The Wonder and the Grief
Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis were species of ancient man who were thought to have used Acheulian handaxes some 1.5 million years ago. These were implements used in butchery, yet they were often plentifully made. Both large and beautiful, their form exceeds their simple function. Some researchers have suggested they had a social significance, for example, as male emblems of fitness to attract mates (Stringer & Andrews, 2005). These implements may have been the first ever “note” given from one person to another to express a wish or feeling.
Scribbled in rock and wood the message then took an inestimable voyage to wash upon a distant shore.
Fifty thousand years ago man was evolving, migrating out of Africa to the Levant, to Eurasia, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This was no terra nullius, as others had gone before in waves of triumph, fall and extinction. New and old lives intersected – Denisovans, archaic Humans, Neanderthals, Homo erectus and the tiny Homo floresiensis. Why all this movement? Our ancestors found related species, interacted with them, and interbred. Clans fused, while others split. It was a time of migration into and away from the tribe. With this spirit of connectivity (Greenbaum et al., 2019) there was a sense that the old ways of doing things were changing. This was bigger than sinew on bone evolution. Cultures and humans were evolving together – this was a leviathan dragging man from the pickings he had scraped over before. From this time – the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution – humankind would never think about itself in the same way.
Artwork flourished in communities who painted and carved representations of themselves and their natural world. They were acquiring the power to project themselves outward and forward. The first bodily ornaments, approximately 50,000 years ago, indicated a knowledge that others would see these products and think of them. Not only think of, but transform the world (Leary & Buttermore, as cited in Leary, 2005). Statuettes like the many tapered and voluptuous Venuses, suggested that the perception of the other may be transformed by mental workings within the self. Burial sites, such as that of the Grotte des Enfants in Italy, revealed children adorned by hundreds of seashells and pierced animal teeth (Stringer & Andrews, 2005), indicating a practice of interpersonal valuing which transcended even death. Guthrie (2005) argues that art is uniquely related to play; the product of a social species having the flexibility for daydream and fantasy. Certainly, Palaeolithic art was likely to have been combined with social ceremony (Stringer & Andrews, 2005); play was becoming a platform for prestige as mankind witnessed the first full exteriorisation of the interior.
This was a rent; a rent tearing through the fabric which shielded self from self, self from other. Even now, we are in that rent – modern man – being torn from the past into the future by the weight of symbol. There is no innocence left in the dreaming of self; through visions of ochre painted on self by another. And I see you watching my arms of ochre, wearing an amulet passed to you by my mother. Wearing the amulet, seeing me, thinking of her, seen by me wanting to lift you even higher. This new world has forever changed our vision; solitary me becomes representational me. No longer do we dwell in caves, but in selves, in relationships and in societies. We live now with valuing emotions, lifting us up and down on a new scale. And we don’t just dwell in clans, but in totem societies. This was the birth of prestige, as we valued ourselves, others, totem groups and objects. But the old bone on bone ways of being have not gone away.
Our new selves will be shared and judged by the clan, elevating, or demeaning our value. What is valued by the other can be valued by ourselves. Self-esteem has been gifted us like a poisoned chalice. And with this new state of self, we have a new platform to take to the agora, the market. No longer is leadership just the province of grimaced attack and agonic defence. Now prestige brings with it a new way to lead, with the ingress and egress of the talented soul. The new competition of prestige requires skills earnt and inherited and will be a basis for a new leadership[1]. And it brings with it dizzying emotions to be felt for the first time. Emotions that will bring tears – tears for a range of illnesses that the old world has never seen the like of.
[1] See Barkow 1975 and Stevens and Price 2000