Boghul & Acephale

                 

A  Neanderthal Illustration, 64, 000 years old

A review of Warning signs–how early humans first began to paint animals (Hodgson & Pettitt, Phys.org)

Dawn. A welter of hominids approaches the savanna beyond their retreating woodland home. Some will return to the shade as the heat builds through the morning.  Some race to caves or pools because they won’t be able to return: the better climbers take all the places in the trees while those who can run, run. They’ll have to run for it when the time comes, and the ones with longer legs will survive. Some of these stay in the forest until nightfall and when the others return go out to hunt for food. Those with the best night vision prevail, and when the woodland retreats to nothing, the roles are reversed. The runners with exceptional night vision have the advantage now. 

What if you lift the Eurocentric patina and even lift the sapiens-centric patina from human evolution studies? Then you would see innumerable bi-pedal creatures in cooperation or competition with each other and the large predators. The hominins didn’t know which was going to prevail. Some of those creatures among the bands that were everywhere may have possessed the kernel of Homo Sapiens sapiens from the very beginning and evolved more or less inevitably into ourselves at last, while others that had prevailed for thousands of millennia ran their course. There’s no guarantee we won’t share that fate. Is it logical to compare our antecedents to ourselves, because they arose out of us? Nope. We arose out of them. What if we begin to compare ourselves to them, unfavorably? What happened to bring us to the end of the line here? Our genus first painted the “paleolithic Sistine chapel” and invented the Mother rite, decimated the large beasts of the field, probably massacred all the remnant of Neanderthal, Denisovan, Heidelbergensis, Homo erectus and any other hominin that got in our way.  Can the same be said about any of them?

Our equally resourceful antecedents and cousins inhabited the planet outside Africa for 1,400,000 years and more. We may barely stretch our escapade out more than 60,000 years. Are we actually essential to life in this world, or is that more “anatomically modern” human-centric wishful thinking? Is the Anthropocene going to be the shortest epoch ever?  Imagine, how could this planet possibly do without us, and the answer is, very easily, as the previous millions of years testify. Now quantum mechanics, physics, astronomy, paleontology, paleoanthropology, archaeology, and dozens of other scientific disciplines aided by cutting edge tech are pushing the boundaries of our vision of God’s magnificent perpetual motion device while the worst of us, fueled by unlimited trillions in wealth, actively work to crush human & natural life, to destroy hope under the illusion that they alone will survive. (One week ago the US FDA decided to murder millions of bees with neonics. Are we being culled by an existential death cult, our obliteration decreed by megabillionaires, enforced by global criminals, and expedited by corrupt government agencies? The near obliteration of our bad male selves by our bad male selves 7000-5000 years ago may not be just an aberration.

The only warning for Warning signs–how early humans first began to paint animals (Hodgson & Pettitt, Phys.org) is against taking the claptrap spouted in the article seriously.  There is so much wrong with their perception of the hunters of that time that an entirely new type of hominin is born. Let the authors introduce you to the City Homo sapiens: “Fortunately, the way hunters relate to the environment has changed little since early times in that they remain acutely sensitive to particular animal contours. So much so, that in challenging lighting situations – and where prey might be well camouflaged – the hunter becomes hypersensitive to such features…”

Or maybe the Country Homo sapiens had damn good eyesight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling after millennia of hunting large beasts and actually, given their intelligence during the course of those tens of thousands of years, acquired the ability to recognize the presence of prey under several conditions of wind, sound, light, terrain, and sensation. Because gosh, desert people and indigenous Americans saw distance better than corrupt Europeans with their telescopes and binoculars up to a few years ago. Maybe the corrupt Europeans are the descendants of our City Homo sapiens!

“In such ambiguous circumstances, it’s better to “see” an animal when it’s not there – to mistake a rock for a bear – than not see it. Such better-safe-than-sorry hair-trigger cues are cognitive adaptations that promote survival. In dangerous conditions, the human visual system becomes increasingly aroused and is even more easily triggered into accepting the slightest cue as an animal…”

Primeval GPS for the City Homo sapiens, since he’s too stupid to learn anything, right? since they can’t smell or hear or taste or feel worth a hoot and wouldn’t know a bear from a rock without seeing something moving in the twilight when they do their best hunting.

“In short, we are preconditioned to interpret ambiguous shapes as animals. Recent evidence from visual neuroscience shows that when individuals are conditioned to see particular objects – faces, say – they are more likely to see them in ambiguous patterns. Upper Palaeolithic hunters conditioned themselves due to the need to detect animals, but this effect was reinforced by the suggestive features of the caves…”

So paleolithic hunters conditioned themselves, all tens of thousands of generations, somehow all at once (how on earth could they manage it otherwise!), to detect animals by their ambiguous shapes. Because they’re just like us that way. So they painted cave art because the shape of the walls reminded them of hunting by ambiguous shape! No, the ambiguous shape of the cave walls helped them see ambiguous shapes of animals, in the wild presumably. So they painted the walls…

‘Caves are full of suggestive cues. They are dangerous places, often inhabited by predators, thereby stimulating increased arousal levels. Hunters entering the caves with an overactive visual system will have regularly “mistaken” the natural cave features for animals. The cave walls also simulated the outdoor environment, where hunters regularly had to be able to spot their prey in camouflage.” The failure of imagination here is so breathtaking as to cause me to doubt my own comprehension. How does such foolishness get published? Watch out, City Homo sapiens people, caves are dangerous places! So that’s a good idea to paint the curves on the walls as animals to simulate the outdoor environment, so it’s not as scary. “Oooh,” you can hear City Homo sapiens saying, “Mommy those big bad animals are gonna eat me! Can you paint the walls so I’m not so skeert?” Why else would the walls be painted?

And the authors write “the way hunters relate to the environment has changed little since early times”. Isn’t that notion a little preposterous? Does it help to be reminded that there was a superabundance of large fauna and hunting was a snap with spears and such? Any decent paleoanthropologist will tell you that evidence of our antecedents spearing large beasts or driving them into death traps must have been damn common because the creatures were hunted out of existence eventually. 

The interments by Homo naledi 250,000 years ago now give the lie to the whole preposterous theories of Dr. Pettit and his team because our little cousins used caves metaphorically, say to assist their dead along the path to rebirth or at the very least to dispose of their dead communally.  It’s pretty damned obvious to anybody with a lick of sense that caves hold numinous power and anything inside is meant to be infused with that power, including handprints and the astonishing drawings of beasts.

“But as we were making the final touches to our academic paper, valuable corroborative evidence came to light supporting the theory. Namely, the dating of a negative hand stencil and a geometric mark from the Monte Castillo cave art complex in Spain dating to a minimum of 64,000 years ago and almost certainly made by Neanderthals.

“When later humans entered the same caves and saw these, the Neanderthals may literally have “handed on” to our own species the notion that a graphic mark could act as a figurative representation. Thanks to the primed visual system of the later hunter-gatherers – and the suggestive environment of the caves – it was Homo sapiens who took the final step creating the first complex figurative representations, with all the ramifications that followed for art and culture.” Because that makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it too much. Now we know how City Homo sapiens got the idea for museums! (Please see the accompanying ‘complex figurative representation” by a Neanderthal illustrator, above.)

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