingly complex systems of gesture.) Naturally one assumes, this time with no hesitation whatsoever, that the second 'burst' in human brain enlargement is connected to the appearance of 'symbolic language' and its numerous complex ramifications (among which may be nothing less than the extensive elaboration of a material culture).

Meanwhile, the period of 'stasis', in the opinion of many of these same palaeontologists, would seem to be that boring time in hominid evolution when "nothing happens" with respect to brain development (Leslie Aiello), when "...toolkits tended to involve the same essential ingredients seemingly being shuffled in restless, minor, directionless changes," in the words of Glynn Isaac⁽⁴⁵⁾. It has been said that whatever it is that humans were doing during this prolonged period they were doing it over and over again.

The data...

But let us look more closely at the facts themselves (and the lack) on which this jumble of observations and allegations would be based. (The whole thing is chronologically incoherent, we shall discover.)

The skulls for which Aiello and Dunbar (1993) have provided measurements are presumed to have belonged to individuals in (or rather close to) the human evolutionary line. They comprise, in all, five presumed genera or biological groupings: (1) the Australopithecines (including Australopithecus afarensis and africanus, and Australopithecus robustus and boisei); (2) Early Homo (including homo habilis and rudolfensis as well as homo erectus); (3) Archaic Homo Sapiens; (4) the famous Neanderthals of course; and finally (5) Early Modern Homo Sapiens, the group assumed to be most nearly antecedent to our own.

In the table which follows I shall give estimated brain sizes and dates for the skulls presumed to belong to each of these categories. If the established dates approximately reflect their actual time on earth the Australopithecines were the contemporaries of homo habilis for nearly two-hundred-thousand (200,000) years, the latter sharing nearly all of its three-hundred-and-ninety-thousand (390,000) year existence in Africa with homo erectus who would eventually spread out, the record indicates, beyond his and her native continental borders, maintaining a presence in the archaeological record until two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand (250,00) years ago, one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand (150,000) of which were spent as an evolutionary contemporary of archaic homo sapiens. The latter shows extensive overlap with the Neanderthals likewise who, in turn, are assumed to have shared their evolutionary chronology in part with early modern homo sapiens, and so it goes.

The skulls in question comprise a mere scattering of physical evidence, especially in the earlier periods where we discover an extensive period (from 2,500,000 to 1,890,000 years B.P.) which is entirely devoid of tokens and another period of nearly a million (1,000,000) years from which only four specimens emerge. (The latter lacuna in the record is the period from 1,700,000 to 800,000 years B.P.) These four specimens (three from homo erectus and one from homo habilis) would appear to comprise the sole basis for Aiello's claim that the period is uneventful. (Incredibly, one of these -- a homo erectus cranium from Africa -- shows a brain volume of 1,001,775, which is nearly within an acceptable range for modern human adults. See Aiello-Dunbar, 1993.)

To place these findings in perspective I have reproduced, in somewhat altered form, certain of the statistical data upon which Aiello's assertions are based (Table I and accompanying Graphic Illustrations). I have followed Aiello and Dunbar in their 1993 grouping of the skulls ignoring, for homo erectus, the geographic divisions into Africa, Java, and China which seem not to be immediately germane.

However, I have departed from (and, I believe, improved upon) their presentation of the data in two significant respects. I have computed average brain volumes for each of the eight groups of skulls and arranged them chronologically by mean estimated date, i.e., according to the mid-point between the lower and upper extremes in the estimated age of the individual skulls in each grouping. To facilitate comparison with modern humans I have averaged the mean values which Aiello-Dunbar give for males and females of the present and called this the Mean for Living Humans.

As a reminder that the samples are small (and the results thus rather less than reliable in some, if not most, instances) I have included, for each group of skulls, the number of specimens on which the calculations were based. In the column at the far right I have given, in the form of an absolute value, the amount of increase in brain volume for each grouping of skulls over the preceding grouping. These quasi-specific groupings are chronologically arranged according to average estimated date. Thus, the skulls of australopithicus africanus, which have a mean estimated date of 2.875 million years before the present, show an increase of 17,516 cubic millimeters over those of australopithicus afarensis with its mean date of 3.1 million years before the present.

Figure A

A graphic presentation of the data contained in column (3) in the above table.

What about the two 'bursts' in brain enlargement which Aiello sees connected to certain major cultural watersheds (and which others, including Mithen himself, have uncritically accepted as implicit in her data)? As I have already indicated, the two 'bursts' in brain development are not evident to ordinary perception and were, in fact, not even mentioned by Aiello and Dunbar in the article in which the measurements of the individual skulls were originally presented. They seem to have come out of the blue.

While there appears to have been a 'rapid' increase in encephalization shortly after two million years ago, which coincides with the effects of the glacial expansion at the poles (a probable causal irritant in the adaptive process we are considering), there is nothing to indicate that brain size became stable for a significant period of time... and that it began, at the end of this prolonged phase (in which 'nothing happens'), to increase once again at an extraordinary rate.

In other words, the 'two bursts', which Aiello and others discern in the data, would seem to arise from the imagination of the scientists themselves. In the pages which follow I shall attempt a more complete exploratory examination of the mythic background against which issues of this kind must be approached. But let me first affirm one or two obvious points: there is, in fact, a 'burst' in brain enlargement -- not two but one. Almost anything of general significance one may say about our evolutionary experience in its entirety is linked, somehow, to the explosive increase in encephalization which characterized the emergence of our species in Ice-Age times. No-one, outside a motley contingent of Christian 'creationists' (who reject the facts of evolution out-of-hand), would question that this took place. The rate of the increase, on the anticipated time-scale of evolutionary process, was dramatic. Few would deny, moreover, that this 'burst' in brain size was the physical correlate of a prodigiously expanding cognitive capacity, whatever its exact nature and cultural effects.

Figure B

A graphic presentation of the data contained in column (4) in the above table.

Column #4, which plots the increases from one grouping to the other, is instructive, if only for the fact that it highlights the probable cultural context within which the 'greatest increase' in encephalization appears to have occurred. This transpired not in association with some known technical innovation, or major 'advance' in the production of an enduring material culture, but at the time when the species undertook the most remarkable of all hominid ventures to that point: its expansion beyond the boundaries of the ancestral homeland (and subsequent colonization of much of Africa and half the continent of Eurasia)!

This event was likely the historical mile-marker for an extraordinary expansion of social experience. It takes no bold leap of the imagination to see this immense period of human geographic exploration, with its inevitable widening of the discursive compass (in the generous sense in which such terms are employed in the pages of this document), as sufficient experiential grounding for a dramatic change in hominid encephalization.

Yet it appears most distressing to interpretive paleontologists and evolutionary biologists (from Glynn Isaac on) that the widening of the geographic borders of human existence (which the brain increase appears to accompany) took place in association with no conspicuous signs of cultural-technical advance. Erectus seems to have accomplished its remarkable adaptation to the earth's diverse climates and topographies with no more than the simplest of stone tools, at best the primitive 'hand-axes' he/she inherited from his/her humble predecessor homo habilis. In the Far East, this extraordinary probing of new terrain and parallel internal exploration of new consciousness (inevitably a reflection of what transpires in the relation of the organism to the physical landsca