What distinguishes humanity from animals? Many attributes
have been proposed over the years, including language and tool-use, but most
have been discarded once it was discovered how widespread their use was in the
animal kingdom. One candidate still survives, and that is the capacity for
abstract, symbolic thought.
We take symbolic thought for granted. For example the idea that
I can write my thoughts in this blog and you can (hopefully) understand them
seems unremarkable, but when you take a step back the capability is quite
astonishing. In his film “Waking Life,” the director Richard Linklater has a
character describe the wonder of symbolic thought: it’s easy to imagine how we
came up with a word for “tiger,” and a phrase that means “tiger attacking from
behind!” But how did humans come up with a word for “frustration”? That’s an
abstract concept, with no obvious analogue in objective reality to point to.
All of human civilization is based on this ability to
conceptualize.
What an intriguing period in human history, when we were
first capable of symbolic thought! There’s no way of knowing exactly when this
happened, but the evidence of art on the walls of caves allows us to give it a
minimum date—by the time humans were capable of painting images of animals they
were obviously capable of thinking symbolically.
For many years, it was thought that the oldest cave
paintings were in southern France, in the Chauvet caves. Werner Herzog produced
a documentary about the art, “Cave
of Forgotten Dreams,” and watching it, I was deeply moved by the power of
the imagery produced by humans 30,000 years ago.
