SIG02 Bullen

CLOTTES J. (dir.) 2012. — L’art pléistocène dans le monde / Pleistocene art of the world / Arte pleistoceno en el mundo Actes du Congrès IFRAO, Tarascon-sur-Ariège, septembre 2010 – Symposium « Signes, symboles, mythes et idéologie… » Finding the first intentional mark makers: Clues in brain development Margaret BULLEN* Keywords: Marks; Intentionality; cognition; synapse. “‘Lascaux Man’ created and created out of nothing, this world of art in which communication between individual minds begins.” (Bataille 1955: 11) Lascaux was, for Bataille, the “birth of art” despite the fact that when it was found by school boys in 1940, it was far from the first painted cave to be discovered. Altamira was almost as famous for its initial rejection by Cartailhac in the 1870s and his later acknowledgement of its being genuinely Palaeolithic, as for its bison curled into recesses in the ceiling; Altamira, La Mouthe, Les Combarelles, Font de Gaume and Niaux are just a few of the caves with paintings already, long before 1940, accepted as being from the Upper Palaeolithic (Bahn 1997 ; Grand 1967). Yet Bataille, a noted French philosopher could still perceive Lascaux as the “end to that timeless deadlock” and “the shift from the world of work to the world of play, from the rough hewn to the finished individual being.” (Bataille 1955: 27). But this is not where or when it all began Here I will endevour to reach back to a time before the creation of the bison, lionesses, horses and reindeer, which “stimulate multiple distributed cerebral processors in a novel and harmonious way” (Dehaene 2009: 309) and which we acknowledge as masterpieces. Our twenty first century eyes have no difficulty in reading into them a narrative which we search for clues to the message it surely contains. We can speculate but we do not know exactly what the lionesses of Chauvet are doing, however we sense their strength and know we too would be fearful of their power to kill. We are moved and awed by them and feel that in some way we share the emotions felt by the people of the past for whom those images were part of their present. It is possible to shift temporal reality in our own lives, to re-experience an earlier age that was our personal experience but we cannot move outside our own frame of reference into another time, place or person. We have tangible evidence for peoples’ capacity to communicate through art thirty to forty thousand years ago. We seek to ”listen in” on their artistic conversations but we cannot know how it was for the people of thirty thousand years ago by studying their pictures. It can tell us something of their external world and we can try to extrapolate from our inner world to theirs. To go * Melbourne Australia. Symposium Signes, symboles, mythes et idéologie… back further is even more difficult; to find the elusive point in time when the realisation occurred that a mark made by one individual could influence another. Not only is it a quest for a time when this happened but also a quest for what was needed. Was it a larger, more specialised brain, or was it more connectivity or more complexity at the fundamental level of synapses? Was it necessary to have language before pictures or are they one and the same? The physical traces we have of our early hominid ancestors are few; remnants of tool kits, faint evidence for habitation and fossilised skeletal material that has managed to survive despite the many taphonomic processes that militate against such survival. How do we get inside the heads of these distant ancestors? As will be discussed later, endocasts made from the skulls gives some information about the potential capacity of the individuals but may be misleading if taken literally at face value. We have to start with the brains that are available for investigation, those of our closest living relatives, the non-human primates. The separation of the line which would lead to Homo sapiens sapiens from that of the chimpanzee occurred about 10 million years ago and this paper will first consider how closely the behaviour of non-human primates reflects that of humans. 1. Communication in non-human animals Humans communicate between each other and with non-human animals in a multiplicity of ways; touch, gesture, sounds and voice are all signs which people use to manipulate their way through society (Sebeok 1975: 11), but it is only with other humans that they use indirect communication, making marks with the intention of affecting some one else, in other words leaving messages. Non-human animals make marks that affect others; scats and tracks betray the presence and the passage of an animal, but does the cat covering up its faeces do so because it knows their presence could alert a predator or because it is replicating the behaviour of its mother? Non-human primates use a wide range of gestures in the wild and in captivity will adopt human gestures such as pointing. In contrast to the inflexibility of their vocal calls chimpanzees’ gestures are flexible and multi-referential making them more like human language than are their vocalisations (Tomasello & Call 2007). Assumptions about primate behaviour are frequently made on the basis of their interaction with humans rather than with their own species. For example non-human primates appear not to appreciate the significance of a human paying attention to an object unless there is an obvious source of gratification or threat. Infants aged fourteen months were able to follow the gaze of an experimenter who hid a toy under one of two opaque buckets and then stared at it (Tomasello & Carpenter 2005: 99), whereas chimpanzees gazing at two opaque cups one of which covered a food item and again was stared at by the experimenter, chose the correct cup no more frequently than by chance (ibid.: 105) They did not interpret the gaze as providing information. It is inferred that they are not motivated as humans are to share emotions, experiences and activities with others of their own kind (ibid.: 19). Chimpanzees could point to an object when the goal was that the chimpanzee received food if the human used a tool pointed out to him or her by the chimpanzee. In this situation there was an immediate goal for the chimpanzee, it obtained desired food. However, not unlike some humans, they have been observed to respond better to competition than to cooperation. For example chimpanzees did not find food when CD-1614 BULLEN M., Finding the first intentional mark makers: Clues in brain development its location was pointed out to them by a helpful human but they did when the human competitively reached for the food without looking at the chimpanzee (ibid.: 120). Non-human primates have not been observed to use symbolic forms of communication in the wild, but does this mean they do not have the potential to learn that something can stand for something else? Savage-Rumbaugh painstakingly trained pygmy chimpanzees to use tools and to request particular tools to obtain food using symbols, and was able to show that a trained chimpanzee could gain the cooperation of an untrained animal to get food which neither could reach without the cooperation of the other (Donald 1991: 133) Donald, commenting on this work in which the chimpanzees also learned to understand English sentences and acquire and use a large lexicon of visual symbols, says “in sum, after undergoing this radical process of enculturation pygmy chimpanzees do not act , think or communicate like the same species. They do things they could never achieve in the wild, obviously without changes to their genome… Savage-Rumbaugh’s chimps may be regarded as over-achievers in the sense that they did not create the culture that revealed their latent capacities” (Donald 1998: 8). 2. The brain in humans and non-human primates – what’s the difference? The cultural inheritance of humans is clearly different from that of non-human primates while, although there are differences in their brains, the biological inheritance of humans and other primates is very similar. The question that arises is whether the differences can explain why humans alone have developed the capacity to recognise others as intentional agents like themselves, who will respond, not only to direct vocalisations or touch but also to creative symbolising and metaphor. Of course we can never be absolutely sure to what extent chimpanzees know each other; we are not privy to their intimate communications. While separation from a common ancestor of the line that would lead to Homo sapiens sapiens from that of the chimpanzee happened only about 10 million years ago, the separation from monkeys such as the macaque goes back about 25 million years. However it is the brains of macaques that have been studied most closely. Newer non-invasive techniques of exploring brain activity have led to major breakthroughs in our understanding but there are still limitations on what can be done. Many humans cannot tolerate the claustrophobic environment of an MRI scanner and persuading chimpanzees to do so when not sedated is problematic. Direct experiments on the brains of humans are only carried out on people requiring brain surgery for conditions such as epilepsy and who are able to consent to the investigations. Post-mortem studies in humans can give information when correlated with clinical information but tissues rapidly become altered post-mortem and particularly the white tissue of connecting tracts. While there is a reluctance to put electrodes into the brains of chimpanzees this does not seem to have been so in the case of macaques and therefore they have been the subjects of most direct scanning and invasive activities.

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