The Great Unanswered Question—well, one of them, to go along with what makes music emotionally meaningful, why people first thought of Gods, and how long it will be before the Expos return to Montreal—has always been at what moment humans began communicating with symbols, and why. There was a time when the man-apes we descend from interacted mostly as apes do—through touch and tone and grooming and a few fixed hollers. Then they became ape-men, who communicated by making things that stand for other things. Lines sketched with the end of a burned stick became bison and horses on the cave wall. They adorned their bodies with beads and tiger teeth, and buried their friends with flowers for the trip ahead. They became symbolic creatures. All this seems to have happened, the record suggests, in a memorably short amount of time, about fifty thousand or so years ago, just before the great cave art of Chauvet and Lascaux was created, when the life of symbols became the life of man.
A new scientific-minded guess at this riddle is both intriguing and politically appealing, not to say politically correct: it suggests that ape-men made art and culture only when ape-men finally became more like ape-women. A group of five scientists just last week proposed that the great symbolic transformation happened at around the time the human face, and the hormones that shape its growth, became—and this is the scientists’ word—feminized. Indeed, that’s the title of a paper in this month’s issue of Current Anthropology: “Craniofacial Feminization, Social Tolerance, and the Origins of Behavioral Modernity.”
The argument is tight enough. “Social tolerance” seems, from long anthropological observation, not to mention common sense, to be necessary for symbolic communication: if you can’t stay put in the circle around the fire long enough to listen, there’s no point in sharing good stories. As human groups got bigger, more social tolerance is what they had to have. Very early man, alas, of the kind who appears on the fossil record for some four hundred thousand years, shows every sign of social impatience; his big, testosterone-fuelled brows seem made merely to intimidate his fellow early man—to scare him (or her) away before the talking and symbol-sharing can even start. As testosterone ebbed and the aggressively masculine stare-downs faded, Paleolithic life had to become less a scene red in tooth and claw and more like an afternoon program on NPR, with thoughtful-voiced disputants sharing the day’s news and seeking its moral points.
One striking aspect of the paper is how much of the argument depends on the analogy of a series of strange modern experiments on Siberian foxes. Over a period of forty years, at first under the direction of the geneticist Dmitry K. Belyaev, these foxes were selected for a single trait, tameness, and they then showed an astonishing range of other unplanned changes as they altered: they developed floppy ears and soft muzzles, and generally turned into dog-like pets. In the same way, the authors argue, an evolutionary path selecting for one trait, social tolerance, is reflected in the evolution of our faces, the tone of our voices, and the organization of our brains. As Pavlov’s dogs haunted the Western imagination a century ago, with their seeming demonstration of the easy mechanization of minds, so Belyaev’s foxes haunt ours, with their seeming demonstration of the surprising plasticity of fixed traits. The larger point is plain, and bold: symbolic communication does not just, in the end and after millennia, produce social tolerance. It is, in its first instance and of its essence, a form of social tolerance—and depends on feminized humans telling the tough guys to calm down and take a number.
The essential notion—that feminization is civilization, niceness the precondition for mind—is so broadly pleasing to our era that it ought to make us just a bit suspicious. Every age’s image of the beginnings of culture is, after all, a mirror of its own bad conscience and best hopes. Freud, the Viennese Jewish patriarch, imagined the start of symbolic order as a set of stern self-denials: early man (and he did mean man) wanted to urinate on the campfire, Freud said, but he decided not to, and what we got instead is civilization. Civilization had its origins in man’s need to sublimate his wilder urges and rages into a productive form. Is it any wonder that at a time when we, in guilt at our own bad pasts, seek more inclusiveness and diversity, a broad net and a self-conscious circle, we also want the origins of culture itself to be gentle and inclusive?
But then, a search for the origins of culture is surely like a search for the “origin” of any of the things that culture makes—say, conversation, or rice pudding. There is, after all, never a single activity by that name; the rice, the milk, and the raisins all came together willy-nilly over the years and millennium, in many different places and depending on six or seven different things at once.
The scientists doing this research surely know this; quavers and qualifications are bound to come. Mono-causal explanations rarely fit a multitasking animal like us, with a meta-level mind like ours. Even if there were a single cause for symbols, or close to it, we would soon find a way to turn it on its head. Self-consciousness is inescapable in symbolic creatures. The most striking thing about symbolic communication is that, however it began, it remains permanently, damnably, double. The first thought engendered the first afterthought. The first word produced the first pun. The first scrawl on the cave wall produced the first critic. The moment we have symbols for things, we have the possibility of making symbols for the things that stand for the symbols of things. (As St. Clair McKelway pointed out in these pages years ago, people made tokens, early money, to stand for the goods they had accumulated, and then criminal-minded counterfeiters made tokens to stand for the tokens.)
Having symbols means playing games, and the first thing people do with the rules of games is change them. Give us a game of Monopoly and we will invent Free Parking as a place to keep the fines, and make up a rule where salaries are doubled if you land directly on Go. Give us a practice of social tolerance large enough to produce pictures in caves, instead of having rages and hunting in surly solos, and some of us (as in the great cave at Chauvet) drew pictures of happy hunting and others drew pictures of objectified, sexually explicit women—fertility figures, perhaps, but sexual objects all the same. The taste for change and reversal in symbol-making has doubtless become accelerated, not to say fetishized, in our era, but it’s hard not to find it from the first.
The fallacy of the single cause of culture does not become less fallacious when it’s set farther back in time. Symbolic communication, even in its higher form as art, is always a tide ebbing and flowing, rather than an event that just arrives—beauty a fight over what made it so, art an argument carried forward through eternity. Science may or may not find the one true origin for human symbol-making, but criticism, in caves and classrooms alike, will always have to learn to count to two.