about WorldViews is gained through different types of records, including tools, other artifacts, and written material, when available. This means that history is pieced together from the remains that survived and the ways these remains are interpreted. Missing evidence or remains that may be discovered in the future can change the prevailing beliefs of the past. For example, recent evidence of the use of fire by early people dates it to 1 million years ago, much earlier than previously thought. In Germany, eight well-preserved spears found in 2011 and dated to be 300,000 years old show humans using these tools many thousands of years earlier than thought (University Tübingen, 2012).
While the early humans may not have articulated a WorldView, they may have had an innate ability to care for their young, believed in immediacy, believed in the importance of rearing their young to survival and of children and adults learning through experimentation, and understood cooperation at least at a family level. Human brains are emotionally empathetic, which may have influenced a WorldView of the importance of tending to babies. Brains evolved such that people felt a need to belong, which helped children stay close to kin as they learned to navigate the world and helped family groups stay intact to help each other. This feeling of a need to belong, also helped with oxytocin, first developed with immediate family and kin and later spread to kith. Learning to cooperate and trust each other is a capacity that allowed for the expansion of the human species. While early humans may not have had a choice in traveling miles each day, they possibly incorporated it into their WorldView that moving is a part of life. Returning to the concept of humans’ connectedness with nature, our brains today continue to work better when we are moving our body. Current research supports that people who exercise outperform sedentary people in long-term memory, reasoning, attention, and problem-solving tasks (Medina, 2008). Implications of this impact of movement on brain functioning are discussed more in Chapter 7.
Carol Lee Flinders (2002/2003) said that the relationships the hunter–gatherers had with the natural world, with one another, and with their concept of spirit included trust, inclusion, and mutual reciprocity, complementing her understanding of their society’s core values: intimate connection with the land, empathetic relationship with animals, self-restraint, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, playfulness, and non-violent conflict resolution. If they had a cosmological story, it may have included Flinders’ description of ‘values-of-belonging’ and it may have been the enchanted universe. It would be easy to imagine early humans believing that their world was alive with forces, powers, and heavily influenced by their constant immersion in the natural world. They allowed nature’s cycles (stars, seasons, migratory paths) to generate a rhythm for their lives.
Sacred cycle stage
Depending on geographical region, with the northern regions developing more slowly than the southern regions because of the influence of Ice Age remnants, the sacred cycle stage comes about 50,000 years ago. This stage is punctuated by behavioral modernity. Behavioral modernity is marked by specific behaviors interpreted through the diversity of artifacts found in settlement remains and the occasional midden. A widely accepted trait definition in anthropology, archeology, and sociology of behavioral modernity is the point at which Homo sapiens demonstrated an ability to use complex symbolic thought and express cultural creativity, often thought to coincide with the origin of language. Symbolic thought includes being able to engage in symbolic thinking such as number systems, writing systems, maps, and models, and demonstrates flexibility in our brain. Developing the capacity for symbolic thought or dual representation allowed culture to be effectively communicated and shared among a larger group of people through language and other symbols; therefore settlements could evolve. It meant humans could share other information such as distances and location of hazards or food. It also meant that people had to be able to understand the symbolism in their culture to be full participants, therefore some people belonged and some did not. Now called a universal developmental task, Judy DeLoache (2010) found that children begin to be able to engage in dual representation at about 18 months and reliably at 3 years of age for some tasks and later for other areas. She defined dual representation or symbolic reasoning as the ability for a person to attribute characteristics and meaning to things that do not really have them. As children develop symbolic reasoning they learn emotional intelligence or how to understand one another’s intentions and motivations. This understanding of intentions and motivations allows for cooperation and community building.
Beginning about 50,000 years ago cultural universals or key elements deduced from archeological evidence have been shared by all groups of people since. In addition to the use of complex language, these cultural elements include use of natural resources (humans’ geographic range expanded, they used different hunting techniques for different species, and began to use marine resources—fish and shellfish), technology (finely made tools, including bone tools, projectile point, special purpose tools, composite tools, and tools with blades and backed scrapers, and the control of fire, including cooking and seasoning foods), social organization (having myths, spiritual practices, and/or religion, expanded exchange or barter networks, organized group hunting, settlements with living spaces and hearths, systematic burial of adults and children, care for the elderly and infirm, game playing, and music), and art (systematic use of jewelry for decoration or self-ornamentation, the use of ochre and then other pigments, and the creation of figurative art such as cave paintings, petroglyphs, and figurines). Hunting and using reindeer was more common than previously, which is why the period beginning 50,000 to 40,000 years ago is sometimes referred to as the Reindeer Age. There still is no evidence of warfare.
There was an upsurge of visual art and music during the sacred cycle stage. The earliest flutes were found during this stage and current research shows that peak experiences of music, present in all human communities, releases dopamine, which emotionally engages the reward system in the brain (Salimpoor et al., 2011). Seasonal rites, initiation rituals, and other ceremonies related to the participation in the sacred ceremonies of life were reflected in cave art (Noble, 1993). The earliest figurative art found is the Venus of Schelklingen and thousands of other wood and bone carvings of female figures have been unearthed. The earliest known ceramic is Venus of Dolní Věstonice, from about 30,000 to 25,000 BCE. These artifacts serve a referential function and given the plethora of female artifacts it seems logical to conclude that they displayed awe and respect for femaleness, birth, and natural systems.
The artifacts, including burial rituals, seem to indicate an understanding of the importance of cycles and the female procreative energy. In some areas children and women were given preferential treatment to be buried inside the settlements in specific relationship to certain parts of the home (Naumov, 2007). They were buried in the fetal position thought to honor the birth and death cycle. Deduced from thousands of artifacts it seems that the female womb was sacred as well as a life-generating deity that was nature herself (Noble, 1993). As both mystery and source of power, the female body was a metaphor for nature; the womb was ever able to renew herself with the cycle of birth. These artifacts give form to the axiom that we intuitively love what is born.
Medina (2008) provides evidence that our brains are wired for flexibility and improvisation, thought to be a consequence of living in the ever-changing natural environment. The evolutionary milestone, the prefrontal cortex, housed in the frontal lobe and controlling executive functions including problem solving, maintaining attention, and inhibiting emotional impulses, allowed for the sacred cycle stage. Humans now were even better equipped to learn through experimentation and adapt to changing natural environments.
With the description of the time period there could be many interpretations of their WorldView in regard to the natural environment and because the population was dispersed there may have been concurrent WorldViews. Putting together the evolution of symbolic reasoning, the long childhood needed for learning, and female carvings and other artifacts in addition to tools, these people’s WorldView may have included awe and respect for nature and natural processes, including childbirth, as well as a shared sense of care and cooperation among humans and with natural systems. Their
