A Critical Question:
How Did a Sense of Time Develop
in the Paleolithic Era?
This blog post is going to be short and sweet yet no less important than my other posts on this subject.
When I started this blog seven years ago, I did so to investigate the "human experience of time." It was clear to me that animals and children, for example, experienced time very differently from adults. It was also clear to me that humans were the only animal that had a sense of linear time with a past, present, and future, that we also had an understanding of duration and that we could coordinate and plan activities because we had the shared concepts in our languages. And we understood the all-important meaning of 'when' -- when in the past, when in the present, and when in the future.
This is a rather fanciful mural of Upper Paleolithic artists as they painted polychrome mammoth figures on the walls of the Font de Gaume cave in France. However unrealistic, this painting, made in 1920 by famed illustrator Charles R. Knight and exhibited in the equally famous Museum of Natural History in New York, made the creation of these cave drawings come alive. This mural may have helped fire the imagination of modern paleoanthropologists so that they now understand better how these paintings were made and as a result have come to a more accurate understanding.
File:Font-de-Gaume.jpg
During the past year, I have suggested how early humans, hominins, could have emerged from living in the present, as all animals do, to acquiring a sense of time. I have suggested that it came about as a result of processes or technologies, such as stone-tool making, that proceeded step-by-step and whose steps were dependent on each other. These processes provided an experience of working with time and also became models and metaphors for the progression of time. I believe the use of increasingly sophisticated processes and the acquisition of a shared understanding of linear time happened gradually and took millions of years.
I have also suggested that in addition to stone-tool technologies that we know a lot about, there were many more processes used by women such as basket-weaving, food gathering and various woven-fiber processes. The only problem is that we have to speculate about the technologies that used wood or fibers or animal skins because those materials decayed and left no trace after millions of years.
Which brings me to the point of this article. While some might disagree with my ideas, a basic irrefutable fact remains which must be explained.
That fact is simple:
How did early humans, let's say Homo habilis, who lived in the immediate time of animals, evolve into modern Homo sapiens sapiens with a linear sense of time?
I would argue that culture, language, planning, coordination, advanced technologies, art, mythology and storytelling -- i.e., all the things that comprise modern human behavior -- could not have happened without an understanding of linear time.
Many have suggested that modern behavior began in full when a complete early language developed. Yet all such languages contain words to express linear time.
Time reference is a universal property of language...
Jacqueline Lecarme, Ph.D., Linguistics
In other words, a sense of linear time was crucial and a linchpin when it comes to understanding behavioral modernity.
I believe that no explanation of the development of behavioral modernity is complete without a comprehensive explanation of how humans developed a linear sense of time, and further how that sense of time, once established, developed within cultures and civilizations.
A search of the Internet showed that there were virtually no studies or papers relating to this transition from the immediate 'now' time that animals live in (and that we once lived in) to an early concept of continuous linear time, except my own here on this blog and my papers at academia.edu and at figshare.com.
In his book, Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day, Gerald Whitrow states the situation very clearly but does not attempt to explore this transition in detail:
"Man must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before he made any explicit distinction between past, present, and future."
"It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present."
And, in a sense, he also warned us to be careful about making modern assumptions about people who lived 50 or 100 thousand years ago:
"Giambattista Vico [ED: a history philosopher] believed that every theory must start from the point where the subject of which it treats began to take shape."
Above quotes from:
Whitrow, Gerald. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press. 1988, pages 21, 22, 159.
This last quote means that paleoanthropologists need to forget about modern timekeeping and modern and abstract conceptions of time. Instead, they need to place themselves back into the past and see the world through the eyes of an Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer who on occasion emerged from momentary existence into an understanding of time that was continuous with a past, present, and future.
This photograph of hands painted on the walls of a cave is from the Upper Paleolithic Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands) in Argentina. These hands, which were 'spray' painted over thousands of years, have a powerful spiritual meaning. Other caves around the world also have such imagery. The power of these overlaid hands might hold a clue to the world view of early modern people.
File:SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b.jpg
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