Part 2 - Sapiens and the Power of Transcendence
The standard evolutionary story of the arrival of our species depends too much on strikingly modern assumptions. Material survival, social skills, and the development of technology are the interpretative tools used to read the evidence. So in Part 1 of this alternative narrative, I developed an account that prioritises inner life and lived experience. Neanderthals and the other species who were our deep ancestors discovered a spiritual intelligence that reached way beyond the purely utilitarian. An engagement with the spiritual commons marks out them and us.
In this second part of the alternative story, I explore the impact of this realisation upon Homo sapiens in particular. Our lives and experience are profoundly shaped not by stone age problems but an ever-renewing awareness of transcendent realities.
Glimpses of our evolutionary past can be gained from indigenous peoples. Take the witness of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian rainforest. When the former missionary and linguist, Daniel L. Everett, travelled to this part of the Amazon, in a bid to make them Christians, he found himself plunged into a world that his modern mind had forgotten how to perceive.
He arrived in a place of spirits that the people relate to, in arresting ways; subtle beings are fully visible to them, not ghostly or inferred. A tree can simultaneously be a spirit, as can a jaguar. The world seen by the Pirahã has a spiritual concreteness that is as irrefutable to them as, to us, is the value of the colourful scraps called money. “I have seen an entire village yelling at a beach on which they claim to see a spirit but where I can see nothing,” Everett writes.
Interactions with that reality has been caught on film by the explorer, Bruce Parry. In one scene from his documentary, Tawai, he follows a Pirahã group seeking a place to build a shelter for the night. The leader does not scout for a sensible location but instead listens to the spirits of the forest as he walks. “Kaoáíbógí says, ‘Do not touch the big trees of the forest,’” he reports to Parry in one moment, Kaoáíbógí being one of the entities that accompany their lives.
Such sights and insights can, of course, be written off as collective hallucinations. And these people may be partly mistaken about the reality around them, as anyone can be. But I don’t think they, or we, can be completely dissociated from their surroundings, otherwise no one could survive. A Pirahã leader would threaten not aid his people if Kaoáíbógí were entirely made up.
In other words, imaginings may be misguided in all sorts of ways, but they cannot be simply false - and, when they are, the sufferers of the fantasies quickly become unanchored from reality and seriously at risk.
No. Homo species are meaning-discovering and meaning-amplifying creatures. Fictions develop not because they aid survival, as a writer like Yuval Noah Harari stresses, but because they capture truths of existence. Science does the same today, in the form of abstract theories rather than participative stories, put to the test in the laboratory rather than the rainforest.
Further, if you don’t accept that these activities of the mind are in some way true then you end up asserting contradictions, as Harari does in his big history, Sapiens. He argues that human gains rose with the ability to tell fictions meant in the pejorative sense of fanciful illusions. He also defines language as “the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.”
What he overlooks is that his scientific story of human history would receive the same condemnation if that were so. It, too, would be a web of useful lies that happen to have the handy byproduct of bonding groups of Homo sapiens who live in a technological age. The medium would fatally corrupt the message.
Surely it is better to assume that science illuminates aspects of reality, as rituals and myths do. The fascinating issue is the types of truth each offers.
So to return to our story and a controversial, much contested matter: the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens. What makes us different from the other Homos that existed - indeed, from other creatures?
No doubt, the meaning-seeking capacities of Neanderthals, and possibly others like heidelbergensis, were impressive. However, to draw on the theory of mind discussed in Part 1: it seems unlikely that they could have had thoughts, or constructed sentences, such as this: “I think (first order) that you believe (second order) that I imagine (third order) that you (fourth) want me (fifth) to build a fire.”
Such conceptions require at least fifth-order intentionality which it seems they did not have. But we do. The case for the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens rests upon the emergence of more sophisticated cognitive abilities and the discoveries that followed. They were, once more, to prove revolutionary.
Increasingly complex stories could be told, nuanced rituals explored, and subtler aspects of reality grasped. The heart of the research being carried out by Robin Dunbar and his colleagues is that whilst earlier Homos had long assembled together to make music and perform rituals, leading to ecstatic states, Homo sapiens radically upgraded them.
Awareness of the spiritual commons took a leap forward, as did spiritual intelligence.
Consider what that introduces into the experience of group connections. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch has argued that Homo sapiens moved beyond being what he calls a solely transactional species. That latter way of being in the world can be observed in groups of chimpanzees who sustain long-lasting coalitions and structures of social organisation through a nonstop process of exchange, combat and politicking: “I’ll scratch my back if you scratch mine” is the popular summary.
But early humans went further with the capacity to live as a transcendental species, as Bloch puts it. This is the ability to live in imagined communities that are known through symbolic rituals, not practical acts, and are therefore held in the mind: back-scratching and nit-picking as metaphors.
By way of illustration, Bloch recalls an elder from a Malagasy village whom he knew for a long time. This senior figure became weak and senile towards the end of his life; he stopped being able to recognise people and spent much of his day wrapped in blankets. But he continued to be treated with great deference and respect. For example, village rituals did not cease requiring his blessing; his transcendental role lasted long after his transactional significance had ceased.
What is striking is that no chimpanzee would continue to bow, literally or metaphorically, to a once dominant individual who had lost in the power play. But the Malagasy elder became what Durkheim called a “social double”: he occupied more than one place in the collective mind.
Homo sapiens routinely deploy this doubling, and it leads to a further unfolding. Individuals, like human elders, can be respected not only because they bless rituals, but because they carry the presence of gods. A special figure can be regarded as a living superposition of, say, ruler, ancestor and deity. Chiefs and kings are cases in point.
A community that exists with such an imaginary fosters other developments of inner life. Consider the impact upon feelings of wonder. There is good evidence that monkeys and apes experience awe. Cameras strapped to the back of macaques in Gibraltar, which can track where the monkeys look, show that, on occasion, they will gaze at sunsets and other absorbing scenes. Interestingly, they may do so even when usually irresistible enticements are nearby, such as fruiting fig trees. The enjoyment of the sunset can overwrite instinctive behavior.
In fact, biologists have long speculated that all sorts of animals can be similarly distracted, at least momentarily. In his best-selling book on earthworms, Charles Darwin felt that he sometimes observed the humble creature of the soil become absorbed by a leaf mould. Such soils were so attractive that Darwin found he couldn’t alarm his worms, as he usually could, with a bright light.
Ancient Homos had feelings of wonder and awe. There is no doubt about that - though Homo sapiens had the further desire to investigate its qualities. Cleverer than their forebears at deliberately producing such experiences, they explored the implications of these immersive journeys with a voracious curiosity.
You might say that if a dog dreams of the chase, and macaques look at a sunset, humans will intentionally investigate what they find beautiful or terrifying; their conscious connection with the cosmos intensifies. At this stage of development, more elaborate rituals and truth-bearing sagas are complemented by speaking of, and maybe theorising about, what would now be called the supernatural.
The millennia long fascination with natural splendours is complemented by otherworldly intrigue; Homo sapiens came to live not only with their ancestors, as had Neanderthals, but also with human-animal hybrids: therianthropes. Creatures such as the minotaur, satyrs and werewolves are their successors.
The Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel is one of the best-known examples, an ivory figure of a supernatural entity that dates to possibly 40,000 years ago. This is about the same time as Homo sapiens decorated cave walls with dancing images of lions and aurochs, which Pablo Picasso remarked have not been surpassed.
The important detail, in terms of teasing out the distinctiveness of humans, is that these imaginary beasts are found nowhere in the visible world. They speak of parallel realities.
Consider, too, the practice of decorating stone tools with ochres. Homo sapiens used these pigments made from iron oxide, as did Neanderthals, though the sophistication of human deployment illuminates a difference. The colours change the appearance of a knapped stone, person’s body or cave wall, though here is the magical bit: part of the world is, thereby, not only adapted but transformed. Stones, bodies and walls morph and shape-shift. Ochre makes them portals to other dimensions.
My guess is that if Neanderthals did use ochres to create symbols that evoked presences they physically saw, early humans used ochres to create symbols that channeled supernatural presences. This ability made way for what was to become religion and, eventually, science.
The profound significance of this extended awareness shows up in numerous ways. Take the activity of storing food and clothing. Evidence from South Africa implies that humans started using ostrich eggs and shells to carry water, pigments and glues from at least 80,000 years ago. They must have used baskets and pottery jars as well, though these objects deteriorate and so aren’t found today.
Such items are storage technologies, but also, more significantly, evidence of a desire for more than material life provides; they are by-products of an insatiable imagination. The abundant life of the spirit-world, engaged by our ancestors, led to ideas of excess in the material world and, with that, the practice of storage.
Humans, therefore, sought to preserve, not just gather; to trade, not just harvest. The notion of a surplus was born because of an awareness of spiritual immensity, from which follow further values, such as ownership and property.
Take a practice such as feasting, which evidence suggests human beings have enjoyed for millennia in sacred places at certain times of the year. They have gathered to roast aurochs and pigs, and drink large quantities of beer - and a lot more besides.
Consider the sumptuousness of these occasions amongst indigenous people. The anthropologist, James Suzman, spent time with the Ju/’hoansi bush people of Namibia, whose feasts include numerous gifts: fish oil, woven blankets, bentwood boxes, copper plates. The plentitude is a sign that ritual dining is not only a celebration of means; it is a celebration of concepts too. Homo sapiens can appreciate abstractions such as plenty when they see piles of food, and conversely poverty when they don’t. Feasts are the material signs of a highly developed spiritual intelligence.
This kind of activity may illuminate another striking difference between heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, and sapiens. Earlier Homos did not develop their stone and flint technologies once the techniques to make them had been discovered. Instead, they were happy to keep making the same unchanged tools for hundreds of thousands of years. They did not have the imagination that sought more of the spiritual commons and so, as a byproduct, more from their tools, too.
Take heidelbergensis. For 800,000 years, an extraordinarily long period of time, these groups made the same type of hand-axes. They could imagine the need ritually to dispose of them, presumably because flint tools were felt to be sacred. We know this because accumulations of knapped flints are found in clearly designated places, like the site at Boxgrove in England. It contains huge quantities of flints, alongside animal bones and hominin fossils, and offers now a deposit which shows that heidelbergensis could not imagine the desire to develop things. The artefacts are unchanged across the aeons; they are relics of contentment.
Homo sapiens was never so at ease. Our more immediate ancestors had a powerful taste for more, fired by their spiritual intelligence. In fact, one of the byproducts of this appetite, trade, has been offered as a reason Neanderthals became extinct, about 30,000 years ago. According to the theory, humans outgrew and displaced their Neanderthal neighbours because they had the essentially spiritual concept of a surplus. That led to more food to go round, which led to larger populations of humans. Over time, Neanderthals were squeezed out, unable to imagine the spiritual perceptions that lay behind sapiens expansion and growth.
It’s even possible that a sort of Neanderthal piety contributed to their downfall by keeping them stuck. They may have refused to trade because they saw storage as a kind of sacrilege: animals and plants mistreated by stuffing them into clay pots. The Neanderthal mind simply did not have the consciousness to understand the practice, and so demonized it, along with the humans who indulged it. Calvin Martin’s book, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time, offers an imaginative exploration of this mindset.
This possibility also suggests that Homo sapiens is not an inherently destructive species. Indeed, it looks as if, for much of human history, concepts such as a surplus supported the fair distribution of resources, as well as egalitarian social arrangements, though it is also right to conclude that, in time, occasions arose in which violence was deployed to steal resources and then, relatively recently, that morphed into organised warfare.
Subduing enemies and enforcing ideologies. Only the creature with advanced spiritual intelligence can perform such feats. It seems as if this behaviour became a regular feature of human culture around 5,000 years ago: a dark side to transcendent yearnings.
But the light lures them and us, too, for there are other fascinating developments to consider. One is the ties that humans have to particular places.
Take the ritual complex at Göbekli Tepe and the settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. The meaning of these sites is contested by archaeologists, partly because it now seems clear that sacred structures, around which people gathering to feast and perform rites, preceded sedentism. So it wasn’t agriculture that, at first, tied people to places. But why did they invest so much in certain locations? Defending the sacred must have played the key role.
When it came to the subsequent choice to live in settled locations, spiritual intelligence was again in the driving seat. Places became holy because these were sites in which the expansiveness of the cosmos was invoked and reliably known. Rootedness sprang from religiosity. Settlements were first about securing access to the spiritual commons.
The domestication of animals and plants was probably driven by sacred sensibilities, too. Bringing about lifeforms that otherwise would not exist in the natural world is a god-like undertaking and farming is, therefore, another tangible sign of the distinctive agency arising from the burgeoning spiritual awareness of human beings.
The point is that such advances take a specific kind of attention that must be sustained over vast periods of time, with the practical gains unobvious for many, perhaps countless, generations. However, a ritually or mythological held spiritual vision, enjoyed because active in the here and now, would have kept proto-farmers, unawares, also in the business of taming plants and animals. How could it have been otherwise? At first, these people would have had no sense of what taming meant, let alone looked like. But taming followed unexpectedly from a consciousness of the sacred - which is why farming is associated with myths from corn maidens to dying and rising gods.
The cultural historian, William Irwin Thompson, was onto this dynamic, arguing that the development of agriculture was primarily a religious phenomenon, not an economic one. He proposed that the lunar shape of horns linked cattle and the Moon, and so sustained gradually more intimate spiritual relationships between bovine animals and human beings. Their breeding and slaughter was primarily, and at first wholly, a ritual overseen by shamans unfolding the inner meaning of monthly and yearly cycles. Animal husbandry followed.
Irwin Thompson was no doubt wrong in some details, in particular that farming was born of a matriarchal culture, for which it turns out there is little or no evidence. But he was right in spirit and is supported by more recent archaeology.
For example, the work of Jacques Cauvin explores how humans came to see themselves as markedly different from the rest of the natural world, though not divided from it. The evidence is the emergence of anthropomorphic divinities that are a corollary of developing agriculture in the Neolithic period.
Human-formed gods signal that Homo sapiens now knew of a realm that was in some way divine and above nature, though not entirely above them. The transcendent was not wholly immanent, and neither were they. The realisation gave them the power and permission to change nature. Our ancestors had stumbled across another aspect of the spiritual commons, represented in deities that have nothing to do with nature, apart from the link with themselves.
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In this brief history, I have attended to the role played by our spiritual intelligence and love affair with the spiritual commons. There is a compelling case for basic links between the evolution of spiritual intelligence, the discovery of the spiritual commons, and the story of our origins.
Such connections might reorientate our lives back to immaterial dimensions of existence with an alternative evolutionary story: the instrumental is not the root of who we are but the participative; survival is not the main theme of our story, but communion.
This conclusion will be rejected by the mainstream tellers of the story. But, as the historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out, to dismiss such possibilities is to make the mistake of telling the story of Homo sapiens based upon the evidence of the material artefacts that survive, whilst ignoring the rituals and rites that have become obscure or perished.
For as Toynbee concludes: “Actually, while this mental apparatus is in use, it plays a vastly more important part than any material apparatus can ever play in human lives.”
The past does not need to be interpreted as if it were only about the utilitarian drive to survive, for that misses the ways in which, from the start, Homo sapiens experienced the world as much more than the merely every day. Earlier Homos had entered the world revealed by the imagination; here they discovered other worlds that coexist with material reality. Homo sapiens, then, extended this way of life and spirit. From being a meaning-capable species, humans became advanced meaning-discovering creatures. That accelerated their evolution.
The transactional communities of earlier primates became transcendental communities led by elders, ancestors and deities. Dazzling objects of great beauty were made, that can still take our breath away. Wonder became an experience actively to investigate, not just passively to enjoy. The invisible world that resonated in the soul, even as it pulsed across the cosmos, became populated by supernatural beings.
In time, the intimate links between spirituality, survival and subsistence morphed into intimate links between spirituality, the sacred and the value of a surplus, which drove the activities of trading and farming. Inventiveness and realisations underpinned everything, as did ritual and spiritual sight.
In short, these activities and forms of perception are not the superstitious dross of an earlier phase of human development, which the scientific mind can discard as cognitive impurities. They are central, needing to be re-affirmed today.
Spiritual intelligence, and engaging with the spiritual comments, reaches all the way back across our evolutionary history. Only an arrogant and disastrous ignorance would conclude that human beings make their reality in an otherwise bleak world of struggle and indifference.
What stands out here is how Vernon re-centers the story of Homo sapiens around meaning rather than mere survival. Our ancestors weren’t just adapting to environments with better tools or sharper instincts. They were adapting to realities revealed through ritual, awe, and transcendence. In that sense, spiritual intelligence wasn’t a byproduct of evolution but a driver of it.
This is why I think the usual “we live by useful fictions” narrative misses the point. If all myth and ritual were just lies we told ourselves, then science would be nothing more than another elaborate fiction. But as Vernon suggests, both myth and science are meaning making systems, just using different languages.
That’s why I read this history as an early warning against what we’re experiencing today. A kind of Reality Drift. When we reduce human history to material efficiency or transactional exchange, we hollow out the symbolic and transcendent dimensions that made us human in the first place. Meaning doesn’t survive abstraction well; it unravels when it’s treated as secondary.
The real evolutionary leap wasn’t fire or flint, but the discovery that life is always more than material. Meaning was never an accessory to survival, it was survival.
Yes, the records of the Pirahã are interesting, but collective hallucination or vision of spirits aren’t the only possible explanations.
What we may have here is a cultural order that holds together by the willingness to *pretend* to see what the elder sees. It’s very plausible as a sorting mechanism to determine authority and thus the actions/movements of the tribe.
And it isn’t very different from our sorting mechanisms. Those who believe in global warming or critical race theory *passionately* are promoted. Those who doubt are ostracized.
The anthropological way to test my theory is simple. Carefully observe the tribe over time and note who sees spirits/demons first and how the others react. If it turns out that *anyone*, even a child, can glimpse the demon on the sand, then the theory fails.
I’m not a materialist myself, but this doesn’t mean I think we can drop Occam’s razor. Our meaning-making has multiple levels, and often truths are mixed in with the less than true. More, the social or mimetic dimension is far more decisive than we tend to think.
Good job dispatching with Harari. A gibbering demon on the sand.