Ten thousand years ago, we were all hunter-gatherers and had been for at least six million years, back to the ancestor we have in common with chimpanzees. Six million years as hunter-gatherers and only ten thousand trying alternate life styles. To put that into more manageable numbers, if our ancestors had been hunting and gathering since the Declaration of Independence, we have had only the last four months to adapt to agriculture, manufacture and trade. We are wired to be hunter-gatherers -- not quite "hard"-wired, for our brain circuits are dynamic and change to accommodate our interests. But our survival over the last six million years was made possible by primate brains adapted to solving the problems of Africa's hot savannahs and weathering the glaciers further north. Our brain is ninety-eight percent chimpanzee. Frans de Waal [1] reminds us what "talking primates" we are: "People engage in verbal fights, provocative or impressive word displays, protesting interruptions, conciliatory remarks, and many other patterns of verbal activity that chimpanzees perform without an accompanying text" (de Waal, 1998: 187).

          Our language archetype, of course, does more than enable us to provide "an accompanying text" to our wheedling and our spats. Although we may spend most of our time gossiping, cajoling, and retaliating, language lets us go beyond these things into art, physics, philosophy and mathematics. The archetype wires a brain to attend to and organize the nuances of what we hear and see. It builds the linguistic tool that our parents, neighbors and teachers seize hold of (as best they can) to teach us survival skills. We design schools to enhance our species' competence at living in the world, and we are naïvely inclined to believe that the theoretical knowledge we hone and pass on from generation to generation defines our distance from non-linguistic animals. We like to think they know next to nothing and cannot think at all.

          This chapter will show how much we have in common with the rest of the Animal Kingdom. All animals have archetypes that organize their experience of the world and one another. Only quite late in human development, about 40,000 years ago, did we begin to put together the various archetypal domains of knowledge and go beyond them in distinctively human ways: using our consciousness to reflect on what we know, and deliberately altering our consciousness to expand what we know.

Guided knowledge versus general intelligence. Our sporadic attempts to teach language to chimpanzees has taught us something about their minds. Their grammarless use of our language is rudimentary because it is not guided by an archetype, but achieved with what is called "general intelligence." All animals have a general intelligence for solving the unexpected problems of everyday life. One very impressive instance of this involves a language-trained bonobo named Kanzi who was taught to make razor-sharp stone flakes like our Stone Age ancestors. Bonobos, sometimes inaccurately called "pygmy chimps," have approximately the size and intelligence of chimpanzees but are more gracefully built and of a more peaceful nature. Kanzi was familiar with experimental tasks in which he needed to sever ropes in order to gain access to a box containing food. He therefore knew the value of a sharp edge. His trainer employed an anthropologist to demonstrate for Kanzi the technique for making Oldowan tools, the earliest type of sharp-edged stone flakes that our Homo habilis ancestors made more than two million years ago. In all fairness to Kanzi, it ought to be noted that today's humans need months of practice to learn the craft. [2] At first, striking one rock against another to produce flakes was frustrating for Kanzi, and he learned he could shatter a rock into flakes by hurling it against the floor of his cage. After scientists had covered the floor with a softer substance, he settled down to patiently striking off flakes and testing them against his lips to see if they were sharp enough. Although Kanzi's flakes remained quite crude, his general intelligence was sufficient to grasp the principle involved (de Waal & Lanting, 1997: 37). [3] No doubt the wheel was invented by an individual lucky enough to have had a flash of realization while trying to solve some transport problem with general intelligence.

          Beavers are capable of extraordinary engineering tasks and surely have an archetype for building their dams, though only human engineers know the theory and mathematics of construction. Our theories amount to linguistic elaborations on what, perhaps, all mammals know; and because we can write these things down and pass them on to the next generation, we can learn to build more interesting things than beavers do. In most cases, however, we are using our general intelligence plus language to perfect and advance a kind of knowing that other animals already have.

          Chimpanzees, we have learned, can come to grasp the significance of numbers, can "count" small quantities, even add and subtract accurately; they can grasp relational notions such as bigger-than, same-as, on-top-of, and the like; they can learn to ask for specific objects (apples) or activities (tickling); and they can learn how to carry out fairly complex instructions (Dunbar, 1996: 53). They certainly do not know that the gravitational attraction between two bodies is equal to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. But they take gravity into account at all times -- just as we do now, and as we did some 400 years ago, before Newton had worked out the numbers. Pigeons are no less cognizant of gravity than we are, for it plays the same role in their existence as it does in ours. Not only do we share the planet with these other animals, we pretty much share the same brain circuitry. Circuits for monitoring sensory data are found in the cerebellum of all vertebrates. The wiring is essentially the same in fish, frogs, snakes, and humans. In each species, however, those circuits are connected to the bodily organ that does the most work in gathering the crucial data: the face of a rat, the forepaws of a cat, and the fingers of a monkey (Bower & Parsons, 2003).

Mental modules. Evolution is conservative and always builds its innovations upon inherited structures. For example, some species of rodents are sexually promiscuous so that the male is required to range much more extensively than the female. To manage the geographical data of a much larger territory, while avoiding predators and not getting lost, the males inherit a proportionately larger hippocampus (a part of the cortex devoted to memory). The same is true of bird species that store their food in a large number of caches and then retrieve it months later; they have a much larger hippocampus than closely related species that do not store food; and if they are prevented from exercising their storing and retrieving talents, their hippocampus will shrink, and the number of dead neurons increase (Hauser, 2000: 66f).

When organisms, including humans, encounter recurring themes or statistical irregularities, natural selection builds such information into their brains, making it an integral part of the survival system. What is innate in this situation is the mechanism for learning a specific domain of knowledge, not the knowledge itself. Thus the learning mechanism filters the experiences, guiding the organism to attend to some events in the environment, but not others (Ibid., 23).

          An archetype is just such a guiding capacity directed to a specific domain of knowledge that operates as an "empty program." Biologists have come up with a variety of terms to describe this sort of mental or behavioral unit: innate releasing mechanism, psychobiological response pattern, master program, genetically transmitted response strategy, fixed behavior pattern, evolved psychological mechanism, prepared tendency, and epigenetic rule or pathway (Stevens & Price, 1996: 9). Possibly the most popular term among evolutionary psychologists is "mental module." It is a useful term insofar as it suggests a building block of the mind, one that is prepared for in the genome and results in (a) determinable brain circuits, (b) recognizable modes of thinking and perceiving, and (c) distinctive patterns of behavior. The term "mental module," however, is not without its critics. V. S. Ramachandran correctly observes:

[The brain's] connections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic. Perceptions emerge as a result of reverberations of signals between different levels of the sensory hierarchy, indeed even across different senses. The fact that visual input can eliminate the spasm of a non-existent arm [i.e., the phantom arm of an amputee] and then erase the associated memory of pain vividly illustrates how extensive and profound these interactions can be (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998: 56).

          As long as we remember that a mental module is as flexible, dynamic, and labile as an archetype -- namely that it is not "hard-wired" but expresses an innate pattern of guidance -- we are not apt to be led too far astray. Our minds are "functionally structured, and the knowing parts of our mind are further structured into devices that specialize in acquiring specific kinds of knowledge about the world" (Plotkin, 1998: 163). For example, in order to construct a stable and meaningful visual scene, we have to coordinate color vision, the discrimination of shapes, and the localization of objects in space, all requiring different brain circuits. Furthermore, our ability to recognize faces depends on a brain function that develops at a specific time early in our infancy, a gestalt-recognition module located in the right hemisphere. People who acquire sight for the first time as adults are distressed to find that they cannot recognize objects, especially faces, and can learn to do so only with great difficulty and by employing the logical and memory functions of the left-hemisphere. The archetype for recognizing shapes and faces has not had a chance to elaborate its brain circuits during a crucial period of infancy and therefore does not guide their vision. Such people have to struggle to compensate for the missing archetype with their general intelligence. Many have given up in despair, finding their new sightedness a meaningless humiliation (Bower, 2003).

Patterns within patterns. Primates -- monkeys to humans -- depend heavily on facial recognition as an important element in the sociality which is their primary evolutionary strategy. Sociality is a very large pattern of behavior that includes smaller patterns within it: language, facial recognition, sexual seduction, political manipulation, the reconstruction of memories, and the like. Archetypes and mental modules, when correctly understood, should not be thought of as mutually exclusive building blocks but as fluid patterns, some of which are nested inside of others, and some of which participate in several other larger patterns successively or even simultaneously. Such a picture of interacting and overarching patterns of patterns comes close to what Jung seems to have had in mind in 1954: "Complex psychology means the psychology of `complexities' i.e. of complex psychical systems in contradistinction from relatively elementary factors" (Shamdasani, 2004: 14). [4]

          There are four large patterns-of-patterns that nearly all observers agree are human mental modules with roots that go deep into the Animal Kingdom. These are language, sociality, an innate capacity for physics, and a similar knack for understanding living beings. We have already discussed the language archetype, and will now briefly consider the mental modules for sociality, physics, and nature.

The Social Module

          Robin Dunbar paints a vivid picture of primate sociality. Primate groups easily distinguish themselves from those of other mammals by their frenetic busyness. At every moment there are significant interactions going on: grooming, squabbling, interventions, trickery, and above all a constant watchfulness, paying attention to who is doing what to whom (1996: 35). The patterns within patterns are difficult to untangle, but we might begin by distinguishing between "empathic" and "aggressive" strategies. Aggressive behaviors have been evident in the Animal Kingdom for upwards of 300 million years -- for instance, the "pecking order" of chickens and the way blue jays defend their territory and dogs their bones.

          Among chickens and stickle-back fish, aggressive patterns are fairly simple, but in more recently evolved species they may be a good deal more complex. Bermúdez describes "roaring contests" between red deer stags for control of groups of females. The stags have three modes of dueling, and invariably begin by trying to out-roar one another. If, after a time, neither has clearly roared longer and louder than the other, they move on to a second contest. Here, they strut parallel to one another while carefully calculating one another's body height and antler size. If one of the stags backs down before the other's roaring or strutting, the contest is over and a clear winner recognized. If neither is intimidated, however, they move on to locking their horns. Bermúdez provides us with a flow-chart of yes/no choices the stag will follow (2003: 136). This order of decisions is logical, predictable, and clearly guided by a mental module that represents a significant growth in complexity over the methods of chickens. The primate brain is capable of much more varied and flexible aggressive strategies -- even as it simultaneously keeps watch on the rest of the group, wary of sympathies that may shift and coalitions that may form. There are many archetypal patterns of apprehension at work, and behaviors that may deliberately be designed to mislead.

          The development of empathic strategies, on the other hand, is much more recent -- Stevens and Price estimate ten million years, rather than 300 million for aggressive strategies (1996: 49). [5] These behaviors include currying favor, enjoying and exploring mutual attachments, giving and receiving care -- even altruism, perhaps. [6] If primate "social life is about building and testing hypotheses" (Mithen, 1984: 96), even grooming is a complex activity. For while two individuals strengthen their bond of friendship, each may also be checking to see how the other feels about yesterday's fracas, and what effect their grooming has on four or five others who may be jealous or suspicious. Much of sociality is about nurturing affection and reducing tensions, but tensions shift about in the larger group with implications for every single member. Thus learning to guess what other individuals are thinking becomes a real asset in primate societies. For instance, a rhesus monkey copulating with one of the alpha male's partners will occasionally run to check whether the boss is returning. His mind is in two places at once, not unlike our own (de Waal, 1996: 111).

Empathy versus contagion. To some extent the term "empathic strategy" may seem to impute too much consciousness to non-linguistic animals. For instance, de Waal describes a scene in which eight rhesus monkey infants crawl all over a companion infant who is screaming because it had been bitten. These infants are not coming to assist; rather they have been infected with the victim's emotional distress and are seeking to comfort themselves. They represent a case of emotional contagion rather than empathy, for empathy implies the ability to identify with another's emotional state while holding onto the distinction between me and you. Those infants lost their identity, and to emphasize his point further, de Waal observes that adult rhesus monkeys usually ignore distress in their companions (de Waal, 1996: 46).

          Nevertheless, something far more effective than emotional contagion is not uncommon among primates and some other mammals. De Waal provides a number of instances where monkeys show signs of grief at a companion's demise and make special provision for handicapped individuals (Ibid., 52-7). A dying dwarf mongoose is allowed first access to the food, along with the alpha male; and then, because he is unable to climb into his sleeping box, the others join him in sleeping on the floor (Ibid., 80). Dolphins and whales bite through harpoon lines and haul their companions out of nets (Ibid., 40). Skeletal remains testify, too, that Neanderthal and other early humans took special care of companions afflicted with dwarfism, paralysis, the inability to chew, and other afflictions. They would not have been able to survive and grow, and their broken bones would not have healed -- as the evidence shows -- had their companions not taken special care of them (Ibid., 7).

Theory of Mind. A huge leap has been made in the direction of genuine empathy -- as well as a capacity for deliberate deception -- when an individual develops the capacity to formulate accurate guesses about what another believes. Tests consistently show that human children develop this capacity around the age of four years. For instance, a puppet play will present a transaction in which Puppet A gives a cookie to Puppet B, who places it in his pocket. Then A leaves the stage. While A is gone, Puppet B takes the cookie out of his pocket and places it in a box. When Puppet A returns, the children are asked where will A look to find the cookie. Three-year-olds will assume A knows what they know and will (incorrectly) expect A to look inside the box. Four-year-olds, on the other hand, will be cognizant of A's mentality and will know that there is no reason for A to think the cookie has been moved from B's pocket. Four-year-olds have a "Theory of Mind," because they formulate accurate hypotheses about another individual's beliefs. [7] Apes, too, have a Theory of Mind; monkeys do not.

          Mithen (1996) calls Theory of Mind a mental module; Plotkin calls it "an innate organ of mind" (1998: 214). Dunbar observes that autistic people never develop a Theory of Mind: they consistently fail false-belief tests, are unable to pretend, and cannot imagine that the world can be other than it is right now (1996: 88). Most discussions of Theory of Mind center on chimpanzees deceiving one another and suspecting one another's motives. Mithen, however, locates it in the evolution of the mind, in that it represents a "second order intentionality" -- not only do I know what I intend, but also what you intend. Fans of television soap operas, he says, demonstrate "third order intentionality"; for they know not only what character A believes but also what character A believes about B's beliefs. Humans are probably capable of five or six orders of intentionality (Mithen, 1996: 108). Theory of Mind, therefore, represents the most primitive form of conscious sociality, where an individual can formulate and test hypotheses about what others will do and how they will react to developing circumstances.

Politics and morality. Bees, ants, and termites are social animals, but their social structure is fixed and inflexible; there is no possibility of two individuals changing places in the social order. Politics is about negotiating for position in a hierarchy (Fox, 1989a: 27); and "chimpanzees never make an uncalculated move" (de Waal, 1998: 30). The same is no doubt true of monkeys, who are said to know "not only who is above or below them, but also by approximately by how many rungs of the ladder" (de Waal, 1996: 101).

          When monkeys put down all their challengers and establish prominence, they settle disputes by favoring their relatives and friends. Among chimpanzees, however, it is common for the "control male" to place himself above the conflicting parties in a dispute. He often favors the underdog and nearly always places the peace and welfare of the community above his own short-term gains. No doubt the alpha chimpanzee has much to gain by this technique, for he is currying the favor of a majority when he keeps the peace and punishes the bullies. He must be capable of at least third order intentionality, as mediating disputes surely requires a "soap-opera" mind. [8] Furthermore, by integrating his aggressive tendencies with empathy, he exercises not only a Theory of Mind but an implicit theory of governance. Chimpanzees do not dominate but "lead," because they realize that "the privileges of high status [are] contingent upon services to the community" (Ibid., 129-32).

          Chimpanzee politics nearly has a moral dimension. De Waal believes morality begins "in the primate lineage [with] the evolution of a capacity for guilt and shame." He refers to that little rhesus monkey copulating with the alpha male's consort and repeatedly interrupting his love-making to check whether the coast is still clear. This anecdote shows that already in the minds of monkeys "inhibitions are rooted deeply enough that concern about the enforcer's reaction persists in his absence" (Ibid., 111). Monkeys expect reciprocity. They expect to get what they have given, whether it was food or a thrashing. De Waal calls this "the first step in the direction of the Golden Rule . . . `Do as the other did, and expect the other to do as you did'" (Ibid., 136). [9] As we proceed up the primate ladder from monkeys to humans, we see morality emerge as higher orders of intentionality are applied to empathy, internalized social rules, anticipation of punishment, reciprocity, peacemaking and negotiation (Ibid., 211).

The shape of primate society. The social module is hardly a simple and discrete entity, rather a set of nested and overlapping patterns (attachment, defense, Theory of Mind, deception, grooming, gossip, politics, morality), and the roots of these patterns run deep into our evolutionary past. Therefore if we speak of having an archetype that guides us to form a social order, we know that its boundaries are hard to establish, and that its shape will not likely be fixed. History knows several different orders human society has assumed, apart from hunting and gathering: subsistence agriculture, city-states, empires, feudalism, Marxism, capitalism, dictatorships, and republics. The social archetype, like language, is apparently an empty program. But it is not so empty for our relatives, the great apes. De Waal has written a pair of lavishly illustrated books (1997, 1998), [10] one on bonobos and one on chimpanzees, that illustrate two rather fixed and opposite approaches to structuring society.

          Chimpanzees live in patriarchal societies where shifting alliances between males -- and often the sympathies of females -- can bring about major changes in the governance of a group. The controlling males settle disputes and distribute food. There is a great deal of fighting, especially between males, and very clear rules for how fights should be pursued. Adult males confront one another with raised hair and bite one another's hands and feet with their large canines. Against females, however, they generally use only their hands and feet. Even in male fighting, it is rare that lasting damage is done, for what counts above all is the capacity to fight effectively within the rules, employing speed and agility (de Waal, 1998: 104). At the end of a fight, the loser is expected to ask for reconciliation. This is generally followed by fervent kissing and embracing and perhaps a lengthy grooming session (Ibid., 27-9).

          In contrast to the hot-tempered, burly, and coarse chimpanzees, bonobos are gracile, sensitive, lively and nervous. They rarely threaten one another with raised hair displays and almost never use physical violence, defending themselves when they do by kicking with their feet rather than biting. If a chimpanzee colony is always erupting in violence, a bonobo group resolves its tensions in sexual encounters -- between males and females, males and males, and especially between females and females. Bonobos form a female-bonded, female-dominated society where even male rank is determined by the mothers (de Waal & Lanting, 1997: 78). Bonobo females have extended periods of genital swelling and sexual receptivity that begin at around seven years, long before they are sexually mature. At that time, the young females begin wandering outside their natal territory, visiting other bonobo groups and engaging in sexual play. Eventually they bond with the females of a new group and make their homes there. In this way unrelated females, through their sexual bonding with one another, form the core of every bonobo society.

          At feeding time in a zoo, chimpanzees begin hugging one another and rejoicing, while distribution of the food is overseen by the alpha male. Bonobos react to feeding time by displaying their erections and genital swellings and reducing their tensions with brief sexual encounters. Females have first access to the food. Several rungs lower in social organization, macaque monkeys throng the food, each individual immediately grabbing as much food as it can, the highest ranking getting the most.

          De Waal speculates that if we had met bonobos first and chimpanzees later, our "reconstructions of human evolution might have emphasized sexual relations, equality between males and females, and the origin of the family, instead of war, hunting, tool technology, and other masculine fortes" (Ibid., 2). They certainly represent opposing caricatures of human social structure: a patriarchy that uses violence to resolve tensions stirred up by conflicting sexual interests, and a matriarchy that uses sex to defuse tensions before they can provoke violence. An archetype that appears to be fixed in one of two positions for our ape relatives is open for wider experimentation and deliberate conscious planning by humans. The patterns within the pattern of the social module, however, reveal our common heritage with the rest of the primate world.

The Physical Science Module

          All animals are guided by innate structures that direct their attention to some details of the world and ignore others. For invertebrates, the guidance and the valuation of data occurs apparently without anything resembling what we would call consciousness. Bees, for example, orient themselves by the location of the sun in the sky and something like an internal clock. Thus when an entire hive has been transported overnight to a time zone three hours earlier, the bees will search for their feeding station too far to the west, "as if their internal clock was telling them it was three hours later" (Hauser, 2000: 71). Similar experiments have been done with ants. When a mirror is used to reflect the sun to the opposite side of the ant's body, it searches for its nest 180 degrees in the wrong direction (Ibid., 70). Salmon and rainbow trout navigate by smell, assisted by attention to the sun's position and changes in the earth's magnetic field (Ibid., 75). Blind mole rats apparently use the earth's magnetic field alone. [11]

          Birds have evolved an archetype for orienting themselves by the night sky. While nestlings, they gaze at the slowly rotating constellations for hours every night and record the position of the centerpoint -- which in the northern hemisphere is the North Star (Pinker, 1997: 181). Birds who have not been afforded the opportunity to "study" the night sky during that critical period of their early lives cannot learn to migrate. Like people blind from birth who become sighted as adults, a crucial gestalt-recognition capacity in the brain has missed its opportunity and failed to elaborate its neural circuits. And just as our innately guided skill in recognizing faces is rarely frustrated when an individual has grown older and turned gray or gained weight, so the sky map of migrating birds is a flexible orientation tool. When clouds obscure the Big Dipper and the North Star is invisible, the birds stay on track.

All species carry specialized mental tools for processing information about objects, numbers, and space. For some species, the relevant objects are fruits, the relevant numbers are three or less, and the relevant space is the distance between fruiting trees. For other species, the relevant objects are predators and other group members, the relevant numbers are one, two, three, or more, and the relevant space is a tropical rain forest filled with competitors. Such variation leads to differences between species in the kinds of mental devices added to each domain of knowledge, devices such as a cognitive map, and a counting system that is based on a limitless set of symbols (Hauser, 2000: 88).

Universal toolkit. The physical science module that is evident in all animals, albeit differently oriented by species, enables every creature on earth to recognize the physical constants of our world: the solidity of objects, gravity, inertia, the fact that physical objects are different from living beings, and the like. Desentization experiments have demonstrated that infants less than a year old already have a physical science perspective. The infants are shown films in which objects behave as they should: billiard balls bounce off one another, heading in the right direction; balls roll down inclined planes; balls roll behind larger objects and disappear for a moment before rolling back into sight on the other side. In short these are predictable and not very interesting scenes; and the infants know it. They get as bored as we do and begin to pay less and less attention as the experiments proceed. Then the surprises begin. Occasionally a ball disappears behind a flowerpot and does not reappear on the other side; a ball rolls up an inclined plane; a billiard ball hits another and the second fails to move. Suddenly the infant is interested. It stares for a long time, evidently revealing its puzzlement -- registering surprise that the laws of physics have been violated. Apes and monkeys respond the same way.

          Infants, other primates, and even "lower" animals recognize the same set of physical principles governing the behavior of objects that educated adults do. Bermúdez calls this the "physical parameter set" and includes a number of elements that linguistic beings can name: an object will have a single trajectory; it will continue to exist when not perceived; it will have a determinate shape; it will be internally unified and not be expected to fall apart; it will be able to undergo only a fixed set of changes; it will be impenetrable; it will fall when not supported; it will have mass; its motion or state of rest will depend upon mechanical forces acting on it; and it will have causal effect upon other bodies (Bermúdez, 2003: 82f). Only a philosopher would identify and list all these details, but every infant and every primate knows immediately when such principles have been violated.

          These innate recognitions are the foundation for what Marc Hauser calls the "universal tool kit" that is shared by insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including humans. It provides the basic capacity by which we recognize objects, count, and navigate. A sense for "object constancy," for example, is essential for any antelope that sees a lion disappear behind a bush. If it forgets about the lion or even comes to believe the lion has ceased to exist, it is not apt to survive. All animals must know the principles of life on earth if we are to interpret our surroundings correctly, find food, escape predators, discriminate between the fall of an acorn and that of a foot. Natural selection has insured that each species is accurately attuned to the world so it can reproduce and its offspring survive.

          Insects follow their physical science archetype's guidance so rigidly that humans can easily fool them: the ants who thought the sun was in the mirror and headed off in the wrong direction, or the bees that had no way of knowing they had been flown overnight from Long Island to California. Mammals have a lot more flexibility with the archetype. Donald R. Griffin describes a number of experiments performed with wild beavers. Dam building is one of an array of guided-behaviors within the beaver's physical science module. It is a rather flexible program; for although all beaver dams are alike, each is designed to solve a particular set of riverine problems with available resources. Beavers know exactly where to dig their burrow, where the ground is high enough to afford them space for a dry chamber within reasonable distance of the water. No one has found abandoned beaver burrows that filled up with water and proved unsuitable (Griffin, 1992: 91).

          In a highly detailed story (Ibid., 87-100), Griffin describes the frantic but well-organized work one colony of beavers did to salvage part of a dam that had been severely damaged by human vandals. As their pond was draining fast, the beavers attempted three or four clever repair schemes that failed, and ended by assisting humans who were erecting a wall of rocks upstream from the dam. The beavers plugged gaps between the rocks with mud, using the same technique they would have used on their own dam of branches, had it been salvageable. They managed to save about half of their pond.

          The beavers reveal a wonderful understanding of the physical science of dam building. They evidently realized that the crucial element in the emergency was the loss of the water that had been held back to form a pond, and they knew how it was escaping. Very likely the dam-building archetype makes them especially sensitive to small regions of fast-moving water -- where it might pour through a hole in the dam -- and gives them a sense of urgency in plugging the hole. But to apply their mud-daubing techniques to the rock pile the humans were assembling shows a real leap in understanding the problem: regardless of the state of the dam, the first order of business must be to save the pond; and regardless of past human treachery, these particular humans appear to be on our side. It is a remarkable story that encourages us to be less certain that "lower" animals do not think in pretty much the same patterns we do.

Tool making. The classic field of human superiority is tool making. The evidence and the dates involved are still somewhat disputed. Earliest estimates place the first recognizable stone tool -- one that was clearly made and not found -- back to 2.5 to 2.3 million years ago, a half million years earlier than the earliest skeletal evidence for Homo habilis, "man the tool maker" (Mithen, 1996: 98; Jordan, 1999: 149). If tools were being made that early, we would have to presume Australopithecines were making them, hominids who were not enough like us to merit the designation Homo. The earliest stone tools require an implicit grasp of the principles of physical science. Our ancestors had to have had some idea of fracture dynamics, a real advantage over the bonobo Kanzi, described earlier. Very likely Kanzi was just imitating and hoping. But he knew what he was hoping for -- something sharp enough to cut rope. The earliest tool makers had more than hope. They had a conviction and a tradition. For more than two million years, hand axes were made to be virtually identical. Our ancestors knew what they were looking for, how to produce it by striking one stone with another, and how to pass the skill on to the next generation. It is evident that we do not have an archetype for making hand axes out of stone. If we had, we would make them as beavers make dams, and pick up the technique as easily as we learn to talk. Tool making is clearly a cultural product, albeit rooted in patterns of inheritance.

          In the very slow process by which tool making changed over the ages, three stages may be distinguished (Pfeiffer, 1982: 92f). First, around two million years ago, an axe was made with only three blows, but required that the tool maker see a stone as containing a cutting edge waiting to be released. In the second stage, a million to a million and a half years ago, "Acheulian" hand axes became symmetrical, and the maker could see not only the future edge in the untouched stone, but the entire tool as well. The symmetrical hand axe required twenty-five to sixty-five blows, meaning that the makers had to be patient and able to see evidence of the goal emerging slowly from the stone. Finally, the famous Levallois technique, beginning around 500,000, B.P., required 110 to 115 blows and a careful preparation of the stone before the splitting action could begin:

In the Levallois technique, you take a flint nodule or nucleus, trim it around the edges to obtain a roughly oval shape, and flatten it a bit on top by further trimming. The next job is to make a narrow, flat section at one end, the all-important striking platform. After these preparatory steps, you are ready to produce flakes. By directing sharp, precise blows against the platform at just the right angle, you can successively knock off a series of sharp, thin flakes in a kind of slicing operation, finally shaping the flakes into specialized tools (Pfeiffer, 1982: 93).

          Paul Jordan finds a "grammar" in tool making, by which he means a time-consciousness that is built into the fashioning of tools, much as it is built into the tenses of verbs. An axe or a specialized flake is made now, in the present, according to a series of steps, a standard pattern inherited from the past, in order to produce something for potential use sometime in the future (Jordan, 1999: 151). We have to think, too, that beginning to craft blades encouraged our ancestors to pay closer attention to the various sorts of stone they came across in hopes of improving their product. Tool making, in short, implies a mind-set and an active process of inquiring into what and how and why. Flint was the most highly valued stone for making sharp edges, and as early as 36,000, B.P., was obtained from underground mining in Egypt (Rudgley, 1999: 175). Pfeiffer notes that our Cro-Magnon ancestors recognized different kinds of flint and had discovered that their properties can be enhanced by heating -- each type heated to different peak temperatures, maintained for a different length of time, and cooled at a different rate. They must have had ways to measure these things (1982: 71). By about 25,000, B.P., fire was being used also to temper wooden spear points, oxidize pigment, and anneal stone projectile points. The scene had already been set for an investigation of the chemical and physical properties of materials (Rudgley, 1999: 147).

The Natural Science Module

          The natural science module accounts for the extraordinary aptitude animals show for the natural world. Mithen (1996: 52-5) points out that all human cultures classify Nature by using the same set of notions: they distinguish species from one another on the basis of morphology; they name groups and subgroups (oak, shingle oak, spotted shingle oak); they distinguish general types of animals (fish, birds, mammals) on the basis of their life forms; and they do the same with plants (grasses, trees). Furthermore, this taxonomic activity sometimes appears to be pursued for its own sake, quite apart from its nutritional, economic, or other necessity: "[A]mong the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico and the Aguarana Jivar of Peru more than a third of named plants have no social or economic uses, nor are they poisonous or pests. But they are nevertheless named and grouped according to perceived similarities" (Mithen, 1996: 53). "Useless" plants are classified just because they are there and because we have a drive to discriminate and to name.

Ice Age biology. Neanderthals and other early humans had to have had a "natural history intelligence" in order to understand their environment and the animals and plants within it. Hunting with the short, thrusting spears we know they used required that they understand the behavior of each species of game and how to approach it or entice it to approach them. They had to have developed tracking skills that recognized the footprints, the habits, the prey, and the feces of their game. When they severely wounded an animal, they had to know how to predict where it would finally lie down to die if they were to catch up with their dinner before scavengers beat them to it. For these activities, they would have to know not only the habits of their game but carry a mental map of their environment and know how each game animal would be likely to use the landscape to escape or, in some cases, to lie in wait (Ibid., 128-30).

          Evidence from the Doura cave site in Syria (100k - 40k, B.P.) shows that our ancestors were processing plum stones and borage (star flower) seeds. The fact that many hearths at the site contain charred plum stones implies they were being roasted to remove harmful glucosides. The more labor intensive processing of borage seed yields two important active ingredients: "gamma linolenic acid (GLA) and alpha linolenic acid (ALA). The first is effective in treating PMS; the second in treating Alzheimer's" (T. Taylor, 1996: 109). Our ancestors had to have been aware of those specific properties, a fact that suggests that their knowledge of medicinal plants was extensive. Indeed, it has often be said that our herbal knowledge was much greater when we were hunter-gatherers than it became later when we settled down on farms and specialized in only a few cultivated species of plants.

          Even more striking evidence of a natural science module in our Stone Age ancestors is the discovery of "hundreds if not thousands of trepanned skulls from all across pre-historic Europe" (Rudgley, 1999: 133). Trepanation is surgery to remove a piece of the skull by boring or scraping the bone, a deft procedure that has to leave the blood vessels and delicate membranes surrounding the brain undamaged. We have no direct evidence why so many trepanations were performed five to eight thousand years ago, but in historical times the operation has been performed: "to treat epilepsy, mental illness, demonic possession, fractures, severe and recurrent headaches, vertigo and deafness, as well as for removing foreign bodies and even as a supposed aid to prolong [life]" (Rudgley, 1999: 129). The amazing thing is that most of those Ice Age operations were successful. Among 214 trepanned skulls from pre-Inca Peru, for instance, 55.6% were completely healed and another 16.4% partially healed -- the patient having died for reasons unrelated, perhaps, to the surgery. By contrast, our great grandparents in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe who attempted trepanation lost nearly all their patients (Ibid., 131).

Mapping the natural world. We have already mentioned that birds who cache food for future retrieval have a highly developed hippocampus. Experiments have been done on the Clark's nutcracker, a bird whose ecological niche requires that it find and later on relocate approximately a thousand caches every year. On being removed from their large aviary cage for a month and then returned to it, the birds found "a substantial portion" of the seeds they had hidden, while at the same time not finding additional caches the experimenter had hidden. Thus the birds were clearly remembering the caches and not merely sniffing about for stray seeds in a random fashion. Furthermore, they were able to relocate their caches even when the humans had moved potential landmarks, such as logs and large rocks (Griffin, 1992: 47; Milius, 2004).

          Male blackbirds know nature well enough to make choices of nesting territories on the basis of what future weather conditions will bring. They need a swampy location that will be thriving with insects about the time the hatchlings emerge, later on in the season. Since conditions in the swamp change from year to year, it has been suggested that the blackbirds "must have a mental representation of a future situation" when they choose a site for their nest. In any event, their attention to the swamp is being guided to recognize cues that other species easily overlook. Furthermore, it is not only the nest-building male that studies the swamp. The females pay more attention to the watery environment of the nest when they choose a mate than they do to the physical attributes of the male. Both genders inherit the blackbird's archetype for evaluating a swamp (Griffin, 1992: 32f). The natural science archetype, therefore, manifests with crucial differences related to each species' "niche" in the natural world.

          Bees, too, have "cognitive maps" of their environment. In one experiment, captured bees were released in the middle of a lake on a boat supplied with a large quantity of nectar. Upon returning to their hive with some of the treasure they had found on the boat, and dancing their directions for the other bees in the hive, however, they found themselves ignored. Apparently the bees in the hive "knew" that nectar is never found in the middle of a lake and would not accept the accuracy of their hive mates' reports (Hauser, 2000: 78).

          Although many more examples could be given, this material demonstrates quite clearly that insects, birds, and mammals, including humans, are all equipped with a natural science module that facilitates survival by apprehending the most relevant environmental facts for each species.

Distinctively Human Creativity

          Thus far we have lightly sketched four mental modules that are so widely accepted as to be well-nigh self-evident, and we have shown that such modules do not begin with the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens or even of hominids. The roots of our human archetypes reach well back, 65 million years into our primate heritage and generally through all the warm-blooded animals (mammals, birds, and cetaceans) even sometimes to the invertebrates. There are other lists of likely mental modules. Steven Pinker (1994: 420) manages to find fourteen without adding anything to what we have described. [12] He has simply named more of the patterns within the patterns. For instance, what we have called the natural science module embraces six of his fourteen: intuitive biology, mental maps of territory, habitat selection, danger recognition, food recognition, contamination recognition. Another six belong to what we call the social module: monitoring well-being, intuitive psychology, "mental Rolodex" of group mates, sense of justice, sense of kinship, and mating behaviors.

          Evidence of a general intelligence that can solve problems that arise at the limits of a species' specialized archetype is also ubiquitous: the beavers who improved a human dam rather than lose their pond while working on their own damaged construction, the chimpanzees who learned American Sign Language, and the Stone Age humans who successfully trepanned one another's skulls. There are many ways in which our human ancestors used their minds in original ways over more than two million years. Tracking game, for example, is essentially a speculative enterprise that requires much more than a recognition of tracks, feces, nightly nests, and the like. The hunter is constantly entertaining conjectures about the behavior of his prey, finding evidence that refutes some of them, developing new ones, and so forth (Rudgley, 1999: 109). Two million years ago, our ancestors had a brain only slightly larger than that of a gorilla, and yet they were doing cultured things: building shelters, making tools, treating skins, living in base camps, etc. (Fox, 1989: 28f). "The tool-making animal needed mind to survive; that is, he needed language and culture and the reorganization of experience that goes with these. And, once he got the rudiments and became dependent on them, there was no turning back. There was no retreat to the perilous certainty of instinct" (Ibid., 34).

          If primates have taken up sociality as their primary evolutionary strategy, humans have refined and developed sociality into culture. Its roots go back at least two million years to the hunting and tool making just described, and also to the distinctively opposed social structures of patriarchal chimpanzees and matriarchal bonobos. There is a long, slow tradition of mentality; and there is also a "Creative Explosion" that first becomes evident around 50,000, B.P., when tool making produced notably more varied and specialized products. By 35,000, B.P., and the appearance of stone sculptures of abundantly endowed women as well as caves painted with animals, shamans, and vulvas, the cultural explosion had become undeniable. It is, therefore, evident that those late Ice Age ancestors of ours who lived in the High Paleolithic [13] had developed minds that were like ours in every respect. The question is, what happened?

Mithen's mental cathedral. Steven Mithen has written a well-respected answer to this question in The Prehistory of the Mind (1996). According to his view, our modern human mind has been built through three distinct evolutionary steps. First, we had a smoothly functioning general intelligence. Natural selection then added complexity in piecemeal fashion by providing us with specialized mental modules (language, sociality, physics, natural science). The modules worked pretty much automatically and in isolation from one another and also from our general intelligence, a notion Mithen illustrates by having his readers imagine the floor plan of a cathedral. The central area of the cathedral is a room with a sanctuary at one end facing rows of pews, a place where a single religious ceremony can take place at any one time. To this simple ground plan, mental modules were added as "side chapels," very much along the lines of the great cathedrals in which more than one religious service can be performed at the same time -- a solemn Mass celebrating the liturgy of the day at the main altar, for instance, while a small memorial Mass for Aunt Mary is being performed before family members in one of the side chapels. During this second stage of the development of the human mind, there were no windows or doors between the main portion of the cathedral ("general intelligence") and the side chapels of language, sociality, etc. Tool making rigidly followed age-old recipes without regard for regional and seasonal hunting requirements. Finally, sometime after 100,000, B.P., language began to be used not only for gossip but applied to tool making, hunting, and other activities of daily life. Mithen accepts Dunbar's theory that human gossip is a refinement of primate sociality and believes that it took some time for our ancestors to realize they could also talk about the aspects of life that had been organized since time immemorial automatically, by the archetypes we have been describing. An enlarged employment of language, then, opened the walls between our general intelligence and our specialized knowledge, and a cultural explosion was the result (Mithen, 1996: 212f).

          The essence of Mithen's cathedral metaphor -- that closed-off sectors of mental life became open to integration, cumulative speculation, and enthusiastic discovery -- is most compelling. It surely describes a quantum leap in the flexibility and scope of consciousness that does, indeed, make sense of the cultural explosion of the period 40k to 10k, B.P. One aspect of his theory, however, appears unacceptable in light of the material we have collected, namely that there was ever a time when our ancestors had only general intelligence and no mental modules or archetypes to organize their experience. On purely logical grounds, it makes no sense to think that evolution had to start all over with Homo sapiens and create entirely new archetypes. Our brain is an advanced primate brain, and when we began to walk upright and assemble in larger and larger numbers, we must have had mental modules which were variations on those inherited by our closest relatives among the primates. But even if we set logic aside, the evidence tells us that we share fundamental structures of mind with bees, blackbirds, beavers, and bonobos.

          How unconscious was early human tool making? Mithen suggests it was like driving a car while conversing with the passengers. Sufficient attention is directed to the mechanics of driving and the pattern of traffic lights, automobiles changing lanes, and so forth, but no deliberate reflection. That is applied to conversation with our friends inside the car. Driving consciousness flows uninterruptedly, and we quickly forget what happened a few moments ago as we maintain our place in the stream of traffic. Neanderthals must have had a similar sort of "rolling consciousness" while tool making and foraging. There was no introspection and no critical attention paid to the product, which is why no innovations were produced. It is the reason that tools could be made by identical techniques and achieve identical results for hundreds of thousands of years (Ibid., 148).

          Mithen goes so far as to suggest that the barrier between technical intelligence and natural history intelligence resulted in part from the fact that tools were made of stone, an inanimate substance that belonged to the physics module, while antlers and ivory, that might have been used for tools, belonged to animals and the natural science module. [14] Because inanimate objects occupied a world apart from living animals and plants, no comparisons were made, weapons were never designed for specific game animals, and tools never had multiple components (Ibid., 131). Furthermore, "The most persuasive evidence for a cognitive barrier between social and technical intelligence is the absence of any artifacts used for body decoration, such as beads and pendants" (Ibid., 139). They may have adorned themselves with found objects, as chimpanzees have been observed to do, but did not sculpt stone adornments. As tool makers, they could imagine the axe in the nodule of stone, but did not use this capacity to carve a figurine (Ibid., 161). [15]

Time and the cosmos. Alexander Marshack [16] has taken a different approach to that crucial period in our history when signs of a dynamic and inventive consciousness were first becoming unmistakable. He has devoted himself to studying pieces of bone and antler, most ranging in age from 100k to 8k, B.P., with some examples harking back to 230k, B.P. Marshack believes the system of notation those bones carry may be older even than the Neanderthals (Marshack, 1991: 56). "From the Russian steppe to the tundra, westward to the Atlantic . . . and south to the seacoasts of Spain and Italy, the hunting cultures of the Ice Age have left evidence of notation" (Ibid., 109). For example, the Blanchard Bone, a flat, oblong piece of bone, about 7½ inches long and 2 inches wide, dating from 34-32k, B.P. It bears a complex serpentine line of "comma" figures etched into its surface. Close inspection reveals that the marks were made at different times with different techniques and different tools. Marshack believes that one mark was made each day, that the marked bones were kept as a record of passing time, that the individual who carried the bone and made the marks did so with whatever tool lay nearest to hand, and finally that the comma marks are grouped in ways that reflect the phases of the moon (Ibid., 48). There can be no doubt that the marks were made intentionally and that they are very likely not decorative. A decorative object would have been done in "one or two sittings with one or two tools, with one concept and one rhythm" (Ibid., 54). That leaves only notation as a motive for marking the bone, and that conclusion is supported by the fact that several North American Indian traditions are known in which sticks are notched for notational purposes and look "exactly like certain Upper Paleolithic notched bones and some Australian message sticks" (Ibid., 139).

          If baby birds study -- and some of them memorize -- the night sky, we cannot be surprised to think that Ice Age people were intensely aware of the heavens and the movements of the constellations. Whether the star groups had been named cannot be known, but it is unthinkable that regular patterns had not been noticed. Those people virtually lived under the stars, without pollution in the air or artificial light from the ground to obscure their view. Indeed, the skies had to have been relatively free of clouds during the Ice Age, since so much of the earth's water was locked up in the glaciers. The oldest astronomical observatory yet discovered, in Goseck, Germany, has been dated at 7000, B.P., only a millennium later than Marshack's latest notched bone (Mukerjee, 2003). "We can assume hominids saw these patterns in the sky and recognized them. What we do not know is the level of their cultural recognition, the myth-making and the utilization" (Marshack, 1991: 127).

          We cannot know what myths our Ice Age ancestors used to explain their existence, but we cannot doubt that they entertained "stories," meaningful accounts of what was happening or had happened, all structured by a sequential listing (Ibid., 39). To mark time implies a consciousness of time and a feeling for beginnings and endings. Things always happen before or after something else, and there is often a significant meaning to what came first. Remembering such things, and seeing their parallels in the movements of the sky implies a reflective distance from events, a sense that what happens here on earth is reflected out there in the larger cosmos -- for if the spring constellation is in the morning sky, soon the ibex will be coming down from the mountains and the earth will turn green again. Marshack discovered this correlation on several bones, where the progression of comma marks was interrupted by a stylized ibex. Some bones display sketches of other animals, fish, and plants, all suggesting a linkage of the lunar events in the heavens with seasonal events here on earth (Ibid., 212-15).

          Marshack says, "The brain is essentially a `time-factored' and `time-factoring' organ" (Ibid., 25). Most vividly, the mastery of fire reveals how pervasive time-consciousness was in the everyday life of Homo erectus. Taylor (1996: 22) puts the date of mastering fire at 1.6m, B.P., and Pfeiffer (1982: 84) at 750k, B.P. Marshack takes a very conservative view that at least by 500k, B.P., it was part of Peking Man's culture -- a time that corresponds to Dunbar's calculations for the beginning of gossip. As soon as fire could be controlled, many time-factored elements had to be understood. Wet and green branches will not burn, but they can dry out and be used later. Fire shows signs of a peculiar kind of life and growth: it must be tended, sheltered from wind, rain, and snow; it must be fed constantly; it "sleeps" in its embers and may "die"; it can be blown back to life with human breath; and its "spirit" can be transported in a burning branch or ember. Fire freed our ancestors to live in new climates and survive the glaciers of the Ice Age, but it also bound them and made them dependant on itself (Ibid., 112-15). Marshack makes a strong case that humans who could control fire probably also entertained the first elements of what became mythic narratives.

          By the time of the Upper Paleolithic (40k - 10k, B.P.), our Cro-Magnon ancestors had a brain and mind essentially the same as ours. [17] They knew the phases of the moon, the lore of hunting, told one another stories, and knew the difference between fiction and fact (Ibid., 132f).

[Homo sapiens at 29,000, B.P.] built huts and even larger houses . . . used coal and bone as fuel . . . ; he sculpted animals and human figures from ivory and from a clay . . . and he then fired his clay figures hard in ovens or kilns; he buried his dead with ornament and ceremony; he used red and black color symbolically and decoratively; he wore leather and skin clothes . . . and costumed himself with rings, bracelets, necklaces, and carved ivory headbands; he even ground and polished stone to make objects of unknown use . . . (Ibid., 37)

The Painted Caves

          Caves with elaborately painted walls have been found throughout Europe, from Andalusia to the Ural Mountains. At least 300 sites are known, meaning that there were probably thousands of them -- some not surviving weather or geological changes (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998: 59). Some were located in areas that are now under water and have been since the end of the last Ice Age when melting glaciers raised sea level by some thirty feet. [18] Interestingly, the oldest cave so far discovered (Chauvet, 35,000, B.P.) [19] has the best art, subtle shading, ingenious use of perspective, elegant lines, "cave painting as sophisticated as it would ever be" (Clottes, 2001: 110). [20] Richard Rudgley makes the cogent point that what we know of Upper Paleolithic artistic creation is the flood of production that occurred beginning around 35,000, B.P., but that isolated examples of such artistry can be traced back another 20,000 years. It is as though what had long been possible and "in the wind" suddenly became irresistible and manifested everywhere (Rudgley, 1999: 234-9). They used "truly complex paints by mixing pigments with mineral extenders and binders" (Ibid., 181). They had a detailed knowledge of their materials, as well as a sense of timing and temperature control (Ibid., 149). The caves, in short, do not represent an accident or exception to the everyday knowledge and skill humans employed in the late Ice Age. And the evident mythic character of the painted caves leads Pfeiffer to say, "The people of the Upper Paleolithic lived at the dawn of the oral tradition, and in a sense started what Homer finished" (Pfeiffer, 1982: 189).

Totemism and hunting magic. The first modern guesses as to the meaning and purpose of cave art took its inspiration from anthropologists' reports of totemism among contemporary hunter-gatherers. The preponderance of animals over human figures seemed to recommend this theory, but eventually evidence that many of the animals were being wounded and killed argued against the totemism theory; for totem animals symbolize a clan and may not be killed. The dominant theory between 1920 and 1960 concentrated, then, on the "killed" animals and argued that they represented a form of "hunting magic": the painted animal in the cave was taken to be a potent stand-in for the real animal living above ground; and if the hunter were to enact the hunt in ritual and myth below ground in the cave, he would be assured of success in the hunt for meat to sustain his community. The theory of hunting magic seemed to be supported by the idea that perhaps only the repeated drawing of the figure was important and that this explained why so many of the painted figures had their outlines retraced many times, possibly over the course of centuries. Also there are many "points" drawn on and around the painted animals, and slashes, as though the animals were being killed symbolically (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998: 66-71).

          Eventually, the hunting magic theory had to be abandoned. Chauvet's walls do not bear the images of any animals that were actually hunted, but primarily dangerous beasts -- mammoth, rhinoceros, cave bear, cave lion -- nothing that played a role in the local Paleolithic diet (Clottes, 2001: 116). Marshack notes that food animals were only occasionally depicted as killed or wounded, that it was primarily non-food animals on the walls and that they were probably being "ritually killed." What impresses Marshack most is that the walls are covered with "seasonal compositions" that imply a "storied" relationship to the people who painted them. They all have the complexity of symbols, wherever symbols are found in human cultures (Marshack, 1991: 274f). In fact, hunting and hunting magic as a theme appears only after the Upper Paleolithic had ended and the caves been forgotten:

It is interesting that of the many human figures found with animals in the Upper Paleolithic art, none have weapons in hand, whereas many do have ceremonial and symbolic dress or objects. It is only later, after the Upper Paleolithic is ended, when the ice is gone and the culture changes, that we get images of hunters at the chase with weapons in hand, and even then we cannot be sure that the hunt is not ceremonial and that the animals hunted and represented are not symbolic of seasonal rites (Ibid., 272).

Structuralism. Between the 1940's and 1960's another, far more abstract, theory was pursued, namely the "structuralist" notion that primitive people "think" and organize their world in terms of "binary oppositions," such as male/female, right/left. The primary exponent of this position was André Leroi-Gourhan, director of the Musée de L'Homme in Paris, who used statistics to study the animal groupings in sixty different caves. He found that bison, aurochs, mammoths, and horses were central, with ibex and deer in secondary positions, and dangerous animals such as lions, bears, and rhinoceroses in the depths of the caves. He assigned a gender significance to each species of animal, based on the fact that feminine symbols were associated with a panel dominated by bison and aurochs in the Peche-Merle cave. He ignored the fact that there were male as well as female bison. By designating every animal and other sign as either male or female, he thought he had uncovered a fundamental symbolic or conceptual discrimination used by our Upper Paleolithic ancestors to make sense of their world. Structuralist interpretations have since been criticized as being filled with debatable assumptions:

Was it reasonable to think that in paintings made over the course of thousands of years, each made reference to others, and that before drawing any new figure the artists took stock of those already in existence? Why would the number of animals have no importance? If they had only general symbolic value, how to explain the fact that they were drawn with details allowing for the recognition of the age, gender, posture, or activity? And finally, the proposed schema were not applicable to many caves, the newly discovered ones in particular; the theories were not confirmed (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998: 78).

Caves as dramatically organized space. Another approach takes each cave-complex -- all the rooms, passageways, alcoves, basements, and attics -- as a meaningful whole. The visitor would take note, for instance, that in the Lascaux cave, two lines of animals in red, black, and yellow converge and then seem "to stream into a funnel-mouth, toward and into a dark hole which marks the way into a deeper gallery" (Pfeiffer, 1982: 1). Those ancient painters put a lot of time, effort, and vision into decorating the chambers and tunnels. They had a small industry making their paint. They must have devoted a good deal of attention to questions of placement and atmosphere. Which caves should be painted, which walls and ceilings within those caves, what animals in what combinations, which ones depicted realistically and which in distorted or fantastical shapes? They must have considered, too, the routes to and between the chambers, and the effects traversing them would likely have upon their visitors. The caves must have been conscientiously planned (Ibid., 143).

          It is not only the cave complex as a whole that is carefully planned, but every nook and cranny as well. Apparently distorted paintings, for example, seem to change shape when viewed from new angles. Deliberate distortion to produce intensified feelings of awe and mystery in the viewer are called anamorphic effects, and they are very common in the caves. Thus in the Tito Bustillo cave in Spain, a painting of a horse with a distorted, elongated neck and snout is wholly transformed when seen from below, and becomes a "perfectly proportioned horse" (Pfeiffer, 1982: 142). Robert Bégouën, one of the three brothers who discovered the side-by-side caves of Trois Frères and Tuc d'Audoubert, and who is now assisting Jean Clottes in studying the caves, led Pfeiffer through a long set of tunnels and around obstacles in the Tuc d'Audoubert to the point that Pfeiffer had lost all thought of art objects, when Bégouën suddenly stopped and whispered, "C'est ici!"

At that moment, and for a moment only, I saw, not two miniature clay bison close at hand but two real-life, full-sized bison at a great distance. They were climbing together up a slope, side by side, every line of mane and muscle sharp and in focus as if caught in photoflash, in a motion-picture frame. My perspective, my frame of reference was transformed. For that moment I was no longer in the dark, underground and enclosed and looking at clay figures, but standing on the edge of a cliff out in the open and looking at animals on a hillside across a wide prairie. A double illusion, because at that distance I would have needed high-power binoculars, plus direct sunlight, to see the bison in such detail (Ibid., 132f).

          One is advised to spend an hour or two in the caves in complete darkness before attempting to look at the paintings, and then to do so only with a flickering oil lamp, such as the artists used. Even after lighting the lamp, it takes a while truly to enter the psychic space the paintings induce. After fifteen to thirty minutes, the animals seem to become animated in the flickering light (Ibid., 113f). It is very easy to overlook what has been painted on the walls, while seeing what has not. One has to "adjust and readjust one's field of view, in effect to look large, medium, and small." One also has to frequently change the angle of the light to find the engravings (Ibid., 32). Images seem to emerge from the walls and hold us in their thrall, and then at the slightest tip of our head, "the image retreats into the Stygian realm from which it was coaxed" (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998: 91). Above all, the caves produce an experience of wonderment and awe as apparitions come and go.

          Pfeiffer concludes that the caves were designed to "imprint essential cultural information," which he likens to "brainwashing" (Ibid., 124). He believes that a growth in population density during the Upper Paleolithic made such propaganda necessary, and that cave art provided "highly charged emotional, inspirational settings for the sharing, imprinting, and passing on of new traditions" (Ibid., 195). He does not give us a reason, however, to believe that these traditions were "new" in 35,000, B.P. In light of what we have seen of our evolution through primate stages to human consciousness, it seems rather more likely that what was painted on the walls, ceilings, and floors of the caves was what had coalesced out of a very long tradition, stretching more than a hundred millennia into the past. Indeed, we might as well imagine that the painters, sculptors, and lay-out artists who executed the caves were struggling to give form to vague but imperative inklings and intuitions about the human condition, about life on earth, about the real and the surreal -- not unlike the artists of our own time.

The shamans. Compared with the care devoted to the depiction of animals in the Ice Age caves, the representation of humans is surprisingly crude, even deformed. Apart from the cave entrances, there are almost no female forms; but there are many vulvas. The men are few in number, sometimes represented nearly as stick figures, and sometimes fantastically depicted as having -- or perhaps wearing -- the body parts of animals, and often displaying an erect phallus. Such figures have been called sorcerers or shamans in light of the world-wide tradition of shamanic practices based upon cultivated trance states. In his classic overview, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964), Mircea Eliade assembles a huge collection of anthropological reports from every region of the earth, and argues that shamanism is characterized by visionary journeys on the part of an expert, the shaman, who sometimes rides or takes on the figure of an animal for the purpose. Shamanism envisages a three-tiered cosmos in which the shaman, alone, is capable of descending to the underworld or ascending to the celestial realm. The depiction of shaman-like male figures on the walls of the caves, therefore, has given rise to several theories about the overall meaning of the painted caves, that they represent the visionary realm encountered in the shaman's journey.

          One of the most intriguing of these emerges from the work of Felicitas D. Goodman (1990), retired anthropology professor who specialized in possession-trance religions and decided to use her retirement to study the nature of trance states. She began by organizing workshops of students whom she assisted into altered states of consciousness by rhythmically shaking a rattle. She found that, up to a point, all participants experienced the same set of sensations: augmented heartbeat, elevated body heat, muscle stiffness, shivering and twitching, seeing shapes, and finding that the sound of the rattle tended to disappear or turn to sensations of light. Afterward, when the altered state had ended, they reported themselves joyously energized and occupying a world that seemed changed, and with a distorted sense of time (Goodman, 1990: 16). What was not the same in the individual reports was the set of visions and beliefs that each experienced as the "content" of the altered state. Preliminarily, Goodman concluded that the trance state must be a kind of empty form that will be filled with whatever belief system the individual brings to it: "If no belief system is proffered, it will remain vacuous. It is a neurophysiological event that receives content only from signals present in the respective culture" (Ibid., 17).

          Goodman's research took a new direction, however, when she found reports from a Canadian psychologist, V. F. Emerson, that differences in the content of meditation experiences depend upon the bodily posture of the meditator. "As soon as we controlled for posture, something much more important began emerging. The experiences began falling into place. . . . we found that each posture predictably mediated not just any kind of vision, but a characteristic, distinctly different experience" (Ibid., 20).

          Hoping to find classic, tried-and-true postures that had been used since time immemorial, Goodman studied ancient art, looking for bodily postures that appeared frequently. One of the postures she selected is that of the bird-headed shaman figure from the Lascaux cave, which is nearly exactly duplicated in a painting of Osiris rising to the heavens from 12,000 years later in Egypt. Both are lying flat on their backs, but with their heads elevated thirty-seven degrees above their heels. The right arm of the shaman lies next to the body, elbow slightly bent, right hand resting on its outside edge with the thumb pointing upward. The left arm extends straight out from the shoulder, left thumb pointing downward. Summarizing the experience of the participants who entered trance in this posture, Goodman writes:

[T]he posture prompted such excitation to arise that in the perception of the participants, a flow of energy was churned, the course of which then became controlled, converging on the genitals; hence perhaps the erection of the Lascaux shaman. From there it started streaming up through the body and into the head, and then, as the astounded participants told so graphically, "I was being squeezed out through my head," or "this thing was coming out as an exact duplicate of myself," and "I came out, flying about in the blue." The agreement with countless tales from around the world was evident. In fact, the conclusion was inescapable: We had rediscovered the ancient art of embarking on a spirit journey.

. . . Put differently, guided by hitherto unnoticed traditional body postures, these "subjects" of a social-science experiment had taken the step from the physical change of the trance to the experience of ecstasy, they had passed from the secular to the sacred (Ibid., 23, italics in original).

Many of the participants saw birds in their visions or became birds or were taken away by birds. Such imagery suggests the reason why the Lascaux shaman has a bird's head (or is wearing a bird mask). Also, beside the shaman's body is a bird-topped staff.

          Goodman found similar typical trance themes were generated by the other postures she attempted. It thereby appears that she has discovered another kind of archetype or mental module, a species-wide guiding principle characterized by patterns of bodily energy and visionary content made possible by certain typical postures. The yoga tradition has known this for millennia, and Lee Sannella's (1992) work on the Kundalini experience -- which bears some similarities to Goodman's Lascaux shaman experiments -- may be an encouraging beginning toward understanding the mechanics of the process. [21]

The stages of trance. Jean Clottes believes the cave paintings reflect altered states of consciousness cultivated by shamans the world over. "At all times and in all places, people have entered ecstasies or frenzied altered states of consciousness and experienced hallucinations. Indeed, the potential to shift, voluntarily or involuntarily, between different states of consciousness is a function of the universal human nervous system" (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998: 12). Due to this species-universal capacity for altered states, Clottes believes that we are closer to the religious experience of Upper Paleolithic people than to other aspects of their lives (Ibid., 13). He means that shamanism should not be considered an influential idea that spread from one place to another, but that it was always and everywhere available through the human nervous system's capacity to enter altered states (Ibid., 81). Entering into the caves promoted altered states, since social isolation, sensory deprivation, and extended exposure to cold temperatures naturally induce altered states of consciousness (Ibid., 29). When we are in an altered state, all of our senses "hallucinate" (Ibid., 14).

          The essence of Clottes' shamanic interpretation of the cave paintings is that three stages of trance have been documented, and visions characteristic of all three are to be found painted on the walls of the caves. The stages are well established and have been used elsewhere to analyze shamanic visions (e.g., Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971, 1975).

          In the first and lightest stage of trance, one sees abstract geometric forms: grids, rainbows, parallel lines, star bursts, zigzags, dots, and the like. They are brightly colored, flicker, change size and shape, and merge with one another. With the eyes open, one sees them projected on the walls. Reichel-Dolmatoff reports that the South American Indians of today who achieve these effects with drugs (yage or ayahuasca) intensively discuss the geometric forms and interpret them in line with a mythology that centers on the Milky Way. We might well suspect that our Ice Age ancestors also made them a matter of community discussion and interpretation. Whatever they may have thought of these geometric "phosphenes," however, they painted them on the walls of their caves. What Leroi-Gourhan interpreted as gender symbols, appear much more likely to be literal representations of the sights people saw when they entered trance.

          In the second stage, the changing phosphorescent forms seem to coalesce into recognizable everyday objects: teacups, snakes, etc. The second stage flows right into the third, as the phosphenes organize themselves into a vortex or tunnel lined with the geometric forms, which then draws the individual through into a bizarre world of deep trance. People, animals, monsters, and landscape are vividly real, or perhaps intensely dreamlike. Entranced individuals may find they can fly or that they become the animals they see or even the geometric forms: "The fretwork is I" (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 16f).

We emphasize that these three stages are universal and wired into the human nervous system, though the meanings given to the geometrics of Stage One, the objects into which they are illusioned in Stage Two, and the hallucinations of Stage Three are all culture-specific; at least in some measure, people hallucinate what they expect to hallucinate. A San shaman [from South Africa] may see an eland antelope; an Inuit will see a polar bear or a seal. But allowing for such cultural diversity, we can be fairly sure that the three stages of altered consciousness provide a framework for an understanding of shamanic experiences (Ibid., 19).

The meaning of the painted caves. Jean Clottes' collaborator in The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves (1998), David Lewis-Williams, is an expert on the rock art of the San Bushmen of southern Africa, which bears many similarities with that of the Ice Age caves. For example, when an eland is killed, the act of killing, the death of the eland, and the place where it dies are all "filled with power" and may occasion a commemorative dance by the tribal shaman. Furthermore, the blood of the eland may be mixed with the paint to be used in the rock art, in order to fill the paintings themselves with potency (Ibid., 33). Finally, when realistic elands are painted, they may be given "small, easily missed features, such as red lines on their faces, that imply that they are actually transformed shamans" (Ibid., 34). This does not prove anything about the cave art, but it does suggest that many of those "points" and "slash marks" that gave rise to the "hunting-magic" theory might have been intended to indicate that the animals so decorated represent shamans who had been transformed into animals in their trances.

          The San believe that behind the painted rock wall lurks a spirit world; and they try to establish a link with that world, not only in their altered states of consciousness but also by means of their blood-powered paint. Just like the Ice Age people in the caves, they blow paint over the backs of their hands while pressing their palms against the rock wall. In this way, they leave the red outline of a hand trying to reach through the rock to the mystic realm. Clottes and Lewis-Williams believe it is the actual covering of the hand and adjacent rock surface with paint (usually red, sometimes black) that is the important feature of the rite. For this appears to "seal" their hands into the walls. "The hands thus reached into the spiritual realm behind the membrane of rock" (Ibid., 95) Furthermore, the way they have painted many of the animals on the cave walls makes some of the horses and lions seem to be squeezing out through the cracks in the rock, sliding out of the invisible world behind the wall and displaying themselves to rapt initiates (Ibid., 33).

          There can be no question that the cave art was carefully planned: from the succession of chambers they chose to decorate, to the lay-out of each individual wall, to the way they incorporated the nodules and cracks of the wall into their compositions (Ibid., 86). Clottes and Lewis-Williams believe that the large embellished chambers were designed to function as "vestibules" that would prepare the minds of the vision questers who visited the underground world. Visitors had to make their way through several such galleries on their way to small, deeper, undecorated chambers, where they were to invoke their own visions in solitude and in a state of sensory deprivation (Ibid., 110). "The embellished vestibules stocked their minds . . . [and] worked toward conformity of visions and so the consolidation of power" (Ibid., 106).

          The evidence seems very strong that what is depicted on those walls is some sort of transformation of Nature as it is found above ground under the sun and stars. There are no sun and stars below. It really seems to be an hallucinatory world, a set of visions that point to a cosmos larger than that of the empirical world.

The best explanation is that the caves were believed to be passages leading into the lost tier of the shamanic cosmos. People who crawled and walked through those passages were completely surrounded by the underworld: Everything -- walls, ceilings, floors, stalagmites, stalactites, bosses, nodules -- was therefore potentially significant. In the many shamanic societies, shamans visit the underworld in their hallucinations; during the Upper Paleolithic they did so in their hallucinations but also literally by exploring the passages, tunnels, and chambers of the caves (Ibid., 99).

Symbol-Using Primate

          It is interesting where the human mind goes as soon as it becomes able to put together the lessons learned in the fields of physics, natural science, sociality, and language. Our ancestors suddenly began to do everything better. Their hunting showed more strategy; they developed a greater variety of weapons, some with longer range; they carved figures out of stone and in relief on walls; they began to paint fantastic scenes. Very likely they did more than record the moon's phases in notches on bones. They contemplated the greater cosmos of slowly turning star clusters and saw that it is related to what happens here below. They became aware of what they were doing and curious as to its meaning. Finally, they learned that human consciousness is variable, capable of an assortment of trance states, in each of which the cosmos assumes a different form. No sooner did they learn they had a consciousness, but they found it could be altered. They could open their outer eyes and see, or their inner eyes and imagine. The cave walls bear witness to what they were attempting.

          Cave art represents the culmination of what evolutionists call our Era of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). After 65 million years as primates, our ancestors spent the last two or three million stretching their minds in new directions. The physical, natural-science, and socio-political world was given to them by archetypes they shared in large measure with the great apes. Like chimpanzees, our ancestors were rather good at selecting appropriate sticks and rocks for digging holes and cracking nuts. But unlike the chimpanzees, they learned to see knife edges in the rocks and work out the physics for releasing them. They began to imagine potential realities and make them come true. Around the time (250,000, B.P.?) they began to think that different tasks might better be served by specially designed tools and that they might count the days in the moon's cycle, they probably recognized the parallel between moon and menses, moon and tides, moon and seasons. Primate curiosity took on new dimensions.

          Chimpanzees and bonobos are experts in soap-opera thinking, as the politics of their groups shows, what is called third-order thinking. They question why their friends and antagonists do what they do. Humans question why the world is the way it is -- fourth-order thinking (Dunbar, 1996: 104). Science and religion comprise the two fundamental sorts of questions humans ask. We want to know the laws of nature, and we want to know what transcends those laws. Both science and religion are present in the caves. The technology to produce the paints and the scaffolding to reach the ceilings demonstrates what they were capable of doing with science. The themes and executions of their cave paintings demonstrate where their techniques of ecstasy had taken them.

          No sooner did they acquire fourth-order thinking, however, than the climate changed. The Ice Age ended, the animals and plants changed, the land became more spacious, the caves were abandoned. Within as few as five millennia our ancestors had largely given up hunting and gathering and settled down to herding and planting. The Era of Evolutionary Adaptation was over, and they were adapting themselves to entirely new lifestyles. Not enough time had passed to allow for changes in the archetypal structure of the mind. Our ancestors had to adapt with the primate modules they had inherited.

 

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1. De Waal is the C. H. Chandler Professor of Primate Behavior and Director of the Living Links Center at Emory University.
   
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2. "[E]ven today there are few students of lithic technique that ever achieve a Neanderthal's level of expertise in producing good Levallois cores or flakes" (Mithen, 1996: 119). Of course Levallois tools are much more complicated than Oldowan. The point is that our Stone Age ancestors were rather accomplished, and a bonobo who can chip off flakes is quite remarkable.
   
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3. Citing Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin, 1994.
   
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4. Citing Jung's marginal notations to Calvin Hall's article, "Jung's Archetypal Theory" (Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston).
   
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5. Stevens & Price name these opposed strategies hedonic and agonic, terms that I find more misleading than mine.
   
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6. The ascription of altruism to non-linguistic animals is much disputed, the definition of altruism often altered to suit one theory or another. It appears to be an area where talking primates wish to stake a unique claim for our own species.
   
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7. There are exceptions -- younger children can learn to have a Theory of Mind, and are particularly liable to do so if they have older siblings (Hauser, 2000: 165).
   
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8. De Waal calls it "triadic awareness": "the capacity to perceive social relationships between others so as to form varied triangular relationships" (1998: 175).
   
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9. Game theorists among evolution scientists may well argue that this solution resembles a "tit-for-tat" game strategy, an "Evolutionarily Stable Strategy" -- one that gives its animals an advantage in the struggle to survive. Such strategizing, it may be implied, arises as a simple arithmetical solution and might become established in the genome by natural selection without any consciousness on the part of the rhesus monkey or the chimpanzee (cf. Badcock, 2000: 88-106). There is certainly reason to be wary of anthropomorphizing interpretations, but to deny all consciousness to our primate relatives is to suggest that, suddenly and without warning, consciousness and humankind appeared on the evolutionary stage at the same moment.
   
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10. The book on chimpanzees (1998, originally 1982) is illustrated with de Waal's own photography and drawings. The bonobo book (1997) has photos by Frans Lanting.
    
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11. "How Blind Mole Rats Find Their Way Home." Science News 165(7) (February, 14, 2004): 110.
    
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12. He does list a controversial fifteenth, the "concept of self," that we have not discussed in order to save it for a later chapter where we will be able to give it the attention it deserves.
    
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13. The Upper or High Paleolithic (40k-10k, B.P.) is the last portion of the "early" (paleo) stone age (lithic). It is "upper" or "high" because human culture is growing by leaps and bounds in comparison with the relative stasis of the previous two million years.
    
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14. This claim may be overstated, for it seems that Levallois flakes require a touching up that is best done with a softer hammer, one made of antler, wood, or bone. On the other hand, the very capacity to make Levallois flakes may be an indication that the "side-chapels" have already been connected with the main cathedral.
    
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15. Rudgley, without quite disagreeing, presents evidence that tempers Mithen's claim. He describes a "manuport," a natural object collected and carried about by an Australopithecine three million years ago in southern Africa. Rudgley also identifies the "earliest known figurine to be accepted by professional archaeologists," the Berekhat Ram figurine, found in Israel between strata of basalt that are, respectively 233k and 800k years old. It is a small pebble whose natural shape resembles the female figure, and this illusion is enhanced by artificially carved grooves (Rudgley, 1999: 235f). Mithen emphasizes the suddenness of cultural developments, while Rudgley emphasizes their slowly gathering momentum.
    
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16. Associate in Paleolithic Archaeology at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
    
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17. "The brain that painted the caves of Altamira was quite good enough to invent moon rockets; it has not changed in the meantime" (Fox, 1989: 133).
    
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18. E.g., Clottes & Courtin, 1996.
    
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19. By way of comparison, the famous caves of Lascaux and Altamira date from 20k and 17k, B.P.
    
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20. The same has been observed of ancient Egypt, that the earliest art is the best.
    
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21. In brief, sitting in meditation sets up a standing wave in the aorta which causes the body to vibrate and generates a pulsation in the ventricular fluid of the brain, resulting in stimulation to a sensory map of the body found in the cortex. The sensation of energy rising from the feet to the head is the result of the progressive stimulation of that sensory map in the cortex (Sannella, 1992).