The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [11]
These landscape preferences and related landform interests have over Falk showed photographs of five natural landscape types to six different groups, each of which was asked about their preferences to “live to “visit” each. The landscape types were tropical forest, coniferous forest, deciduous forest, East African savanna, and desert. None of photographs included water or animals. The age groups were eight, eleven, fifteen, eighteen, thirty-five, and seventy and over. From age fifteen on, landscape preferences were varied, with an equal liking deciduous forest, savanna, and coniferous forest, all three of which still outrated tropical forests and desert, the latter being the least preferred all age groups. The most striking finding was in the youn gest group: eight-year-olds preferred savannas for both living and visiting above other age groups. It is hard to explain this result from habituation, since, just as with Komar and Melamid’s Kenyans who had never seen Hudson River, none of the eight-year-olds had ever been in a environment.
These age-related findings have been elaborated by Erich Synek Karl Grammer, who demonstrated a significant change in landscape that accompanies the onset of puberty: younger children prefer flatter, savanna-type landscapes of low complexity. By age fifteen they have come to favor more mountainous, complex landscapes with more trees. Synek and Grammer regard this as a partial replication of Balling and Falk, but they also see it as demonstrating that outdoors experience increases sophistication in responses to landscapes.
In other words, outdoors experience pulls landscape taste away from early-age default setting. But such variations do not prove either subjective relativism or that such tastes are social constructions: the very they are altered systematically, in predictable patterns according demonstrates their place in the structure of natural predispositions. Thus Elizabeth Lyons showed that women have a greater liking for vegetation in landscapes than men, which has a likely evolutionary source: women would prefer refuge-rich, fruit- and flower-laden landscapes, while would turn their heads toward landscapes with prospect views, as hunting and exploration possibilities. From a more purely cultural side, studies have shown that farmers cross-culturally stand out from other demographics as preferring productive-looking farmland to innate interests in landscapes and our ability to exploit them. this is no more strange than the fact that learning English will permanently engrave an individual’s linguistic capacities.
III
Habitat choice was a crucial, life-and-death matter for people (and proto-people) in the Pleistocene. The decisive significance of habitat has been nicely dramatized in a description by Orians and Heer-wagen, who ask their readers to try seriously to imagine what daily would have been like for an articulate, intelligent hunter-gatherer species. They call this nomadic Pleistocene existence “a camping trip that lasts lifetime.” Camping for us means an excursion from modern life; for ancestors, living from the land was the only existence. You wake up, Orians and Heerwagen describe it, amid your small band of adults children. Realizing that you’re running out of food, you set off together. Clouds on the horizon indicate rain in the distance, so that is the direction where the group heads. As the sun rises toward the zenith, you seek relief from the heat in the shade of a group of trees. The women in group discuss the presence of sugary berries in this area they remember from a previous year. The men talk over possibilities for tracking game and haft arrowheads for a possible hunt. The sound of thunder far off later afternoon indicates that the dry season is coming to an end. The group drifts