1.6. The Origin of Civilization
But wherefore should there be such a thing as the bicameral mind? And why are there gods? What can be the origin of things divine? And if the organization of the brain in bicameral times was as I have suggested in the previous chapter, what could the selective pressures in human evolution have been to bring about so mighty a result?
The speculative thesis which I shall try to explain in this chapter ? and it is very speculative ? is simply an obvious corollary from what has gone before. The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities. The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization.
Let us begin by looking at what we mean by social control.
THE EVOLUTION OF GROUPS
Mammals in general show a wide variety of social groupings, all the way from the solitariness of certain predatory animals to the very close social cohesiveness of others. The latter animals are the more preyed upon, and a social group is itself a genetic adaptation for protection against predators. The structure of herds in ungulates is relatively simple, utilizing precise genetically given anatomical and behavioral signals that are all evolved for group protection. Primates have a similar vulnerability, and for the same reason are evolved to live in close association with others. In dense protective forests, the social group may be as small as six, as in gibbons, while on the more exposed terrains, the group may be up to eighty, as in the Cape baboons.1 In exceptional ecosystems, the group size may be even larger.
It is the group then that evolves. When dominant individuals give a warning cry or run, others of the group flee without looking for the source of danger. It is thus the experience of one individual and his dominance that is an advantage to the whole group. Individuals do not generally respond even to basic physiological needs except within the whole pattern of the group’s activity. A thirsty baboon, for example, does not leave the group and go seeking water; it is the whole group that moves or none. Thirst is satisfied only within the patterned activity of the group. And so it is with other needs and situations.
The important thing for us here is that this social structure depends upon the communication between the individuals. Primates have therefore evolved a tremendous variety of complex signals: tactile communication ranging from mounting and grooming to various kinds of embracing, nuzzling, and fingering; sounds ranging from assorted grunts, barks, screeching, and yakking, all grading into each other; nonvocal signals such as grinding teeth or beating branches;2 visual signals in a variety of facial expressions, the threatening, direct eye-to-eye gaze, eyelid fluttering in baboons in which the brows are raised and the lids are lowered to expose their pale color against the darker background of the face, together with a yawn that bares the teeth aggressively; various postural signals such as lunging, head jerking, feinting with the hands, and all these in various constellations.3
This huge redundant complexity of signaling is essentially devoted to the requisites of the group, its organization into patterns of dominance and subordination, the maintenance of peace, reproduction, and care for the young. Except for signifying potential group danger, primate signals rarely apply to events outside the group, such as the presence of food or water.4 They are totally within group affairs and are not evolved to give environmental information in the way human languages are
Now this is what we start with. Within a specific ecology, for most species, it is this communication system that limits the size of the group. Baboons are able to achieve groups as high as eighty or more because they have a strict geographical structure as they move about on the open plains, with dominant hierarchies being maintained within each circle of the group. But in general the usual primate group does not exceed thirty or forty, a limit determined by the communication necessary for the dominance hierarchy to work.
In gorillas, for example, the dominant male, usually the largest silver-backed male, together with all the females and young, occupies the central core of each group of about twenty, the other males tending to be peripheral. The diameter of a group at any given moment rarely exceeds 200 feet, as every animal remains attentive to the movements of others in the dense forest environment.5 The group moves when the dominant male stands motionless with his legs spread and faces a certain direction. The other members of the group then crowd around him, and the troop moves off on its leisurely day’s journey of about a third of a mile. The important thing here is that the complex channels of communication are open between the top of the dominance hierarchy and all the rest.
There is no reason to think that early man from the beginning of the genus Homo two million years ago lived any differently. Such archaeological evidence as has been obtained indicates the size of a group to be about thirty.6 This number, I suggest, was limited by the problem of social control and the degree of openness of the communication channels between individuals.7 And it is the problem of this limitation of group size which the gods may have come into evolutionary history to solve.
But first we must consider the evolution of language as the necessary condition for there to be gods at all.
THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
When Did Language Evolve?
It is commonly thought that language is such an inherent part of the human constitution that it must go back somehow through the tribal ancestry of man to the very origin of the genus Homo, that is, for almost two million years. Most contemporary linguists of my acquaintance would like to persuade me that this is true. But with this view, I wish to totally and emphatically disagree. If early man, through these two million years, had even a primordial speech, why is there so little evidence of even simple culture or technology? For there is precious little archaeologically up to 40,000 B.C., other than the crudest of stone tools.