Venus Revisited: Out of Africa?

So busy was I protesting the innate sexism involved in interpreting Paleolithic art that I neglected yet another, and perhaps even more important intrinsic bias: racism. All too frequently this aspect of the Big Picture escapes my notice because I'm comfortably ensconced in my lily white skin. It's fortunate, therefore, that the likes of John McWhorter exist, and I do get reminded every now and then that my views are not the only ones--nor the only reasoned ones. McWhorter is a linguist and fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and one of the most eloquent and thoughtful conservative columnists around. I've started looking on him as the true heir of William F. Buckley, and he's given me a reason to start reading The National Review again.

At any rate, McWhorter's May 15 column for TNR, Big Bosoms and the Big Bang: Did the Human Condition Really Emerge in Europe?? (bowdlerized in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday, May 31, using the subtitle as the title) pointed out a glaring omission in my assessment of the Hohle Fels figure: the underlying assumption behind most descriptions of art from Pleistocene Europe. What McWhorter argues so elegantly against is the notion that some kind of mutation allowed us to become truly human--in Europe, about 30,000 years ago.

Now, as I always point out in my first History of Art & Design I lecture, fully modern human beings provided evidence of artistic inclinations in southern Africa at least 70,000 years ago, by incising designs into bars of ochre, and apparently decorating themselves with shell necklaces. Not only that, but aboriginal rock drawings in Australia date to as early as 40,000 years ago, and some specimens from the south Asia may be even older. (See, for evidence, articles at Aboriginal Art Online, and Robert G. Bednarik's 2007 paper, "Lower Paleolithic Rock Art in India and Its Global Context.")

Just as Martin Bernal alerted us to the Eurocentrism involved in our understanding of how the Classical tradition arose in Greece (although he overstated his case by insisting that the Greeks "stole" ideas from Africa and the Near East, and his assertions about the origins of Greek culture in general are highly controversial; see his book Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization), McWhorter does us a favor by noting that if we look at human origins through the polarized lenses of Anglo-American archaeological tradition, we end up ignoring very good evidence that if we "became human" at any specific moment, it probably took place in Africa, Asia, or Australia, (or all of the above) rather than in Europe.

Although all archaeological evidence is problematic because the record is, by nature, incomplete (rendering female impact sketchy at best, if we spent our early years weaving and gathering and tending babies), the idea of locating our humanity in one small region at one particular time is just silly--whether it's Germany or India or the northwest coast of Australia. So many factors seem to have gone into making us what we are, that a small female figure, a carved penis, a disemboweled Bison, a design scratched on a pigmented mineral, or a stone adze don't even begin to tell us who we are or how we got to be us in the first place.

To my mind, if you're looking for Big Bangs, pick up Richard Wrangham's new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Now that language, tool-making, and even laughing seem to have been taken out of the list of possibilities of what makes us "uniquely unique," the remaining difference seems to be this: that we're the only species that cooks its food.

Image credit: A bar of incised ochre and other tools from Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated to about 70,000 years BP. Copyright held by Chris Henshilwood, photo from Wikimedia Commons.