Origins

Last week, I had a rare opportunity to exchange ideas about the origins of art and symbolism with scientists, students, and the general public in India. After reading my 6 February essay, the president of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Dorairajan Balasubramanian of the L. V. Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, invited me on a lecture tour as part of the academy’s 75th anniversary. For a busy 8 days, I gave lectures and met informally with small groups of students in both the “hard” sciences and the humanities at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the Centre for Cell and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai (the city formerly known as Madras), among other places.

My talk, which I called “What Made Humans Modern?” after the title of an earlier story I had written for Science, focused on how archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to trace the origins of art and symbolism by using proxy indicators of the cognitive mechanisms involved, such as the ritual use of ochre and sophisticated toolmaking. I also described possible Darwinian explanations for the evolution of advanced cognition in modern humans.

I was very impressed with how serious and engaged my listeners were. One question that came up after nearly every lecture was why our species became so far advanced cognitively over all other animals. In response, I suggested (rightly or wrongly) that the human line, which split from the chimp line around 5 million to 7 million years ago, might have had a “lucky break” when it went bipedal while other animals did not, as that evolutionary development later allowed brain expansion and other adaptations such as greater flexibility of the hands.

Some audience members were skeptical that symbolic behavior, especially language, was unique to modern humans, citing the dances of honey bees, bird songs, and dolphin sounds, among other indications of sophisticated animal behavior. I suggested that although we should not minimize the talents of other animals, most of their impressive abilities are nevertheless stereotypical and instinctive. They bear little resemblance to the kind of nearly endless innovation and nuanced expression represented by human language, art, and music. (See my article about the apparent “gap” between animal and human cognition.)

But as I fielded such questions, and in the talk itself, I was careful to present the various scientific viewpoints about these often controversial questions and avoid coming down hard in favor of any particular conclusion. My audiences seemed particularly responsive to that more journalistic approach, which allowed them to make up their own minds about the mysteries of human origins.

—Michael Balter

Photo Credit: Vivek Handa