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Special exhibition installation:
"Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture"
November 19, 2002–July 4, 2003
Gallery view of the Invention of Agriculture: Ci Wara's Divine Gift |
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| Figure 12 |
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Imagination and creativity are part of the same process, for only once we create mental symbols can we combine them in new ways and ask "What if?" Intuitive, nonsymbolic reasoning can, of course, take one a long way; and indeed, we can probably look upon the considerable achievements of the Neanderthals as the ultimate example of what intuition can do (Tattersall, 2000). But there's little doubt that it is symbolic thought that above all differentiates us from them. And that, indeed, separates us not only from every other hominid, but from every organism, that has ever existed.
The origin of the human capacity was thus a recent happening. And it was an emergent one (Tattersall, 2000), not an extrapolation of earlier trends. Much as many paleoanthropologists like to think of our evolution as a linear process, a gradual progression from primitiveness to perfection, this conceptual hold-over from the past is clearly in error. We are not the result of constant fine-tuning over the eons, any more than we are the summit of creation, the ultimate product of an inexorable trend. Instead, we are the product of a much more complex process of speciation, competition, and ecological change. This pattern of human evolution, as shown in the accompanying diagram (Fig. 12), emphasizes that Homo sapiens is simply the single surviving product of a complex sequence of events that produced an extremely bushy hominid family tree, rather than the culmination a linear sequence of steadily perfecting species. Throughout the long story of human evolution prior to our arrival, the presence on earth of multiple kinds of hominid at any one time seems to have been typical. From which we may conclude that the status of Homo sapiens as the lone hominid on earth today says a great deal more about the special nature of our species in particular, than about what it means to be a hominid in general.
This contribution was initially prepared by Ian Tattersall for the symposium "Genesis: Exploration of Origins," organized at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Dr. Alisa LaGamma, and held there on March 7, 2003 in conjunction with the exhibition "Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture." Dr. Tattersall thanks Dr. La Gamma most warmly for inviting him to participate in this most illuminating event, as he does those colleagues who kindly allowed him to use their illustrations here.
Ian Tattersall is a curator in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. Over the past thirty-five years he has published almost 300 books and papers in paleoanthropology and in various areas of primate ecology and systematics, especially the lemurs of Madagascar. His most recent trade publication is The Monkey in the Mirror (Harcourt, 2002).
(See references cited in this paper)
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