Thinking in Symbols: Video by American Museum of Natural History:

Transcript




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Pvh9_jttk


THOMAS WYNN

Modern human culture is embedded in symbols.

So when I get up in the morning, and I dress, the way I dress actually sends messages about who I am
[and] how I conceive of myself. So everything I do is symbolic. The kind of car I drive...is symbolic.
The church I go to...is symbolic All of these things stand for something else...and everybody else can
interpret the fact that they stand for something else.

IAN TATTERSALL

There are many things that make human beings unique as a species.
There are many physical peculiarities.
But the one that makes us feel unique is our extraordinary symbolic mental capacity.

We disassemble the world around us. We break it down into a mass of symbols that we give names to;
and then we recombine those symbols to remake the world in our heads.
And in a very real way, we live in a world of our own making.

Clearly we need a whole bunch of different mental capacities in order to indulge in abstract thought;
and we don't know what the key capacity was; we don't what it was exactly that was added at the
moment that humans began to express the abstract, symbolic, cognitive style.

But, clearly, it's a product of the human brain. And the human brain is a product of 350 million years of
vertebrate evolution.



THOMAS WYNN

What we see initially in human evolution is bipedalism.
It looks as if that occurred perhaps as early as 5 million years ago.
But they don't give us any impression that they are more than bipedal apes.

About a million and a half years ago we get [one of those] really big jumps...in evolution.
Brain size was about 85% of modern brain size; body build was much more modern; then about half a
million years ago, cranial capacity comes up almost to [the] modern range

In Europe, they've evolved into Neanderthals; in Africa, they evolved into Homo sapiens: so anatomically
modern humans are in place by 200,000 years ago.

CHRISTOPHER HENSHILWOOD

Human physical remains tell us what people looked like: how tall they were; how big their brains were;
information like that; but that's all they tell you about: the capacity of humans: they don't tell you how
humans behaved. And that's where you need to rely on the material artefacts: the artefacts we recover
from the sites people lived in.


We're in Blombos Cave, in the Southern Cape, South Africa; and we've been excavating here for many
years; because this cave contains important evidence of the origins of modern human behaviour.

What we're looking at here is what's called a section: this is the deposits that were brought into the
cave; that were left behind by people who lived here hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of years ago.

And each time people came into the cave, they brought food with them, they brought various materials
with them; they left the materials in the cave: that's what's caused these lines you can see against this
wall over here.

Some of the most interesting finds have been below this orange sand layer: which dates to about 72 to
77 thousand [years BC] - and this indicates to us a very, very early period for people using material
artefacts in a symbolic way.

Some of the artefacts we have over here...these are some of the beads, which date to about 75,000
years ago. They are made on a small shell. Now what they've done is, they've pierced a hole through the
mouth of the shell to create a hole that they could string the bead [through] to make perhaps a
necklace; and I think that's one point that all archeologists agree onthat beads are typical markers of
symbolic behaviour; or behaviour that's mediated by symbolism, again...

ARCHAEOLOGISTS

Is this anything? No - think it's just stained with a little ochre It is a little tip of ochre: [it's] a very, very
small [one] I don't want to scratch it now but if I did, the colour would show up much better.

CHRISTOPHER HENSHILWOOD

Ochre is becoming one our prime finds This is a very nice piece It's been worked, it's been scraped
on the one edge over here...it may have been used in this kind of way - that people smoothed it across
their skin like that...which would have left a red mark, almost like a red lipstick

We know certainly, in contemporary societies, that people use ochre very strongly to indicate
affinities...or sexual status: a whole lot of things, in fact

IAN TATTERSALL

There's still some discussion about the exact implications of these findings at Blombos cave; but the
interpretation of bodily adornment certainly has been recently reinforced by discoveries in the Levant
and North Africa, so there's some consistency here

CHRISTOPHER HENSHILWOOD

I think Blombos cave gave us, really, the first solid information that humans were using symbols at
77,00075,000 years ago We now know, that people did not evolve modern type behaviour in
Europe They were already modern before they left Africa

So our previous understanding of Europe being the cradle of modernity has now been overturned...and
Africa's now back in the spotlight again...