Did Neanderthals Pray? - Part 1
Sep 20th, 2008 | By Abhishek Bhatnagar | Category: FeatureControversies abound in the homo-fossil record. There are those that argue Homo floresiensis was a microcephalic Homo sapien, and there are those that argue that Homo rudolfensis does not even belong to the genus. We haven’t even agreed upon the chronology of our emigration from Africa, upon how it occurred, and why it occurred. But as the genetic record becomes clearer (thanks to new technologies), these questions have taken a back-seat, and arguably, much more interesting ones are being raised; for example, did Neanderthals have a religion?
I use Neanderthal here as a general term to refer to many of our uncles and aunts. The mystery is the evolution of culture. When did it evolve? Was it a sudden large mutation that brought about the change as many argue, or was it a slow and predictable process caused by multiple factors?
I’m going to try and convince you that it was a little of both. But first, for those who are not familiar, a very brief history of our descent is in order.
I’ll begin the story at Homo hablis (2.2 mya - 1.6 mya), the first non-Australopithecine relatives of ours. Some of these guys are believed to have left Africa about 2 million years ago to spread into Asia and Europe. Their encephalization is known to be about 53% of modern humans. Until recently it was believed that they were human ancestors, but a study published in 2007 presents a strong case to the contrary. It is now believed that they and Homo ergaster are descended from a common ancestor. Homo Ergaster (1.9 mya - 1.4 mya ) is the the first creature that looks similar to us. It stands almost completely upright, has a much more flat-jaw, and has an encephalization of about 70 - 72% that of humans. The very famous Turkana Boy is a specimen of this species. Nicknamed “working man”, H. Ergaster were skilled tool makers. H. Habilis had previously been using some basic flints, but Ergasters developed the very popular hand-axes and cleavers. In the latter part of their existence, those populations that emigrated early from Africa are referred to as Homo erectus. Again, as in every other step of the way, great controversy surrounded the classification of these beings. It is today generally agreed that Homo Erectus are not our ancestors. This idea is completely compliant with the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. So the Ergasters were eventually replaced by Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 mya - 0.4 mya). These creatures with an encephalization of 82% - 104% stood on average taller than modern humans. Three lines descend from the Ergasters - Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floreneisis, and Homo sapiens. H. floreneises, or the hobbits are not universally accepted to belong to this lineage. In fact and oddly enough, a Smithsonian Institute graphic completely excludes them from the Homo Family (perhaps it is simply outdated.)
Neanderthals were the accomplished creatures about whom we produce theories after theories. Like the latter Heidelbergensis, their cranial capacity was larger than ours, and they were physically bigger. They lived on this planet for about three times our current measure and showed a panoply of abilities we consider modern. Earlier Neanderthanls lived pretty slow and steady, but those that lived with us are thought to have borrowed our advanced tools, and used them by mimicking us. Whether or not they developed these tools themselves, (or perhaps we learned some things from them) the fact that they could use them as skillfully proves the presence of some key mental faculties. Homo Sapiens, making an appearance about 200,000 years ago, emigrated from Africa in two waves. There was the ancient lineage that left the motherland more than a 100,000 years ago, and there was the tribe from which all living men and women are descended that emigrated about 40,000 - 50,000 years ago (some believe that some of the aboriginal populations alive today are a mix of the new lineage and the old - I find this somewhat fanciful.) But then about 30,000 years ago, we find a burst of what we call culture: wall paintings in French Caves, religious buildings in Gobleke Tepe, sculptures and symbolic objects traveling through bands of tribes.
So what led to this sudden burst? There are theories in the air proposing the complete evolution of the modern mind as being very recent, about 10,000 - 15,000 yrs. But can that be right? Can it be that only in the last ~250 generations have we been selected for what allegedly differs us from Cro-Magnons? Perhaps these theories are a little short-sighted. We can plainly see that technological advancement is not linear, but exponential, so maybe our ancestors just had a slow start. The glaciation periods that shadowed most of the 190,000 years of their existence must have made long-distance traveling, communication, and general survival very difficult. So maybe their everyday problems did not involve developing faster virtual networks, and discovering the secrets of higgs fields, but instead finding fresh food, and maintaining social structure. And in all honesty, these are not the concerns of modern tribal societies either. If people that are genetically the same as us can live in such a radically “primitive” world, then what more proof do we need?
But we can’t just proceed on such a simple basis, we must have a look at other creatures alive today who are also of the same family. Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas, and other primates are all part of the much larger family that connects us. Ourselves and chimps had a common ancestor 6 million years ago. And chimps don’t have any culture, do they? Several researchers are studying just this. We have found that many of the “lesser apes” live in harsh hierarchical societies. And we have also seen that the “greater apes” can cognate many parts of our world. They might not be able to speak or pantomime effectively (also a matter of debate as discussed in an older post) but they have certainly convinced us not to overlook their abilities.
But before we address the question of culture/religion in their societies, we have to first agree that religion cannot exist without language. So let’s try to connect linguistic abilities in humans to their counterparts in the living natural world. Now there are waaaaay to many papers and studies that can be covered in this subject, so I’m going to try and stay modest, and mention only those two or three that I find the most striking.
But first it should be noted that vocalizing animals are not evidence of “speaking” animals. Lots of creatures (mammals/birds) are known to have multiple noises in their vocabulary, each meaning something different, and often further constructable. For example, the calls made by male putty-nosed monkeys in case of an aerial attack are different from those made in case of a ground attack. This is very important, but it has been found that creatures like this make these sounds universally. They make them in the absence of other members of their species; they learn these sounds not from their parents and surroundings (like we learn our words) but from genetically coded information. Their so called “words” are more like our audio expressions - laughing, screaming - and other things we do universally, things that do not differ culture by culture.
… this article continues here.
Last 5 posts by Abhishek Bhatnagar
- Where is the case for optimism? - December 29th, 2008
- Mutiny on a Chromosome - December 20th, 2008
- Conservation-ing - December 1st, 2008
- The life of a language - November 30th, 2008
- Five animal names that make you giggle - November 16th, 2008
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A factor to consider: the adoption of totalitarian agriculture by our cultural forebearers about 10,000 years ago. And by “our”, I’m not referring to the West, but really to just a few ticks of a percent less than the entirety of the current human population - East and West; Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and so on. I’m talking about the 99.7 or so percent of humanity that engages in totalitarian agriculture: agriculture which entails essentially playing God with nature. Essentially the complete superceding of hunting and gathering with growing your own crops and farming your meat. And furthermore, clearing out ecosystems for more crop and farm land, killing off all organisms that negatively affect agricultural yields and promoting the proliferation of anything that helps agricultural yields.
A book I read a few months ago by Daniel Quinn entitled “Ishmael” - which I highly recommend - paints a very interesting picture. One of the relevant parts of the picture to what you’re considering is that when our ancestors settled down in particular locations in order to cultivate particular regions (spreading continually, as populations increased and new agricultural opportunities were sought and discovered) they were able to do things like acquire surpluses of possessions, develop technologies, specialize labour, establish broader scale trade and so on. During the time of hunting and gathering, they couldn’t acquire surpluses, develop technology beyond stuff that could be easily transported, tribal population sizes were at the mercy of nature’s food provisions, etc. Settling down enabled the growth of populations, increasingly populous, distantly connected and complex social systems, labour specialization, and so on. Eventually came things like commerce and broader political systems. As networks spread, the spread of mythologies probably grew, with the mythologies held by subgroups with more wealth and power (and thus able to have more kids, control more resources, and outfight other groups and such) having a competitive advantage.
As I understand it, prior to the cultural revolution that was totalitarian agriculture, humanity was far more fluid. Far more mobile, existing in smaller groups, with many little cultures as opposed to fewer bigger ones.
The evolution of our major religions could very well have been a cultural outgrowth of the proliferation and global expansion of totalitarian agriculturists and the increased social networks (e.g., trade) and social structures (written communication to enable communication across larger more dispersed groups; money; economic and political systems such as agriculture moving out of the tribe and into the landplots owned by more wealthy ancestors, etc.).
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Ron- symbolic culture exists among contemporary hunter-gatherers and is almost certainly not borrowed in its entirety from settled neighbors. While your suggesting concerning the evolution of today’s major religions (I assume you mean the Abrahamic traditions and other “world” religions like Buddhism) warrants merit, this does not answer where religion comes from, only why certain religions expanded at the expense of other religions.
Most theories associate religion with language, and the debate over the sophistication of neanderthal communication is still pretty hotly contested. It is tempting to say that symbolic communication is crucial to the development of religion, but there are many possible ways that this could play out? Do primitive religions and language evolve in tandem, or does one lead the evolution of the other? As far as I know, there have been no observations of behavior that could be considered “religious” in the higher primates, even in our closest living ancestors.
We should remember that paleontology does not exist in isolation, and conclusions reached within that field also take into account conclusions reached by other fields, such as linguistics. While the human capacity for language is unique among the animal world, plenty of species communicate in a myriad of ways and some of this communication is more sophisticated than in other instances. There are actually 9 components to human language, and a breakdown of these traits across different species reveals that humans are the only living animals to possess all 9 but different combinations of these traits are observed in animals. One theory even posits the evolution of increasingly sophisticated pathways of neurological control over the limbic system. Obviously traits in a given population are never affected by only one selective factor. Evolution is always a tradeoff in cost and fitness, but it doesn’t stop there: fitness is a tradeoff between “Darwinian fitness” and reproductive fitness, etc.
Neanderthals buried their dead and it is possible that they developed symbolic material culture (for example by using pollen in burial sites). The major difference between us and them (particularly the “classic” neanderthals) seems to be a case of specialization in a particular niche. Neanderthals, as Abhishek points out, predated our species by about 400,000 years. During this time the were most successful exploiting a particular niche as big game hunters. For whatever reason- perhaps our direct ancestors were slightly more behaviorally diverse, perhaps they had access to new niches that the neanderthals did not, perhaps because they were smarter or maybe because they took more risks, these direct ancestors of Homo sapiens, when they spread (probably several times) out of Africa in waves of expansion, developed more variable subsistence economies.
In Europe and Asia, from around the time that the last neanderthals lived and leading up to what Ron refers to as totalitarian agriculture, there may have been another economic transition. Before the development of agriculture, populations of fully modern humans settled in valleys where they corralled and eventually domesticated animals. It is during this time that dogs were probably first kept as pets. This was the first time modern humans (formerly Hunter Gatherers) had access to a food surplus and hence time off. At this point, they had modern cognitive abilities and language, and probably had religious practices of the animistic or shamanistic variety. It is also probable, based on the widespread use of Venus figurines, that fertility was an essential component of their religious beliefs. Agriculture is not required for human beings to value fertility. Beliefs about fertility were probably present in the earliest religions of primitive hunter-gatherers, but the question remains whether Homo sapiens inherited the precedents for religion from near-human ancestors (and when this happened relative to the split between the lines leading to Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis [which some call Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, making neanderthals a particularly specialized subspecies of sapiens.])
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Ron, you’re very right about the unprecedented impact “totalitarian agriculture” (cool term) had on our species. Whether this was a good thing or a bad, is your opinion. But the point I was trying to explore was the evolution of the mental faculties that can handle what we call modern culture. Religion to me is nothing more than a way to shrink your community - to promote your genes over others (we have Christians, and then we have Baptists, and then we have Souther Baptists and on and on.) By setting taboos that separate you from other populations - such as no pork for the Muslims (to separate from the Romans), no beef for the Hindus (to separate from the Muslims), and literally millions of others - a community makes sure it’s kids marry in the same community. Undoubtedly, agriculture made certain communities more powerful that others, and eventually led to religious proselytization, but I’m certain religious beliefs go much more beyond that.
And that’s the real question, when and why did our brain reach the capacity to do all this!
“One theory even posits the evolution of increasingly sophisticated pathways of neurological control over the limbic system.”
That seems really really unlikely, though I should probably hear out the theory before making up my mind about it. But what you suggested is exactly what I want to find out Barry, the relation between to evolution of language and religion - what components of these might be in our living cousins. I don’t find it very plausible to say they evolved in tandem, though language must surely have helped set the rules tighter. I do find it plausible to say though that symbolic culture showed up before we did.
That’s what I’m doing right now, just gathering some of the articles/books I’ve read suggesting signs of language in living animals. I’ll post the second part when I’ve done that. In the meanwhile, check out Tecumseh Fitch’s web page and the link about the descending larynx is deer.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/
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“One theory even posits the evolution of increasingly sophisticated pathways of neurological control over the limbic system.”
“That seems really really unlikely, though I should probably hear out the theory before making up my mind about it.”
I read a couple papers on this being observed in chimpanzees when I took linguistics. Infants being pressured by their mothers to walk for themselves instead of being carried modified their calls and cries to get the response they wanted from their mothers: to be picked up and carried. But the ability of a chimp to (consciously?) modify its mode of communication is no where close to the level of symbolic communication that the first Homo religio population would have to master.
“I do find it plausible to say though that symbolic culture showed up before we did.”
That is possible but the lack of an adequate archeological record stands in the way. Also the question depends on what you mean by “modern humans,” and whether or not neanderthalensis is counted as a subspecies of modern humans. Species are to some degree arbitrary, since there was no point in, for example, the process of hominization when members of generation F sub1 couldn’t have bred successfully (incest aside) with members of the parent generation.
Obviously human populations were much more variable in the past (I use human to refer to all prehistoric hominids in this context) and our current fossil record does not represent the full extent of that variability across time.
Elephants have been discovered to bury their dead, and they are very social animals. When it comes to distinguishing different species of prehistoric hominins, australopithecines and apes, who speciated frequently in rapid bursts on more than one occassion, puts a researcher at a loss because of the problem of the species concept. Both species concepts, the biological and ecological concepts, are based on observations of contemporary animals, and then applied prehistorically. In human paleontology alone there is endless debate between lumpers and splitters, and as a student of the subject I tend toward the lumper’s side of the argument. Speciation really is a relative concept. I know that probably sounds like a radical thing but it’s a real problem for constructing lineages of prehistoric human ancestors. So even if it possible to pinpoint the time frame during which this capacity evolved for symbolic communication (and I think we can agree that the same faculties are essential for religious thought), there would still be intense and possibly irreconcilable debates between over which species it evolved in first. After all, office politics are not an exact science, and it would be idealistic and naive to suggest that scientists never act in their own interests in contradiction of overwhelming evidence. Paleontology is messy field. One of my professors actually calls human paleontology “The Academic Mafia” for this reason.
There are also limits to what we can know about human prehistory. For example, we can’t know everything about how the brain of a specimen was organized from its fossilized skull. Cranial capacity is variable within species, and though we can know the shape of the brain we can’t know much about its internal organization, which is a better indicator of intelligence than size alone. A basis for language in human evolution must include neuroscience.
Also, a language as sophisticated as any human language doesn’t necessarily have to be oral. It could be a sign language, and this is one of the oldest theories concerning neanderthal communication. Although a sign language can be structurally as sophisticated as a spoken language, there are practical considerations when one takes into account the constant eye-contact required to exchange information, whereas a spoken language confers obvious advantages in dangerous environments such as the ones that big game hunters like neanderthals would have faced.
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Barry and Abhishek, I’ll respond to a collection of points you made, hopefully in not too disorganized a fashion.
FIrstly, I’m well aware of the existence of symbolic culture in modern hunter-gatherer communities. But it appears that I did in fact address something that was not exactly what Ab had in mind. My bad.
Ab, a book I’d recommend is Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. The book is an attempt at explaining the cognitive and social underpinnings of religion. It talks about mythical beliefs from a memetic perspective, asking what sorts of ideas are most likely to be developed, remembered, correctly communicated, and spread. It also talks about the cultural development of major religions. One interesting thing that he said was that fundamentalism did not result from there being firm ideas initially codified thousands of years ago which some people held and hold onto rigorously. According to him, early on our major religions were not codified and were more fluid. Codification came somewhat later as a result of imitators providing similar religious products and insodoing taking away some of the power and sources of income of preceding religious service providers. Boyer essentially says that religious codification was in good part an act of branding and copyright making. *These* are the officially recognized churches of X. *These* are the churches where you can get real recognized religious services. Pay no attention to the imposters down the street. In fact, they are evil. Give us your allegiance and money. Follow our directions.
One of the common necessary substrates of both language and religions as we know them are capacity/proclivity of humanity to infer mindedness. According to Boyer and other cognitive scientists, this capacity to infer mindedness has overgeneralized to the point where we sometimes infer intelligence in nonhuman and, indeed, inanimate referents. Combine this with selective memory biases (e.g., confirmation bias, spurious correlation inferences) and mysterious earthly phenomena and you can get people postulating witches as explanations for illness, gods of thunder, and so on.
Regarding the tangential issue I took on in my first posting - i.e., the development of Big Religion (lol) - the factors I’ve discussed - 1) totalitarian agriculture, settling, population expansion and colonizing, trade and commerce and the development of long-term societies as opposed to small traveling bands of nomads; and 2) religious branding and demonizing of cultural/spiritual competitors (as they represent competition for loyalty, obedience and income) - seem to be plausible prominent factors. The unity of the development of totalitarian earth conquest philosophy and early judeo-christianity, if Daniel Quinn is correct, can’t be minimized.
According to Quinn, the story of the garden of eden was probably written not by early judeo-christians (or their forebearers), but by their victims. In his book “Ishmael”, Quinn paints a compelling picture wherein the eating from the tree of knowledge (which, as we all know represents attempting to take on the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of (the) God(s)), the exile from the garden and having to toil the fields was a metaphor for the advent of totalitarian agriculture. Quinn says that when our ancestors stopped living as hunter-gatherers and started totalitarian agriculture which involves deciding which species live and die, they left the garden (so it was self-exile) and by their own volition, began toiling the fields. The garden of eden was simply nature as it was in the particular region of the Middle East they were all in. It provided a sufficient amount of life resources (food, water, etc) for a certain number of humans, and it wasn’t all that difficult to procure these resources. Further, there was no real such thing as “work”, it was argued, because the amount of effort needed was much lower, it was done at times selected by the people and it was done simply as a part of day-to-day living, with far less of a work-leisure differentiation.
Relatedly, Quinn and some anthropologists argue (not uncontestly, however) that studies have suggested that the hunter-gatherers of the time may only have had to engage in hunting and gathering for about 2-3 hours a day 7 days a week, which is obviously far less time than people in our world work, be they in Canada, America, Korea (where I am now), China, India, Russia, Spain or Australia. This is relevant to Barry’s point about religion emerging because people finally had time for such developments after the development of agriculture.
According to Quinn, many of our Hobbesian views regarding the “prehistoric” world (i.e., the world before 10,000 years ago, when totalitarian agriculture culture began) such as that there was a persistent threat of famine, of secumbing to disease, or to being eaten by a bear are grossly exaggerated. Regarding being preyed upon by predators, Quinn says that while this did happen, it wasn’t something that was a huge problem for humanity. He said that predators tended to go after other species more so than humans because humans, with our abilities/tendencies to develop weapons and work in intelligent teams, represent relatively risky targets.
Regarding food availability, t’s basic ecology that an ecosystem can support a certain number of individuals of a given species. Populations will equilibriate at right around the ecosystem’s holding capacity. There will always be some famine because generally speaking, populations tend to approximate the holding capacity. Part of the mythology of Totalitarian Agriculture/Judeo-Christianity was that humans are special, that we should not be at the mercy of nature but rather nature should be at our mercy. And so we should strive to control nature and to conquer it and be fruitful and multiply. Through totalitarian agriculture, humans were able to increase yields dramatically which enabled/caused population expansion, which further motivated expanding colonization and manipulation of nature, which has often produced a number of unforeseen and deleterious consequences.
I’ll close by saying that I do not know that what is written above is true and, with the exception of the cognitive sciences, I am not highly educated in the areas just discussed. But I found the arguments to be worthy of consideration.
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“This is relevant to Barry’s point about religion emerging because people finally had time for such developments after the development of agriculture.”
Ron- you make some great points but I think you must have misinterpreted something I said. Yes, many hunter-gatherers have comparatively shorter workdays than agriculturalists, pastoralists or industrialists. Maybe I didn’t make it clear that when I mentioned the surplus of time (and food supply) I was talking about the birth of a leisure class (or at least the predeccessors of the leisure class- the priestly elites) and the infusion of wealth into religious practice. I think this is relevant to your consideration of the effects of totalitarian agriculture, but it is important to remember than hunting and gathering is a general term used to described varied lifestyles such as the simple HG of nomadic !Kung San or the complex HG of settled northwestern Native American populations who adapted their HG technology to exploit the rich resources of rivers and coasts (and had a very hierarchical society). I didn’t mean to suggest that agriculture predates religion, just that agriculture (and other more advanced modes than simple HG) opened the way for religions to become more complex, or to use the terminology you brought up, “codified.”
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“One theory even posits the evolution of increasingly sophisticated pathways of neurological control over the limbic system.”
<— I misspoke. I should have said neocortical. Sorry about the mistake.
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Lol that kind of makes more sense. Thanks for the correction!
But I do recall watching a Steven Pinker video on swearing, and in brief he mentions that “contations” of words are known to origin from the limbic system, wheras denotation comes from the regular parts. This is what makes something like turrets possible.
Anyway, I’ll post the rest of the article when I get back today…
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[...] This article is a continuation of the post located here. [...]
how did the talk bitch
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how did the freaking neandrathals talk u homo
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