Part 1 - Neanderthals and the Discovery of the Spiritual Commons
Around a quarter of a million years ago, groups of hominins – the primates most closely related to us today – split from their evolutionary cousins. In time, they became a new species.
They had grown apart from their ancestors and relatives, and felt themselves to be different, which eventually they expressed in the name they gave themselves: Homo sapiens.
Exactly what made the difference much debated. Some say humans evolved language, others an ability to tell stories, others again that a highly flexible imagination began to mark Homo sapiens out.
I’ve concluded that our ancestors became adept at consciously detecting that there is a spiritual commons. They evolved further by growing into an awareness of being: Homo sapiens can also be called Homo spiritualis. An active participation in this implicit dimension of reality was essential to them and us. Spiritual intelligence had become the core part of this hominin’s way of life.
They dwelt in the world led by stories and rituals. Gestures and greetings, devotions and deeds, commitments and creeds: this was the original form of what can be called spiritual intelligence, the felt conviction that arises from, and gives rise to, a conscious participation in a vitality – or ecology of vitalities – that exist within and around the individual.
Rituals informed Homo sapiens that their life is embedded in a bigger life. Robert Bellah concludes that our ancestors had realised that the “relentless utilitarianism” of merely surviving “can never be absolute”. “The world of daily life is never all there is,” he writes in his great book, Religion in Human Evolution. Rather, the spiritual commons is at the centre of life.
In other words, the story of Homo sapiens looks very different from the narrative driven by survival alone. The challenges of responding to environmental change were no doubt part of the life of our ancestors. But the inner story of the species is also crucial and one way of describing it is to consider a feature of minds called intentionality.
The approach is championed by the evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar. His work gives a basis of my reflections here, though I’m using the insights of others too, to go beyond Dunbar’s own conclusions.
Intentionality is the mental ability to focus on something or someone, and it comes with various degrees of conceptual flexibility. A rudimentary form is second-order intentionality, also known as possessing theory of mind. This is the ability to have an awareness of your own state of mind and that of another, hence the “second” in second order.
Some animals have it, including apes, as also seems to have been the case for the evolutionary ancestor of Homos called Australopithecus. A sense of what theory of mind enables is indicated by a three-million-year-old collection of fossils known as AL-333. The fossils are the remains of a party of seventeen or so adults and children belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis. It appears that their group was attacked, possibly by wild cats. The resulting carnage fatally injured some of the company, whom the survivors tended – care that led the uninjured to die too. Their connection with one another was stronger than the threat of death. Theory of mind can do that.
By the time Homos such as heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis evolved, less than 1 million years ago, the fossil and tool evidence suggest fourth-order intentionality had become possible. These evolutionary relatives of ours would have been able to hold thoughts a bit like this: “I know (first order) of your belonging (second order) that together (third order) we share with our tribe (fourth order).” The implication is that two individuals would have been consciously able to share their inner life, and that they would probably have been able to talk with some nuance about the life they together enjoyed with others.
Different kinds of participative intelligence were emerging.
You might ask why anyone would want to juggle such a labyrinthine notion connecting I, you, we and others. After all, many animals use other means to form groups, sometimes of vast sizes. Wildebeests assemble in herds numbered by the million and, whilst they make lots of noise, they don’t speak. However, primates like us opted for complex inner relationships.
In monkeys and great apes, this elaborately experiential approach is fostered by activities such as grooming, though that imposes limits on troop sizes due to the time it takes to comb, pick nits and scratch. Advanced mentalizing is more efficient and, with it, it looks as if heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis could have lived in extended groups of up to about 100 individuals.
In these societies, they made and used tools as earlier hominins like Australopithecus afarensis had been doing for millions of years, though they went further. They decorated themselves with bird feathers and seashells, carefully buried their fellows, and possibly painted on cave walls.
Such practices are evidence for the possession of new skills and new states of mind. For example, although many animals deploy tools, from crows hooking grubs with twigs to chimps smashing nuts with stones, Homos developed the ability to make tools like axes and hammers that are much more elegant than is required to fulfil their function.
They are a mark not only of aesthetic sensibilities, which naturalists including Charles Darwin have speculated many animals relish when absorbed in the colorful displays of a potential mate, but of the ability deliberately to produce aesthetically pleasing objects.
That started to emerge around 500,000 years ago, with the production of what are now called Acheulean tools. Their graceful shaping and pleasing curves are hugely significant. They indicate that heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis had high levels of self-control, that they shared goals and values in addition to instincts and drives, and that they had capacities for future planning going beyond mere habits. They could also hold images of beautiful objects in their minds, which they laboriously manifested in flint and stone.
These relics of their lives, inner and outer, are signs of an imagination that does more than inventively solve problems. It desires consciously to bring beauty into the world. They were enjoying more than the relentless utilitarianism of merely surviving.
There is also disputed evidence that Neanderthals knowingly used symbols, which would mark a further development of imaginative power. If they did create shapes such as hand stencils, they were possibly employing patterns and colouring objects with the intention of abstractly evoking the presence of perceptions held primarily internally, in the mind’s eye.
That is remarkable. It would indicate that Neanderthals had a sense of vitality that was not only in their minds, or the creatures and places around them, but was in an immaterial world – which is to say, a spiritual world – that the symbols channeled or conveyed.
They may have known what Homo sapiens came to know for sure: the world of daily life is never all there is. Neanderthals, too, could have shared a conscious sense of the spiritual commons. The feature of experience that was to become fundamental to Homo sapiens reaches back deep into our evolutionary history.
The activity of deliberately burying relatives means that we can say with more certainty that Neanderthals had another capacity: to live indefinitely with others who were absent. Death no longer brought active interacting to an end.
This is a radical departure in itself. Other animals can remember members of their families, flocks and herds, and often engage in pleasurable and intricate greetings upon being reunited. Elephants will entwine trunks, trumpet and bump into each other. But for a select handful of primates, like Neanderthals, it began to make no difference whether their community was tangible or virtual. “The social life of a chimpanzee takes place in front of its eyes and around its nose and ears,” writes Dunbar. “By contrast, for humans it can also take place without any immediate sensory inputs from individuals. Social life takes place in our minds, in our imaginations.”
One upshot of this extension of connection over the horizon of what’s physically present is that ritual behaviours became increasingly important. All animals have ritual-like habits, and many communicate with one another via ornate displays, but the type of rituals Neanderthals and others practiced would have exploded with internal significance.
There was probably lots of time for rituals, as it seems that the business of staying alive took up only so much of the year. There are studies of hunter-gatherers alive today which indicate that about two days in toto a week is spent gathering food, and about another two carrying out practical tasks such as collecting firewood. That leaves three for the ritual and imaginative activities that feed minds blooming and buzzing with their several orders of intentionality.
The sociologist Émile Durkheim called it effervescence – a sparkling vibrancy conjured by the ceremonies that linger when they end, thereby sustaining and unifying families and tribes, as well as their appreciation of the spiritual commons. It is reasonable to infer that regular and frequent religious-like activities embedded themselves into these Homo cultures.
“For foragers the food quest is very far from being a matter of efficiently extracting resources from a hostile wilderness,” writes archeologist, Graeme Barker. “They typically operate in an animate, feeling, benign, and articulate nature that is full of ‘kinfolk’, the plants and animals they seek… The foraging way of life is as much a mode of spirituality as a mode of subsistence.”
Neanderthals, and possibly other Homos, would have been preoccupied by the invisible realms that they felt animating the material world around them. The world has an interiority mirrored in their own interiority; the macrocosm around them echoed through the microcosm within them, which they could test and shape through early forms of myths and rites.
“Meaning, imagination, and hope, which constitute our capacity for belief, are as central to the human story as bones, genes, and ecologies,” writes Agustín Fuentes, an anthropologist who is championing the crucial role played by conscious awareness in human evolution. Cultures could become as rich as perceptions were deep.
“All of these enabled our lineage to develop a level of communication-based social learning, a cooperative and collaborative intensity of information transfer that surpassed those of other hominins,” continues Fuentes, still with Neanderthals in mind. Hence, whilst an ant will indicate food sources to its fellows with a dance, a Neanderthal could share traditions and legends. When coupled to the presence of the dead, these communities may have begun saying remarkable things to one another such as, “Our ancestors give us this place.”
Another facet of this way of life arises from the mastery of fire. It seems likely that, at first, fire was kept after being sparked by natural events like lightning strikes. Maybe the ancient tradition of ensuring sacred fires stay alight reaches back to this time, possibly 400,000 years ago.
Other animals are afraid of fire, so safety is a practical gain that comes with its manipulation, though its value would have risen sharply with the discovery that fire alters the properties of things. Treated in the right way, it will soften meat and harden wood. More remarkably still, fire brings light into the hours of darkness. It is likely that being able to sit around a fire at night introduced a dramatic possibility: that not only objects like flints and skins could be worked, but that the natural world itself might be influenced and manipulated.
Fire revealed that the world Homos had discovered held a power of an entirely different order from spears and axes. Maybe it dawned in their minds that they might contend with the sun, as fire uncoupled the availability of heat and light from the cycle of day and night, counteracting the effects of the setting sun and cold of winter. Using fire smashed previously unsurpassable boundaries; it expanded the spiritual commons.
There is good reason to think that Neanderthals used it to take the first mental steps into the less timebound, celestial domains around them – which is to say that their spiritual intelligence grew. It is likely that sitting around fires, late into the night, with nothing much to do except discuss and tell stories, they indulged virtuous circles of wondering, inspired by dancing flames.
We are approaching the emergence of Homo sapiens who can be called spiritualis. I will continue this alternative account of the emergence of our species in part 2 of this story, Sapiens and the Exploration of Transcendence.
Excellent. A story that needs to be told, and is ALWAYS missing from tv documentaries on the subject of our origins and emergence, as well as from most books.
great essay.
this seems to me the main conclusion from the Fall story in Genesis.
that man had ‘woken up’ to the spiritual realities and had ‘become like the gods, knowing both good and evil’ as the serpent has said.