Though it isn’t possible to do Jaynes justice in a short space, his most famous idea was that the ancient human mind was of two parts: it was “bicameral.” Inspired by research showing the brain is right-left specialized, Jaynes hypothesized that in the evolutionary past the left brain must have been completely separated from the right brain. The effect, according to Jaynes, would have been disquieting: language generated in the left brain would have been interpreted by the right brain as coming from outside or somewhere else. Ancient people, in other words, were functionally lobotomized and regularly experienced auditory hallucinations. These voices were called gods and this supposedly explains the origin of religion. For Jaynes, the bicameral mind lacked what he calls “consciousness.”

With this hypothesis in hand Jaynes began scouring the historical record looking for evidence of bicamerality. In the Iliad, an ancient oral poem finally written down around 800 BCE, Jaynes thinks he has found it:

[I]f you take the generally accepted oldest parts of the Iliad and ask, “Is there evidence of consciousness?” the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world.

Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear. Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest that they were universal.

Jaynes must then explain the origin and evolution of the bicameral or “unconscious” mind, which he does here:

But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? Let us go back to the beginning of civilization in several sites in the Near East around 9000 B.C. It is concomitant with the beginning of agriculture. The reason the bicameral mind may have existed at this particular time is because of the evolutionary pressures for a new kind of social control to move from small hunter-gatherer groupings to large agriculture based towns or cities. The bicameral mentality could do this since it enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.

I think that verbal hallucinations had evolved along with the evolution of language during the Neanderthal era as aids to attention and perseverance in tasks, but then became the way of ruling larger groups.

Setting aside for a moment the objection that modern humans are only minimally descended from Neanderthals and we don’t know whether they had language, Jaynes obviously believes that bicamerality is ancient and ancestral. All humans, in other words, descended from these hallucinating hunter-gatherers. Much later in time some of these hunter-gatherers (those in the Near East) developed agriculture and the “voices” were pressed into the service of social control. Even when the ruler-god isn’t present, people hear voices and attribute the commands of those voices to the ruler-god.

It’s all very tidy. The problem, however, is that the bicameral mind on which everything is built and depends eventually breaks down. The story that Jaynes tells about the breakdown is remarkable, indeed fascinating, but for my purposes the details are unimportant. All we need to know is that in complex agricultural societies, pressures and contradictions increase until the bicameral mind finally dissolves: it becomes unified or unicameral. This is the beginning, for Jaynes, of “consciousness.” It is the hallmark of fully modern minds which recognize the voice inside the head not as “god” but as “I.”

It is that this point that Jaynes’ story, still believed by many, runs into deep trouble: some groups of people never practiced agriculture, never lived in complex societies, and never experienced a breakdown of bicameralism. These people are of course hunter-gatherers, many of whom continued foraging until relatively recently and some of whom still do. These groups, descended directly from the hallucinating ancients, presumably retained bicameral minds and lacked “consciousness.”

If this were the case (it isn’t), our histories and ethnographies would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales about bicameral hunter-gatherers. They would have been strange beings incapable of recognizing that the voices inside their heads weren’t real. While this is the obvious implication of Jaynes’ theory, we needn’t take my word for it. Here is how recent “pre-literate tribal” people are described by the Jaynes Society:

They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred.

This is stunning. It reads like a racist Victorian description of non-European subhumans, and if I didn’t just pull it from a website advocating Jaynes’ views, that’s what I would think it was.

Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated. Nothing in the ethnohistoric or ethnographic record suggests this and in fact the opposite is true. What we find in the record is that these people, despite their different histories and cultures, were (and are) just like us.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian. (1986). Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (2), 128-148 DOI: 10.1037/h0080053

Once a month my mastiffs and I walk to our local bookstore, located right in the center of a thriving restaurant and arts district filled with locally owned shops. It’s a daylong affair, punctuated by coffee, conversation, and discovery. The owner whom I’ve known for years is always there; she brims with  obscure knowledge and wonderful recommendations. I’ve read at least 20 books this year I never would have considered or even known about without her. I’ve read another 40 books I never would have considered or known about without spending many hours browsing the shelves and stacks. Many are no longer in print and most haven’t been reviewed.

At the end of a magical day, we go next door with a backpack full of books for beers and some food. The dogs like beer. On one of our recent outings I came across Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief, published in 1935 by Joseph Jastrow. It is curiously written in Victorian style and on the surface appears to be a series of vignettes demonstrating human folly and foible.

Jastrow, an early pioneer in experimental psychology and eccentric founder of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, divides the book into 7 parts that correspond to 7 psychological traits or propensities. When these traits are combined and not overridden by rationality or reason, the common result is mental error and unfounded belief. According to Jastrow, the traits are:

• Credulity: The Urge to Believe
• Marvel: The Appeal of Wonder
• Transcendence: Escaping Limitations
• Prepossession: Finding What You Look For
• Congenial Conclusion: Folk-Mind and Doctrinal Survivals
• Cults and Vagaries: Strange Solutions
• Rationalization: Flaunting Reason’s Banner

At the start of each section Jastrow explains what each trait (which can be psychological, cultural or both) means and how it works. Following this prefatory telling, he then shows each trait or proclivity in historical action. There are 3-4 standalone vignettes for each section; some are well known (Madame Blavatsky, Ouija, Numerology, Phrenology, Clever Hans) whereas others are wonderfully obscure and rescued from oblivion (Leo Taxil, Theological Zoology, Astral Chemistry, Jaeger Woolens). The moral of each story is that humans are psychologically prone to wishful thinking and with cultural reinforcement (which is never lacking) we will believe just about anything.

Jastrow was taking aim at all manner of supernatural, mystical, and magical thinking, yet did so in ways that did not directly attack religion. He reasonably surmised that if the religiously inclined were to contemplate his carefully chosen examples they would realize there could be no principled distinction between one form of folly and another. Jastrow’s friendship with William James may have prompted the book and been a gentle rejoinder to the man who turned toward mysticism later in his life.

In closing, Jastrow — a pioneer in the evolutionary study of language — asks why humans are driven by sincere wishes and dubious confirmations. Without any apparent sense of irony, he roots the problem in language:

I place first vagueness, with its symbol, the cloud. If you would impose, be cloudy, vaporous, misty; soar under conditions of low visibility, trailing a smoke-screen in your wake. Erratic beliefs like wraiths shun daylight; clarity is their vital enemy. And man, by the very necessities of his mental existence — by the urgencies of expression and communication — has, in the supreme invention of language, forged the very instrument of his undoing. Words make effective cloud-screens. As indispensably as they express thought when used lucidly they may as effectively mask it, obscure it, conceal its absence.

In all ages, cultists and propagandists of a hollow or shaky cause resort to verbal screenery. The more successful become adept in linguistic obfuscation. My reference is not to the most common employment, the political appeal, nor to rhetoric, which Huxley called the pestilent cosmetic smearing the fair face of truth. My theme is limited to beliefs and faiths which in intent make an appeal to fact. In another reference, I have called this trend the lure of the obscure, accounting for the wide prevalence of the cult of the occult.

This provides a nice sense for Jastrow’s style, which during the 1960s landed him on the required reading list for undergraduate English majors at Harvard. Rendered differently, it’s a clarion call that hearkens back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and forward to Jerry Coyne.

For me, the moral of this story is not that Jastrow prefigured or presaged recent work in the cognitive study of religion, or that he did it in high style with entertaining vignettes. It is that I never would have found this book or known that it existed by searching Amazon. Had I been Farhad Manjoo, this nothing is what I would have found. Support your local bookstore.

Though we don’t know when humans first gained the ability to talk, my guess is that one of the first topics of protracted conversation revolved around dreams. Making sense of dreams surely was a priority. My guess is also that those who offered the most convincing explanations or interpretations were the first shamans.

It probably did not take long for these early shamans, whose status derived at least in part from their ability to interpret or make sense of dreams, to discover that dream-like states could be induced outside of sleep. Physical exertions and deprivations could lead to trance states and hallucinations. Psychotropic plants could do the same.

Shamans the world over interpret these experiences as soul flights. From a shamanic perspective, the problem with sleep-dream soul flights is they are hard to control. While some control can be gained through training or what is called lucid dreaming, there is greater possibility for control and direction when one is awake. This may explain why shamanic societies tend to place greater emphasis on deliberately induced trance states than they do on sleeping dream states.

In shamanic societies, the tight linkage between supernatural beliefs on the one hand and dreams-trances-visions on the other is not in doubt. The traditional exemplar comes Australian Aborigines, whose supernatural cycle is known as Dreamtime or Dreaming. Other well-known examples come from the San of southern Africa with their trance dance and the Plains Indians with their vision quest. In Amazonia, the use of psychotropics to induce “spiritual” hallucinations or soul flights has long been famous.

In all these cases, sleep dreaming has taken a back seat to deliberately induced altered states of consciousness. An interesting exception to this comes from the historic Iroquois, whose supernatural beliefs were structured in large part around sleep dreaming and the interpretation of dreams. In Jesuit Relations (1610-1791), which constitutes one of our best sources on Amerindian life during the early contact period, missionaries characterized sleep-dreaming as “the Iroquois divinity.”

This is a fascinating twist on the dream-trance-vision complex and its relationship to supernatural beliefs. I can’t help but wonder whether it constitutes a survival of sorts or whether it is a unique development that presaged Freud by hundreds of years.

There may however be something special about the relatively recent and fully modern human pulses out of Africa. When humans arrive in Europe and Australia about 45,000 years ago, we find tell-tale archaeological signatures ranging from burials to tools. The most salient signature is evidence of symbolic thinking, the proxies for which are usually carved figurines, grave goods, personal adornment, and rock art. Evidence of symbolic behavior is, in turn, usually taken to be a proxy for language fluency. My reasoned assumption has always been that where we find symbolism-language, supernatural beliefs and ritual activities are also present.

Although there is a general sense that the humans who most recently left Africa to colonize the world were symbolically and linguistically modern, this sense is troubled by the fact that the earliest and most compelling evidence for these abilities comes from Europe. The African record hints at these abilities some 75,000 years ago in the form of new tools, ochers, and adhesives, but persuasive symbolic proxies such as figurines and art are lacking. Hence we have a gap between presumably modern humans in Africa some 75,000 years ago and undoubtedly modern humans in Europe 45,000 years ago.

One possible way of bridging this gap is to look for evidence of symbolic behavior along the migration routes which led to the peopling of Australia. This is precisely what Jane Balme and colleagues did in “Symbolic Behaviour and the Peopling of the Southern Arc Route to Australia” (2009). Because the coastal migration routes followed by humans 75,000-45,000 years ago are now mostly submerged due to rising sea levels, it is not surprising that the evidence is sparse.

Along the Arabian peninsula, there are no fossils and few tools. There are some suggestive sites in India but dating has been problematic. In southeast Asia, the earliest firm date (46 kya) for the presence of modern humans is at Niah Cave in Borneo. In Australia, there is some controversy over dating but most estimates place humans there by 45,000 years ago. There is therefore not much archaeological evidence for the Africa to Australia migration which presumably took 30,000 years to complete.

As the authors observe, even less of this evidence is symbolic:

[T]he earliest unambiguous evidence for symbolic behaviour in South Asia is the ostrich egg shell beads dated to 28,500 years; the earliest explicitly symbolic artefacts are found on the Indian subcontinent between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. In Wallacea and Australia the earliest evidence for symbolism overlaps with the time of the arrival of people in Australia and includes painted rock fragments dated to 42 ka from Carpenter’s Gap in the Kimberley…there is evidence for ritual burial practices at Lake Mungo, about 40,000 years ago, in the form of cremation and fragmentation of one body and the use of sprinkled ochre on the extended burial of another.

This relatively limited record has caused several researchers to observe that “evidence for symbolic artefacts associated with the colonisation
of Australia is slight compared to the record for the colonisation of Europe by anatomically modern humans.” While Balme and colleagues don’t disagree, they argue that the migrants surely were capable of symbolic behavior. In support, they contend that the colonists traversed several kinds of challenging environments (from desert to plain to jungle) and boats were needed for some crossings. To the authors this suggests complex or modern cognition:

The crucial point to be made, however, is the theoretical position that the rapid colonisation of the southern arc indicates that it was colonised by people engaged in complex information exchange systems, who displayed planning depth and conceptualisation and these attributes were all bound up with the development of language.

While this is probably true, the limited data do not compel the conclusion. As things currently stand, there isn’t much evidence for symbolism along the route or at the early Australian destinations. We can infer symbolism or language but this doesn’t really bridge the gap between maybe-symbolic Africa 75,000 years ago, definitively-symbolic Europe 45,000 years ago, and probably-symbolic Australia 45,000 years ago.

We still don’t know whether the first modern humans out of Africa were linguistically fluent or whether such fluency developed along the way. Regardless, I don’t think symbolism or language was necessary for such a journey. The ancient presence of Homo erectus in Indonesia and Homo floresiensis or “Hobbit” on the Island of Flores certainly suggest this.

Reference:

Balme, J., Davidson, I., McDonald, J., Stern, N., & Veth, P. (2009). Symbolic behaviour and the peopling of the southern arc route to Australia Quaternary International, 202 (1-2), 59-68 DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2008.10.002

Jaynes begins the essay by reminding us that motion, our understanding of which today is taken for granted, formerly was a problem:

Motion is now so much the domain of physics that it is difficult for us to appreciate that this was not always so. Before the seventeenth century, motion was a far more awesome mystery. Shared by all objects, stars, ships, animals, and men, and since Copernicus, the very earth itself, it seemed to hide the answer to everything. The Aristotelian writings had made motion or activity the distinctive property of living things, an idea that occurs naturally to children and primitive peoples of all centuries.

Motion, in other words, was conceived as animation. Everything that moved did so through the agency of unseen forces or spirits.

Early theorists of religion, such as Edward Tylor, called this understanding “animism” and asserted it was the earliest or original form of religion. Modern theorists of religion, such as Scott Atran, call this understanding “folk physics” and argue that religion arises from the over attribution and imputation of agency.

Although Jaynes wasn’t thinking in these terms, this early essay on motion presages his later interest in religion. Motion and religion may not seem to be related, but they are and have been perhaps since the beginning. Jaynes seems to have understood this.

While recounting the intellectual history of motion, Jaynes comments on Fabricus ab Aquapendente (1537-1619), an Italian Renaissance thinker and rival of Galileo. In 1618, Fabricus published a book containing this remarkable statement:

In truth, nature fulfills her aim by so bestowing behavioral movements and functions among animals that they preserve themselves through them; this consists in a preservation of the ablest in obtaining food, in continuing the species, and in avoiding injury.

It looks like Fabricus was thinking along evolutionary lines several hundred years before Darwin.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian (1970). The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (2), 219-234 DOI: 10.2307/2708546

But our homunculi are not just liars and confabulators. They are also credulous and can easily be fooled into believing they intended to do something when they had no such intention. The setup for this experimental finding, by Margaret Lynn and colleagues, was surprisingly simple.

Test subjects sat in front of a computer screen. They thought they were connected to the computer through a phony brain-computer interface, which may have looked like this:

The subjects were then told to move lines that appeared on the screen by thinking about moving the lines. Although the lines did in fact move, the movement was caused by the experimenters. In some cases, the movement was frequent. In others, it was infrequent.

Under conditions of frequent line movement, participants reported more intentions to move lines. Under conditions of little movement, participants reported fewer intentions. Because the test subjects had absolutely no control over line movement, the results suggest we can be fooled into believing we intended something we didn’t.

While credulity may know some bounds, the bounds seem to be fairly elastic and easily manipulated.

Reference:

Lynn, M., Berger, C., Riddle, T., & Morsella, E. (2010). Mind control? Creating illusory intentions through a phony brain–computer interface Consciousness and Cognition, 19 (4), 1007-1012 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.05.007

Source:LiveScience

This isn’t surprising. Socially constructed and doctrinal lines separate “religion” and “spiritual” from “paranormal” and “magic.”

The common substrate is belief in the supernatural, which arises naturally from ordinary operations of the brain-mind. While these operations can be overridden, they rarely are because nearly all societies reinforce such beliefs with specific supernatural and religious content.

While this may sound calamitous, it isn’t. There are good evolutionary reasons for lying to ourselves and being cheerful about it.

In “The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception,” psychologist William von Hippel and anthropologist Robert Trivers turn conventional “know thyself” wisdom on its proverbial head by arguing that self-deception evolved so that we can effortlessly tell lies without getting caught. Although they don’t come right out and say it, their premise is that (a) everyone lies and (b) lying can be beneficial. Lying, in other words, should not categorically be condemned a priori as bad, sinful, or unwarranted. It’s not hard to imagine circumstances in which lying is beneficial and indeed right or moral. Any such thought exercise should begin with the righteous lies told to Nazis looking for Jews.

While lying to someone else without being caught is of obvious utility when the price of detection is death, von Hippel and Trivers are more interested in the lies we tell ourselves:

There are many ways to deceive other people. An obvious choice is to tell an outright lie, but it is also possible to deceive others by avoiding the truth, obfuscating the truth, exaggerating the truth, or casting doubt on the truth. Just as these processes are useful in deceiving others, they can also be useful in deceiving the self. For example, if I can deceive you by avoiding a critical piece of information, then it stands to reason that I can deceive myself in the same manner.

Just as telling an outright lie is more difficult than fudging the truth or withholding information, it is also difficult to tell ourselves outright lies. For the lies we tell ourselves to be effective, we must believe what our homunculi are telling us. How do we manage? By biasing our information search strategies, offering fanciful interpretations, and selectively recalling memories. If we are really good at this, we believe. If we aren’t so good, we rationalize.

Regardless of which deceptive strategy we use or the result it entails, von Hipple and Trivers find one constant: “What marks all of these varieties of self-deception is that people favor welcome over unwelcome information in a manner that reflects their goals or motivations.” If such goals and motivations are fitness enhancing, that is they enable survival and reproduction, then it is easy to see how believing or rationalizing our self-told and self-made lies is beneficial or adaptive. It may also explain Nietzsche’s observation that false judgments and untruths are necessary conditions of life.

Our homunculi are not just good liars; they are also cheerful optimists. Puzzled by the fact that most people are optimistic and remain so even in the face of bad news or contrary evidence, Tali Sharot and colleagues recently studied how the brain manages this tricky business.Their conclusion: the part of our brain that codes for errors or contradictions doesn’t work so well when the update information is negative and the consequence would be lowered expectations or pessimism. Incredibly, this difference applies only to those who were classified as having “high optimism” before the testing and not to those who had “low optimism.” Both high and low optimists track and code desirable information equally well.

Congenital optimists, in other words, have homunculi that wear rose colored glasses. These glasses filter out negative information or contradictory evidence and distort probabilities. Realistic Bayesians these homunculi are not. As the study authors note, this may be a good thing:

Underestimating susceptibility to negative events can serve an adaptive function by enhancing explorative behavior and reducing stress and anxiety associated with negative expectations. This is consistent with the observation that mild depression is related to unbiased estimation of future outcomes and severe depression to pessimistic expectations. However, any advantage arising out of unrealistic optimism is likely to come at a cost.

As an example of such a cost, the authors cite the unrealistic assessment of financial risk leading to the 2008 economic collapse. There is another cost and it is the ultimate casualty: truth. But perhaps this is just my bias.

What both these studies show is that we are very good at deceiving ourselves and once we have arrived at a conclusion, no matter how unwarranted, changing our minds can be difficult. While this may be depressing for some, for the self deluded and unrealistic optimists it won’t matter.

References:

von Hippel, W., & Trivers, R. (2011). The evolution and psychology of self-deception Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34 (01), 1-16 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X10001354

Sharot, T., Korn, C., & Dolan, R. (2011). How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality Nature Neuroscience, 14 (11), 1475-1479 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2949

Aside from the usual concerns about over interpretation, some wondered whether there was any justification for assuming that Paleolithic people had an essentially modern aesthetic category which might be called “art.” If they didn’t, it would follow that artistic interpretations of the cave paintings were just that and shed little light on Paleolithic minds.

Frustrated by the sense that we weren’t getting any closer to understanding Paleolithic symbols, some began searching for alternatives. One of the more compelling came from cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams. Having studied rock art around the world, Lewis-Williams noticed that certain kinds of symbols regularly appeared across time and space. This was an enigma, given that the peoples producing these recurring symbols had not been in contact with one another. These symbols were not, in other words, the result of cultural diffusion.  Lewis-Williams calls these symbols “entoptic forms”:

What could account for this similarity of forms in rock art around the world? Lewis-Williams argues, with considerable force, that such images are the result of a universal cognitive architecture. Our brains are constructed in a particular way to process visual images and carry out other sensory related functions. When we experience altered states of consciousness (“ASC”) and reach a stage just before full blown hallucination, the mental images we generate are similar across time and space. These images are entoptic forms.

We know from ethnography and ethnohistory that in non-state societies, ASC is often the province of shamans. With this in mind, Lewis-Williams argues that entoptic forms are related to shamanic practices. Although we can’t know what kind of cultural meaning the symbols had or were assigned, we could at least link them to ASC and shamans.

If we don’t go any further, the argument is fairly parsimonious and anchored in shared biology. Lewis-Williams, however, goes further. He contends that shamans were largely responsible for the European cave paintings and that access to the caves (and images) was restricted. He sees in this an emerging social complexity and stratification, whereby shamans are privileged and powerful. Although this is plausible it is also speculative. There is little evidence for emerging complexity or stratification in the Upper Paleolithic archaeological record. It is bootstrapping to argue that because shamans (may have) made the paintings, shamans (may have) had more power.

While the functional linkage between shamans-ASC-entoptics and ritual surely holds in some or even many cases, it is looking less likely in others. In 2004, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder suggested that 13,000 year old “flutings” inside Rouffignac Cave, France were made by children. In 2006, Sharpe and Van Gelder experimentally confirmed these findings and found that children between 2 and 5 years of age made these markings:

This year a Cambridge University doctoral student in archaeology, Jessica Cooney, discovered that children were responsible for even more “art” at Rouffignac than was previously thought. In a recent interview with History (which includes a slide show), Cooney discussed her findings:

What I’ve found in Rouffignac is that they are screaming to be heard — the presence of children is everywhere in the cave, even in the passages furthest from the entrance. There are no areas in Rouffignac with flutings where we find adults without children, and vice versa.

Many theories about cave art point to shamanism or ritual use. While I don’t rule that out, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case for all caves. With children involved, it could have been one of those reasons but also very likely could have been play or a time for practicing art, or simply an exploration of the landscape.

If we didn’t know that young children made these markings, it would be tempting to attribute them to shamans experiencing ASC. There are some obvious resemblances between entoptic forms (see chart above) and the childrens’ markings at Rouffignac. While one could argue that the children were shaman apprentices being tutored in ASC and entoptics, this amounts to special pleading. I can’t think of any ethnographic or ethnohistoric instances of children this young being trained as shamans or inducing ASC.

These findings also call into question the often made argument that the deepest, darkest recesses of caves were reserved for experienced shamans (with privileged access to the spirit world) undergoing the most intense ASC. If children were in these dark zones, it is hard to argue for restricted access or shamanistic exclusivity.

The most likely or parsimonious interpretation of these symbols is the one given by Cooney: play. If children were doodling “entoptics” in the cave with their parents, it suggests that “artistic” interpretations of these symbols deserve reconsideration. All in all, this research serves as a good reminder that not everything produced by Paleolithic peoples requires a utilitarian or functional explanation.

References:

Lewis-Williams, David, & Dowson, T.A. (1988). The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art Current Anthropology, 29 (2), 201-245

Sharpe, Kevin, & Van Gelder, Leslie (2006). Evidence for Cave Marking by Paleolithic Children Antiquity, 80 (310), 937-947

Until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to promises per se or their critical importance to the evolution of conscience. Nietzsche, not surprisingly, understood its importance and addressed the issue in Genealogy of Morals (II:1): “To breed an animal with the right to make promises — is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set for itself in the case of man?” 

In Making Sense of Nietzsche, Richard Schacht highlights the importance of this question — and its answer:

What engages his attention here is the fundamental issue of what the possibility of promising (and keeping one’s promises) presupposes, and the ramifications in human life in the establishment of this possibility. Its establishment, Nietzsche contends, required the development of a kind of memory going beyond the (basically animal) capacity to absorb and retain things experienced.

This immediately calls to mind chimpanzees. Many have observed they are always “in the present,” trapped as it were by memories that can only be cued by external events or environments. The ability to self-cue memories without such prompts — to cease being creatures of the moment — was a fundamental cognitive shift or what I would call a phase change involving consciousness. By this view, which makes considerable transcend-sense, promissory ability is the prerequisite for “moral” ability.