There is no doubt that life is carried forward because molecules of DNA, which constitute the genes,
embody a coded history of life’s genealogical past. In this respect we are part of nature in
everything we do, from stepping on a bus to painting a house. Like all other living things, our
behaviour is governed by a chemical coding of our genes, which is a record of successful long-term
interactions with the environments of our ancestors, near and in the distant past. It is a biochemical
memory that remembers the body’s responses of growth reproduction and behaviour that have been
responsible for the survival of our ancestors. In this respect, the body of a plant, animal or microbe
represents a kind of prediction that its future environmental experiences will, to a general extent,
resemble those of its ancestors. Animals, especially those with brains, are particularly good
survivors because the nervous system also has a remarkable picturing ability for remembering what
is the most useful way of responding to short- term variations in the environment. As a computer
model, the brain (hardware) and its networks of memory cells (the software) have evolved to
continuously scan the environment, and use memories of good and bad responses to keep short-
term survival strategies up to date. The genes model the basic aspects of the environment that
change very slowly over generations. The brain produces models of survival as day-to- day
interactions between perception via the senses and a mental representation of environment that
triggers the correct response. This interplay between changes in the environment and their
representation as virtual images in the central nervous system allows us to move through a mental
world of our brain’s making, and produce neuromuscular responses that aid survival. Since brains
are also products of natural selection, ancestors, near and in the distant past, also carried virtual
worlds of their contemporary environments in their heads. Brains are a particular expression of DNA
tasked with the role of recording lifespan- events as pictures to help predict the immediate future.
We describe these virtual worlds as ‘patterns of thought’ and the process of perception that
generates them as ‘reading the environment’. This faculty of ‘graphicity’ is a vital process of
comprehension. We become interested in shapes and colours that do not fit into the known. In this
we prefer intriguing suggestions to actual representation. For example, a trail of footprints occurring
together with disturbed vegetation and dung deposits is read intently by a hunter as the pattern of
his prey. It is comprehended as a detailed mental map of events over a wide area that points to the
course of action necessary if the hunt is to be successful. According to Steven Dawkins it seems
plausible that the ability to perceive the signs and generate such pictures might have arisen in our
ancestors before the origin of speech in words. If the thought- picture could be represented as an
arrangement of shapes and signs, constructing an environmental model in the head is a helpful way
to communicate, and coordinate what has to be done in a social group. Such mental imagery could
be an educational resource to help group cohesion and promote social evolution. This seems the
likely origin of art, which depends on noticing that something can be made to stand for something
else in order to assist comprehension and communication. Dawkins suggests that it could have
been the drawing of mind-maps in the sand that drove the expansion of human evolution beyond the
critical threshold of communication that other apes just failed to cross.
It may be pertinent that ceremonial sand-pictures of native Australians function as maps. They are
patterns created by an individual ‘dreamer’ through the two-dimensional spacing of symbols
standing for people and local topographical detail. The fact that these patterns are closely
associated with ‘dreaming’ is significant. Dreams are set up by our simulation software using the
same modelling techniques used by the brain when it presents its updated editions of reality. These
aboriginal maps of the dreamtime were community properties. Their role was to codify the
neighbourhood and its use by the community in the form of a locally accepted non-representational
pattern of relationships. The collection of pictographs reinforced the existence of a tribal territory
and its natural resources by incorporating stories about its occupation by the group’s ancestors.
The pictures, now being made permanent works of art on cloth and hardboard, had a social function
to maintain a subculture of understanding by reinforcing comprehension of group identity and space.
Rock art of North America, which consists of pictographs constructed from circles, spirals and lines,
also seems to have its origins in dreams, and a significance in carrying messages about origins
and group identity across generations (Fig 1.1).
Fig 1.1 Motif from a shelter cave in the Devil’s River drainage of Texas 1,000- 2000 BC
Reaching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, there is in the Americas a tremendous variety in
all aspects of indigenous art from prehistory to the arrival of Europeans, differing region by region,
era by era, and often tribe by tribe. There are representations of flora and fauna, men and gods,
earth and sky; symbols of clan and tribe, religion and magic; formal designs from the primal to the
highly intricate. They appear in examples of basketry, weaving, pottery, sculpture, painting, lapidary
work, masks, drumheads, weapons, apparel, beadwork, goldwork, blankets, ponchos, and many
other forms.
At the heart of being human, we enjoy nothing more than the demand made on us by the artist to use
our own ‘imitative faculty’, our imagination, and thus share in the creative adventure of the artist. The
greater the artist’s skill to induce ambiguity into a work, the greater the viewer’s pleasure in
unravelling the puzzle. In other words, our pleasure rests on the mind’s effort in bridging the
difference between art and reality. This pleasure is destroyed when the illusion is too complete and
the picture looks lifelike.
In the cave art of the European Palaeolithic we may contemplate on the existence of the bovine
quality in art which is 35,000 years old, and may conclude that since then there has really been no
fundamental development in our imaginative and technical abilities to represent natural forms that
are close to us practically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes the whole body of an animal is
contained in the shape of the rock. It was the rock that revealed its animal 'spirit', and was the root
of the image’s ambiguity. Their common mental ground is specific material features, such as cracks
and smooth, rounded surfaces, which are used to enhance animal features in the mind of the artist.
Most of the paintings consist of collections of symbols arranged haphazardly on the rock surface
indicating that several individuals contributed them at different times. Occasionally they occur as if
welded by one person into an overall composition. For example, the Chumash, who once inhabited
the coast of southern California from Malibu to Morrow Bay, created painted compositions in which
dozens of interrelated shapes were confined within a limited space. At Arrow Head Springs, two
rounded boulders with painted panels mark a Chumash sacred site on a steep slope overlooking
Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands (Fig 1.2).
Fig 1.2 Arrow Head Springs: Santa Barbara California: Chumash Native American rock painting
Although the animal forms of Palaeolithic art have a high aesthetic profile, they are usually found
together with abstract shapes, such as circles, spirals, and grids. These shapes emerge in the
trances of modern spiritualists, and people with certain sight defects, where they are generated from
particular regions of the brain. These findings have led to the belief that the rock faces played a
spiritual role in the social life of prehistoric peoples. Beyond the rock face was their spirit world; the
rock wall is a spiritual place where shamans sought power in a personal interaction at an important
boundary between the living and material worlds. Trances have a practical purpose- healing people
who are sick. In other words, in making art against stone, a spiritual healer was trying to understand
what the brain makes us feel. We are essentially human when we use graphic ways of portraying
other realities, and the Palaeolithic artist deep in a cave, or balancing on a rocky mountainside, was
expressing a mind identical to our own in order to serve his community.
