Meditations: Evolutionary Mythology?

The National Museum of Mongolia has a floor dedicated to the very early history of Mongolia, from at least 5000 BC to the 9th century AD, and some of the earliest featured items are replicas of cave paintings, made by ancient peoples who lived in the Mongolian region. The oldest date from about 5000 BC, and Mongolians are proud of these prehistoric works of art.

While looking at these paintings, I thought to myself, “these look just like most cave paintings.” I don’t know what I expected, but I guess I figured that, separated by a vast distance, Mongolian cave paintings would be different from the paintings at Lascaux. But they aren’t, really. It’s a lot of the same: animals drawn without detail but with a skill unique to artists who spend a lifetime watching those animals, and figures that will eventually evolve into petroglyphs. But why shouldn’t the paintings be the same? The lifestyle of Mongolian cavemen must not have been too different from the lifestyle of French cavemen. I am aware of the gross anachronisms of this statement, and that sort of drives my point home. There was no Mongolia, there was no France, there was only land and people living on it. There was not even culture, really, so how could the cultures be different?

And it occurred to me—I tend to think of similarities in culture as derived from some universal human experience, a horizontal “sameness” that runs through people everywhere. But maybe I’m looking at it wrong; maybe our similarities are derived from the fact that our current cultures were all, at one point, the same. Not a horizontal line, but a fractal tree connects us to a single base. And from this single base derives so much of what we all have in common. From a scientific perspective, this kind of makes sense. Perhaps the greed of everyone, from Ancient Roman politicians to modern Mongolian mining execs, relates to the scarcity of food in our cave ancestors and the need to horde. Perhaps the success of the “dark triad” relates to the fact that the most self-centered got the most of the gazelle. And though I can’t figure out how “odi et amo” would be an evolutionary success, maybe that, too, can be traced back to the owners of same fingerprints found in the paints on those caves. On the one hand, I keep hearing that the world is flattening and cultures are growing ever more similar, but is this just after millennia of different peoples growing apart? Our similarities, perhaps, are not remarkable, but merely holdovers from the days when life everywhere, for all people, was pretty much hunting, keeping warm or cool, and desperately attempting to do two things: survive and reproduce.

Apparently evolutionary anthropology is already a field, but I don’t know how much it’s connected to literature, art, and culture, especially not in the sense of modern connections. The mad Pasiphaë, mother of the Minotaur, and the first Mongolian shamaness, who married a bull and had two shaman sons, perhaps are not odd anomalies, but the remnants of the prehistoric culture that relied very much on two things: Women and livestock. (Note the result of Pasiphae’s liaison in comparison to that of the shamaness, and then compare the implications of that to my earlier post on women in folk literature.) Maybe many more literary/artistic traditions common across cultures are also the result of a commonality that evolutionary anthropologists are examining, but not yet applying to other fields. And maybe anthropologists could research further the gradual branching off not only of the human genome, but of the human condition, and the culture that lies with it.

But I’ll bring up another point; I’m being very culturally egotistical here, assuming that all cavemen were the same just because their rock paintings were the same. They only had certain tools at their disposal, so they could only produce so much in terms of art. Maybe cavemen did have different cultures. Prehistoric means there’s no writing, no concrete records, only the vague but important results of archaeology. It could be (and my mother, a fan of those Geico commercials, will appreciate me giving Neanderthals their due) that the discussions and thoughts and day-to-day lifestyle of cavemen varied widely. Add to this the fact that, actually, a lot of genes have been pruned and pruned and pruned (Neanderthals being a great example), and maybe the diversity of peoples in 10,000 BC was as great as it is now. Maybe they had more cultural variation than we, living in a world of increasing internet and decreasing linguistic differentiation, will in 100 years.

I don’t know about all this, but if we got a bunch of evolutionary anthropologists and a bunch of true humanities scholars together in a room, they could make some pretty Awesome discoveries. But then, they might just get down to their evolutionary roots and throw poop at each other.