In July and August, this blog covered one of the great revolutions in information transmission, the evolution of language. And as we move into September, we will consider another, the invention of writing. But in between these two great revolutions, there are tantalizing hints that people were experimenting with other techniques for enhancing social memory.
Genevieve von Petzinger has made an extensive study of cave paintings from Ice Age Europe, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago; her results are presented in a recent book. The most famous cave paintings are pictures, sometimes of extraordinary quality. But von Petzinger has been interested in something else, in the geometric signs that often accompany these paintings, or stand on their own. These are not random doodles. A limited number of different signs – she lists just thirty two – is found repeatedly. Some signs, like the Spanish Tectiform, are limited in geographic distribution. Some appear early and disappear later, some do the reverse, others persist through the whole period.
These signs would seem to be some kind of symbolic code. But not, yet, a writing system. Perhaps some of them represent astronomical phenomena, like modern astrological symbols:
or perhaps they represent the terrestrial natural world, or social divisions, or all of the above. At this point we don’t know.
Lascaux cave paintings, Southwest France, discovered in 1940. (Some analyses push the dates back before 18 thousand years ago, earlier than the previously accepted 16 – 15 thousand.)
Deep inside the Lascaux cave, past the world-renowned Great Hall of the Bulls, where Paleolithic artists painted a colorful menagerie of horses, deer, and bulls, starts a lesser-known corridor known as the Apse. There, at the bottom of a sixteen-foot pit, next to fine drawings of a wounded bison and a rhinoceros, lies one of the rare depictions of a human being in prehistoric art. The man is lying flat on his back, palms up and arms extended. Next to him stands a bird perched on a stick. Nearby lies a broken spear that was probably used to disembowel the bison, whose intestines are hanging out.
The person is clearly a man, for his penis is fully erect. And this, according to the sleep researcher Michel Jouvet, illuminates the drawing’s meaning: it depicts a dreamer and his dream. As Jouvet and his team discovered, dreaming occurs primarily during a specific phase of sleep, which they dubbed “paradoxical” because it does not look like sleep; during this period, the brain is almost as active as it is in wakefulness, and the eyes ceaselessly move around. In males, this phase is invariably accompanied by a strong erection (even when the dream is devoid of sexual content). Although this weird physiological fact became known to science only in the twentieth century, Jouvet wittily remarks that our ancestors could easily have noticed it. And the bird seems the most natural metaphor for the dreamer’s soul: during dreams, the mind flies to distant places and ancient times, free as a sparrow.
This idea might seem fanciful were it not for the remarkable recurrence of imagery of sleep birds, souls, and erections in the art and symbolism of all sorts of cultures. …
You’ve probably heard the news – by now it’s pretty old news – that there is more genetic variation within human populations than between them. More specifically, we can say that, averaging across the whole genome, a typical human being will get about 85% of her ancestry from a gene pool she shares with all humanity, about 10% from a gene pool specific to a continent-scale race (East Asian, Sub-Saharan African, or whatever), and about another 5% from a localized gene pool (Japanese, Yoruba, or whatever).
This is an interesting statistic. It mostly reflects the fact that different human populations haven’t been diverging for very long (in evolutionary terms). Plus there have been episodes of gene exchange after the initial Out of Africa divergence.
But the statistic is also misleading. It holds for the genome as a whole, where it looks like most genes have not been under strong selection. But the subset of genes that has been under strong selection can differ a lot more between populations. (Slightly off-topic: this is why you can’t plug the numbers for ethnic genetic similarity into the formula for kin selection, and make predictions about ethnic nepotism. See here for a blog post, and here for an article.)
A case in point is the EDAR gene, which encodes a protein active in ectodermal tissues like skin. Somewhere in East Asia around 30,000 years ago, a point mutation occurred in this gene, a single nucleotide substitution. The mutant allele spread rapidly, and is now found in most East Asians and New World Indians. The population that entered the Americas must have been at or near fixation for the new version of the gene. This rate of spread is far too great to be accounted for by genetic drift. The mutant must have have had some selective advantage.
Frequency of old (blue) and new (red) EDAR alleles
Charles Darwin thought that the main selective force driving the divergence of human populations was sexual selection. Different groups developed different standards of beauty, and selected mates accordingly. (Here’s an article arguing that culturally transmitted aesthetic standards can drive particularly rapid divergence.) In support of this, we observe that some of the greatest differences across populations, with zero overlap between some pairs of populations, are in readily visible, esthetically charged traits like skin color and hair form.
The EDAR gene acts on physical appearance: it affects hair growth. Carriers of the mutant version have thicker hair shafts, and their hair grows out straight, not wavy or curly. So perhaps sexual selection for thick tresses contributed to the spread of the gene. Darwin vindicated! But before we get carried away with that theory, we should note that the mutant version has several other effects. It causes incisors to develop with a characteristic “shoveled” shape. It results in more numerous sweat glands. It also affects mammary glands, leading to less mammary tissue, but a denser network of ducts to carry milk. A recent article argues that it was differences in survival among nursing infants, rather than mate choice among adults, that gave the First Americans their distinctive hair.
And here’s what a mouse looks like with the East Asian version of the EDAR gene (left).
Only in the last half century or so, with the discovery of the Big Bang, has it been possible to do something like Logarithmic History. But human beings have been speculating for far longer than that on the origins of the universe, and we’ll have plenty of occasions here to pay tribute to earlier prescientific cosmologies. (The early chapters of the book of Genesis are probably most familiar to Western readers, but there are lots of others.)
Strikingly, it may be possible to reconstruct a very early interconnected set of myths concerning the world’s origin, which date back to long before the invention of writing (or farming, for that matter). This is the argument of Michael Witzel and some of his associates, set forth at length in Witzel’s ambitious recent book, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Witzel is an expert on the Vedas (Hindu sacred texts)* who has grown interested in wider comparisons. He argues that there are striking parallels in myths told in traditional societies across a wide expanse of the Earth. These parallels are not the product ancient archetypes welling out of the collective unconscious, but are survivals of a coherent narrative of the origins and destiny of the universe, the gods, and humans, which was told tens of thousands of years ago. This mythological narrative includes the following:
In the beginning: primordial waters / darkness / chaos / ‘nonbeing’
A primordial egg / giant
A primordial hill / island / floating earth
Father Sky and Mother Earth and their children, for four generations, defining Four Ages of creation
The Sky is raised up and severed from the Earth
The Sky and his daughter commit incest, and the hidden sun’s light is revealed
The current generation of gods defeat or kill their predecessors.
A dragon is slain by a culture hero
The Sun becomes the father of humans (later on, of chieftains), and establishes their rituals
The first humans, whose evil deeds lead to the origin of death and the great Flood
A generation of heroes and the bringing of fire / food / culture by a culture hero
The spread of humans / emergence of local nobility: local history begins
In the future: final destruction of humans, the world, the gods
A new heaven and a new earth / eternal bliss
Some elements of the myth seem to have an astronomical significance. The revelation of the sun seems to be especially associated with the winter solstice, and the slaying of a dragon, bringing rain, with the summer solstice. The Greek version of the Four Ages (and its Near Eastern antecedents) is clearly related to the movements of stars and planets.
Witzel labels the resulting mythic narrative “Laurasian mythology,” because its major elements are found mostly in Eurasia, the Pacific, and the New World. It contrasts with a Gondwanan mythology found Africa, New Guinea and Australia. (These two mythologies happen, by chance, to correspond roughly to the ancient supercontinents of Laurasia and Gondwana.) Laurasian and Gondwanan mythology overlap to some extent. Stories of a great Flood sent to punish unruly or sinful mankind, leaving only scattered mountaintop survivors to repopulate the world, are found in both.**
Witzel proposes that Laurasian mythology dates all the way back to an Out Of Africa expansion 40 thousand years ago. I have chosen fairly arbitrarily to introduce it instead at a later date. But it can’t date any later than the main settlement of the Americas by the ancestors of Amerindians.
* Witzel’s work on the Vedas has led to his being dogged by a lot of Hindu nationalists who are outraged that he thinks Indo-European languages came from outside India, an occupational hazard for the Indo-Europeanist scholar.
** When I did fieldwork several decades ago among the Ache Indians in Paraguay, they were curious about the way the story of Noah seemed to fit with their own flood story.
Glacial periods within the present Ice Age start gradually and end rapidly. The last glacial period began around 90 thousand years ago, and reached its peak, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), around 20 thousand years ago. During the LGM most of Northern Europe and northern North America were under ice. Sea levels were more than 300 feet lower than today. Human beings in Europe were confined to refugia in the south, notably Spain and southern France.
In the period after the LGM, temperatures rise, the ice retreats, and humans recolonize the North. Not just Europe: people will gradually make their way into Siberia, and some of these Siberians will eventually make their way to the New World.
For a flavor of life during these times, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is worth checking out. She is the author of two beautifully written novels set in this period in Siberia (Reindeer Moon, and The Animal Wife). As a child, Thomas was part of an expedition to the Kalahari, as recounted in her book The Harmless People. Her experiences, along with northern archeology, color her imaginative reconstruction of Ice Age hunters.
What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
Thomas Browne. Urn Burial
In the mid-twentieth century, Soviet archeologists excavated a site at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal that included the remains of of a 3-4 year old boy. Recent ancient DNA tests on the boy are one piece of evidence that is shaking up our understanding of how populations differentiated once Homo sapiens left Africa. (News story here.) It now looks like, back in the day, there was a widespread ancient population – people have been calling them Ancestral North Eurasians or ANE – that was already clearly differentiated from East Asians, and from populations in Southwest Asia. This population would eventually make a significant contribution to the ancestry of both American Indians and Europeans. American Indians seem to get most of their ancestry from a population ancestral to modern East Asians, but a large minority (about 25%) from ANE. And we’ll see when we get to Indo-European origins and the Indo-European expansion that ANE is a significant factor there as well.
These genetic findings dovetail neatly with work on historical linguistics by Joseph Greenberg. In Indo-European and its closest relatives: The Eurasiatic language family, Greenberg argued for a Eurasiatic language family, ancestral to more generally accepted families including Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Japanese-Korean-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut. He argued that the closest relative of this macrofamily was another macrofamily, dubbed “Amerind,” embracing most American Indian languages.
Greenberg’s proposal has not met with universal acceptance. One linguist (Don Ringe, a heavyweight in Indo-European studies) wrote “One is seldom asked to review a book that contains nothing of value, but that is unfortunately true of this volume.” The gold standard for historical linguists is being able to reconstruct an ancestral language, and the systematic sound changes leading to its descendants. Instead of this, Greenberg could only offer a mass of suggestive similarities. But the close correspondence between Greenberg’s farflung Eurasiatic family (and its Amerind sister) and the recent genetic results suggest that he was onto something. Either that, or he made a surprisingly lucky guess.
The Venus of Willendorf, from Austria, is one of a number of “Venus figurines” from the European Upper Paleolithic.
The statuette is realistic, except for the attenuated/missing hands and feet, and the absence of facial features. Obviously she’s fat, and nude. But not entirely unclothed. The pattern on her head is not just an abstract design, but carefully depicted piece of headgear.
It took a woman, archeologist Olga Soffer, to notice that this figurine represents not just a naked woman, but a fashion statement. Here’s a quotation:
A close examination of this specimen shows a spirally or radially hand‐woven item which may be initiated by a knotted center in the manner of some kinds of coiled baskets. The technique represented is a two‐element structure in which an apparently flexible, horizontal foundation element or warp is vertically wrapped with stem stitches. The foundation element is clearly visible between the stitches, some of which are plain while others are countered. Work direction is right to left, and at least seven circuits encircle the head, with two extra half‐circuits over the nape of the neck. The selvage, as depicted over the forehead, simply has the wrapping element encircling the final horizontal warp circuit. Several areas on the body of the cap appear to illustrate splices, where new material has been added.
Many other Venus figurines are also nude but adorned – with headgear, or with bands and belts, or with skirts, sometimes worn, gangsta style, below the buttocks. These figures tell us something about the complexity of textile technology long ago. What more is going on – whether we’re seeing a representation of mythology, of a beauty pageant, or an initiation rite, or all of the above – is a mystery.
I just posted a tweet about population structure in people thirty four thousand years ago. Like modern hunter-gatherers, people back then apparently managed to distribute their marriage alliances broadly and so keep their coefficients of inbreeding down.
And also, apparently, unlike Neanderthals. It looks like Neanderthals frequently had high levels of inbreeding, evidenced by many and extensive Runs Of Homozygosity, long stretches of DNA in one individual that look the same because they trace back to the same recent ancestor showing up multiple times through several genealogical lines (e.g. a great grandma on Mother’s side is also a great grandma on Father’s side) before recombination could shuffle her genes.
In an earlier post I wrote about the evolution of pair bonds in human ancestors, associated maybe with the evolution of a sexual division of labor. (Not everyone buys this story. Some of my colleagues here at the University of Utah think that “male provisioning” in humans is more like the peacock showing off his tail than like Daddy Bird and Mommy Bird feeding the various baby birds.) But human mating is more than pair-bonding; it enlists some distinctively human social aptitudes. Previous posts have covered the human gift for sharing intentions, getting on the same page as the other person. But getting this intimate with another person is scary. It can get you in trouble, even get you killed, if you get off on the wrong foot. So we have another mode of interaction, especially with people we don’t know very well and with our social superiors, where we don’t bare our hearts, but instead follow a safe script. We treat the other person as the occupant of a social role, rather than an individual: Sir, Your Excellency, Your Majesty, Your Holiness, Professor – not Jimmy or Bill. They may wear special regalia or a uniform, and (if you’re in the army) you’re told to salute the uniform, not the man.
Building large scale societies depends on treating other people according to their social roles even when we don’t know them personally. But we were doing the whole roles-norms-and-scripts thing long before the Rise of Civilization. One of the classic topics in anthropology is the Mother-in-Law taboo, which shows up in one form or another in one society after another. You show respect to your Mother-in-Law. You don’t make ribald jokes in her presence. Maybe you don’t address her or share with her directly, but through someone else. Or maybe you avoid her company entirely. Maybe when you see her footprints around the campfire you inconspicuously brush them away so you’re not looking at them.
Long before human beings had armies, and bureaucracies, and aristocrats and commoners, they were crafting complicated marriage rules, and expanding their social universe beyond the circle of intimates, to those scary outsiders, The In-Laws. Maybe this is partly what gave our ancestors an edge over Neanderthals.
“The Inheritors” is a novel by William Golding about the encounter between Neanderthals and modern humans. Like “Lord of the Flies,” it is written with a mid-twentieth century awareness that advanced societies don’t leave behind the potential for cruelty.
Neanderthal 1, the first Neanderthal fossil recognized as probably belonging to another species, was discovered in the Neander Thal (=Neander Valley) in 1856. He is close in time to the last Neanderthals: the most recent review of the evidence finds that Neanderthals disappear as a distinct group around 40 thousand years ago. They were almost certainly outcompeted by Homo sapiens who had arrived in Europe earlier. There was probably some kind of coexistence between Neanderthals and H. sapiens over many thousands of years. Regional cultures from this period, like the Châtelperronian, may represent Neanderthals copying the Aurignacian culture of incoming H. sapiens. The final blow may have come between 39 and 38 thousand years ago, when a “Heinrich event” sent cascades of icebergs into the North Atlantic, drastically chilling Europe. Homo sapiens recovered from the cold spell; Neanderthals did not.
Just last year we have learned that one of the earliest modern human fossils from Europe, Oase 1, from Romania (40 kya), has substantially more Neanderthal DNA, 6-9%, than living Europeans. Furthermore, this DNA comes in the form of long stretches of chromosomes, rather than little bits broken up by millennia of recombination, showing that his Neanderthal ancestors go back just a few generations, maybe to some great-great-great-grandparents. We’ve also learned from isotopic evidence that Oase 1 got the proteins in his diet from a broad array of sources, including freshwater fish. Neanderthals, by contrast, look like top predators, gaining nearly all their protein from large herbivores.
And here is some of the art produced by Homo sapiens 40 thousand years ago. The lion man from Hohlenstein-Fels
And the earliest known cave paintings, from Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Thinking about how Neanderthals might have talked is one way to get at language evolution and how language works. Another way to do this is through science fiction. I’m not thinking so much of constructed languages like Quenya, Klingon, or Dothraki. There are whole communities of people out there – conlangers – busy inventing and learning such languages; some fun introductions are here and here. But mostly these languages are meant to fall within the range of variation of existing human languages. I’m thinking instead of some science fiction stories that imagine more radical alterations of language.
A few decades into the future, the United States is falling apart. A drifter stumbles into a community of deaf-and-blind “Kellerites” who are doing pretty well for themselves in the New Mexico desert. They communicate partly by spelling out things in handtalk. “By handtalk I mean the International Manual Alphabet. Anyone can learn it in a few hours or days.” But Varley recognizes that handtalk is not a real language. For a real language the community uses shorthand. “Shorthand was not code for English or any other language; it did not share construction or vocabulary with any other language. … Each word was something I had to learn and memorize separately from the handtalk spelling.”
The Kellerites are fictional, but sign language is not. In Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (who also writes obituaries for the New York Times) writes about a Bedouin community in Israel with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Deaf kids there have spontaneously come up with their own sign language. This is a real language, not derived from Arabic or Hebrew, with soundless “phonemes” that are combined to make signs that are more-or-less arbitrarily paired with meanings to yield words that can be combined into phrases and sentences according to rules of grammar. A nice detail: deaf babies exposed to sign language will start off “babbling” with their hands, just as hearing babies babble by making sounds. The human Language Acquisition Device (Chomsky’s phrase), an “instinct to acquire an art” (Darwin’s phrase), will work with whatever material it can get ahold of.
So Varley gets a lot right; I expect he did some research on sign language for this story. If the deaf-and-blind ever did form their own community, and come up with their own language, it would be a full-blown language a lot like his shorthand.
On the other hand, this bit, with the Kellerites merging verbal intercourse with the other kind of intercourse, is a little over the top:
But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation.
Or, as Eliza Doolittle said, “How kind of you to let me come.”
A tightly written spy tale, set a century or two in the future, where the United States went through World War III, went communist, and then got over it. It reads like a James Bond story as written by Francis Galton. The protagonist learns that there is a secret community of super-geniuses, who call themselves New Man (an allusion to real-life super-genius John von Neumann? By the way, “Neander” also means “new man”). They work behind the scenes to keep humanity safe from itself. This sometimes involves some antifa vigilantism: “ ‘Two weeks from now there will be a giant pow-wow of the new, rejuvenated, bigger-and-better-than-ever Ku Klux Klan down Carolina way. When the fun is at its height, when they are mouthing obscenities, working each other up to the pogrom spirit, an act of God is going to wipe out the whole kit and caboodle. … Sad.’ ”
And New Men have their own super-language, Speedtalk. Speedtalk more-or-less violates one of the key design features of real languages, the duality of patterning. Real languages have one level of meaningless phonemes combined according to rules to make syllables (so spy fits the sound pattern of English, but psi – if you try to pronounce the p – does not). One or more syllables are then arbitrarily paired with meanings to make words, and then there is a second level where another set of rules determines what combinations of words make grammatical phrases. Even sign languages work this way.
But Speedtalk instead has just one level, approximately, pairing up individual phonemes with meanings. This is quite a stretch. In real languages, the inventory of words is orders of magnitudes greater than the inventory of phonemes. But Heinlein tells us that adding variations in length, stress, and pitch is enough “to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English [800+ words] so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a ‘normal’ language, one Speedtalk word to an entire sentence.”
There’s more to Speedtalk than this. Heinlein was very taken with an intellectual fad of his time, General Semantics. General Semantics hovers somewhere between a serious intellectual endeavor and complete crackpottery. Firmly on the crackpot side of the line was Count Alfred Korzybski, who gets a chapter in a debunking book by Martin Gardner. Korzybski’s magnum opus Science and Sanity is all about how reforming language is the key to creating the first truly rational civilization. This means the verb “to be” has got to go. As Heinlein puts it. “One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad is it as a mental tool. For example, the verb ‘to be’ in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every one of which is false-to-fact.”
Entertaining, but silly. The score today is: “to be” 1, General Semantics 0. If you want some real semantics, Pinker beats Korzybski.
This is Book Four of a tetralogy. A million or so years in the future, civilization on Earth has sunk to a medieval level, albeit littered with bits and pieces of advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Wolfe really, really likes to have you figure things out, instead of telling you, but you can work out that the action takes place in South America. An endless war is going on against the Ascians, a totalitarian state to the north ruled by the Group of Seventeen. An Ascian prisoner of war tells a story, constructed entirely of canned slogans, while another character, Folia, interprets.
It starts off like this
The Ascian began to speak: “In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”
Folia interpreted: “Once upon a time …”
“Let no one be idle. If one is idle let him band together with others who are idle too, and let them look for idle land. Let everyone they meet direct them. It is better to walk a thousand leagues than to sit in the House of Starvation.”
“There was a remote farm worked in partnership by people who were not related.”
“One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.”
“On this farm there lived a good man.”
“Let the work be divided by a wise divider of work. Let the food be divided by a just divider of food. Let the pigs grow fat. Let the rats starve.”
“The others cheated him of his share.”
And so on.
Of course the story and its interpretation are fanciful. A functioning language has to be more than a collection of stock phrases. But the story illustrates something about the way real languages work. People don’t just communicate by encoding and decoding literal meanings, but by inferring one another’s communicative intentions, always thinking “I wonder what he meant by that.” There’s a whole branch of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, that studies how this works. And pragmatic inference in language is just one instance of a special, powerful human aptitude for creating shared intentions. This aptitude means that there are always ways to subvert official speech, in any language, even Ascian or Newspeak. Or Korean: the news several years ago was that North Korea had banned sarcasm.
Logarithmic History 