Our God Sensing Ability

Inspiration

A recent study by UC Davis emeritus professor Richard Coss makes the case for why Neanderthals died out while humans thrived: Neanderthals moved into Eurasia much earlier than humans, employing a thrusting spear to hunt, at a time when their prey had yet to develop a fear of 2-legged creatures.  Meanwhile, humans, for eons, developed and practiced long-distance spear throwing on the plains of Africa, where skittish animals were quite familiar with hunters.   Once they arrived in Eurasia, humans were much more successful at hunting the now easily spooked animals that lived there, compared to Neanderthals, who still needed to confront animals at close range.

But aside from the Human-Neanderthal difference, Coss’ is a mammoth insight.

What makes his theory revelatory is the connection he proposes between spear throwing and art.  Humans, using the part of the brain developed by spear throwing (hand-eye coordination, anticipatory imagination) developed artistic abilities that represented reality—thus cave paintings of wild animals.  And, this representation hints at something even more astonishing. 

Hunting would have involved 1) anticipating the arc of a spear, aimed higher than its target to account for gravity; or, 2) even more challenging, aiming at where animals would be once spears arrived at their destination;  And, 3) manipulating an animal’s path into a future meal.  When successful, humans would be rewarded with a feast.  This behavioral pattern would thus select for humans with well-developed anticipatory skills.  And, in turn, this would translate into enhanced artistic imagination: taking things (a hunter’s prey) out of its temporal context (where the animal currently is) and making it, well, art (imagining where the spear and animal will be), all using an inexplicable calculus, or ‘feeling’, the way we type letters on a keyboard without looking, or read lines of type without actually seeing every letter.

In following the implications of Coss’ theory, the next step is asking what it means for humans to anticipate:  Well, essentially, anticipating is dealing with time.  We look forward to events in the future (a feast, for example), and arrange bodily impulses (the desire for our favorite foods) in order to coordinate with an expected point in time (gathering together with others to celebrate an occasion).  This gives rise to repressing the here-and-now in favor of a timed future, which is the basis for much culture and religion.

What a basic religion teaches is that someone who successfully anticipates and plans for the future (successfully abandoning the here-and-now to throw a spear toward a future meal), will be rewarded with righteousness (a feast).  Seen as artistic metaphor, this is the wonder of a thing (animal) taken out of its earthly context (flesh and blood reality) and enjoyed at all times as art (anticipating the feast, and eating it--where both provide pleasure).

And when we let fly a spear, aimed at an imaginary future space where an animal will be, or we let our arm and hand paint an image that is surprisingly lifelike, we give our senses over to an inner calculus, a feeling.  And the more we do this successfully, the more this inner spirit awakens in us, until we suddenly become aware of what seems like assistance from outside ourselves, and we say something like “Mine hand was steadied by the grace of God."

Note: A recent study suggests that Neanderthals also made cave art.  But, the art is abstract (lines, circles, hand prints, not figurative (animals), and it is only attributed to Neanderthals because it dates so far back in time.  And even if it is Neanderthal art, it probably makes Professor Coss' case, in that it is relatively immature, compared to the human kind.