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- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked, large-brained.
Long the master of fire, tools, and language
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable,
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our shared
understanding of the past.
Carta brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
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- Good afternoon.
Imagination makes huge demands on the brain.
And when we use imagination,
there's neural connectivity that occurs
between many areas of the brain.
But not all brains are equal,
so people who have high creativity brains
have different networks from those who don't.
This means that the study of imagination
and the study of brains is not a linear thing.
Face recognition in objects
requires a certain proportion of brain power
that we call the face recognition area
and when people are thinking about faces,
this is what is activated.
Now, archeologists, and I'm an archeologist,
can't access brains.
All we can do is to have a look at items
of material culture as proxies
for imagination in the deep past.
But how far back can we go?
And it's perhaps important or relevant
in a group like this to say once upon a time.
(audience laughing)
Three million years ago, at Makapan in South Africa,
this little jaspilite pebble was found
and the question of course is,
did Australopithecus have a face-recognition
part of the brain?
And about 300,000 years ago,
this flint hand-ax, with a shell in its center,
was found in the UK.
And here, the question is, was the fossil shell
perhaps more important than the tool itself?
Did it spark imagination?
And about 300,000 years ago in Israel,
at Berekhat Ram, this little object
that some people think was a figurine was found
and the use-wear traces on it were analyzed
by Francesca d'Errico and April Nowell
and they discovered that it had,
in fact, been purposely modified.
It had been ground
and there were some nick marks around the neck.
What they also found, however, was that red powder
tends to come off when this is ground
and so maybe it wasn't a symbolic artifact,
even though it had been purposefully modified.
Now, the important point about all three
of these objects that I've shown you
is that they represent outliers,
not regular patterned behavior.
And if we're thinking about imagination and symbolism,
we need to know that this is shared behavior.
So all of these objects could be accidental.
There, of course, they give us a very nice clue
as to her early imagination may have arisen.
Proxies for imagination appear
very regularly in the last 100,000 years.
So there's no problem about recognizing them then.
And they tend to multiply exponentially after that.
So the first ones I'm going to show you
are from Diepkloof in South Africa.
The oldest of these engraved egg shells
is 100,000 years old
and they were found up 'til about 60,000 years ago.
We know that they're water bottles
because some of the openings,
down on the the bottom right there,
have the ground openings just like the ones
in the Kalahari today, where you see
a woman pouring water into this water bottle.
You can see that her water bottle
is a little decorated there too, whereas the older ones,
in fact, have much greater variety
of decoration on them
and perhaps engaged more imagination.
Refitting suggests that the Diepkloof
water bottles were highly decorated.
You can see that the patterning was all over them there.
What I think is really important
is that the engraved eggshell occurs at many sites.
So we see it here at Klipdrift
and at sites up in, Namibian.
There, you see a pathway up towards the west
that has engraved eggshell,
whereas the perforated marine shells
that I'm about to show you have a pathway
that goes up the eastern part of Southern Africa.
They don't only occur in the eastern part
of Southern Africa, they go right
the way up to North Africa and into Israel as well.
So let's have a look at those.
These perforated marine shells that are probably beads
are 72,000 years old
and yet, the ones further north are even older.
Some experimental work by Marian Vanhaeren
has suggested that people imaginatively
strung these together in different ways.
The oldest ones, at the top,
were strung together in little pairs like that.
The ones in the middle were strung back to back.
And then the younger beads were strung
in even a different way.
Again, using imagination.
I think it's important that shell beads
are also found at Sibudu
and Klasies River in South Africa.
So once again, we have an established behavioral pattern.
The Sibudu ones are 72,000 years old.
The Klasies ones, a similar age.
But there's much other technology
that occurs in the last 100,000 years,
that demonstrates the imagination of people at the time.
You've already seen the Blombos engraved piece of ochre
that is 72,000 years old.
There's other engraved ochre from Blombos too.
So, once again, we see a pattern there.
There is engraved ochre at Klasies River
and at several other South African sites.
At 100,000 years ago at Blombos,
paint was manufactured in an abalone shell
and this was red ochre mixed with a number
of ingredients including an unknown liquid.
We don't know what the paint was used for,
but we do know that it was a compound,
complex mixture.
At Sibudu, there's also paint.
It was found on this flake here
and this paint was made out of ground red ochre powder,
mixed with casein, casein being a milk product.
Was this perhaps the first tempera paint
that was ever used in the world?
I think it may have been.
At Sibudu, there are also many imaginative adhesives,
made out of things like red ochre and resin
or red ochre mixed with graphite,
mixed with other products, sometimes fat,
a whole variety of adhesive recipes.
Also at Sibudu, this time at 77,000 years ago,
people imagined how they could get rid of insects
that buzzed around their bedding, annoyingly, at night.
And so they placed aromatic leaves,
in this case, Cryptocarya, on top of the sedge bedding
and these aromatic leaves are slightly poisonous
and probably kept the mosquitoes away.
Burial, something that has only briefly
been mentioned up until now,
allows our imagination in a different way,
because when we see a burial,
we know that people were imagining ancestors.
They were thinking about the after-people,
as well as the afterlife.
The earliest burial that we know about so far,
comes from Israel, at Skhul and Qafzeh.
And here, the burials, which are repeated,
as many as 10 at a time,
have been buried with shell beads, perforated marine shell
and red ochre as grave goods.
Then, at Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains
of South Africa, at 72,000 years ago,
an infant was buried with this conus shell,
which had been perforated, perhaps as a pendant.
The little sketches over on the left
were from the excavation in the 1940s.
Through time, burials became much more complex.
And here in Russia, at 34,000 years ago,
we see one of the most beautiful
burials that has come to light so far.
It's a young man on the left,
that's the archeological example,
covered with 3,000 mammoth ivory beads
with fox canines and bangles made of ivory
and the reconstruction on the right
suggests that these decorative items
may have been stitched onto the clothing
that he was buried in.
But when we think of imagination,
we can hardly separate it from fantasy.
And probably the earliest secure
archeological evidence for fantasy
is the Lion-Man from Germany,
32,000 years ago.
This is an ivory figurine,
the figurine of a human figure with a lion head.
This kind of therianthrope,
because the mixture of animal and human features
defines a therianthrope,
it's a manifestation of an abstract concept
but it really is the first evidence
that we have of true fantasy.
It's not the only one, though.
And at Apollo 11 in Namibia,
27,000 years ago,
the motif of a feline is used again.
Here on the painted slab, you see half-human, half-feline.
The head is a feline and the back legs are human.
And this slab was buried in the little cave
that you see up on the top left there.
Now, all the evidence that we have for imagination
and highly developed technology,
some of which I've shown you,
can be used to imply that we had complex cognition
and modern brains way before
any of this evidence that I've shown you,
right back to 300,000 years ago,
when homo sapiens first arrived
in the archeological evidence.
But for once, let's turn this idea on its head and say,
material culture itself is not passive.
And so when people manipulate items,
when they work on material culture,
this is stimulating their imagination
and their cognition.
And by doing, we develop the brains even more,
we develop imagination further
and it's this kind of thing that leads
to increased technological
development through time,
increased imagination, increased creativity.
And thus, we can say that technology
and cognition and imagination
engage with each other reflectively
and reflexively.
And the reflexivity that we see
between the technology and the cognition and imagination
gave rise to what I've demonstrated to you,
the exponential growth of material
culture by 100,000 years ago.
So all of the things that I've shown you,
beads, paint, art, engraved ochre,
engraved ostrich egg shell, adhesive recipes,
bow and arrow, that I haven't mentioned,
new tool classes and burial,
all of these appear very rapidly
by 100,000 years ago.
We may have had the humble beginnings
of this earlier than that,
but certainly, we get definitive evidence
by 100,000 years ago.
Thank you.
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