Symbols in an early age

I have written before about Temple Grandin, an autistic animal behaviour expert who has used her condition to help explain the mental landscape of animals. She has noted how regular people can only with difficulty see the world around them – we do see the world, of course, but primarily through the prism of our expectations, our abstract ideas about the condition of our world – our internal mental world view. Animals see the world directly, without interference from any preconceptions they might develop about their environment. They can be put ill at ease by changes we manage mentally with ease. That is why your cat or dog can be put ill at ease by some big new piece of furniture in your living room until they have sniffed and inspected every corner of it.

It is hard to know when this change in the mental landscape of human beings took place. A veritable explosion of human culture took place in the Upper Paleolithic – people had been making efficient stone tools forever, but suddenly they were making physically beautiful and artistic tools out of bone, and they made needles for sewing and harpoon heads designed to lock into a fish as it struggled – tools that require great mental conceptualization in advance as they are designed. We began to paint vignettes of horses, ibex, mammoth and deer on the walls. The animals being painted on the wall were not simply a reflection of what we hunted, since the mix of creatures on the wall is a different blend than that evidenced by the butchered remains at our campsites.

Anthropologists long speculated that the sudden difference was language. But all the latest evidence cannot support that conclusion. The Broca's brain area that handles language had begun to develop millions of years before. The legends of Flores (where the Homo Floriensis skeletons were found) talk about a people of small stature who murmured to one another and who could mimic the speech of the local villagers. And Neanderthals are now known to have possessed a hyoid bone identical to that of modern humans, which combined with their advanced Broca's brain and sophisticated hunting, makes them a good candidate for advanced language abilities.

In “The Neanderthal Enigma”, James Shreeve notices that some of the unusual things you find about the earliest developments of the Upper Paleolithic is that it appears humans began to gather in larger groups. One particular site where mammoth bones washed up (mammoth bones made excellent construction materials) boasted tools made of rocks from dozens of kilometers away. This is interesting, because it is a way in which we differ from our closest cousins – like them we cling to small family groups, but occasionally expand our circle to a large extended group we identify with.

This, he supposes, is where symbolic thinking may in some measure come from; in a small social group, a person does not have to have many aspects – but in a larger group with social ritual, a person needs to be able to present different fronts, for example “I am an artist,” “I am a healer,” “I am a mother,” or “I am a hunter.” This is not a deception – my readers will know of several masks that each and every one of us wear – and though each is a near complete disguise, neither are they false guises: I am a musician, I am a son, I am a father, I am a grandfather, I am a professional, and I am a worshiper. I truly am each of these things, although I am not alike in every way in each of these roles.

Symbolic meaning in our self-conception lead to symbolic meaning in the world around us. The same sky could be threatening, beautiful, or mean practical things regarding the hunt or the campsite. These interpretations would develop into not just a way of examining reality, they became our reality.

How to tie this into my cosmological musings? Stay tuned...