Early Humans and their Fantastic Art Help Us Understand the Rise of Human Consciousness

 

The Mind In the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art – David Lewis-Williams (2002)

 

            Yet again, my employment and its proximity to amazing books yields delicious fruit.  As a sojourner into the mind and an avid reader of books studying and exploring consciousness, I am always on the look-out for seminal works in this field.  This book is one such tome.  Reading countless references to it in other works spurred me to keep a mental note, should I ever come across this book at a bookstore of library.  I was ecstatic when I saw The Mind in The Cave while perusing the shelves at my workplace.

            I first became fascinated with prehistoric art as an art and art history student.  The images ancient humans drew, painted and etched into the walls of caves are amazing and as beautiful as anything created by us in the past thousand years.  Checking out books on the art found in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet opened my mind to the vast stretches of pre-history lost to us, and to the inherent artistic sensibilities and beautiful works of our ancient brethren.

            While the actual images and artworks created by early humans are indeed beautiful and moving, David Lewis-Williams’ focus is not on them.  Instead, the author seeks to use these early artworks to explore the how they detail the rise of what we term human consciousness.  By a careful, deliberate, and wide-ranging analysis, Lewis-Williams weaves together the story of how modern humans, Homo sapiens, developed our specific mind/consciousness, and how it differed from our nearest ancestor, Homo neanderthalensis, who co-existed with Homo sapiens for quite some time in what is now Western Europe.

            It may be hard to imagine but the uproar caused by the discovery of ancient human artworks in caves was virulent, and for a time, it stifled the proper scientific and art historical study of the cave art.  In a world where people blindly believed what con-artist priests told them, the idea that the earth was older than 6,000 years old was seen as a blasphemy of the highest order.  Everyone “knew” that god created the world, and everything on it, very recently.  They “knew” this because it was told to them as irrefutable, divinely-inspired fact.  To think this was around one hundred years ago, after Isaac Newton, Galileo and Darwin, baffles me.  The human drive to remain ignorant and accept the simplest explanation, regardless of evidence or counter-evidence, drives me insane.  It took decades for anyone to take the primitive art seriously, for, much like in today’s world, you always have idiots and the willfully ignorant railing against evidence of deep time such as fossils, claiming them to be placed in the earth by their exceedingly stupid and malevolent god to “trick” us and to “test” our faith.  What a hopeless well of stupidity.

            David Lewis-Williams describes the many ways this knowledge was resisted and ignored.  Not only did people think the artwork found in the caves could not be as old as it seemed, but they also did not wish to allow that ancient man was the equal of modern man.  Humans have an innate need to self-aggrandize, and to consider the present day to be a pinnacle of sorts.  Many people still think this way.  They truly believe that the entirety of existence, the billions of years-old Cosmos, and the near infinite expanse of galaxies around us, was created by a god whose sole purpose in doing so was forging the human race in its image. 

Another obstacle was that humans always sought a superficial understanding of things, leaving them mostly ignorant.  It is in this way that many humans at the time, and even today, inferred that what Darwin posited when he proposed Natural Selection as the means by which life evolves on Earth was that us humans are the pinnacle of evolution, that the billions of years of preparation and shifting forms of life were all in anticipation of the masterpiece that is the human race.  This is as asinine, destructive, and egotistical an idea as any created by the human race.  It is the sole basis for much of the entrenched racism found in the world, for the ignorant and self-proud racists obviously put themselves at the top of creation, closest to god, while everyone else was “obviously” beneath them.  Seemingly sensible people would expound on how the “natural order” of things meant that anyone not of pale skin was closer to the animals than to divinity.  Even in a document created by enlightened minds, such as the US Constitution, the value of a non-white male was seen as 3/5 of what a white male was.  Systematic and entrenched racism spoils much of scientific discovery and human advancement.

            Having discussed the topic at length, and how the ignorance was overcome, the author explores the differences between the artwork created by Homo neanderthalensis and that created by Homo sapiens, and how this shines a light on the rise of human consciousness.  Using the data gathered by archeologists and anthropologists, Lewis-Williams differentiates between Neanderthal and Human consciousness in a very clear manner.  While the debate concerning whether consciousness is an inherent part of life still rages, it is plain to most humans that the living creatures around us exhibit self-awareness of a sort, and awareness of their environment.  It is clear that other animals plan, strategize, and experience a wide range of emotions, just like humans do.  What is also clear from neurological and neuropathological studies is that the other consciousnesses around us lack something we humans all share.  This is the ability to “see” ourselves in a detached manner, to self-analyze, and to understand that the current moment will, if certain actions are made, lead to specific outcomes in the future.  One of the key pieces of evidence for this is that for over three hundred thousand years, Neanderthals thrived without agriculture.  The sowing, care, and harvest of plants for food and other uses requires the ability to step outside of the immediate moment, and posit a future that exists solely in the imagination.  The seasons must be considered.  The appropriate soil and needs of the crop must be noted and remembered.  This is a purely human characteristic, something lacking in the neanderthal record.  There are very few Neanderthal burials found, and they are rudimentary.  Quite a big difference from the elaborate, and ritualized human burials of early man.  Lewis-Williams posits that early man, able to step outside of his immediate mind-state to experience all the higher-consciousness effects we take for granted, began to understand that life is temporary, that the world existed before, and will continue after, we die.  Neanderthal man did not have this capability, which seems to arise from our specific neuronal structure. 

            Even in the relatively short period where Neanderthal and Homo sapiens lived alongside each other in what is now Europe, a period lasting over 20 thousand years at least, it is evident that Neanderthals did not understand their Homo sapiens neighbors.  Interbreeding happened, as is now evident by the genetic testing showing that most European people have between 1-4% neanderthal DNA in them, something that none of the human populations in Africa have.  What did not happen is the migration of ideas and knowledge.  Neanderthal tools never improved once they mingled with modern humans.  They may have seen the proto-agriculture and animal husbandry practiced by early humans, but they did not assimilate it.  They also would have seen the burial rituals of early Homo sapiens, but they never assimilated the concept.  The author’s claim is that the Neanderthal were physically unable to do so, their brain structure preventing the development of higher consciousness.

            This ability to create metaphor and symbolism led humans to explore deep, dangerous cave systems, and to leave behind the amazing artwork we are in awe of today.  While too many people try to explain and analyze these images through the prism of modern art and art theory, the author instead seeks to understand the mental state of the cave artists themselves.  In this way he explores why the art was made, and how the caves were used for ritual purposes.  One of the enlightening parts describes how the entrances of these caves, the areas that may still get some outdoor natural light, were used communally by ancient man, not as living sites or shelters, but for communal ritual purposes.  The excavation of these caves shows that while they were used repeatedly, they were never a place for habitation, apart from purely temporary use as emergency shelters.  This flies in the face of the accepted and ignorant idea of the “caveman” that suffuses modern thought.  Ancient Homo sapiens built homes and structures, just like modern humans do.  The caves were, from the start, living symbols of the cosmos, the womb of the Earth Mother, and were used by the shamans and shamanistic humans for specific ritual purposes.

            The author posits that the artwork created in these caves should be seen as the end result of the neuropsychological effects which arise in all humans through either trance, ritual, or psychoactive substances. This hypothesis fits the data we have, and avoids the pre-judged dogma that most archeologists and historians bring to the study of ancient man, which presupposes that the reasons ancient man created the artworks is of the same motivation as that of a modern human creating art.  The fallacy that the author counters forgets that the world we currently live in is an aggregate of the collective human experience, and that the making of images to a current human is filled with suggestion and analogy of which ancient man would have never conceived.  Lewis-Williams explains how the imagery, from dots, dashes, chevrons and lines, to the representations of animals, or animal “spirits,” all arise from the workings of our extremely complex neurological processes. 

For the most part, the individual artworks were created in private and remained private.  Very few humans actually ventured deep into the caves themselves, for they were and are fraught with danger.  In this manner, Lewis-Williams suggests that the creation of art was done by those either designated as or seeking to be, shamans.  The artwork was not on public view, and was never intended to be communicative.  The primitive art, consisting mainly of a specific group of deified animals (bears, bulls, ibex, horses) served the shaman’s purposes, and not the tribes.   Comparing the types of images created by our ancestors with the images seen by those who hallucinate due to mental illness, or the use of psychoactive substances, is where the author truly shines.

It is this skill to imagine form, and find meaning in such forms, that modern Homo sapiens acquired or developed, and which the hominids predating Homo sapiens (Homo neanderthalensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus) did not.  This innate ability we have, and which we cannot seem to find in any other creature, led us to create Art, and Language, the two greatest and most valuable developments leading to the modern world we all share.  The ability to think symbolically allows for anyone to enjoy art and literature, and for humans to pass on acquired knowledge and wisdom to the subsequent generations.  We all contain the inherent mental hardware which allows such thought, purely because of our shared humanity. The skill to imagine, to hold a thought for longer than the current moment, differentiates us from any preceding creatures, and make us unique.   I am so glad I found this book, and I cannot wait to explore more of our primate ancestry through the beautiful, exquisite artwork they created.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/mind-in-the-cave-consciousness-and-the-origins-of-art-softcover )