Birth of the Arts

Natural History, Dec, 2000 by Ellen Dissanayake

What lies behind the human urge to elaborate, to embellish, to make the ordinary extraordinary?

One of my most unforgettable experiences was being handed a stone tool made by an archaic Homo sapiens and being told by the distinguished paleontologist Kenneth Oakley that it was probably about 250,000 years old. I held it in my palm with what surely resembled the feeling of a religious devotee who has been allowed to touch a holy relic--a sense of privilege, humility, and wonder.

Almost exactly the shape and size of the inside of my open hand and made from a piece of army-jeep brownish green flint, the tool was what is called a hand ax. Long before the invention of agriculture, someone not so different from me had taken up a large cobble, assessed it, and fashioned this very tool. Of course, he (or she?) could not have imagined the room or city or time in which someone like me would one day come to hold this item and wonder about the life and being of the person who had made and used it. That asymmetry was one of countless others between us. And yet, holding the hand ax like a talisman, I felt a connection to its maker that I can still retrieve (even if, just as with the person who touches a relic, whether of a saint or a famous athlete, the feeling has as much to do with me as with the material object or its owner).

In any event, I was interested to read, much later, an account that the naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote of his thoughts and emotions while he, too, held a flint tool shaped by human hands. Admiring its purposefulness, he noticed something he found even more remarkable:

   As I clasped and unclasped the stone, running my fingers down its edges, I
   began to perceive the ghostly emanations from a long-vanished mind, the
   kind of mind which, once having shaped an object of any sort, leaves an
   individual trace behind it which speaks to others across the barriers of
   time and language. It was not the practical experimental aspect of this
   mind that startled me, but rather that the fellow had wasted time.

In an incalculably brutish and dangerous world he had both shaped an instrument of practical application and then, with a virtuoso's elegance, proceeded to embellish his product. He had not been content to produce a plain, utilitarian implement.... This archaic creature had lingered over his handiwork.

Eiseley's embellished hand ax was not a singular example. Oakley had shown me photographs of two Paleolithic hand axes that had been deliberately fashioned so that a marine fossil embedded in the stone appeared in a central position, almost like an insignia. Years later I saw a similarly worked tool--a scraper--in a museum in France.

The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss titled a famous volume The Raw and the Cooked to describe the universal human imperative to transform "nature" into usable "culture." Such transformations characterize humans everywhere--from present-day subsistence farmers, such as the Yekuana Indians from the upper Orinoco River in Venezuela, converting raw, poisonous cassava tubers into a processed and cooked staple food, to early toolmakers working flints into implements or modern technocrats turning silicon into microchips.

Herbert Cole, an American anthropologist, has given the Levi-Strauss phrase additional explanatory bite by referring to the raw, the cooked, and the gourmet, thereby calling attention to the unusual fact about our species that Eiseley recognized in the embellished hand ax: for humans, transforming nature into culture may not always be enough. For the Yekuana, studied by Tufts University anthropologist David Guss, it is insufficient simply to plant, to reap, to set out in a canoe, to treat a wound or illness, to kill an animal, to begin to menstruate, to marry, or to die. As in many other traditional societies, these are all occasions for elaboration in both word and action.

Evolutionary biologists often overlook this penchant of humans to "linger over their handiwork," to "embellish" or elaborate, to make the ordinary implement (or material, movement, sound, utterance, motif, story, or idea) extraordinary. They assume it is a cultural overlay, a superfluous side effect of some ability (such as curiosity) that evolved for an adaptive purpose, or simply the product of a lone individual with time on his or her hands. To the unsentimental gaze of a scientist looking for the "selective value" of an activity, elaborating is truly perplexing, for it is an axiom of evolutionary theory that successful creatures expend their resources on survival-related ends: finding food, protecting themselves from harm, putting provisions aside for a rainy day, seeking mates and mating, caring for offspring, and, after all these are attended to, conserving their energy. Tool-making clearly contributes to survival. Continuing to work on a hand ax after it is "finished," however, would appear to interfere with fitness, not to enhance it.

Yet there we are, in every society--people adorning themselves, their artifacts, and their surroundings; making music, dancing, dramatizing, and poeticizing; and often spending vast quantities of time, energy, and material resources doing so. When evolutionary explanations for such extravagant behaviors as performing dances and making art are given, they often center on the suggestion that displays of creativity, physical skill, strength, and stamina improve reproductive success, especially that of males. By singing, by dancing, by speaking well, by skillful building, goes this idea, males draw attention to the superior qualities that set them apart from less talented or tireless males, thereby impressing and attracting mating-minded ladies. The animal world has visual, architectural, musical, and terpsichorean analogues to our own species' male theatrics: the peacock's splendiferous tail, the bowerbird's chambre d'amour, the thrush's territorial warbles, and the great bustard's acrobatic dances all either repel rivals or seduce females, or both.