Mithen

Introduction

Steven Mithen is an archaeologist at the University of Reading. This post is prompted by a review (reference 8) of his new book (reference 3) in the NYRB. With the title of the book suggesting a connection to the work of the late Zoltan Torey, with whom I am presently engaged.

From the references to reference 3, Mithen appears to have written a number of popular books about the archaeology of the human mind. Perhaps something of what a correspondent – a resting luvvie – used to call a media tart – but that does not necessarily mean he is to be avoided!

The review prompted me to produce the rather uncertain table above, helpful up to a point, but a reminder that our history cannot easily be reduced to short series of milestones. I was tempted to make these milestones into an Excel worksheet so that I could have lots of them. But then one needs to deal with place: at any one time one might have pottery in one place and pigs in another. Or one might be more interested in logical dependencies rather than dates. It could quickly get a bit out of hand, become an industry in its own right.

Nonetheless, I do learn that after maybe a quarter of a million years of stasis, the Neanderthals of reference 13, Homo neanderthalensis, faded away. While our own, closely related line, Homo sapiens, after what looks like a long period of stasis, suddenly breaks out at around the time of the end of the last ice age. Noting that during this time of seeming stasis, the breed had succeeded in fanning out from Africa and colonising large parts of the rest of the world. Some ebbs and flows, possibly driven by the swings and roundabouts of climate, but successful. We must have had something going for us.

I think Mithen, an archaeologist by trade, believes that consciousness is driven, in some large part, by externals, by the stuff that archaeologists might turn up in their diggings. With the effect on consciousness of the printed word being a good example. Which leads us to tables like that offered above, largely driven by the archaeological record. But there is a problem with language, clearly important in this connection, but which does not, of itself, leave durable traces or markers and is hard to date.

The NYRB article

There is pretty good agreement that language is the big thing that makes humans different from, superior to all the other animals. But not about when it came to us, where it came from or how it came to be. It was clearly not there in the beginning, before we moved away from the other primates, none of whom had or have real language.

With one of the big debates being between those that believe that the acquisition of language was achieved over a long period with a long series of small adaptive steps and those that believe that language only required a few basic ingredients which could have been thrown together quite quickly, once the ground work – for example the right sort of vocal apparatus – had been done. The trick was learning how to use it.

Noting here the link between language and speaking. And if we include more or less silent speech, I believe this link to be mandatory: there is no language without speech, the vocal apparatus is the medium through which language comes to be. And with plenty of people believing that language is also the vehicle used by the brain for its inner workings, the workings which we cannot see and of which we are only dimly aware.

A debate which continues and which continues to attract contributions from all kinds of neighbouring disciplines. With one such being archaeology. With Mithen being from this last. And with the present article being hung off his latest book, reference 3.

‘… Homo sapiens is the sole surviving twig of a luxuriously branching evolutionary bush…’. A phrase which also appears in the Wikipedia article at reference 9. The slightly earlier Neanderthals survived for a bit, perhaps a quarter of a million years, but did not evolve and did succumb. Mithen appears to believe that they did not have language.

Given that the function of language is to communicate, we need to explain why there are so many of them, mostly mutually unintelligible. One angle here might be the usefulness of language as a group marker: if you don’t talk like me you are foreign and so fair game.

The review seems a bit muddled about when the human vocal (and aural) apparatus became good enough for language, although I understand that the received view is that it was a long time – say a hundred thousand years – before language appeared.

We are reminded that art, in particular cave art, was around during the last ice age, well before the Holocene warming kicked in. Art which was suggestive of some kind of symbolic thinking: thinking about and painting animals even when those animals were not actually present in the here and now. We had managed to detach the animal from its representation, from its symbol. Another ability widely thought to be necessary for language.

Mithen argues for a central role for something like synesthesia, an ability to blur the distinctions between the senses, the distinctions between things. Giving rise to a tendency to treat fishes and trees, for example, as if they were humans. A suggestion which reference 1 seems to carry into the invention of farming.

The reviewer reminds us that birds had feathers for a long time before they thought to use them for flying. Which suggests that it is not unreasonable for humans to be language capable for a long before they got around to language. But when they did around to it, it might have happened quite quickly, say over a few thousand years.

In sum, he tells that while the conclusions in the book about how exactly language arrived on the human scene are a bit shaky, we are offered an accessible survey of the issues. However, this is a new book at a new book price and I shall take a look at reference 5, to be had quite cheaply from Abebooks, in the first instance.

The farming paper

 have also taken a look at reference 1, about the invention of farming in the Levant, from which the helpful graph above is taken. From which I associate to the rather different Milankovitch cycles of reference 11. For those with a taste for archaeology, there is also the report at reference 4 from the dig at WF16, a report which includes some helpful introductory material.

Maybe humans learned how to cooperate on building projects, rather than on farms. Having learned on building projects, they were ready for farming. There are some quite elaborate settlements which pre-date farming, not to mention the extraordinary monuments of Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey.

‘… whereas my proposition is less philosophical in nature: it is simply that the economic basis provided by farming enabled a massive expansion in the diversity and quantity of material culture, which had a profound impact on the nature of human cognition, epitomized by the invention of writing within the early civilizations’.

Confusion of pestle and mortar with phallic imagery. And there is plenty of much more recent evidence for associations of this sort.

‘… As such, the origin of farming may indeed be a consequence of the cognitive fluidity that is characteristic of modern humans, while it was the domain-specific mentality of the Neanderthals that left them as hunter-gatherers for the entirety of their existence…’.

By academic standards, an easy and interesting read.

Odds and ends

Mithen talks of early human fluidity of thinking, by which I think he means, or at least includes, allowing human qualities to be projected onto other forms of life. One might come at this from a different direction, a different direction touched on at reference 12. Humans work hard at making sense of the world, which one might describe as trying to reduce the entropy of the sensory input – without spending too much time and effort on that reduction. Sensory input flows in time and humans do have to keep up if they want to stay alive.

Now one way to reduce entropy on the cheap, as it were, is to assign features of the sensory input to pre-existing concepts in the brain. A bit of top-down processing which speeds up the business of fitting a model to the sensory input.

One also has to build a repertoire of suitable concepts and part of this might be classifying the various things one comes across out in the world, with a fairly basic classification being the divide between the animate – which includes plenty of other stuff beside humans and the inanimate. Pigs are in but pottery is out. 

Mithen also talks of writing making for a big step up in the power of language, something with which most of us are going to agree. From where I associate to the telephone: why bother to learn what the biggest mountain in Montana is called if you can just ask your telephone? And from there to the thought that when Bing does a search on your computer for something, it leaves out all the files that happen to be offline – which might be a lot of them in the world of OneDrive. I think there is a lesson for brains here, in that its background processing is weakened to the extent that it does not have all that data about Montana to hand, to draw on. Background processing is not in the business of asking telephones to help. Maybe this is where large language models, so much in the news just presently score: they attempt to load it all up.

At reference 4 we get a detailed description of the excavation of an early Neolithic site in southern Jordan, between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba – this last being a place I first learned about, many years ago now, in the ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. In which connection I might add that I have just discovered a topology switch in gmaps – with turning it on making what you get much more like what you might get in a printed atlas.

I was tempted to take an interest in the way in which the authors of reference 4 have attempted to capture what they have done with text, images and diagrams – particularly in the highly organised catalogue of 35 structures and other features to be found in part 2. The reduction of a complicated site and a complicated process to the printed page: someone has done some serious data analysis here. I was impressed with the careful way that images had been labelled – including, for example, telling us the length of the various scales included.

One of the images from structure 053. Note the potential confusion between phalluses and pestles.

 was intrigued by this impressive pot, carved out from stone rather than thrown from clay. From structure 084, but I did not work hard enough, dig deep enough to get a date.

All in all, impressed by what today’s desktop software – quite possibly Microsoft Office – makes possible. I associate to my fifty year old copy of reference 14, in some ways comparable and which includes a lot of very careful drawings of things large and small, some in fold outs. One advantage of which was that someone had to take a long, hard look at all the stuff being dug up or studied – a long, hard look which it is easy to skip over when you can just take a snap and pop it into your report.

Conclusions

Another interesting digression, even if some of Mithen’s conclusions seem rather speculative. We shall see how I get on with reference 5 when it turns up.

References

Reference 1: Did farming arise from a misapplication of social intelligence? - Steven Mithen – 2007. Turned up by search for Mithen. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Mithen. Aged 64.

Reference 3: The language puzzle: Piecing together the six-million-year story of how words evolved – Steven Mithen – 2024.

Reference 4: WF16: Excavations at an Early Neolithic Settlement in Wadi Faynan, Southern Jordan: Stratigraphy, Chronology, Architecture and Burials – Steven Mithen, Bill Finlayson, Darko Maričević, Sam Smith, Emma Jenkins and Mohammad Najja – 2016. 750 or so pages.

Reference 5: The prehistory of the mind: a search for the origins of art, science and religion – Mithen, S. J – 1996. London, UK: Thames & Hudson. 

Reference 6: The cognitive functions of language – Carruthers, P – 2002. A philosopher. 20 or 30 pages of paper followed by as much again of commentary.

Reference 7: The extended mind – Clark, A. & Chalmers, D – 1998. Analysis 58(10-23). 

Reference 8: Look who’s talking: When did our first linguistic ancestor emerge, and how did the transition from a non-linguistic to a linguistic state take place? – Ian Tattersall, NYRB – 2024.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Tattersall. Who looks to be well qualified to review the book which is the nominal subject of this post.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing. 

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/lisiecki-and-raymo-2005-used.html. 

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/bantu.html. 

Reference 13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal. 

Reference 14: Samothrace: Excavations conducted by the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University – Karl Lehmann, Phyllis Williams Lehmann (editors) – 1968. Volume 3: The Hieron. Itself in three volumes, about three inches of it altogether. Remaindered to me at £1 each. Available today from Abebooks for maybe £25 a go. A monument to the wealth of an institution? To archaeology before they invented Time Team on television?

Reference 15: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/footnote-to-everest.html. An earlier, rather different archaeological digression. But from very roughly the same period.

Reference 16: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=bpb. And another, this one in England, but from hundreds of thousands of years earlier.