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The Range of Unknowns
There are many other exciting problems to consider in a thorough account or these issues, including the implicit question of “more-or-less” genotype stability, before we can consider the phenomena of late Paleolithic shamanism. Consider the following questions.
Given widespread agreement that the initial out-of-Africa dispersal (as it is called in homage to Isak Dinesen) took place around 160,000 years B.C., why did it take so long after that date–somewhere between 40,000 to 140,000 years–to develop the great variety of artifacts that occur in the archeological record: “bone, antler, and ivory technologies, the creation of personal ornaments and art, a greater degree of form imposed onto stone tools, a more rapid turnover in artifact types, greater degrees of hunting specialization and the colonization of arid regions” 11
Did these changes in the tempo of change as well as in extent signal a change in human cognitive capacities? And if so, what? What happened when Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalis? Why, as early as 30,000 years B.C., were caves and grottoes decorated with images?12 And why only in Northwestern Europe?
Does this mean that the familiar sequence noted above, from Stone to Bronze to Iron ages really applies only to this area and that elsewhere the anthropological succession from band to tribe, chiefdom, village, city, empire, etc. may prove more useful?
Many of these questions have been addressed by the relatively new subfield of cognitive archeology, and we shall consider some of their findings in the third section.
Voegelin on Early Consciousness
To conclude this section, let me remind you of a few of the opening remarks to major studies made by Voegelin that bear upon the problem of early human consciousness and political science. The first is from 1940:
To set up a government is an essay in world creation. Out of a shapeless vastness of conflicting human desires rises a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion, leading a precarious life under the pressure of destructive forces from within and without, and maintaining its existence by the ultimate threat and application of violence against the internal breaker of its law as well as the external aggressor.
The application of violence, though, is the ultimate means only of creating and preserving a political order; it is not the ultimate reason: the function proper of order is the creation of a shelter in which man may give to his life a semblance of meaning. It is for a genetic theory of political institutions, and for a philosophy of history, to trace the steps by which organized political society evolves from early ahistoric phases to the power units whose rise and decline constitute the drama of history.
For the present purpose we may, without further questions, accept the fact that as far back as the history of our Western world is recorded more or less continuously, back to the Assyrian and Egyptian empires, we can trace also in continuity the attempts to rationalize the shelter function of the cosmion, the little world of order, by what are commonly called political ideas. The scope and the details of these ideas vary widely, but their general structure remains the same throughout history, just as the shelter function that they are [destined] to rationalize remains the same (CW, 19:225-6).
The second is from 1952:
The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history (CW, 5:88).
The third is from 1956:
God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it (CW, 14:39).
The last is from 1966:
The problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics (CW, 6: 33).
This is part 1 of a six part article. Part 2 will appear next week.
NOTES
1. See also R.C. Zaehner, Our Savage God, (London, Collins, 1974) which makes a similar argument in favour of this distinction.
2. See, for example, CW, 33:333 and his amusing remarks on Meher Baba, Voegelin to Ernst, 7/01/1974 in CW, 30: 780.
3. See Colin Renfrew, Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (London, Phoenix, 2008), vii.
4. James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient World: A Cognitive Approach to Archeology, (Lanham, Altamira Press, 2002), 76.
5. Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archeological Thought, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), 104-5, 121-38.
6. Michael Chazan, “Concepts of Time and the Development of Paleolithic Chronology,” American Anthropologist, 97 (1995), 457-67.
7. Anne Solomon, “What is an Explanation? Belief and Cosmology in the Interpretations of Southern San Rock Art in South Africa,” in Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayou, eds., in collaboration with Paul G. Bahn, The Concept of Shamanism: Uses and Abuses, (Budapest, Akadémiai Kiado, 2001), 169.
8. Renfrew, Prehistory, 41.
9. The term often used today to refer to anyone, whether formally trained as an archeologist, an anthropologist, a paleontologist etc. who is concerned with prehistoric human beings.
10. See Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong, Lucy’s Legacy: The quest for Human Origins, (New York, Harmony, 2009), 263-5. The original study by Marean et al. is “Early Human Use of Marine Resources and Pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene,” Science, vol. 449 (18 October, 2007), 905-09.
11. Steven Mithen, “From Domain –Specific to Generalized Intelligence: A Cognitive Interpretation of the Middle/Upper Paleolithic, in Colin Renfrew and Ezra B.W. Zubrow, eds., The Ancient Mind: Elements of a Cognitive Archeology, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 32.
12. Some prehistorians and archeologists connect the extinction of the Neanderthals to the symbolic capability of the newly arrived Homo sapiens. The argument, very simply, is that Homo sapiens could create symbolically sustained and so larger social networks than the face-to-face contacts to which the Neanderthals were allegedly restricted. See Clive Gamble, The Paleolithic Societies of Europe, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), 382. See also Matt J. Rossano, “Did Meditating make us Human?”Cambridge Archeological Journal, 17:1 (2007) 47-58. On the other hand, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, (New York, Basic Books, 2009) 36, 53, argue that interbreeding between the two species of Homo both extinguished the Neanderthals and accelerated the development of symbolic interaction among modern humans. As Leo Strauss once said of a similar issue, God knows who is right.
