Shame of Man (17 page)

So he left her and his tribe and walked alone again, except for a girl-child who came with him. They passed a mountain, and fell, and then came to water. There were people there, odd ones, but he lived among them and learned their ways of the water. Hunting in water was like hunting on land, only different; he had to strain to discover the ways in which the disciplines
were similar, because it was better to adapt what he knew than to learn from the beginning.

A croc attacked, and he fought it and killed it. Then the woman he had protected came to him, and became beautiful, and it was An, or Ann, no, Anne, and he mated with her and liked her, and it was much better than what had been before. In fact the prior dreams were already fading, and this was the only reality he knew. He was with Anne, loving her, feeling emotion he had not known before.

He saw a baby lying in a glade. There were spirits around, threatening him, so he took the baby and held the spirits at bay. He brought it home to Anne, so there were two babies.

The babies grew, and more babies came, until there were children all around. Anne nursed them, and sang to them, and taught them to speak, and danced for them, and they learned well. They liked singing and dancing and drawing, and that showed that they were real people instead of primitives. Hugh took them hunting, as they got older, and they learned that well too. They grew up speaking the language of the tribe Hugh and Anne had left, not that of the tribe they had come from. They learned to chip stone well instead of clumsily, and they were intelligent instead of ignorant. One of them was like him, in appearance and manner, using his left hand. Sometimes the others looked askance at that one, but he was good in the things he did, so they did not object.

In time there were so many of them that they became a tribe of their own, and Hugh and Anne were honored elders. They crowded the primitive tribe, expanding their hunting and foraging territory. But they did not mate among themselves; instead they went out and took mates from the fading other tribe, and brought in those men and women, and tried to teach them the ways of better speaking and organizing. In this they were really not successful, but their children had no trouble learning the good ways. Some went out to other lands, where they found their own places and saved many abandoned babies, who in turn grew up to be like their adoptive families instead of like those who had abandoned them.

In this manner the spirits saved many children, and conquered the world. Not with any invasion, slaughter, or force, but simply by blessing their children with superior ways. Whole subtribes grew up, honoring the spirits. They spread everywhere, displacing the primitives, and everything was wonderful.

Hugh woke. Anne was nursing Mina and stroking Chip's head, keeping him calm. All seemed to be well. He got up to tend the fire, which was down to warm ashes.

Already the dream was fading, leaving only weird fragments. But that was the way of dreams. They could be interesting and strange, but probably
meant only that the spirits were mischievously toying with the minds of the sleepers. If this meant that the spirits had no animosity for Hugh and Anne, as long as they took care of the babies, this was good. This was excellent hunting and foraging terrain, and they could stay here indefinitely, raising the children they acquired, teaching them the proper ways, just as the dream foretold.

It seems that primitive or cold-bodied creatures don't dream. When they sleep, if they need to, their brains shut down as well as their bodies. But warm-bodied creatures, notably the mammals, do dream. Why? Nature does not institute such procedures without reason. That reason is straightforward, though as yet generally unrecognized in science: the dreams represent important work being done. They relate to memory: a person deprived of dreaming suffers in the formation and retention of new memories.

Consider the situation: All day most creatures are active, hunting, foraging, feeding, mating, surviving. Life experience pours in pretty much randomly. Some are important, such as which berries induce vomiting or which bugs sting; such information needs to be recorded and made available for retrieval. Some are not important, such as how many times the third mouthful of food was chewed or the color of the wings of the fourteenth sparrow from the left in a flock of 100. Impressions have to be culled, lest what is important be buried under trivia. But it is not convenient to do this at the time; full attention needs to be available to the process of living, however tedious. Absent-mindedness on the hunt can be deadly. So the impressions are stored temporarily until they can be properly sorted.

Unlike cold-bodied creatures, warm-bodied creatures have a brain that is fully functional at night. This is its downtime: when new impressions are not pouring randomly in. So this is the time when those accumulating temporary memories are processed. The precise process is as yet not understood, but in essence those impressions are brought up into consciousness, considered, culled, cross-referenced, and filed as more permanent memories. Cross-referencing is vital, because this is the mechanism for recall at need. When a berry is seen, the associations relating to berries are traced, and the danger of some berries is recalled. But it may be that black stain is required to mark an item or a route, so the associations of black are traced, and the poisonous black berries are recalled: a convenient source for this purpose. Or it is necessary to describe a particular insect, whose size is about that of this berry, a useful comparison. It is not possible to know in advance exactly what connection will contribute to future survival, so all discernible attributes are referenced. It may be necessary to inspect the memory of tasting that berry from many angles, to do the job thoroughly, and it requires consciousness to make decisions as to what is relevant. So the whole experience of the berry is reviewed, and of the stinging bug, and of everything else in the recent day. It may be that the key to cross-referencing is not objective assessment of the qualities of experience, but relates to
feeling
about it. In the absence of the
waking censor
—
the conscious critical facility of the mind
—
this feeling can get out of bounds and bring on a nightmare. But it may be necessary; fear, horror, and anger are powerful motivators, and it is important to have related memories clear. This process of summoning and reviewing may be the essence of what we call dreams. It is not necessary to remember this process; indeed, the process itself should be forgotten, or it, too, would become experience requiring processing, in an endless recursive sequence. So only dream fragments are remembered, as the waking mind tries to make sense of what are essentially random bits of experience and emotion. But the job, itself forgotten, is done, and key memories are strengthened and defined. The process of dreaming, if not our memory of the dreams themselves, is vital to our mental health.

Animals have relatively simple minds, compared to men. When anatomically modern human beings made the breakthrough to mentally modern status, between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, their comprehension of the world and of their own society and capacities increased enormously. This meant that there was that much more information to process during the dream state. Thus dreams surely became more sophisticated and organized in their fashion, in order to do a job that other creatures could not, literally, even dream of. Modern man is a dreamer
—
and thus, paradoxically, more practical and realistic than other creatures.

What was the breakthrough that gave the Moderns such power as to conquer the world? How did it come about'? This is perhaps the greatest untold story of mankind's history. The development of language with sophisticated syntax enabled man to communicate in far more effective manner. This facilitated his understanding of the world and increased his power to handle it, using complex symbolism that enabled him in due course to develop nuclear power and intricate computers, and to appreciate the arts also. That breakthrough, once made, could have spread slowly out from its origin in Eden, going first to the children, as shown in this chapter. That would account for a mental transformation that did not affect the genes: the existing people acquired new minds, quietly, tribe by tribe as those with such minds trained their children. Perhaps it seems incredible that those with old minds would not notice the change. But consider what is happening today, in America, where children exposed to the violence and short attention span of television programming grow up to form the most violent and rootless society of the world
—
without their parents fathoming why. As the twig of the young mind is bent, so the tree of the adult is inclined, on a massive scale.

What was this mental change? Why did it prove to be beyond the capacity of Archaic or Neandertal man? This may be associative thinking. When one segment of
Homo erectus
entered the shallows of Lake Victoria and lost his body fur, he had to learn how to forage and hunt and sleep in the water, without sacrificing his abilities to do the same on land. He required a double set of reactions. He developed this by adapting: the ways of the land, developed over the course of millions of years, translated to the similar yet hardly identical ways of the water. This was a shortcut, far faster than starting from scratch. In so
doing, he thus learned not only to survive in water, but the art of associative thinking. When he left the water to reconquer the land this mental facility was available for other purposes. Such as adapting the extensive vocabulary of anatomically modern man to new purposes, shifting the usage of words to apply not to the foreign medium of water, but to the foreign concepts of past, present, future, and supposition. Modern man learned “maybe”: the tool of imagination itself.

What was the key to this shift, that made it a survival quality? It may have been the development of self-consciousness. Ordinary consciousness is a remarkable quality that sets the animal kingdom apart from the plant kingdom. With consciousness, a creature can make choices, thus adapting his limited brain to many situations, instead of having to have every possible thing hard-wired. This is an advantage that enables conscious creatures to prevail when they otherwise might not seem well equipped for survival. Self-consciousness is another level, one that only mankind and perhaps a very few animals possess. Neandertal man perhaps had it to a degree, but he had diverged before the full effect of the water phase was felt, so was more limited in this seemingly incidental respect. It might seem to be no particular advantage, except for the chain of other things it leads to. High-level self-consciousness is probably what set the Moderns apart from the Archaics, and led them ultimately to dominance.

Associative thinking may have given man the capacity to appreciate more than the ordinary ongoing present tense of the animals. It may have been a mental tool, developed for one purpose, then applied to other purposes. It enabled him to ponder other realities: not merely land versus water, but today versus yesterday. How might things have been, had he taken another path and not trodden on that poisonous snake? He became conscious of time and choice. His language expanded to address such concepts. The connections between language and world view are substantial. When children learn such language, they learn the concepts too, and their understanding is rapid though the evolution of the concepts may have been slow. Just as the average child today has no problem with computers that completely baffle his grandfather, so children absorbed the significant change in man's outlook without difficulty, and retained it as adults. So perhaps in a single generation, or perhaps over the course of 50,000 years, mankind's new consciousness developed. He became fully aware of himself, aware of himself making decisions, of himself thinking, of himself thinking about thinking. He became aware of his own mortality. This sort of thing may be literally unimaginable for animals, but is easy for modern human minds. Self-consciousness: the ultimate awareness. It may have seemed as if this awareness was a thing apart from the body, a spirit inhabiting it, that perhaps moved on to another body when this one died. Perhaps the root of all religion was here.

Most creatures appreciate the company of their own kind. When man became self-conscious, he wanted the company of other self-conscious people. He was able to appreciate that if he could think about thinking, so could others. If he feared
his own ultimate death, so might others. He wanted to share his special awareness with them, and to draw comfort from them. But how does one communicate self-consciousness to others? How can one be sure they understand? Words can convey concepts but not all feelings. There was a need to share what went beyond vocabulary, however sophisticated the language might be. This may have been where the arts came in. The sophisticated symbolism of language was only one ability of the new mind; it could appreciate the symbolism of a sculpture, or a drawing, or a dance, or music. Music, perhaps more than any other art, appealed directly to the aware mind, and stirred special emotions in it. When one aware person sang, and others listened, all of them knew that the others were experiencing similar awareness. They were sharing the feelings of their own kind.

And so self-consciousness may have led to complex language and all of the arts, including perhaps the art of love. Those of the new mind were not only able to communicate in ways others literally could not dream of, they were able to share feelings others lacked. This enabled them to congregate in much larger groups without quarreling, and in that unity was strength. A multitude could rest quietly, appreciating the arts. Listening to a tale of self-aware people experiencing unusual adventures. Watching a lovely woman dance, pantomiming hope, joy, love and sex. Singing together, feeling the united emotion. Sharing the dream. Sharing religion.

This change worked its way slowly through the minds and natures of the water folk, and slowly spread out across Africa until they all had it, until at last it reached that fringe in Asia Minor that was balked by the entrenched Archaics and Neandertals, who were well adapted to their life-styles and their terrain. When Modern minds made that conversion, they faced the vast terrain of Eurasia with potent new tools of understanding, technology, and social order. But this time their conquest was not by conversion, for the Archaics and Neandertals lacked the associative water minds, the camaraderie of the arts, the unity of group self-awareness; it was by conquest. For the first time they were displacing those whose capacities were not even close to their own. Thus the conquest occurred in a geological instant, and the other descendants of
Homo erectus
were gone. They had been replaced by the gracile dreamer.