THE DAWN OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Dawn of Consciousness
Chapter 7

A
limited form of consciousness emerged as intelligence developed in the hominid section of the ape line. The degree of consciousness possible in an organism is directly proportionate to the degree of development of its language or signaling/signing system. Early hominids and humans lived in a world dominated by emotions such as hunger, lust; fear and anger, much like their mammalian cousins.

Their consciousness was only a fraction of ours. It was limited by their greatly reduced (from our point of view) communications capabilities. Emotion, however is still is the necessary precursor and driver of language.

There is no real evidence of complex language before 60,000 years ago. It is amazing how much can be communicated by facial expressions and gestures and our ancestors certainly accumulated large vocabularies of them. Art is an important indicator of and measurement of consciousness. The earliest forms of which appeared during the ice age about 32,000 years ago in the caves of southern Europe. The very first art was undoubtedly body adornment – make up, tattoos, neck-laces, etc. – followed by carved tools and utensils and then magnificent cave paintings of the ma-jor fauna of the day that were probably forms of hunting magic, designed to ensure a safe and successful hunt for the artist and his friends.

This means that anatomically modern humans (indistinguishable from us in body shape and brain size) lived for about 30,000 years with very little language or consciousness and another 40,000 years with very limited language and consciousness. Even today most people are still driven by their mental reflexes.

Gorillas, Chimps, and hominids lived in hierarchical groups of up to 30 individuals. The size of these groups is limited by the communications available to them for social control. Thus for the first two and a half million years of hominid life, our ancestors and cousins lived in hunter-gatherer bands continuing the ape tradition..

Agriculture made possible the settled life of villages and then cities that marked the beginning of civilization about ten or eleven thousand years ago. Interestingly, agriculture first emerged in the latrines of our hunter-gatherer forbears where the seeds of the fruits and vegetables they had eaten sprouted the following season and miraculously produced precious food. Surely an Einstein of that time made the, now obvious, connection between those defecated seeds and the delicious foods that resulted, and started the long process of improvement in food production that drove the advance of civilization.

Until that time, each fit member of a hunter-gatherer band had to produce his share of the band’s food. Their possessions were very few, self-made, and very portable. Food Production allowed freedom for some individuals to assume other tasks such as manufacture of goods and admini-stration of the group’s affairs. Obviously, the quality of craftsmanship and diversity of goods greatly increased at that time.

Interestingly, it was the arrival of agriculture, civilization, and cities that necessitated the arrival of the first gods. It was the voice of those gods speaking directly in the heads of those early civi-lized peoples that asserted the king’s commands when he wasn’t present. Agriculture allowed villages to emerge, but it was religion that allowed cities. Until today, religion has been an inte-gral part of the social control complex of cultures. Many people still think the voice they hear in their head comes directly from God.

The tremendous political and technological advantages that accrued to the first food producing peoples gave them a competitive edge over their neighbors, many of whom became the first slaves. Human slavery has now existed for about ten thousand years. Aristotle actually believed that since, in his experience, each citizen required two and a half slaves on average, that no city could exceed a total population of one hundred thousand without losing control of all those slaves.

The Fertile Crescent – parts of modern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, and Iran was home to many easily domesticatable wild species of wheat, barley, peas, melons and flax. It also had many wild species of domesticatable large herbivorous mammals such as sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses. This fortuitous good luck – no other area of the planet had anywhere near this pre-existing diversity of domesticatable species – brought a permanent advantage to the entire Eurasian landmass and North Africa. It is no accident that civilization appeared first where food production was most easily exploited.

In ancient times, agriculture could only expand along the East-West axis because plants and mammals are adapted to their latitude – climate – not their longitude. This explains why Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas – they are on a North-South axis unlike the East-West axis of Eurasia – were largely passed by by agriculture and civilization. This lucky occurrence was the first major differentiating advantage that accrued to the benefit of the peoples of Eurasia and North Africa. That, together with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution would eventually push the peoples of Western Europe to the highest level of civilization and technology on this planet.

Dogs adopted people between ten and fifteen thousand years ago. Individual wolves or wild dogs that had been rejected by their packs (hunting bands) adopted human hunter-gatherer bands as their own. This first wild animal domestication (from our point-of-view) was a very important precursor to the implementation of agriculture by our ancestors. Besides being hunting dogs and lookouts, it was herd dogs that made animal husbandry possible. A modern sheepherder recently said that one trained dog is worth three good men when it comes to herding sheep.

It was the problem of managing the larger settled populations that agriculture made possible that first brought the gods into existence, probably with the assistance of the first chiefs. It’s not hard to imagine the utility of the gods to those first chiefs in ensuring obedience from their followers. In a very real sense, our first gods were evolutionary developments – products of gene-culture coevolution.

The oldest known town is Eynan in what is now Israel, about 30 miles from Mt. Hermon. This bustling town of about 200 was fully operational about 9,000 B.C. It was definitely agriculture that made this population density and permanent location possible as evidenced by the abundance of sickle blades, pestles, mortars and other agricultural implements found in the dwellings. Evidence shows that the first crops were cereals and legumes. The first known city, about 8000 B.C., was the agricultural center of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia (now Turkey). This city of 5,000 had no roads between its clay buildings. Access was by ladders and over the roofs.

The shear number of people in these new towns necessitated a much more powerful leadership structure than the band of 30 or so individual hunter-gatherers required. In larger towns, the Chief needed several assistant chiefs to provide for the administration of food production, dispute resolution and defense.

The centralization of goods and food in those cities and villages provided tempting targets to their militarily competent neighbors and encouraged the first development of warriors, initially temporary and then permanent. Thus warfare started about ten thousand years ago at the same time that agriculture began. With ten millennia of warfare now hardwired in our genes, it would not be wise to expect that war will be unnecessary, now or in the future. At least as long as our culture retains its biological basis.

The first calendar – 12 months of thirty days - appeared seven thousand years ago in Egypt, its development driven by the need to manage the extensive agriculture that developed in the fertile Nile Valley. Copper, gold and silver were first worked six thousand years ago, also in Egypt, mainly for ornaments, utensils and weapons.

All evidence points to about 3500 B.C. as the time when writing first appeared in what is now Iran in the ancient biblical city of Uruk. Through the Gilgamesh epic (Around 2000 BC) and other contemporary writings we got our initial glimpse into the mentality of the first literate hu-mans. Consisting of 2,000 signs on clay tablets, the first writing was in the form of pictographs (icons) that stood for the clay or stone tokens used by the King’s functionaries to keep track of his property and possessions.

Thus writing initially developed as a royal accounting system. Next came the Sumerian Cunei-form notation consisting of wedge shaped impressions made on clay tablets by a wooden stylus. This system was an important breakthrough in that it was based on the arebus. Differing from a pictograph or icon (which stood for an item), an arebus denotes the sound that is the name of an object rather than the object itself. It was the first step in the development of the phonetic alpha-bet. The Chinese developed their pictograph system around three thousand years ago and the Japanese copied it. Like the QWERTY keyboard, they were soon too established to be replaced by the better system.

Horses were initially important to humans only because they were hunted for food up until about 3000 BC when they were first domesticated and hitched to travois (slide cars) in Mesopotamia. They joined dogs and oxen as the first beasts of burden. The first known wheels (solid wood disks) were illustrated in wall carvings on carts about 2500 BC in the kingdom of Ur. Solid wood wheels quickly were replaced by six spoked wheels with iron tires. Those carts were further re-fined into finely tuned war chariots by about 2000 B.C. that then spread radially throughout the Eurasian landmass, finally reaching China by 1500 BC.

From that time until the twentieth century, the history of war was very much the history of horses. Those first horses were too small to carry a fully armed man, so it wasn’t until around 1000 BC that horses had been bred large enough to be used in cavalry. Cavalry very quickly displaced chariots in war due to its superior mobility, but chariots still survived for racing purposes for an-other 1500 years.

The first known use of bows and arrows in war were revealed in Mesopotamian writings of 2500 B.C. - at about the time the Sphinx was built at Giza. The Greeks, originally Turkic peoples, started to migrate from the Caspian region around 2000 B.C. The first water fed toilets were built in the Palace in Crete around 1500 B.C.

A very different mentality from our own is clearly revealed in the earliest writings that we understand. As is obvious in THE ILLIAD (written around 900 B.C. about the Trojan War of 1250 BC) and the earlier Mesopotamian epics, human mentality involved two separate parts: An executive (the voice of the god or gods) who told the man what to do and the operator (the man himself) who did what he was told to do by his hallucinations. The Princeton Psychology Professor Julian Jaynes calls it the Bicameral Mind in his book The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Even today, the voice in your head that’s always talking to you that you think is you thinking is a vestigial form of the pre-conscious god-executive. It constantly searches your memories for ear-lier, similar situations to provide guidance for your behaviors in current situations. Doing what this voice tells us to do frequently prevents us from seriously considering the current situation (the NOW). Full consciousness requires critical examination of what that voice tells us so that our behavior is mediated by conscious consideration. Many people’s behaviors are still just re-flex reactions to that voice’s orders completely devoid of conscious consideration. Surely you must know some people like that. I don’t think you can call such automatons conscious.

The first written evidence of consciousness, in the modern sense, is recorded in THE ODYSSEY, probably written down by several poets around 800 B.C. but attributed to Homer. This new kind of heroic man actually dared to contest with the gods. This powerfully contrasts with the puppet-like heroes who are merely playthings of the gods in THE ILLIAD. Odysseus dared to challenge the gods when he killed the Cyclops who was the son of Poseidon. He even rubbed it in when he bragged about it. He was grievously punished for his impertinence by having all his friends killed and his voyage home delayed by ten years.

The bloody Dorian invasion (sometimes called the invasion of the Sea People) of the Pelopones-sus around 1000 B.C. massively disrupted the descendents of Agamemnon and Odysseus. The militarily unstoppable Dorian troops brutalized the Greeks (with whom they couldn’t even communicate) without compunction. They drove a huge portion of the surviving Greeks to resettle in the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, which is now Turkey, amidst great violence and hard-ship.

Their very survival under these nightmarish circumstances demanded guile. The Odyssey was written down about this time (about a hundred years after the Iliad was written) and clearly reflects the new consciousness that appeared there. There is even evidence that Odysseus was honored for this innovation in the form of temple-like structures, dated from that time, which included the bronze tripod cauldrons associated with Odysseus and Ithaca.

After this catastrophe, the wily Greeks quickly integrated their conquerors into their society and then proceeded to develop into the most conscious culture on the planet to that time. In this con-text, it is then no surprise that the Greeks were so precocious in developing the foundations of Western Civilization. The Iliad is a priceless window into the long dim dawn of humanity before the appearance of consciousnesses in our species and the Odyssey is a window into the very birth of modern consciousness on Earth.

In the middle of the seventh century BC, a huge milestone in human economics occurred. That was the appearance of the first coins in one of the kingdoms set up by the Greeks who had been driven from the Peloponessus three hundred years earlier. The streams of the Kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor were blessed with naturally occurring alluvial deposits of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver. The king’s new moneyers accurately weighed out globs of it and stamped them with a symbol that designated them as officially weighed and denominated as staters or fractions thereof - the first money ever. About a century later in Lydia, King Croessus (of rich as Croessus fame) refined the electrum into gold and silver and produced the very first gold and silver coins, again, as staters and fractions of staters.

A bit later, Darius the grandson of Cyrus the Great, the emperor of Persia who freed the Jews from Babylon, defeated Croessus in battle conquering Lydia and making it part of his huge em-pire. He was impressed by those coins and immediately copied the idea beginning the spread of MONEY to all corners of the globe.

The Yehudin liberated by Cyrus returned from their exile in Babylon to the Holy Land where their prophets then wrote the Old Testament to create the shared myths needed to rally the formerly dispersed and oppressed peoples. Since it was written in the late sixth century B.C. the ancient stories of Moses, the Ten Commandments and the Exodus of 1200 B.C; and Solomon and David of 900 B.C. were actually mostly propaganda designed to meet the political needs of the times rather than accurate histories of the children of God. The Ten Commandments ordered that Jehovah was now the only God permitted for these formerly polytheistic peoples in order to facilitate the centralization of power in the new Kingdom of Israel. Thus the modern monotheistic religion of Judaism was born uniting the ancient peoples of Israel and Judah.

In the sixth century B.C an unprecedented explosion of advanced consciousness was released by Solon, Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Zoroaster and the Jewish prophets. Independently, they had done nothing less than invent the human soul after only a few centuries of consciousness development. Thus the soul was invented by the first scientists, developed by religion, and then rejected by science until now. We can now assert that the soul is actually physically present in the universe and thus is subject to study by physicists, and, eventually, use by the God we will make in the future to resurrect all of us.