Feb 02 2010
High Fashion as a Leap to Advanced Thought?
Is high fashion evidence of big smarts? An article posted at ScienceDaily last month got me thinking about it: Use of Body Ornamentation Shows Neanderthal Mind Capable of Advanced Thought.
While I find the data in the research compelling, I’m not so sure about the inferences drawn.
The data:
Professor João Zilhão and colleagues examined pigment-stained and perforated marine shells, most certainly used as neck pendants, from two Neanderthal-associated sites in the Murcia province of south-east Spain (Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Antón).
Couple that neck pendant with a pair of earrings and some perfume, and that Neanderthal is ready for a night on the town! (Or maybe the valley.) Assuming, of course, that the pendants were worn by females. Which is an assumption that could very well be false. Maybe the ornamentation was of the unisex variety. Or for the cavemen only.
Inference 1:
he practice of body ornamentation is widely accepted by archaeologists as conclusive evidence for modern behaviour and symbolic thinking among early modern humans but has not been recognised in Neanderthals — until now.
“Conclusive evidence” for symbolic thinking? I wonder. Is the . . . intuition (what’s in a word? a lot) “this looks attractive” evidence of symbolic thinking? If the pendants were traded as currency, I could more confidently accept the symbolic-thought conclusion.
Inference 2:
The widespread view of Neanderthals as cognitively inferior to early modern humans is challenged by new research . . . . Professor Zilhão said: “This is the first secure evidence that, some 50,000 years ago — ten millennia before modern humans are first recorded in Europe — the behaviour of Neanderthals was symbolically organised.”
Symbolically organized? Many birds decorate their nests with pretty bits of debris “intentionally” collected for the purpose. Even colorful scraps of human trash. Does this show a rudimentary form of a symbolic organization to their behavior as well? What about the bowerbird and its behavior?
Bird-brained fashion:
The most notable characteristic of bowerbirds is their extraordinarily complex courtship and mating behaviour, where males build a bower to attract mates. There are two main types of bowers. One clade of bowerbirds build so-called maypole bowers that are constructed by placing sticks around a sapling, in some species these bowers have a hut-like roof. The other major bowerbuilding clade builds an avenue type bower made of two walls of vertically placed sticks. In and around the bower the male places a variety of brightly colored objects he has collected. These objects — usually different among each species — may include hundreds of shells, leaves, flowers, feathers, stones, berries, and even discarded plastic items, coins, nails, rifle shells, or pieces of glass. The males spend hours arranging this collection [source].
From the bowerbirds behavior, would we likewise infer that it was capable of advanced thought, of having a symbolic organization to its behavior? Okay, there may be a fundamental difference between the creation of a decorated bower and that of fashioning a pendant, but I would make that distinction with caution. It seems all too easy for we humans to over-estimate the meaning of our own behavior, while under-estimating that of other species.
