The transition from nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers to sedentary communities is one of the more epochal shifts in the history of humanity. This shift in living conditions can be traced as the ultimate cause of Homo sapiens’ transition from foraging bands of a few dozen individuals, to the vast urban populations that have so defined our species throughout recorded history. In fact, this single innovation of lifestyle would be, according to Renfrew’s Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (2007), the central fount from which virtually all subsequent cultural and material developments would spring.
There is a curious “gap” in the understanding of our own evolutionary/ developmental process; while modern humans and their pre-Paleolithic ancestors are physically and genetically indistinguishable, there are cognitive light years of distance between the two groups. Moreover, the path toward complexity and higher-level cognition did not proceed a steady pace. Rather, there was a massive acceleration approximately 40-60,000 years ago (p. 71). From the perspective of physical ability – which includes the physical brain’s potential for development – there is no major genetic shift to account for such a jump; as Renfrew said, “all humans are born equal,” whether that be in 2012 or 80,000 BCE (p. 79).
Renfrew’s resolution to this “sapient paradox” is in the settling of the myriad migratory tribes of hunters into permanent communities. These would have been areas of plenty – abundant fishing near rivers or coasts, predictable and regular game, and enough edible vegetation to support a permanent population (p. 120). This predictable and convenient source of food allowed these communities to shift their foci from the day-to-day struggle for subsistence and tracking, and into the “tectonic phase” of development. This phase is further subdivided into mythic, material symbolic, and theoretic stages – marking the rise of oral traditions, abstract symbolic tool use, and formalized writing structures, respectively (p. 97).
With this shift, community members were freer to begin specializing their individual skills. No longer did someone have to be proficient at every societal skill – hunting, collecting, skinning, just to name a few - to be contributory, but could know devote far more energy toward the advancement of fewer and more intricate tasks. Further, a settlement allowed for the production of technologies far too complex or impractical for a nomadic clan; pottery, refined stone tools, and eventually metallurgy being some of the more concrete examples (p. 123). But this increasing complexity required its own increasingly complex symbolic system to understand it. Thus in “a co-evolutionary process” (Carson, 2003, p. 12), humans’ symbolic representations of their changing world themselves were adapted and rendered increasingly complex, nuanced, and meaningful. Mathematics and the abstract conceptualization of number, for example, arose from the “practical need to keep track of objects, such as sheep or goats, that people depended on for food” (Carson, 2003, p.5).” Whereas a member of a hunting tribe would undoubtedly have a concept of quantity, there was simply no need to keep an exact and running calculation of how many animals were in a herd, or berries were on a bush. In a sedentary society, however, with social interaction more specialized, commerce and trade – as well as its darker cousin, theft - would have become far more central to these communities. As such, the ability to keep track of how many pots one made, or how many goats were in one’s herd (and whether a few had suddenly gone conspicuously missing) became of paramount importance to these burgeoning societies.
As these tribes each made the transition into permanent settlements, the rapid advancement in specialization and technological innovation was coupled with a parallel explosion of social innovation (p. 106). With the basic necessities of life dispersed throughout an increasingly specialized network of people, individuals could afford to spend far greater amounts of time contemplating what “might be,” or “had been” or “will be,” rather than merely what was before them. Moreover, the symbolic tools created to define this world were becoming sufficiently intricate as to be able to express these sparks of imagination, artistry, and faith.
References
Carson, R. (2003). A Vygotskian perspective on culture & cognition: A reflection on how tools mediate action. EDCI 552 Coursepack. Montana State University, Northern Plains Transition to Teaching, Bozeman, Montana.
Renfrew, C. (2007). Prehistory: The making of the human mind. New York: Random House.
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