Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [15]
Humans with animal features, bird-headed humans in particular, show up prominently in some of the most ancient prehistoric images. Lascaux, the French cave known as the âSistine Chapel of prehistory,â is marked by the image of a bird-headed man, in a scene that includes a bison and a bird on a stick. This image was painted about 17,000 years ago.
Les Trois Frères, another French cave containing several hundred prehistoric paintings and engravings of animals, also features several half-human figures, the most prominent of which is a stag with human arms and legs. Known as the âSorcerer,â it looms above the superimposed engravings of a multitude of animals. It was painted approximately 13,000 years ago.
In Chauvet, the recently discovered French cave that contains the oldest-known paintings in the world (estimated to be about 31,000 years old), there is an image of a composite being, part woman, part bison, part feline.
It is hard to know what the prehistoric people who produced these images really had in mind. They died too long ago and left no texts explaining their motives. However, scholars have been tempted to interpret these images, because they go so deep into the ancestry of our species. Some view the chimera figures as âarch-sorcerers,â or as shamans partially transformed into animals, or as representations of the owner of animals. But others have pointed out that shamans do not need caves or realistic animal imagery. Their main job is contacting the spirits of nature in visions or dreamsâan activity that leaves few concrete traces. This means it is difficult to prove that prehistoric humans practiced what we now call shamanism. But the outstanding chimera signs left by prehistoric artists show an ability to identify with animals and suggest an awareness of the transformations that occur in nature. These hybrid signs carry a multiplicity of meanings.
All the worldâs species originated through transformation, or evolution. Contemporary biology demonstrates that humans share genetic sequences with bacteria, mushrooms, worms, bananas, and monkeys. Our very distant ancestors were single-celled organisms. Species are not fixed; they evolve through time. And to signify this, neo-Darwinians use a chimera logo, a fish with legs.
Until recently, rational observers dismissed as âchildish metaphorsâ the animist beliefs of indigenous peoples regarding human kinship with nature. But now science shows that our kinship with other species is literally true. Every living being, including the tiniest bacterium, is made of proteins built according to instructions encoded in DNA and RNA molecules. Heredity between species is so extensive that 99 percent of mice genes are found in humans.
We are all hybrid beings, resulting from countless transformations. Transformers, one and all.
Chapter 4
CABIN FEVER
After traveling in Peru, I returned home to the Jura Mountains, on the border between Switzerland and France. At the time I was mainly living in an old house in the hills heated by a wood-burning stove and a fireplace. It was October, so I stacked wood to prepare for winter. Then I transcribed Amazonian interviews and read books and journals. I also went for runs and hikes in the forest. Some friends expressed worry when I told them I was doing research in the middle of nowhere on the intelligence of other species.
Though I am not a scientistâanthropology being a form of interpretationâI had been reading journals such as Nature, Scientific American, and La Recherche for several years and had files on subjects such as ants, brains, chimpanzees, dodder plants, embryos, fungi, genes, human evolution, intelligence, âjunkâ DNA, knowledge, language, mitochondria, nematodes,