Anthropogenesis: The Saturday, Sunday and Monday Poem

I'm flying off for an England tour (family and work), and as I haven't missed a Monday poem since that first 5-minute challenge (ah, Kelsey McNally, I rage yet) I am posting a poem for Monday now. Except now is Saturday, so I thought I'd better bridge the weekend as well. So three poems for three days, although there are millions of years between them.

I am much taken with the questions of origins, so all the poems examine, with very (!) varying degrees of success, aspects of evolution.

There are many theories as to the reason for the increase in primate brain size which became an explosion once hominids evolved. One of them was quite nicely reported in The Times this week.

Basically, in 1988, two primatologists, Richard Byrne and Andy Whiten, published Machiavellian Intelligence, in which they posit a strong connection in our primate ancestors between the ability to deceive and mental capacity, which might help to explain the development of our own brains. They arrived at this theory through study of current primates - which appeared to show that our closest relatives (gorillas, chimps, orang-utans) are practised, habitual deceivers. And those that deceive, do better.

The book explores "the idea that intelligence began in social manipulation, deceit and cunning co-operation." Their work was further developed when Robin Dunbar, of the University of Liverpool, came up with a way to demonstrate a link between brain size and the complexity of an animal's social life.

Those with bigger brains (in particular, a bigger neocortex, which is the "thinking" part of the brain that deals with abstraction, self-reflection and planning) lived in bigger social groups.

Baboons = big brain = big social group.

Vervets = small brain = small social group.

Even more exciting, the size of the neocortex was such a strong predictor of the size of the social group a primate lived in that Dunbar could predict that size, just by looking at the brain. And get it right!

One word of warning - according to Dunbar, the human brain is evolved to function in a social group of around 150 people (friends, colleagues and acquaintances). Any more than that and you're stressing your neocortex unduly. Until we evolve a bit further, that is.

So, a poem for Saturday.

Darwin vs.

The neocortex we ought admire

for its liar, liar, pants on fire;

the fittest are those who fib the best

and gain dominion o'er the rest.

And as a liar, this I know:

it was not God who made it so.

An olduvai core is rather like the Holy Grail to me: they are the oldest created things to which we still have access. They were made over 2 million years ago (won't bore you with precise timelines) and are undoubtedly tools.

Named after the Olduvai Gorge - the Grand Canyon of prehistory - in the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania, they, and the stone flakes struck from them, were certainly made and used by the earliest Homo species (including Homo Habilis) and quite possibly by the Australopicines (a hominid genus that came to an end). They are really our first tangible clue as to what makes us man.

Going back to brain size, this emergence of tool use strongly correlates to the explosion in brain size of hominids that led to us. Of course, there are numerous theories as to why - the creation of tools and their use itself, the necessity for more abstract thought and forward planning that tool creation suggests, the very real fact that these tools enabled the enhancement of hominid's diets (the brain is a very energy-expensive organ) and then the question of language, to share knowledge, which is a book in itself. That's just a few, by the way.

Anyway, in 1995 I luckily had a short meeting in town (London town) that left me the opportunity to get to The Royal Academy to see the Africa: The Art of a Continent exhibition. I walked into the crowded first room and immediately, twenty-five feet away from me, saw a glass case, illuminated. I knew instantly what was inside it and hadn't expected it at all. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. Honestly.

So here, a poem for Sunday. It's not a new poem, but it's my favourite of anything I've ever written.

Moment

for a heartbeat there is no heartbeat
between the hominid and me
she holds it steady hand like mine
I hold it steadfast in my gaze
and will not look away till I can bear the weight
for this is it this rock
the birth of homo habilis who bears me
these two million years past imagine
what happens in her mind that makes her reason
if I hit this with that then other will result
and I can use it glass-cased before me
is the Olduvai Core of Prehistory
and I can’t use language in order to grasp
this the moment of the start of our past

Finally, a leap forward of a couple of million years and we've got Homo Sapiens in Europe, painting things on cave walls. In the Cueva de la Pileta, Andalucia, Spain, the earliest paintings are probably around 22,000 years old, from the Solutrean period. The cave art continues through the Magdalenian, up to 9,ooo years ago. This is the Upper Paleolithic.

The entrance. When I went there that terrace, cabin and fence hadn't been built.

Map showing the extent of La Cueva de la Pileta
I was lucky enough to visit this cave, and have been trying to write about it for quite a while now. So what follows is not the Monday poem, but the story of what a poem will one day be about, when I find the poem. I know it's out there. Well, in here.
All the pictures within the text are actually of La Cueva de la Pileta.

So for Monday: a draft of a poem to be.

Man

Come and join me, we’re going on a journey
Julie and I and now you,
driving to our destination we are so high
you may look out of the car window
and see the Iberian eagle
turn its head and look straight in your eye:
which is thrilling, if not exactly pleasant.
We will get lost, a little,
for this is rural, archaic Spain
and road signs are yet to be invented.
Moreover, we are seeking Benaoján
which none of us can pronounce.

We’re here, but nothing else is,
The Rough Guide states this is the place
but no one’s told the locals.
We will ascend the rock cut steps
and it’s hot for this today,
but a bottle of Evian later
and there, there, the mouth of a cave
sealed with a Pentonville grille.
Wait ten minutes sweating and we are joined,
Julie and I and now you,
by two German seekers of truths
with better boots by far than us:
I worry they’ve been before.

A mere fifty minutes later, a mere forty minutes late
our guide arrives.
He has an oil lantern, little English
and no German, clown mimes slipping
and banging his head as warnings,
ignores the bars and unlocks
a small wooden door
and we go in.
I’ve never been in a cave before
that wasn’t somehow lit, have you?
The lantern’s glow extends to around six feet
and after that, damp black mystery.
You hear so much more, drips, breaths, hiss
then Jesus hits a stalactite
and it makes a musical note;
he laughs, as do Julie and I.
The Germans don’t.

And then we all stand
and the lantern is lifted
and the first auroch is revealed
and there is no breathing now
we have travelled time,
Julie and I and now you
and it is dark, very dark
and cave art like in all the books
is before us now
but it’s not like in the books
I don’t belong here.

We stumble and creep on and down,
Julie and I and now you,
led by the lantern and the speared goats
and the speared deer and the speared aurochs
and the speared horses, even speared mares in foal
look down each time we halt
and I don’t belong here.

Julie knows now that she too is trespassing
for in the oil light
I can see her jarred.
We halt again
and the caterpillar eyelash things
deepen my distance
for I could look at them a geological age
and never uncrypt
for I cannot see with their eyes.

The final sala, half a mile in and down
the Sala del Pez
and I am amazed.
There is nothing like this in the cave art books.
Here, in the Sala del Pez
is a five foot long, anatomically perfect
drawing of a fish
Here, in the heart of a mountain
in the part of Spain
where it doesn’t mainly rain
a Platichtys flesus (the European Flounder)
is the one that got away.

It is not time that separates Julie and I
nor you, if you are she,
from the genius of these caves
but a single chromosome.

Must get highest, must get deepest,
must catch biggest, must kill most.
Ten thousand years
Men don’t change.

Having now alienated 49% of the population, I'll see you in a week!