Art and syntax in evolutionary perspective.

Chris Knight. University of East London. C.Knight@uel.ac.uk		

Recent archaeological evidence for the world’s earliest art provides a
time-window and context in which to speculate about the origins of
speech.  Middle Stone Age mining, selection and symbolic modification of
red ochre pigments points to artistic creativity emerging in sub-Saharan
Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.  Theoretical models and
ethnographic analogies suggest a function within rituals of initiation. 

What are the implications for the evolution of speech? The core
component of language, unique to Homo sapiens, is abstract and
computational.  The challenge is to explain how, when and why this
abstract quality came to the fore.  The problem presents theoretical
difficulties because animal signals are inseparable from behaviour,
being evaluated by receivers as indices of biological states.  They are
neither digital nor abstract, and an evolutionary perspective compels us
to infer that ancestral human signals were once similar in that respect. 

From one point of view, abstractions are no more than hallucinations. 
Phonological abstractions appear to have this property: speakers agree
on their features, yet acoustic analysis shows this to be the only
reality they have.  Noam Chomsky adopts a different perspective. 
Redefining the field, he has conceptualised abstractness as intrinsic to
a natural object - the language faculty - located in the head.  While
this has been fruitful, no other branch of science defines its own or
any other theoretical abstractions as intrinsic.  Interdisciplinary
integration is therefore likely to require some alternative way of
looking at the basic facts. 

One competing perspective is that offered by Wittgenstein and kindred
twentieth-century philosophers.  Uniquely, humans inhabit two worlds:
one of analog physical reality, the other of digital institutional
facts.  Money, laws and football scores fall into the second category,
lacking existence apart from communal faith.  Hunter-gatherer initiation
rites - recurrently the context for body-painting and other indigenous
art - are coercive performances designed to install the hallucinations
of one generation into the generation below.  In conforming to
collective protocol, such hallucinations match linguistic abstractions
in one respect - functionally, they are real. 
 
But what of syntax? In the evolutionary past, incipient capacities for
recursion may have served non-linguistic functions such as navigation or
mind-reading (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002).  Such capacities would
have been concrete and domain-specific – the recursive embedding of
spatial maps or of conspecifics’ current intentions.  But if that is
accepted, an unanswered question remains.  What unprecedented selection
pressures could have led to the emergence of domain-general recursion?
What new cognitive environment might have driven the recursive nesting
not merely of currently experienced realities - but of free-floating
abstractions in a world of their own? The evidence for Middle Stone Age
initiation ritual suggests an answer.  Art is the construction of
illusory worlds.  In entertaining institutional hallucinations,
anatomically modern humans would have come under pressure to invoke,
combine and make reference to these, exapting their capacities for
recursion to that end. 

Reference: Hauser, M.  D., N.  Chomsky & W.  Tecumseh Fitch, 2002.  The
language faculty: What it is, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science
298: 1569-1579.