ANTICIPATION: The Archaeology of Time (Part One)

So, the question is: At what point in hominid evolution did humans begin using the concept of "TIME"? The very idea of time is invisible, an invisible tool, if you will. Other, more obvious "prime motivators" have been attributed to moving cultural evolution forward, so-called 'Great Leaps Forward'. Leaving aside for the moment the potential fallacy of teleology, some of these attributes, as proffered, are, stone tool use, division of labor, language, cooperative hunting, bipedalism, and even cooking. I believe ALL of the above are significant to establishing new neurophysiological structures and capabilities. But the one single-most important idea humans adopted in the long march of time, IS time.

There is scant evidence that our cousins, the other contemporary hominid species, Homo neanderthalensis ever operated in the conscious concept of time. There are famous sites, such as the burial with fossil pollen of flowers deposited within a grave, which is taken to mean thoughts of an "afterlife", but there is no regular, consistent demonstration of operating on a daily basis with a consciousness of temporal scheduling.

Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, gives forth, somewhere in the Magdalenian, an artifact made of the antler of Rangifer terandis, reindeer. On this antler is inscribed the phases of the moon over an extended period of a couple of months. Think about this. Tracking the changing appearance of the moon over time indicates not only that they were aware of the altered state of the off-world phenomenon, but also, that there is a regularity, a pattern discernible, which is trackable, i.e., can be EXPECTED to change day to day, through this invisible ether of time. Waiting for the next night to appear, so one can record the phase of the moon, implies that one is anticipating something recordable which is different than the state before, the night before.

Consider the implied and plotted trajectory of a cannonball fired across a field. In the plotting, the dotted line represents the prior states of the position of the cannonball. Given that dotted line, and curves in nature, it is possible to make a reasonable guess, or PREDICTION of where the cannonball will land. in order to make that prediction, one needs the neurophysiological structures in the brain, already pre-configured for operating in time, to make a predictive statement, which has not yet happened. In the future.

Speaking about things which have not happened yet, or more precisely, the ABILITY to speak about future events implies that a) you can think such things, and b) that others can understand you talking about future events. This is not a simple proposition. Understanding that someone is speaking of events not yet realized means that the audience also has the brain structures to take in the meaning of your references yet to be.

Given that this species had for many millennia been hunting, collectively, and that bands of hunters had to go away in space from the base camp, for many days at a time, only to return to share the proceeds of the
hunt, implies that everyone in the tribe understood the necessity of doing so. When the hunters returned with booty to share, rejoicing at the good fortune led to an opportunity to share tales of the hunt. This is the classic rendition of the origins of theater, where the hunters recount the exploits encountered during the several-days hunt. It has been fancied as dancing around a campfire, acting out the highlights of the hunt, with suspenseful moments, the critical actions, the missed shots, and the resolution bringing resources.

At some moment in this long march of theater, Sapiens had been unconsciously acquiring the ability to understand things which had already taken place, the recounting of which was already familiar to them. At some point, a threshold was crossed where the pre-configured neurophysiology was used for yet another contemplation of actions acted out over a temporal stage, only this time, it was yet to be realized.

Crossing this Rubicon was the moment that sapiens became the pre-ordained fittest to survive in the unbespoke competition for dominance in Pleistocene Europe. Being able to anticipate, to configure future events like next week's hunt, gave this fecund species it's advantage over neanderthalensis.The question is, when did that happen? The reindeer antler comes from about 30,000 years before present.

Parietal cave art recently discovered at Pont D'Arc on the Rhone in Provence dates to about 32,000 YBP. So, we can assume that in the neighborhood of 30-35 thousands of years ago, Homo Sapiens had already acquired the brain structures capable of operating in the invisible tool of Time, since parietal art implies a viewer of that art, displaced in time from the making. It is not unreasonable to hazard that there were several millennia of precursor development of the ability to manage things in time before the hard evidence makes an appearance.

The interesting point about working within an understanding that not everything happens at once, is that one can PLAN ahead for survival, one can configure one's environment to guarantee a modicum of success down the road. By the time of the Late Paleolithic, when humans are hunting them, reindeer herds had for countless millennia been traversing regular migration routes in their transhumance. Approaching the hunt could go two ways: Either one's tribe could be wandering to-and-fro across the earth hoping to encounter some megafaunal supper, or, one's tribe could use the invisible tool of time, with the tribal memories of the pattern of reindeer migration at certain indicated times of year, at specific places, and wait for them to come to you. This latter method is much more ergonomically efficient, and has the advantage of freeing time for other activities, in the meantime.

All that is required is an understanding that there is such aching as predictability of a pattern operating in a timeline. Such periodicities are abundant in nature, if one follows the idea of regularity. Regularity, of course, is written over time; knowing the pattern allows planning ahead for resource exploitation, and better survival.

Much, if not all of cultural evolution is predicated on anticipating perturbations in otherwise dependable natural patterns, and mitigating for those disturbances. If you rely on annual flooding to lay down fresh soil which gives rise to an abundance of harvestable crops, even before the Agricultural Revolution, in the Horticultural Era, and you have the advantage of tribal memory which tells that there is periodicity to wet/dry years, of say, seven years, then you can adjust your migratory trafficking to accommodate the fluctuation. You can wander over a wider circuit in dry years to supplant the lowered expectations of harvest in any given area. This insures a better survival rate for your tribe. Knowing the perturbations in the periodicity helps to plan for compensation to the variable flux.

So knowing how to operate within the invisible tool of time helps to succeed in the struggle for survival. This ability becomes increasingly important as culture becomes more complex and complicated, until today, it is corporations with a good handle on logistics and "JIT" manufacturing systems that succeed. Much of our lives are consumed by being at the right place at the right time; we are driven by temporality.

Much of our success is not even conscious of managing in the context of time, but the lessons learned over the vast stretch of human millennia come down to us as a sequence of three large-scale methodologies which operate in the background of human activity. These are roughly sequential in evolutionary utility, although they can operate contemporaneously and in concert.

The three methods are, Mitigation, Moderation, and Modulation. One could add, for completeness, another method deriving from these, as "Mini-Maxing". But the latter is, properly, a refinement of the others. How these work in real time, is seen in most human affairs, particularly in large scales, and is consistent with the adage that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'.

Viewing these methods, or approaches to natural conditions is best seen in a more primitive, or simpler, context, such as a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where the number of influential factors is fewer, and thus more discernible, if still already complex.