The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (11 page)

Our Ice Age ancestors temporarily put an end to leadership based on confrontation. As Christopher Boehm reminds us, the headmen of foraging groups were not bullies. They were generous, modest, and diplomatic, because their constituents were too skilled at alliance-building to put up with bullies. The fate of a bully was to be lured into the bush and shot with poisoned arrows.

Those who study apes, however, tell us that their dominance hierarchies provide stability to their societies. Without such a hierarchy, where was the stability in foraging society going to come from?

Some anthropologists argue that in the process of creating the first human beings, natural selection did away with the dominance hierarchies characteristic of our ape ancestors. Proponents of this view suggest that during the centuries since agriculture arose, some societies have done everything in their power to reinstate a social hierarchy.

While we understand why some would hold this view, we would like to play the devil’s advocate. We see other ways that the evidence can be interpreted.

When we look at hunters and gatherers, we see a dominance hierarchy as clear as that of chimpanzees. It is, however, a hierarchy in which the alphas are invisible supernatural beings, too powerful to be overthrown by conspiracy or alliance, and capable of causing great misfortune when disobeyed. The betas are invisible ancestors who do the bidding of the alphas and protect their living descendants from harm. The reason human foragers seem, superficially, to have no dominance hierarchy is because no living human can be considered more than a gamma within this system.

Confirmation of this hierarchy will appear later in the book, as we watch inequality emerge in human society. We will see would-be hereditary leaders who attempt to link themselves to revered ancestors or even to supernatural beings. By the time we reach the civilizations of Egypt and the Inca, we will be introduced to kings who actually claimed to be deities. Such strategies for justifying inequality would not have worked if humans did not already consider themselves part of a natural/supernatural dominance hierarchy.

The celestial alphas were the source of the ultimate sacred propositions. Our beta ancestors were the focus of many rituals. The emotions of living gammas made possible the awe-inspiring experience.

Religious conservatives have long argued that secular laws are derived from ultimate sacred propositions. They will be pleased to learn that their view is supported by what we know of foragers. They may be less pleased to learn that ultimate sacred propositions are not eternal and unchanging. In the Aranda view of Creation, humans were once told that initiation required the knocking out of a tooth. They later decided that they had been told to circumcise initiates. Still later, they decided that they had been told to create sections and subsections. Religions transmitted by word of mouth changed constantly to keep up with innovations and altered circumstances.

There is, therefore, nothing wrong with religion per se. Its role in establishing the morals, ethics, values, and stability of early human society is well documented. What bothers some leading scientists is that many of today’s huge multinational religions refuse to take significant scientific information into account.

One roadblock preventing these major religions from adjusting to social and scientific progress is the fact that their sacred propositions are now set in type. Several of the world’s great monotheistic religions preserve, largely unaltered, the ultimate sacred propositions of Aramaic-speaking societies that lived too long ago to have heard of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Crick, and Watson. Had those sacred propositions been passed on by word of mouth instead of in printed texts, religious cosmology might very well have changed slowly over the centuries to keep pace with scientific cosmology. What no one could have foreseen was the invention of the printing press and the fossilization of a pre-Copernican view of the world. So if today’s multinational religions sometimes seem resistant to social and scientific breakthroughs, Gutenberg will have to share some of the blame.

That Old-Time Religion

During the Ice Age, the ultimate sacred propositions were transmitted not through scripture but through ritual performance. For examples of how this might have happened, we can return to Spencer and Gillen’s nineteenth-century accounts of Australia’s Aranda and Warramunga people. Their ultimate sacred propositions can be found in their creation myth, which took place in an era the Aranda referred to as the Alcheringa.

During the Alcheringa, Earth was only partly formed. Creation took four stages. During the first stage, two self-created beings called the
ungambikula
discovered rudimentary half-human, half-animal creatures from which true humans could be made. These creatures were limbless, deaf, and blind, living in a featureless world that had just emerged from the sea. The ungambikula used flint knives to release these creatures’ limbs, carve fingers and toes, bore nostril openings, make cuts for mouths, and slit open their closed eyelids so that they could see. The half-animals out of which some of the first people were made—dingoes, emus, cicadas, crows—became the totems, or mascots, of later clans.

Early humans wandered Earth, performing rituals that generated spirit people. Each ritual created a sacred landmark, such as a spring or a rock outcrop, to which the spirits were tied. Some spirits eventually became people, but others became part of a reservoir of “spirit children” who lay in wait to be reincarnated. When an unsuspecting Aranda woman passed a sacred landmark, she ran the risk of being impregnated by a spirit. Such spirits, the ultimate source of all babies, returned to their landmarks after the people they inhabited had grown old and died.

In the second stage the Aranda were taught to perform circumcision with flint knives. This ritual replaced their earlier circumcisions, which (all male readers should skip the rest of this sentence) were done with glowing fire sticks. In the third stage they learned ritual subincision, an even more painful mutilation of the male organ. In the fourth stage they learned the section/subsection system. We now know that stages two, three, and four were later additions to an older creation myth. We suspect that stage one of the myth was very old, because ancient rock paintings in northwest Australia depict half-formed humanoids without mouths, like those of the Alcheringa. These cave paintings, like those of Ice Age Europe, were probably visual aids for the teaching of creation myths.

Earth gradually took on its present form as early humans and their animal ancestors traveled, creating landmarks to mark sacred events or places where people died. During their travels, some older men became weak and were given nourishing drinks of blood from the arms of younger men.

This was the cosmology the Aranda conveyed to Spencer and Gillen in the 1890s. Like all cosmologies, it provided the basis for Aranda morality and ethics. It explained why Aranda clans were named for the plants or animals involved in their ancestors’ creation. It lessened the trauma of infanticide, which the Aranda considered no more than the returning of a reincarnated spirit to the sacred landmark where it lived. It explained the practice of ritual bloodletting, including the giving of healthy men’s blood to sick old men.

Aranda elders knew, of course, that each new generation would have to learn its group’s cosmology from scratch. An appropriate time to indoctrinate youths into all this sacred lore would come when they were old enough to be initiated. Young men would learn male lore from older men; young women would learn female lore from older women.

Anyone who has ever tried to deliver a long, complicated lecture to young people knows that they do not always pay attention. Let them watch music videos over and over, however, and they commit every lyric to memory. Combine art, music, and dance, throw in an intoxicating beverage, and they cannot get enough of the awesome experience.

The Aranda held a secret ritual known as
churinga ilpintira,
which integrated art, music, and dance. It was performed at a secret venue in the desert and began with a group of men smoothing an area of bare ground. One or more would provide blood, often as much as a pint, from veins in their arms. This sacred blood was used both to dampen the ground and to serve as a medium for the paint. Impersonating legendary ancestors, the men serving as artists painted their bodies red, white, yellow, and black, adding downy bird feathers glued on with blood. Using a chewed twig as a brush, they slowly painted the earth with white pipe clay, red and yellow ocher, and charcoal. As the painting took shape, the elders sang ballads recounting the mythical exploits of the ancestors; less experienced men watched and learned.

Aranda earth-paintings were geometric, featuring circles, squares, dots, and lines. Each told the story of an ancestor from the Alcheringa. Members of the Emu clan painted yellow, white, and black figures that represented the eggs, intestines, feathers, and droppings of the emu. Members of the Snake clan painted their totemic ancestor slithering through mythological landscapes. Redundancy drove the story home: the paintings, the songs, and the artists’ decorated bodies all reinforced the same account. Repetition of the ritual ensured that no one would forget his or her clan’s creation myth.

The churinga ilpintira allows us to see why cosmology, religion, and the arts were crucial to hunters and gatherers. Ice Age foragers had language but no writing. The lessons of myth were passed on audiovisually. Performances combining art, music, and dance fixed in memory the myth and its moral lessons. At the same time, some aspects of the story were allowed to change over time.

We doubt that art, music, and dance arose independently. More than likely they evolved as a package that committed sacred lore to memory more effectively than any lecture. If you doubt this, think back to high school and ask yourself which you remember best: your math teacher’s lecture on logarithms or the words to the number-one song on the jukebox. Many baby boomers, unable to remember the hypotenuse of a right triangle, will never forget that “Long Tall Sally” was “Built for Speed.”

In Western society today we have lost sight of the original purpose of art, music, and dance. We now attribute art to individual “geniuses,” born with a “gift” that yearns to “burst out” in an act of “self-expression.” Those without talent need not apply.

The truth is that in early human society, everyone was an artist, a singer, and a dancer. What the archaeological data suggest is that the use of the arts increased as larger social units appeared, because each moiety, clan, section, or subsection had its own body of sacred lore to commit to memory. That is not to say that individual talent went unrecognized. Spencer and Gillen reveal that some Aborigine tribes began rewarding good singers or dancers with valuables, encouraging them to perform at other groups’ rituals. Even show business, it would seem, began among hunters and gatherers.

The Warramunga, neighbors to the Aranda, had similar ground-painting ceremonies. Spencer and Gillen were invited to watch one of these rituals, which is illustrated in
Figure 5
. The painting recounted the creation of spirit children by a totemic serpent.

In addition to transmitting secret ritual information, the churinga ilpintira was designed to elicit an awesome emotional response. Rappaport suspects that the precursors to human emotions might have been the deep bonds of love and dependence seen between mother and neonate in the apes. But emotion in humans evolved to be even stronger, strong enough to make intelligent people do irrational things, strong enough to inspire the selfless acts that strengthen society. Dancing, drinking, and singing for days, as some tribes did, opened a window into the spirit world and thereby confirmed its existence.

If all of this sounds mysterious it may be because, as Edward O. Wilson once wrote, the ultimate motivation of religion is probably hidden from our conscious mind, allowing it to be the process by which “individuals are persuaded to subordinate their immediate self-interest to the interests of the group.”

Freed from the continual status confrontations of ape society, human foragers created extensive networks of cooperating pseudo-relatives. They transmitted their cosmology and sacred propositions to the next generation with rituals involving song, dance, and art. Such multimedia performances created highly emotional experiences. Pictures were more memorable than a thousand words, and our ancestors, like modern filmmakers, used music to evoke happiness, sorrow, fear, and tension. “Art for art’s sake” is a relatively recent idea; Stone Age art, like the religious art of the Middle Ages, had an agenda.

FIGURE 5.
   Many hunters and gatherers of central Australia used art, music, costume, and dance to transmit their creation myths to the next generation. In this scene, based on a 100-year-old photograph, men of the Warramunga tribe have painted and sung the story of a mythical serpent. The painting features the undulating body of the serpent, who left spirit children at the places shown as concentric circles. The kneeling men are dressed to represent creatures and places in the myth. Until a young man had learned his clan’s sacred lore, he was considered inferior in virtue to his elders.