Another mystery

Cave painting from Chauvet, ca. 31,000 years BP

Continuing on the previous post: the creativity of early humans is on display in Upper Paleolithic cave art and in portable sculptures, dating to about 40,000 years ago. According to Colin Renfrew, whose book on prehistory I have been reading, it took a long time for the scholarly world of prehistorians to accept that this art was truly so old. There is earlier evidence for decorative human "patterning," in a cave in South Africa dating to 65,000 years ago, but it consists of intersecting incised lines, not of images that shows the interaction of humans with their surroundings.

What is of interest, however, is that the brilliant examples European paleolithic cave art, aside from a few exceptions, occurred only in Spain and southwestern France. Non-figurative cave art dates to 40,000 years ago at the El Castillo Cave in Spain. Animal paintings dating to 30,000 years BP (before the present) were discovered in Chauvet in France. Renfrew writes that it would be tens of thousands of years later, "some time after the inception of the  Holocene climatic phase, to see the great upsurge in rock art that then occurs."

Since those discoveries in the 19th century, scholars of prehistory have branched out all over the world, and the earliest cave paintings with comparable "sophistication" have been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Cave art from Sulawesi (image: CC 1.0 Luc-Henri Fage)

Where am I going with these reflections on prehistory? What interests me is the issue of "transmission" of culture. Renfrew distinguishes two facets of human development. One is species specific, called "speciation, which culminated ca. 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. The skills associated with this stage include the use of fire and of stone tools, which were important in the adaptation of humans to their environment. This phase occurred before the dispersal of humans out of Africa, . Everything afterward was "tectonic," with humans building on the Homo genetic endowment, which, it seems, was "hard wired" in the human DNA.

The tectonic phase brought no change to the genome, and the rest is history: cultural evolution and the transmission of "culturally inherited" behaviors. What was there in humans, in homo sapiens in particular, that drove the species to spread throughout the earth and to transform the environment, to mold nature itself to its purposes? This subject is close to my research on a more modern aspect of this human ranging across the world, namely, "world literature," in particular Goethe's concept. What propelled world literature was another dynamic phase of human history, the overseas explorations beginning after Columbus's arrival in the New World.