Often, in empirical science, the realisation that we have no evidence of something, and therefore no positive knowledge, transforms too quickly into the conclusion that because we have no positive knowledge, we may therefore assume the negative. Sometimes this conclusion is correct, but it cannot be applied indiscriminately. To cite one interesting example of the correct and useful refusal to apply it, in recent probabilistic reasoning about extraterrestrials the absence of any direct evidence for their existence is taken by many to be irrelevant to whether we should believe in them or not. Drake's equation is more powerful than radio signals or space ships in shaping our beliefs.
In palaeontology and palaeoanthropology, the signals that come down to us in the present are usually the result of contingent, singular events that could just as easily have failed to occur. Any individual object that survives erosion or decomposition from the distant past is an exception, and needs to be understood as such. In light of this, a methodological principle worth adopting in these fields holds that the earliest found artefact of a given sort cannot be the earliest artefact that ever existed of that sort. As an individual object, it is exceptional, but it justifies the presumption of a large class of absent objects to which it belongs or belonged, and in relation to which it is not at all exceptional.
Inevitably, we imbue the traces of material culture that happen to have been preserved with more significance than they deserve, or would deserve if subsequent conditions had preserved more than a small fraction of material traces of the same sort. We have no other choice, but we should never allow ourselves to fall prey to the illusion that we have done a thorough survey of all or even many works of a given type. Our appreciation for, say, the Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel (c. 37,000 years before present) is then different from our appreciation for, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, which have been selected out of a wide sample of similar works, in part because of historical contingencies, but also, in part, because of their excellence in their kind. For any work of Palaeolithic art by contrast, we cannot know whether it is excellent in its kind or not. And if we cannot know this, the question itself seems misplaced.
Perhaps the biggest challenge, in the absence of an understanding of the kind or the 'genre' in which prehistoric works were produced, is the reading back of aesthetic intention. What would this be? Wanting the things to look 'nice'? Wanting them to bear meaning? The problem is compounded by taphonomy and related processes: the natural history of objects that had a brief period as works of artifice, but then were left after the death of their creators and inheritors to erode and corrupt as all natural things do: a seashell might start as a natural object, spend a brief life as an artificial object in conjunction with other seashells in a necklace, and then return to its earlier status as a natural object again when its human owners die and it begins its long afterlife of slow erosion.
Not only can we often not know what sort of meaning was attributed to a particular object; nor can we know, often, whether this object was originally the focus of some effort of meaning-endowment, or rather only the by-product of such an effort focused on some other object, now lost. Bifaces, or so-called hand-axes, are the most common example of this problem: are we looking at a tool, or at the left-over core of something that was thrown away after it was no longer useful for the making of tools of a different sort? Are we looking at a grave with ritually arranged bones, or at a pit that was once the site of a massacre, into which bodies were thrown with wanton indifference? Such interpretive problems are extremely common; indeed they are the general rule in palaeoanthropology.
If we cannot even know, often, whether some anthropogenic trace in the world was the result of intention at all, a fortiori we cannot know whether something was created with the intention of producing something of aesthetic value. And doubly a fortiori, we cannot know, I contend, whether this value, if it is there in an intentionally produced, is grounded in something that might be called 'representation'.
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It seems that there is a widespread equivocity in the way we speak about representation, one that does not cause us much trouble when we are speaking of the aesthetic quality of, say, Lady Liberty Leading the People, and of how this quality is distinct from that of, say, mid-century minimalist Scandinavian furniture design. But as harmless as it is in such recent cases, it is by contrast detrimental to our clear understanding of what is being asked when we ask whether the Neanderthals “had art”.
Ordinarily, if not in the technical usage of semioticians, we understand what it means to say that, say, an American-flag lapel pin “represents” its wearer's Americanness, even though the pin itself does not depict an American, or a map of the United States, but only rather a flag, or perhaps only stars and alternately coloured lines. It is plausible, perhaps even likely, that the first properly aesthetic innovations of early Homo were functionally akin to the lapel pin: decorative sorters, signalling how the wearer was affiliated. But even if these were “only” shells or bones, rather than carved figures of sea or land animals, there is no reason to suppose that these materials, in the way they were put together, did not represent something to the people who wore or saw them-- something with a reality and robustness no less vivid or real than the idea of being American. To take another example: imagine a Neanderthal necklace consisting in three seashells: there is no reason not to suppose that the grouping together of this number of objects not only marked the wearer as a member of a particular clan or lineage, but also that to look at this necklace, and to apprehend the number of seashells implicated in it, had as much representational meaning as a Greek Orthodox icon representing the three persons of the Holy Trinity. I'll return shortly to the question of iconic representation and of how it differs from “naturalism”, for now my point is only that although whatever the “trinity” of the three shells was is something that we can never recover, we can nonetheless be certain that it was no less meaningful to its wearer than the Christian Trinity is to the iconolater.
In the Palaeolithic cave art of anatomically modern humans (c. 45,000 to c. 15,000 years before present), there is a common distinction between representational figures on the one hand --the “naturalistically” depicted woolly mammoths and ibex and so on-- and the “symbols” on the other, which are called “aviform”, “tectiform”, and so on. These designations are consistently said to be mere conventions imposed by researchers, and not to involve any positive claim of resemblance to birds, etc. They are grouped according to chains of resemblance, the same sort of chains by which we can also establish that the letter “A” is associated in the history of literacy with an earlier figure resembling a bull's head, even though “A”, not to mention “a”, looks nothing like a bull's head.
But of course what it is to “look like” depends on what you are prepared to see, and we have no way of retrieving with any degree of certainty what Palaeolithic people were prepared to see. I have a pair of green Paul Frank socks with a large red patch on the heel. The patch is of the same shape and colour as the monkey's mouth on a number of other Paul Frank products. On the socks it looks nothing at all like a monkey's mouth, if we are thinking in terms of naturalistic representation. And yet because I am familiar with the Paul Frank brand (though do not own any other items), I consistently perceive the patch on my socks as a monkey's mouth. The letter “A” looks far more like a bull's head in fact than the patch looks like a monkey's mouth, and yet it is only in the latter case that the association is made, since in the former case the symbol has been taken up into an alphabetic system of writing that is based on a different set of principles and that is vastly more powerful than crude likenesses in evoking the things it is about. Whether or not Palaeolithic aviform symbols, in the way they were seen by the people who made them, were conceptually dissociated from any likeness at all, as is the letter “A”, or whether they “represented” in a way that we cannot hope to recover, as does the red patch on the socks, is something we are almost certainly not in a position ever to determine.
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The earliest object testifying to a possible appreciation for representation among early hominins, if not to a capacity to create representations, occurs far earlier than either anatomically modern humans or Neanderthals: the Makapansgat pebble, dating from around 3 million years before present, in South Africa. In other words, it came into being roughly 59 times further back in history from the last known living Neanderthal, than this last Neanderthal is from us. It is a small brown piece of jasper that seems to have taken on a certain likeness to a human face as a result of natural wear and chipping. Researchers conjecture that it was found by an Australopithecus africanus, and was removed far from its place of origin and brought back to a cave, presumably as a result of her interest in its likeness to a face. We have good reason to believe that the occipital face area responsible for the neuroanatomy of face perception was sufficiently developed in Australopithecus for these hominids to experience pareidolia much as we do, for face-like natural forms, emerging by chance in clouds or pebbles, to strike them as phenomenologically, and perhaps as morally and aesthetically, salient.
So she picks it up, and transports it, and it becomes the earliest known (but, according to the principle with which we began, not the earliest!) manuport. Is it a work of art? Imagine that someone goes out into nature and collects 100 natural objects conducive to pareidolia, and brings them home and places them together on a shelf, like the glass menagerie. This display would plainly be a work of art, and given that it is made up of several likenesses of faces, it would be a work not only of art as in artifice, but a work of representational art in the robust sense we tend to value. Now imagine that person only comes back with ten such face-bearing objects; or five; or three. Or one. Imagine that one object is mixed together with a number of other mundane objects, pebbles and leaves with no face worn into them at all. Is the face-bearing singleton still a work of art? Imagine you are trying to answer this question from a distance of 3 million years, with all the ordinary erosion and weathering that time on earth brings with it.
The reason we find the Makapansgat pebble captivating seems to involve the hint of a common interest, shared with the Australopithecines, in representations of human and other animal forms. But nothing like a capacity for creating figurative art is required for us or other hominins to come to see either natural or artifactual objects as imbued with meaning. And again, even if we feel confident in supposing that some object had meaning for some past human or human ancestor, there is still no way for us to determine from a distance whether this is representational meaning or not-- if only, again, in the way that the red patch represents a monkey's mouth, or a group of three beads represents the Trinity.
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These difficulties are substantially the same for the vestiges of Neanderthal material culture dating from circa 70,000 years ago as they are for the aviform symbols of 30,000 years ago or for the pebble of 3 million years ago.
There has been some well-meaning but rather peculiar special pleading for Neanderthals in recent media discussion of a number of new discoveries, aiming to show that they were not “knuckle-dragging ape men”, but were in fact refined aesthetes. Rhetorically similar pleading has gone on, remarkably, for the reformation of our image of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, though here the reform is largely of its phenotype and only indirectly of its behaviour: it is still “terrible” in that it is rapacious and predatory, but you are wrong, and popular science journalists will tell you you are wrong, if you think it is an ugly Godzilla-like reptile and not a graceful bird. Some researchers have recently acknowledged that the reform went too far too quickly, and wish to bring back some of the reptilian features they had just sought to scrap.
It is hard not to see all of this as a social-pedagogical phenomenon not entirely different from the expressions of political correctness that also require us to relearn what earlier generations thought they knew about, say, the bloodthirstiness of the Mongol horde or the cannibalistic lawlessness of the inhabitants of the Caribbean at the beginning of the European conquest. It might seem strange to see these reforms extending all the way back to a long-extinct species of Homo, or even to a late-Cretaceous dinosaur, as if they stood to gain anything from our sharpened sensitivity to the reality of life as they lived it. Whales underwent a similar image overhaul, from mighty leviathans in eternal war against our whaling vessels in the 19th century, to gentle song-makers of the deep by the mid-to-late 20th century. But at least here the transformation had some obvious conservationist benefit. What do Neanderthals stand to gain from the recent campaign against belittling them?
It seems we can't help but render in our own image whatever others, human or non-human, we have attached ourselves to, for professional or hobbyist interests, as spokespeople. And it is not as if the reformers are entirely wrong: popular imagination enjoys splitting and exaggeration of otherness; science educators and enlightened people generally therefore have an interest in returning the volley by lumping and by emphasis upon sameness. And Neanderthals, though extinct, are obliging in this.
The Neanderthal reform has played out on two levels (three if we include the supercilious insistence in recent years on the silence of the “h”): genetic and cognitive. As to the former, we now have a fairly vivid picture of the encounter between Neanderthals and modern humans not as a fight to the death, but, at least often, as an exchange of genetic material, an absorption of each into the other. And where there is genetic exchange there cannot but be cultural exchange.
For some years human prehistory seemed to present us with an enigma: we knew that anatomically modern humans existed at least 100,000 years before present (this length of time has recently been roughly tripled by new discoveries of skeletal remains in North Africa), but the cultural innovations that we tend to think of as pertaining to the human essence --or, to put it less scholastically, the suite of behavioural traits we see as flowing automatically from the cognitive capacities characteristic of anatomically modern human brains-- only seemed to take off in the past 50,000 years or so. How could there have been human beings identical to us, but with none of the same characteristic activities that we see as making us human, in particular, activities expressive of symbolic thought?
More recent discoveries have largely revealed that we had been inferring too hastily from the absence of material evidence to the non-existence of the thing for which we sought evidence (we'd been looking for radio signals, so to speak, rather than applying Drake's equation). In particular, the picture has been rejected on which symbolic expression began at the moment anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe and pushed out or killed the non-symbolic brutes, the Neanderthals, who had previously occupied the continent. That relevant evidence remained absent for so long of course had much to do with the fact that Europe was the primary focus of study, like the proverbial search for lost keys at night under a street lamp, not because one has any reason to believe that they were dropped there, but only because that is where the light is brighter; except that in the case of palaeoanthropology, it was taken on faith not only that the “keys” would be found near the light, but also that the “light”, even though we could not really see it, must always have emanated most brightly on that continent.
The more recent picture suggests that, far from being overrun and annihilated, the Neanderthals might in fact have taught the anatomically modern humans, upon their migration to Europe circa 45,000 years ago, much of what they came to know, and much of what we associate (again, to use Scholastic shorthand) with the human essence.
Some of the relevant artefacts remain difficult to classify, such as the purported Neanderthal bone flute, from roughly 43,000 years before present in Slovenia, which might indicate a pre-Sapiens ability to make music (and thus also, presumably, to impose rhythms on rituals, to sing songs with narrative content, etc.), but might also have been created by anatomically modern humans, and might simply be a bear femur with holes bored into it.
More significant is the discovery in Spain, reported early in 2018, that the wall paintings in at least three different caves are at least 65,000 years old (thus, around 20,000 years older than the first arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe), while the perforated beads and pigments in one cave, the Cueva de los Aviones, may date from as long ago as 115,000 years before present. All the available dating techniques are prone to significant error, but the consilience of inductions, to speak with William Whewell (and of abductions, to speak with C. S. Peirce) strongly compels the view that there were Neanderthals making art in Europe before Sapiens arrived.
But what sort of art? The “wall paintings” are paintings in the same sense as the monochrome painted walls of our homes. (I know a contemporary French artist who has a house-painting company in Los Angeles: his “work” is identical to the non-art created by other house-painters, but he contends, and gets at least a good portion of the art-world to believe, that his work is of a different order, ontologically closer to the monochrome canvases hung in museums.) There is red pigment on stalactites, for example, that seems to have been placed there out of an interest in altering the natural colour of these speleothems, but that could easily be supposed by a non-expert observer to be naturally occurring.
There are also negative hand-prints that appear to be at least 66,000 years old. These pose very interesting questions in our search for precedents. On a certain understanding, they are no more representational than animal tracks. They do not represent absent hands in the way a painting of a mammoth represents an absent mammoth; they are hands, or, rather, they are the vestige of once present hands. And yet, at the same time, they almost certainly reveal that someone wished to see the figure of a hand on a wall, and that it is that wish that left the trace, a wish that of course (we suppose) no deer ever had in the laying down of tracks.
The bored seashell beads are perhaps the most impressive evidence of manuport and artifice among the Iberian Neanderthals. We know they were decorating not just cave walls, but also themselves. We assume, in turn, that these decorations were immersed within a rich symbolic life-world in which Neanderthals distinguished themselves, marked out the sort of people they were, by the decorations they wore. Again, we have every reason to assume that the meanings involved were as vivid and important to them as those we know attach to the wearing of a rosary or of a coloured bandanna signifying gang affiliation.
But, again, was this “representational” meaning? It is perhaps significant that in strongly neighbourhood-based gang affiliations, one is often said to be “representing”-- to represent the South Side, for example. This is “representation” in what prima facie appears to be a different sense than the representation involved in a naturalistic depiction of a mammoth. But is it in fact so different? The rosary represents Catholicism, the American-flag lapel pin represents Americanness, the monochrome house painted by my artist friend represents contemporary art, or perhaps rather contemporary art-world posturing. All of these --gangs, nations, faiths of various sorts-- are thought to be ideas rather than things, and thus to be indepingibilis, unrepresentable, except perhaps through certain iconic anchorings that are understood not to be depictions of the thing itself.
But here is the problem: we cannot be sure that the mammoth paintings made by early Sapiens in Europe were not also iconic in this way. Some recent art, such as Christian Orthodox icons, is also iconic, in that the point is not to capture what, say, a woman and a child actually look like, but rather to epitomise the theology of the Madonna and Child in a schematic way. And yet Orthodox icons are pretty good at conveying what the actual anatomy of a human woman and child are, at least as good as a Palaeolithic painting of a mammoth is at conveying mammoth anatomy. So the claim that early anatomically modern humans “innovated” representational art, while Neanderthals “only” had decoration, is strictly unfounded. We do not know in either case what the artists were trying to do, what they thought they were doing, or how they imbued the material traces they left behind with meaning. Neanderthals might have been painting mammoths, and we just haven't found these (again, we may not infer from absence to non-existence); or they might have been able to paint mammoths, but were just more interested in monochromes. We don't know.
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In the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant imagines a situation in which a man, in a seemingly uninhabited country, “perceived a geometrical figure, say, a regular hexagon, inscribed on the sand.” Kant thinks that in such a case one could not fail to “attribute, although obscurely, the unity in the principle of its genesis to Reason.” We are always, he seems to believe, in a position to make the positive affirmation, vestigium hominis video: “I see the vestige of a man.”
Confidence in conclusions of this sort are however put to the test when we turn to deep prehistory, and seek to interrogate, perhaps to abolish, the boundary between the natural and the artificial. Kant thought this boundary was absolute, and that we could always find sufficient reasons for placing objects on the one side or the other of it. But human beings are natural beings as well, and it is revealing, and crucial for aesthetics, to reflect on what their vestiges have in common with tracks and burrows, and tides turned red by dinoflagellates.
The vestiges of men are of a different order, we often suppose, because their creation involved a sequence of symbolic representations. But when we restrict ourselves to human material vestiges, we quickly see that we cannot really know which ones were produced by such a sequence, and which ones were not. To assume that some were, and that some were not, for example that the mammoths of Sapiens were, but the monochromes of Neanderthals were not, is to project back a hierarchy that is more a reflection of our own aesthetic values than a measure of these different human groups' aesthetic or technical abilities.
I am convinced, in turn, that a similar projection takes place whenever we seek, with Kant, to ascribe the principle of the genesis of some things to Reason, and of other things to “the sand, or the neighbouring sea, or the winds, or beasts with familiar footprints, or any other irrational cause.” The Neanderthals inhabited a rich symbolic world, and their art was therefore representational in the way I've described. But I am not certain this creates an ontological rupture between it and the natural world. I am not convinced they themselves perceived such an ontological rupture. In fact I think that the supposition that there must be one comes very late, perhaps reaching its culmination in Kant, and that it has caused a great deal of confusion in our efforts to take stock of what early human material culture was all about: what makes it marvellous, and beautiful, but also perfectly natural.
