The Human Hive: The Evolution of Cities and the Dawn of the Anthropocene

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The Tower of Babel 

Despite the sophistication of Aboriginal society, for a multitude of reasons, not least the barren nature of much of the Australian continent, their culture remained locked in time and tied to the fragile ecology of the outback. Elsewhere, the human superorganism followed the same pattern of data accumulation and networking, but on a larger scale. Beginning around 12,000 years ago, two dramatic and intimately related shifts occurred in human behaviour. One was that humans began settling in cities, mostly around the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean; the second is the emergence of agriculture. There is much debate on which came first, but each could not exist without the other and can be thought of as parts of the same self-organising process, perhaps stretching back to the cave cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic. Most certainly they were not part of an eureka moment and were, instead, the culmination of the long process of human interface with the environment, taken to its logical conclusion.

E.O Wilson describes human camps through most of prehistory as, essentially, nests; rings of people clustered around a fire or hearth which was, at once, an object of mystical significance as well as serving the practical purposes of cooking food to extract more calories. If camps were nests, then these first cities were more akin to hives. The largest and best preserved of the Neolithic cities is the strange underground citadel of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, which is almost ten thousand years old and, at its height, housed around 10,000 people. However, it is not a city in the modern sense, and comparison to a hive transcends mere metaphor. Çatal Hüyük was a semi-subterranean honeycomb of individual nests that were packed in dense clusters and were entered through the roof. While bees coated their hives with propolis resin, humans did so with plaster. There were no such thing as roads or “blocks”, just an open expanse beneath which humans clustered in their thousands. In this sense, they are unlike any cities that still survive, and represent a strange, proto-city that vanished as soon as technology offered better alternatives. In another, the way they haphazardly cluster together would seem familiar from the slums of Mumbai, the favelas of Brazil, or the medieval warrens of London and ancient Rome. Seething, chaotic, organic masses of humanity, out of which structured, organised entities would later crystallise.

From what we can piece together, the lost city of Çatal Hüyük represents a transition between nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures and agricultural, city-based dwellers. Despite language freeing us from proximity, it also set in motion a process of shared group identity and technological advancement that, ironically, led to the consolidation and concentration of human activity, while casting our geographical ‘footprint’ much wider. There is something almost preordained about agriculture in that it was invented independently in 8 locations across the world. While the exact origins in each case are lost to time, the innovation-density feedback loop would made it more likely to be invented as time progressed and more environmental data was harvested. This process has a number of consequences; despite the backbreaking labour that agriculture implied, it also led to a hugely increased food supply and massive population growth and, therefore, hunger for greater resources.

Cities, in the words of philosopher of technology, Kevin Kelly, “seem like machines eating the wilderness” and are “the largest technology we make”. From strange origins in places like Çatal Hüyük, they have evolved into titanic engines of re-organisation that shape our understanding of the world as they simultaneously transform it. And while Kelly might call them ‘technologies’, they also follow patterns of organisation that are distinctly organic, even today. Physicist Geoffrey West wanted to know if Kleiber’s Law – the power law that correlates an animal’s metabolic rate with their mass – also applied to Cities. As science author Stephen Johnson notes;

“The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface area, the length of electrical cables: all these factors follow the exact same power law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms”

What was most interesting, however, while energy usage was more efficient as the city scaled – as predicted in Kleiber’s Law – the rate at which ideas were generated (as measured by metrics such as patents) followed a different power law, and increased as the cities scaled in size: a pattern that fits with both van Schaik’s primate observations and Powell and Thomas’ social network hypothesis of technological innovation. As Johnson notes; “[a] city that was ten times larger than its neighbour wasn’t ten times more innovative, it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative”. Innovation led to technological advances, that led to a growth in the power of a city or, in later time, networks of cities, until such time as the overall process ground to a halt by reaching agricultural limits, suffering unforeseen environmental catastrophes, being destroyed by rival city-networks, or a combination of all of the above (as is thought to be the case with the Bronze Age Collapse).

It is not possible to find a distinction between the worldviews and the technologies city and city-network societies developed, as the two are self reinforcing and interdependent. The flora, fauna, geography and climate of the local environments carved the thought processes and intellectual frameworks of groups. Through interaction with the environment via the framework of language, new technologies were developed that, in turn, led to new ways to manipulate it. These tools then themselves became part of the symbolic environment inhabited by the group, and inspired new metaphors and ways of thinking about the world. This, in turn, gave rise to a new generation of ideas and technologies. This process is akin to the idea of the paradigm shift outlined by Thomas Kuhn, reaching what appear to be meta-stable states for long periods, under which ideas seethe and percolate until they burst through into the mainstream, both developing and aiding technology.

A calendar is a good example of how a technology influences how we think of the world. Developed by correlating certain astral phenomena with seasonal changes as signals for when to sow and harvest crops, through continued ritual behaviour they became overarching psychological models of how to imagine the world. Calendars were developed in all of the eight regions where agriculture was independently developed, and can be thought of as the cognitive technology that allowed and facilitated the manifest technologies of the plough and sickle. In forming so much of the backbone of a society’s conception of the world, they also acted as a framework for other ritual behaviours; seasonal harvest feasts, for instance, that we still celebrate in the modern age under different guises; notably Christmas.

The Mayan calendar – the most sophisticated system developed by any early society – was also used to predict where spiritual realms would intersect with the material realm, opening the door to potential disasters. As such, rituals were performed based on this faulty causality in order to offset this imagined cosmic threat. Today, after being elaborated on, redesigned and reiterated over thousands of years, calendars are so much a part of the cognitive landscape we inhabit that the concept of their invention is invisible. Sunk deep into the collective undermind and taken for granted, they are nevertheless an artifice; a shared cognitive tool on which we construct our shared past and future over the fleeting and hallucinatory Now.

The wheel is another example of how a technology affects our perception of the world. Historian Jacob Bronowski talks of how the wheel, invented around 3600 BCE and eventually ubiquitous across Eurasia and North Africa, led to a ‘rotational’ way of thinking about nature that influenced Euclid’s geocentric ‘epicycle’ explanation of the rotation of the planets. The Mayans, who had agriculture and sophisticated calendars but not wheels (other than in toys) struggled to grasp the motions of the planets, even in the beautiful but flawed manner of Euclid. Indeed, throughout time, technologies of the age have supplied the metaphors with which we both comprehend reality and understand ourselves. During the Enlightenment, we imagined the mind as a mechanical device; today we see it as a computer processor. Our collective imagination is inseparable from technology.

As the technologies we inhabit become ever more complex, so does it inspire new ways to understand and reorganise the physical universe. The matter that composed the environment we evolved in has over the millennia been reduced to its component elements and used as the raw materials of a New Ecology that now spans 83% of the planet’s surface. The rest is walled off in porous reserves, where the dominant life forms of the last epoch are picked off by corporations, mercenaries and desperate peasants alike. The species absorbed into the New Ecology; dogs, cattle and crops, have had their evolutionary destiny hijacked by the new system. Globally, the combined amount of biomass that constitutes humans and their domesticated life forms is now in the region of 3 billion tonnes. Compare this to one of the bedrocks of the ocean ecology; krill, which number a mere 379 million tonnes.

Those not consciously incorporated into the process or driven to oblivion have filled the evolutionary vacuums and fed from the abundant waste and surplus of the New Ecology, such as Rats, Pigeon and Cockroaches. Chemical waste, such as CO2, has raised the average temperate of the planet to invoke changes to the biosphere we have yet to fully comprehend.

This titanic reordering of the physical world at which we find ourselves at the epicentre has occurred just 50,000 years since we evolved language, and 10,000 years since we founded the first cities. The process of urbanisation, pioneered by our remote ancestors in Çatal Hüyük, is ongoing and accelerating. In 1912, 10% of the global population lived in cities, now it is over 50% and growing, with 19 cities now boasting over 10 million inhabitants. With the feedback loop of concentration and innovation growing exponentially, and our understanding of our impact on the Environment comes I to sharper focus; our solution will be to save the Old Ecology by incorporating in into the New Ecology. Whatever process we began in the dank catacombs of Çatal Hüyük, is far from complete.

From Words to Worldviews: The Human Superorganism and the Origins of Language, Culture and the Self

Sociobiologist E.O Wilson has long drawn comparisons between human civilisations and the insect superorganisms that dominate the macroscopic realm. These ‘eusocial’ organisms, such as ants and termites, “belong to multiple generations. They divide labor in what outwardly at least appears to be an altruistic manner. Some take labor roles that shorten their life spans or reduce the number of their personal offspring, or both. Their sacrifice allows others who fill reproductive roles to live longer and produce proportionately more offspring.” Ants build cities, farm aphids, fungus and even plants. They operate in massive societies, one of which has been discovered stretching 4000 miles across Eurasia. In terms of sheer biomass, ants are by far the most numerous organism on earth, with some estimates in the region of 9000 million tonnes, vastly dwarfing other insect species [18]. It is the ability to act towards collective group goals, facilitated by complex communication, that gives them this immense power.

While ants have had millions of years to assert themselves over nature, humans have surpassed their dominance in just over 50,000. While ants and termites are capable of communication and coordination with a combination of postures and pheromones, humans evolved an increasingly complex system of symbols and language that increased in vocabulary and complexity as time progressed, and expanded our repertoire of tools to reorder the environment. In the words of Wilson, “we invent symbols that are intended to be understood among ourselves, and we thereby generate networks of communication many orders of magnitude greater than that of any animal. We have conquered the biosphere and laid waste to it like no other species in the history of life. We are unique in what we have wrought”.

Following the Toba catastrophe, genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that a relatively small group of humans – denoted by the L3 haplotypes – left Africa and went on to colonise Eurasia, Australia and, ultimately, the Americas, while others – identified by the L1 and L2 haplotypes, seemingly retreated back to Southern Africa [1][13]. But it is in Europe that we see the most immediate and dramatic explosion of human culture and symbolic thought; evidenced by the sudden appearance and exponential growth of technology and art from around 35,000 years ago – what is called the dawn of ‘behaviourally modern’ humans.

We see evidence appear of much more deliberate, planned actions and continuity of thought. Anthropologist Randall White shows that in Europe, there was widespread use of beads; items that would have been very time intensive to fashion out of materials such as amber, lignite and ivory – the latter of which would have taken several days to carve. From the stunning cave paintings strewn across southern Europe, to strange carved ‘Venuses’ that some have attributed to primeval, matriarchal cultures, it is clear that something fundamental had changed in the prehistoric mind and its relationship with the world. It is argued by paleoanthropologists Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall and theoretical neurophysiologist William Calvin amongst others, that language, as we understand it today, first emerged during this period.

The humans that survived this turbulent period did so because they had developed a new way of routing information through the brain, which, in turn, led to new ways to navigate and make best use of the degraded environment. The evolution of a brain region called the angular cyrus was a crucial part of the equation. This region takes sensory information from both sight and hearing and relates them together; it is no coincidence that this region is proportionately far larger in humans than in other anthropoid apes. Modern humans also have a more evolved auditory cortex than anthropoid apes and, from this, developed a region of the brain called Wernicke’s area, which draws information from the angular gyrus and associates it with ‘meaning’, essentially displaying it in context with other information. The other neural component of language developed from the motor cortex is Broca’s area, which is involved in the processing of words back into vocalisations. Thus existing cognitive structures were adapted through selection and put to use in the manufacture of words.

Sensory information, on its journey through the nervous systems, also needed somewhere to float while we decided what to do with it. Cognitive archaeologists Thomas Wynn and Fredrick Coolidge believe another crucial development during this period was the emergence of episodic working memory, or ‘autobiographical’ memory. Psychologist Randall Engle has shown there is a strong correlation between working memory and problem solving ability [26], so it stands to reason that ‘problem solving’ our way through the Toba catastrophe and its aftermath would have acted as a selection pressure. Working memory acts as a workbench that enables us to reassemble facts about the world to make best use of them. It also became the locus of personal identity, rooted in facts about our personal existence – what Heidegger would call ‘Facticity’ – that could be used to explore past events or project them into the future. In other worlds, thinking and personal identity came to be at the same time.

The Escape from Proximity

If we consider the two modes of communication in pre-humans, we have one whose strength lies in long distance transmission (vocal/aural), and another that is much more high fidelity, but limited to direct experience (visual).  One specialised in gathering and sharing environmental data for the group, especially in regard to danger; and the other in spreading tool-making behaviour patterns and social ’mind reading’. Humanity’s great leap was to mentally combine the two modes by linking aural signals to visual representations of things in the world. Archaeologist Clive Gamble calls this the “release from proximity” [14]; the ability to transmit visual information via aural means, freeing them from the bonds of pure imitation. Transmitting  ‘sight’ through sound. The result was the increasing ability to transmit high fidelity information over longer and longer distances and, more importantly, down through time.

In the ruined Africa of the Toba aftermath, the ability to transmit information about the locations of food sources and retain them in memory would have meant the difference between life and death. Having vocal labels to associate with places, things and even inner states would allow such data to be spread horizontally through the group, then afterwards, vertically through time, long after the death of the one who saw the original event.  From these first oral cultures and blossoming of symbolic thought would have come longer strings of statements. Compound words would have, over time, allowed more granular understanding of the world; words, combined together as one might build a spear from wood, rock and ochre. As primatologist Jane Goodall states, “they could discuss what happened in the past and make complex contingency plans for both the near and the distant future… [t]he interaction of mind with mind broadening ideas sharpened concepts’. Language, combined with problem solving and cultural memory, began the culminate process of the intentional, ordered altering of the physical composition of the environment. This slow accumulation of information about the world would, in time, lead to its profound transformation.

Along with the accumulation of environmental and cultural data, new methods were developed to preserve and transmit it to new generations, and new frameworks were devised from these fragments of fact. The incredible cave paintings that characterise the Upper Palaeolithic, at first, posed something of a puzzle. Located deep within the Earth and in places difficult to get to, even with modern technology, they at first appear hugely inconvenient locations to practice any sort of craft.  However it is now thought the caves were chosen, in part, for potential as canvases, but also for their acoustic properties. If that is the case, it is possible they were used for some form of ritual behaviour.

Rituals are not only common amongst modern tribal cultures, but ubiquitous in modern religions, in many forms. One of the most ubiquitous cultural traditions are ‘coming of age’ ceremonies that introduce children to the world of adults, often accompanying new responsibilities and revelations. We know that common ritual behaviours such as music, dancing and rhythmic drumming can induct trance states, open up areas of the brain associated with memory and language, as well as releasing endorphins and inducing feelings of wellbeing [13]. In other words, rituals form the ideas and circumstances to transmit information between minds and commit them to long term memory.

With this in mind, we can imagine how these caves may have looked to the Palaeolithic children being inducted into the tribe, taken from a world of relative silence to subterranean temples, decorated with primeval infographics of bison and deer, illuminated by the ethereal glow of torches. To rhythmic chants reverberating around the underworld, stories would be told of quasi-mystical creatures; perhaps explaining where they lived, how they behaved, where they fit in the worldview of the tribe, and, ultimately, how to track and kill them. These were ancient rituals that forged distinct neurological pathways of how to perceive the world and react to it, repeated over the generations and transmitted down through time – in some cases, over ten thousand years.

Living Information Systems

Slowly, a shared imagination of the world, based on this rich, environmental data, emerged to cover all knowledge in the immediate environment; all the best hunting grounds and safe caves; methods of carving wood and tanning hides; ways of creating glues and sewing clothes; the best places to forage, and the safest ways to avoid predators and stalk prey. Just as these cognitive transformations formed the seeds of personal identity, collectively, a group identity also emerged from this shared understanding. Just as facts about the world constituted the narrative mythology of the individual, so stories were built to explain the past and future of the group itself, as a tool to make sense of who they are, that also acted as a framework with which to manoeuvre, predict and exploit the natural world.

Once language took hold, technological evolution was ‘autocatalytic’, with each new invention making others likelier. We see evidence of a technological explosion including flint tools, needles, and pits in human camps to store food. There was also an exponential increase in the variety of ‘composite’ tools, and the emergence of sophisticated projectile weapons such as spears and, eventually, bows and arrows, gave the newborn human super-organism an almost unfair advantage over prey. A wave of extinctions followed this technological renaissance as we moved throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. But the technology that empowered us the most was not the physical tools we fashioned from rock and beast, but the cognitive technology of shared ideology that enabled these physical transformations to begin with.

Unlike tribal societies the world over, the Aborigines of Australia never developed bow and arrow technology, leading us to think they migrated extremely early in the Upper Palaeolithic, perhaps as long ago as 46,000 years ago, after which they remained relatively isolated from cultural evolution elsewhere. Their culture is the nearest we get to a fossilised worldview, and it offers a unique look into how our remote ancestors may have organised both their society and environmental data

It is built on what one might call social information technology that took the form of narratives that wove together the metadata of the phenomenal world built on a framework easy to understand for any human; genealogy. In his research into these societies a century ago, sociologist Émile Durkheim was fascinated to see how aboriginal tribes divided into “moieties”; social units which were further subdivided into smaller units or “clans”. Each of these were associated with a natural element – such as a type of animal, plant or star – and remained experts on it. In essence they became specialised nodes in a networked information system that covered all knowledge of the local environment. “In fact the moiety is the Genus… the marriage class is the species… we are no longer dealing with a simple dichotomy of things… but with hierarchised concepts” In essence, the society itself was a living information system.

The philosopher Hilary Putnam called this the “linguistic division of labour”; analogous to Adam Smith’s economic division of labour, in which nested networks and hierarchies of experts act as repositories of information within a society. Known as the ‘Causal theory of reference’, this model views all knowledge as fundamentally networked and relational in nature, and in which each mind is a node that both stores and processes environmental data. This form of highly detailed, distributed information system is common amongst tribal cultures. Anthropologist Cecil Brown conducted extensive research into how pre-literate humans understood their environment. He concluded there is an extensive overlap in how tribal groups from across the globe organise information, using hierarchical categories around five or six levels deep, modelled on a genealogical tree [6]. (Something akin to this may well have began to develop during the Middle Palaeolithic before being cut short by the volcanic catastrophe.) It is from similar ‘folk taxonomies’ that Aristotle ultimately derived his influential work; an influence on Western thought to this day.

Just as Aboriginal society mirrored its understanding of the local environment, ‘songlines’ made it possible to link these local databases together into what amounts to a vast data repository of the entire Australian continent. Via these recitations, learned by each new generation at coming of age ceremonies, a single individual could, in theory, travel across the unforgiving outback by singing verses that outlined mountains, watering holes, honey ants and their relationships to one another. The way-finders on these journey of ‘the Dreaming’ also took the form of rock paintings, some of which are still maintained and repainted by aboriginal communities, in a tradition that may go back forty thousand years. These oral roadmaps were part mythology, part world history, part survival guide [8]. But taken together, they were a networked method of how to navigate and make use of the environment to aid our survival.

Such social information systems, while elaborate, were only scratching the surface of what networked humans were capable of. And, on the other side of the world, were about to move to a whole new level of complexity.

Sources

1. Wilson, Edward O, The Social Conquest of Earth, Liveright, 2012
2. Quoted from Calvin, William H, A Brief History Of The Mind: From Apes To Intellect And Beyond, Oxford University Press, 2005
3. Morley, Ian, Evolution of the Physiological and Neurological Capacities for Music, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2002
4. National Geographic, “Hot Tub Monkeys” Offer Eye on Nonhuman “Culture”, 2004
5. Ramachandran, Vilayanur, Mirror neurones and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution, Edge.org, 2000
6. Wright, Alex. Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. National Academies Press, 2007
7. Linden, David J, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008
8. Morville, Peter, Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, O’Reilly Media, 2005
9. Quoted from Shields, David, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Knopf, 2010
10. McCrone, John, The Myth of Irrationality: The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star Trek, Carroll & Graf Pub, 1994
11. Hawking, Stephen, The Grand Design, 2010
12. Rogers, Connie, Revealing Behavior in ‘Orangutan Heaven and Human Hell’, 2005
13. Stringer, Chris, The Origin of our Species, Penguin, 2011
14. Gamble, Clive, Palaeolithic Society and the Release from Proximity: A Network Approach to Intimate Relations, World Archaeology, 1998
15. Himelfarb, Elizabeth J., Prehistoric Body Painting, Archaeology Magazine Volume 53 Number 4, July/August 2000
16. King, Barbara, Roots of Human Behavior, The Teaching Company
17. Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, Mark G. Thomas, Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior, Science, 2009
18. Biomass (Wikipedia)
19. Bronowski, Jacob, The Ascent of Man, 1973
20. Fukuyama, Francis, The Origins of Political Order, 2011
21. Yong, Ed, Boom-boom-krak-oo – Campbell’s monkeys combine just six ‘words’ into rich vocabulary
22. Everett, Daniel: Language; The Cultural Tool.
23. Penn, Derek C. and Povinelli, Daniel J., Causal Cognition in Human and Nonhuman Animals: A Comparative, Critical Review, Annual Review of Psychology, 2007
24. Arthur, Brian W., The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, 2012
25. Blaisdell, Aaron, Rational Behaviour in Rats, 2010
26. Klingberg, Torkel, The Overflowing Brain, Oxford University Press, 2009

Information Entropy and the First Social Networks

While tool use behaviours have been observed in primate societies, they vary between populations, and their growth is limited to direct visual observation and are, by and large, geographically isolated. As van Schaik noted; large groups thus have a distinct advantage over time; leading to both a statistically higher change of innovation and more minds in which to house behaviours, should disaster strike. If the Japanese macaque population were halved by some disaster, the behaviour patterns would survive because they have become so ubiquitous throughout the entire population. Should van Schaik’s comparatively smaller group of tool-making orangutans perish, the group on the northern shore would carry on oblivious to such innovations, as if they had never existed.

Anthropologist Luke Premo argues we may have lost more knowledge than we currently possess due to these types of cultural extinctions. Despite technology conferring a relative advantage to our remote, tool-making ancestor Homo Habilis, the small groups were still at the mercy of an unforgiving environment and the monsters of the Pleistocene. Premo argues “These small groups could have been exposed to fairly high changes of the whole group going extinct” [26]. Human history can be viewed, in some sense, as a continual battle against information entropy and, as we will see, language evolved as a response to just these types of challenges.

As mentioned previously, early humans likely possessed a sophisticated nonverbal culture and rudimentary tool-making abilities. Starting in the early Palaeolithic, we see the emergence of technologies used for purposes of communication. Sally McBreathy and Alison Brooks point to evidence of the discovery of tools used for communication – pigments – at sites in the south of Africa that date back a quarter of a million years. Interestingly, these were found alongside early tools thought to be used for fishing, hinting at a link between complex communication and technology. Similarly, archaeologist Lawrence Barham has found corroborating evidence dating back to between 200,000 and as early as 400,000 years ago, near the Twin Rivers in Zambia [15]. He and his team discovered a collection of hundreds of pigments of various colours, including brown, yellow, purple, blue and pink, which had been derived from nearby minerals. Nine of those “show signs of having been rubbed or ground to reproduce, presumably, a powder…. unambiguous evidence of the systematic collection and processing of pigments over a long period.” What these pigments were used for remains a mystery, as no artwork has been found, although one theory is that it was used as personal decoration, perhaps to imply some social status and cultural nuance. Certainly, if pigments were being manufactured, they would have been used for some form of communicative purpose.

A bone fragment of the pre-human Homo heidelbergensis – thought to be the joint ancestor of humans and Neanderthals – was uncovered in the Twin River cave. This is particularly interesting as studies of heidelbergensis skulls have determined they had auditory systems similar to modern humans and could have – in theory – understood language. We also know that, at the time, the groups of these creatures were organised enough to either take down large prey, such as horses and deer, or scavenge their remains while fending off other animals, something that surviving primates remain incapable of [13].

Is it possible that Homo heidelbergensis possessed some form of proto-language? Certainly in terms of volume, Homo heidelbergensis had a brain just as large as modern humans, thought we do not know if the various parts of the brain that related to language were proportionately as big. We do not know if they have the vocal dexterity to speak as we do, but it is possible that language may have taken a totally different form. Linguist Daniel Everett identified a form of language used in a number of Amazonian cultures, including the Banawás, Paumaris and the Satere-Mawes, called “high speaking”. A language based on whistling, it is totally separate from their day to day language and used to organise themselves when on the hunt, but also sophisticated enough to tell jokes and spread social information [22].

However, we cannot say with any certainly that they possessed such abilities. It could well be the case that, although increased usage of tools would allow more mental metaphors to be used to imagine scenarios, even as internal monologues, they could not transmit these inner thoughts with any degree of fidelity.  Primatologist Jane Goodall describes this scenario as being “trapped within themselves”. While we may never be able to say conclusively that something resembling language was used by these remote ancestors, if they did, it did not evolve much past this rudimentary state for over a hundred thousand years, in which time Homo heidelbergensis split into two distinct sub-species; our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons and the robust, large-brained Neanderthals, who migrated out of Africa to Europe and the Middle East.

It is not until around 80,000 years ago that we see the next burst of technological development, again tied to early communications technologies. In the Taforalt Caves in Morocco, perforated ochre-smeared shells dating back around 80,000 years were discovered that hint at personal ornamentation; perhaps to confer social status. During the same period, in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, was found the first concrete example of our internal thoughts being recorded in external media: in this case a slab of ochre on which a human purposefully etched geometric patterns for reasons lost to time. This was found alongside evidence of a type of technology called Pressure Flaking (a deliberate process of sharpening stone), which predates its usage in Europe by tens of thousands of years. The presence of such “modern” technology at such a remote point in time indicates that something far more interesting may have been going on; the emergence of inter-group social networks.

Recalling the insights from van Schaik’s orangutan research, which relates population size to feedback loops of technological development, geneticists Adam Powell and Mark Thomas and archaeologist Stephen Shennan created a computer model to explore optimal population sizes for the generation of new technologies. The model was based on variables such as population density and whether or not ideas were shared between groups, and identified a tipping point at which new ideas became self generating [13][17]. They concluded this density threshold was reached around 100,000 years ago, which is indeed what we have cursory evidence for at Blombos during this time. Commenting on this research in his book, The Origin of Our Species, biologist Chris Stringer argues that the network itself was crucial in the survival of technology.

“Cultural change in the middle Stone Age greatly accelerated, and the increased store of learning was beneficial to the survival of individuals and their groups. In turn this would have started a feedback mechanism, leading to further increase in population density and contacts, and so on. What is interesting about this work is that it suggests genetic continuity, large brains and intelligence on their own will not ensure success for human groups – the survival of knowledge itself is also vital” [13]

Ideas and behaviour patterns that were widely distributed and not isolated to a certain band or clan would have stood a better chance of survival, so the larger the social network, the more minds it can be copied to. Geneticist Matt Ridley proposes that the curious locations of shell and obsidian beads discovered during this era, in some cases hundreds of miles from their point of origin, hint at a primeval trade network along which cultural change could flow.

It also could be the case that our ancestors practiced exogamy, in which females were exchanged between tribal groups, perhaps to great ceremony. There is DNA evidence that this practice existed in the Neanderthals [13] and was widespread in early human cultures, where it remains tradition in parts of the world to the present day.  Exogamy may have evolved as a way to increase genetic diversity and avoid incest but, as a consequence, also would have meant that females would have been the primary vector of cultural as well as genetic evolution throughout this crucial phase of history.

Whether cultural interconnection implies a shared language, or indeed any language in the modern sense, is unknown. We have no direct evidence for this, only tantalising hints at symbolic thoughts that suggest something like language may have existed. By this stage of evolution, even if ‘full blown’ language capabilities were not prevalent, nonverbal communication would have been at least as sophisticated as it is today, both within groups and between competing tribes.  It is more likely that pigments, beads and other forms of communication technologies were used in inter-group communications and to denote rank and position without the need to transmit complex ideas verbally. This is evident in modern tribal societies; the Kīsedje and Kayapo people of South America wear plates in their lips to show social status, while Xavante men from the same region use wooden stakes to infer their role within a society.

But the primeval social network that spanned the prehistoric world was not immune from information entropy. Had things progressed in a linear fashion, humanity may have evolved its first civilisations in the savannahs of Africa instead of the arid wastes of Mesopotamia. But 73,000 years ago, fate intervened in the form of the Toba supervolcano. The gargantuan eruption, one of the largest in recorded history, was the equivalent of an 800 megaton explosion and led to a “nuclear winter” that blotted out the sun for almost a decade. It left a legacy of planetary-wide climate disruption that included massive droughts along tropical regions. The global human population, just flickering to life, dropped to as few as 3000 breeding individuals, devastating the newly emerging African social networks and destroying the knowledge within.

Pushed to the brink of extinction, what emerged from this epochal winter was a species transformed by catastrophe into a new type of entity; the mammalian super-organism.

Sources

1. Wilson, Edward O, The Social Conquest of Earth, Liveright, 2012

2. Quoted from Calvin, William H, A Brief History Of The Mind: From Apes To Intellect And Beyond, Oxford University Press, 2005

3. Morley, Ian, Evolution of the Physiological and Neurological Capacities for Music, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2002

4. National Geographic, “Hot Tub Monkeys” Offer Eye on Nonhuman “Culture”, 2004Ramachandran, Vilayanur, Mirror neurones and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution, Edge.org, 2000

5. Wright, Alex. Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. National Academies Press, 2007

6. Linden, David J, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008

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8. Quoted from Shields, David, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Knopf, 2010

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14. King, Barbara, Roots of Human Behavior, The Teaching Company

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16. Biomass (Wikipedia)

17. Bronowski, Jacob, The Ascent of Man, 1973

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20. Everett, Daniel: Language; The Cultural Tool.

21. Penn, Derek C. and Povinelli, Daniel J., Causal Cognition in Human and Nonhuman Animals: A Comparative, Critical Review, Annual Review of Psychology, 2007

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23. Blaisdell, Aaron, Rational Behaviour in Rats, 2010

Consciousness and the prehistory of language

By the early 20th century, philosophers had spent centuries trying to explain the nature of consciousness, forming a rich and detailed vocabulary and elaborate hierarchies of concepts to describe the minutia of mental states. But this search for truth saw them drift further and further into the realms of abstraction and saw certainty slip further from their grasp.