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On the other side of the world, the people of ancient Greece were developing an astrological and divinatory system conceptually not far removed from the Chinese system, predicated on relationships between space, time, and the elements. Here again, the system began with the correlation of natural elements with certain directions, colors, and natural phenomena, all framed in terms of genealogical relationships—in this case, between the gods. For example, Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, was the brother of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. Artemis, the moon goddess, was the sister of the sun god Apollo. Ares, the brutal god of war, was brother to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, justice, and the arts. Each god, in turn, represented a set of naturally occurring phenomena. Often, the gods would appear under alternate guises. “Every god has his doubles,” writes Durkheim, “who are other forms of himself, though they have other functions; hence, different powers, and the things over which these powers are exercised, are attached to a central or predominant notion, as is the species to the genus or a secondary variety to the principal species.”
¹⁵
Like other mythological systems, the Greek pantheon employed the familiar construct of family relationships to invoke a web of semantic relationships (see
Chapter 4
for a further discussion of Greek mythology).

In human cultures throughout the world, ancient preliterate mythologies reveal this pattern of gods and other supernatural beings as coded entities, organized into families, who represent the phenomenal world. The oldest mythologies, with their divine genealogies, echo the familial structure of folk taxonomies, forming a hierarchical scaffolding to allow preliterate peoples to organize their knowledge about the natural world. As the pantheon of gods and mythic relationships grew over time, specialized gods began to cluster into increasingly narrow categories, until finally the smaller gods became mere echoes or alternate names of their former selves. As these early classification systems grew in complexity, along with the human so
cial structures that created them, they also laid the groundwork for the gradual erosion of superstitious belief. As Durkheim and Mauss put it, “Mythological classifications, when they are complete and systematic, when they embrace the universe, announce the end of mythologies.”
¹⁶
Even in our highly systematized age, however, we still feel the reverberation of old mythologies, the ancient archetypes of the classifying mind.

In ancient Peru, Incan messengers used to travel across the Andes carrying a bundle of woven thread known as a
Quipu
, or “talking strings.” When a messenger arrived at his destination, he would deliver his news while reeling off knots in the string like a rosary. For the Incas, a people with no written language, the
Quipu
served as their core information technology: It was a newspaper, a calculator, even a repository of laws. A skilled
Quipucamayu
(“keeper of the Quipus”) could use the device to tell complex stories by weaving the colored threads together. Each thread represented a different facet of the narrative: a black string marked the passage of time, while other colored strings symbolized different characters or themes in a story: rulers, neighboring tribes, gods.
¹
By juxtaposing the multicolored strings of the story along the black-stringed axis of time, the
Quipucamayu
could “write” almost any kind of narrative. Despite a total lack of writing as we would understand it, the Incas managed to keep track of enormous stores of information by manipulating these symbolic objects.

Until recent years, historians tended to give nonliterate cultures short shrift as systems thinkers. In the popular Cave Man stereotype, prehistoric people were cultural simpletons, too preoccupied with
survival to pursue the loftier avenues of civilization. While mainstream academic views have shifted to accommodate a growing appreciation for preliterate societies, our mainstream culture still harbors a vague prejudice against people who don’t know how to write. As a result, we often fail to appreciate the richness and complexity of nonliterate cultures and what they can teach us about the way our minds work. As it turns out, preliterate societies not only exhibit surprisingly complex cultural behaviors, but in many cases make innovative use of symbolic information technologies to record, store, and distribute their shared knowledge.

 

Drawing of a
Quipu
, from
Meyers Konversations-Lexikon
(1888).

 

While symbolism may seem like an intrinsically human capacity, the practice of using external symbolic artifacts emerged only in our relatively recent past.
Homo sapiens
reached anatomical modernity at least 100,000 years ago, yet it took us more than 60,000 years to begin producing the kinds of symbols that most of us recognize as the manifestations of human culture. For most of human beings’ time on earth, we have behaved in ways barely distinguishable from our Neanderthal cousins: foraging in loose-knit groups; fashioning rudimentary tools like sticks, rocks, and spears, occasionally burying our dead. Then, about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, our ancestors suddenly started displaying a whole tapestry of symbolic behaviors: decorating
bone knives, stringing bead necklaces, making paintings. “In a blink of geological time,” as science writer John McCrone puts it, “one line of hominids suddenly became symbolically minded and self-aware.”
²
That we should have survived for so long without producing symbolic artifacts is hardly surprising. After all, every other species on earth has managed to survive without producing a single bead necklace, cave painting, or pop music CD. The question that still vexes many researchers is this: Why did we cross the threshold to symbolic expression so quickly? Human mythologies are rife with explanations for the emergence of symbolic thought: Eve biting the apple, the appearance of a primordial Buddha, or the arrival of mystical space aliens, to name a few.

There is also a more mundane explanation, one grounded squarely in the archaeological record. The arrival of symbolic expression appears to have coincided almost exactly with a period of rapid climate change, starting about 45,000 years ago, when the last great ice age sent glaciers out across much of the earth’s surface. As temperatures plunged, our ancestors started competing over dwindling food supplies. Competition for resources brought people into closer social proximity, and that proximity appears to have triggered the emergence of symbolic expression. Call it a primordial tipping point.

In the popular stereotype of “primitive” or preliterate societies, we might think of our ancestors as big game hunters from time immemorial, but in fact we come from a long line of scavengers. For our first 60,000-odd years,
Homo sapiens
were scrappy opportunists who foraged for plants, chased foxes and beavers, and lunged after rabbits and pigeons. As global cooling sent temperatures plummeting, however, those once-easy pickings ran scarce, and our ancestors had no choice but to set their sights on, literally, bigger game.

Now, any able-bodied biped can thwack a pigeon, but stalking a woolly mammoth, or an 8-foot-tall prehistoric cow, takes teamwork. Faced with the choice between starvation and banding together to hunt larger prey, humans started working together. Whereas once they had moved in loose-knit bands with little or no social structure, now they started collaborating in larger groups, hunting big animals, huddling in caves for warmth, and forging the kinds of social bonds nec
essary to support an expanding body politic. Social relationships grew more complex, demanding new forms of mediation. And somewhere along the way, people started making symbols.

For ice age humans, symbols appear to have emerged only after we came in from the cold and started working together. The first unambiguously symbolic objects were beads and pendants, usually made of stone, shells, or ivory. These objects would have been worthless as tools; their only plausible function had to involve some form of symbolic expression. While we can never know exactly what these objects meant to people, archaeologists comfortably speculate that beads may have served as emblems of social identity, marking affiliation with a particular band or tribe, denoting gender, or marking major rites of passage like coming of age or marriage. The use of these totems seems to suggest the value in having a means to identify oneself and one’s status in a larger social group. In small groups, people can easily recognize each other as individuals. The larger a group becomes, the harder it gets for everyone to know each other. In lieu of face-to-face recognition, people started relying on external signifiers as a way to communicate information about themselves: social rank, marriage status, and so forth. As ice age humans began to shift their way of life from loose-knit bands to larger tribal communities, they began to build what Kuhn et al. call “ornament technology,”
³
using a lattice of symbols with shared meaning to signal status and form the basis for new kinds of relationships. The use of beads and other totems facilitated what Gamble calls a “release from proximity,” a rudimentary kind of social contract built around a shared understanding of what certain symbols meant. With an agreed set of symbols in place, human groups could begin forging wider networks of trust. And from those networks, new kinds of hierarchies emerged.

During the Upper Paleolithic period, starting about 35,000 years ago, people seem to have devoted enormous time and energy to making beads of astonishing sophistication, with painstaking attention to detail. In one European ice age community, bead making seems to have turned into a mass obsession, with over 14,000 beads appearing at one 28,000-year-old burial site. “These beads were very important to these people,” says White. “They spent thousands of hours of their
life making ivory beads even though they were living within 150 kilometers of a huge glacial ice sheet.”

Beads seem to have functioned not only as communication objects within particular groups, but also as units of cultural exchange between otherwise disparate groups. At the caves of Altamira in Spain, archaeologists have discovered an enormous variety of symbolic objects—ostrich-shell beads, ivory figurines, seashells, pieces of amber—suggesting that the site may have served as a trading post for ice age Europeans: a hub on the regional trading network and a nexus for a kind of proto-commercial exchange. The sheer variety of styles suggests that different social groups gathered there to exchange these artifacts (and probably other goods as well) as a means of solidifying social relationships or forming alliances. These early trade networks served much the same purpose as the Internet today: as a vehicle not just for commercial exchange but also for forging social bonds between far-flung communities.

The emerging technology of symbolic communication would wreak lasting changes on the structure of social organization. Symbolic communication provided a networked communications platform that allowed more complex social—and eventually political—hierarchies to emerge. In other words, the relationship between symbolism and political power stretches back at least 30,000 years.

Given that human beings survived so long without symbols, however, why has symbolic culture proved such a durable adaptation? As we have seen in the previous chapters, symbols are more than just semantic emblems; they rely on emotional responses lodged deep in our limbic systems. Understanding this emotional aspect of symbolic expression sheds light on why some systems of symbolic expression persist while others fail. Effective symbols trigger deep-seated emotional responses. In all likelihood, there are epigenetic rules governing our responses to certain kinds of symbols. By triggering limbic system responses, simple totems like beads and pendants allowed people to transfer emotional bonds from people to objects; in turn, the objects could function as charged particles of emotional meaning, enabling people to forge increasingly far-flung
ties with each other. In ice age communities, beads and pendants were imbued with emotional meaning that could invoke responses between strangers grounded in the deeper emotional bonds of kinship: Power, loyalty, or even something like love?

 

Drawing of a bead necklace from the neolithic site of Pigna (Italy), by Paolo Orsi,
Bullettino di Paleontologia Italiana
48 (1929).