An Alternative Paradigm

The significance of human consciousness, expressed in an advanced level of self-awareness, to understanding how we became human hardly needs to be emphasized here; it seems self-evident. The centrality of art to the evolution of consciousness is not a new idea; it has been expressed by various writers (for instance, Read 1954: 143; Steiner 1964, 1970, 1972, 1990; Gebser 1985: 316–333, 487–505; Shiner 2001; Bednarik 2003) for many years. Whereas the replacement model, most strongly expressed in the “African Eve” hypothesis, postulates that there was no major change in human behavior until the “big bang of consciousness” of the Aurignacian (White 1995, 2003; Noble and Davidson 1996; Mithen 1999, 2004; Klein and Edgar 2002; Mellars 2005), the gradualist model derives greater support not only from the empirical evidence, but also from other disciplines, such as evolutionary anthropology and psychology (Lock and Peters 1996; Hodgson 2000, 2003; Bloom 2001; Dunbar 2003; Sedikides et al. 2006). For instance, the proposition of language emergence during the last third of the Late Pleistocene is widely rejected by nonarcheologists, with a minimum duration of 500 ka postulated (Dunbar 2003). This is consistent with the evidence of very early seafaring, which as we have seen demands quite complex “reflective” communication by around 1 Ma ago, also evident from Bickerton’s (2010) hypothesis which at present offers the most plausible model of language origins. Sedikedes et al. (2006: 66) also perceive human self-awareness having been established before the appearance of archaic Homo sapiens, and in fact detect its “first glimmerings” “in the late stages of the Homo ergaster/erectus period”.