Kuu

This is only my second post so I hope I am placing this in the right forum.

I was sort of thinking, as far as man's evolution goes, at what stage would have a proto-man, looked up as a sunset and thought to himself 'that is beautiful'

To me, it doesn't seem to be an evolutionary advantage to Man's love of art and beauty so why did it evolve in Humans?

I suppose there is no real answer to this question.

Duvenoy

Hmm.

I would tentivly say during the period that man's tools became a bit more complicated than a busted rock, showing an appreciation for form as well as function.

Neat question. Hope someone can answer it better than I.

doov

Vorkosigan

Long before the cave paintings, there was artistic sense...

From Glenn Morton:
<a href="http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/mining.htm" target="_blank">http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/mining.htm</a>

"The interesting thing about this mine is what was being mined. The ancient peoples were not mining flint, which would be considered useful for obtaining food. Lion cave is a pigment mine. They were mining red ochre, a pigment used by primitive peoples as body paint for their rituals. The amount of material moved is quite impressive. In the literature, I have heard estimates of 50-100 tons. But if the entire cavern carved out by the miners was hematite, I calculate that nearly 2700 tons of material was removed from this site. This is an incredible amount of material for paleolithic man to have removed from the site. Obviously, red ochre was an important item. What was it used for?

Dickson gives a history of the use of red ochre. He writes (Dickson, 1990, pp 42-43):

"Specimens of ochre have been reported from some of the oldest occupation or activity sites known from the Lower Paleolithic period in the Old World, including Bed II at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, Ambrona in Spain, Terra Amata in France, and Becov in Czechoslovakia. The use of ochre apparently increases during the Middle Paleolithic period in the Mousterian tradition and becomes common in the Upper Paleolithic period. "Ochre has no apparent practical or technological use until the development of iron metallurgy sometime in the second millennium before Christ when it becomes a principal ore for iron smelting. Nonetheless, many of the Paleolithic period ochre specimens show evidence of having been worked or utilized in some fashion. For example, the two lumps of ochre recovered at Olduvai Gorge show signs of having been struck directly by hammerstone blows (M. Leakey 1971). Howell (1965:129) states that the ochre specimen recovered at Ambrona showed evidence of shaping and trimming, although Butzer (1980:635) asserts this may only be natural cleavage. Still the ochre comes from the same horizon as the famous linear arrangement of elephant tusks and bones and was probably brought to the site by the hominids who are thought to have killed and butchered elephants there. "At Terra Amata, which was occupied around 300,000 B.P., de Lumley (1969:49) reports a number of ochre specimens recovered from the two occupation layers associated with the pole structures uncovered at the site. Specimens of red, yellow, and brown were recovered and the range of color variations suggests the ochre may have been heated. De Lumley also reports that the ends of some of the specimens were worn smooth suggesting they had been used in body painting. "Clearer evidence of ochre use comes from Becov in Czechoslovakia. This cave site, occupied ca.250,000 B. P., yielded a specimen of red ochre that was striated on two faces with marks of abrasion together with a flat rubbing stone with a granular crystalline surface that had been abraded in the center possibly during the preparation of ochre powder (Marshack 1981: 138). Whether or not the rubbing stone was actually used in the preparation of ochre powder is uncertain, but a wide area of the occupation floor from which the ochre lump had been recovered was stained with red ochre powder.

Why was pigment so important to people 70-80,000 and years ago that they would begin the massive mining operation? Why would they heat it to alter its color as Dickson suggests? If archaic Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Homo erectus were simply intelligent mammals lacking a religion (as Hugh Ross suggests [Ross, 1991, p. 159-160; 1995, p. 2]) then why all the interest in carrying around useless ochre? There can only be one reason. Since ochre (mineral: specularite, Fe2O3) can not be eaten nor used for any utilitarian purpose in a primitive society, art and ritual are the only remaining possibilities. The active mining of ochre for the past 80,000 years is highly indicative of a religious or spiritual sense for that entire time. The occurrence of ochre in Homo erectus sites as far back as 1.5 million years ago, would also argue for ritual among them. This red ochre mine is highly indicative of the ritual and spiritual lives of those who lived between 50 and 100 thousand years ago.

But this may not be the earliest evidence of a desire for pigment. The earliest evidence of a red pigment, a weathered basalt which when rubbed produces red powder, came from Bed II at Olduvai, dated at 1.7 million years ago (Oakley, 1981, p. 206-207)"

This article is wonderful, and should give you some new ways to view your question...

Vorkosigan

Camaban

Vorkosigan: Thought about taking basic camouflage into account?

Camouflage methods become more advanced, and an appreciation for good camo is formed, then it's tried on paintings to show what is meant, and goes from there.

Vorkosigan

Good suggestion. But I don't see anyway to know what really happened.

Vorkosigan

One of the last sane

Why not self-adornment? Is it any use for tattooing?

lpetrich

What we experience as "beauty" may be the result of some mechanism for having an attraction for certain sights, which would indicate either desirable entities or desirable places to be.

There has been much work on birds on what makes a bird seem attractive to another bird. Among birds, when one sex is splashier-looking than the other, it is almost always the male. And there is experimental evidence that female birds tend to prefer splashier-looking males; for example, female African widowbirds are known to prefer male ones with longer tailfeathers, as has been shown by giving male ones longer tailfeathers.

Longer tailfeathers and other such features are associated with good health, as has been found by measuring immune-system performance and quantity of parasites; a side effect of being in good health is, of course, being able to commit resources to grow longer tailfeathers and other such features.

Likewise, being symmetric is an indicator of good health, because symmetry is a result of internal growth processes, while asymmetry is usually the result of injuries and infections and infestations and the like.

Ability to commit resources is evident in the bowers built by male bowerbirds; the healthiest ones build the biggest bowers. This may also explain the horns and antlers of many ungulates -- having the resources to spend on growing these structures is a sign of good health.

Also, being splashily colored can even be an indicator of one's ability to escape predators, because surviving after having advertised oneself to them indicates good survival ability.

But why is it the male bird whose appearance gets selected in this fashion? The answer is a result of how much by way of resources each sex contributes to the next generation. Females produce much bigger gametes (eggs) than males (sperm), and therefore have more to lose from a bad investment. Thus, they are naturally selected to be more choosy, and they generally have much more "practical" sorts of colors, such as camouflage colors.

And association of selectivity with resource investment has been demonstrated with certain Australian crickets, whose males produce sperm capsules (spermatophores) that the female eats. When males produce big sperm capsules, they become choosy and the females become competitive, while when they produce small ones, it is the females that become choosy and the males that become competitive.

This mechanism may operate in our species also, but there are interesting variations. For example, when food is scarce, being fat becomes beautiful, while when food is abundant, being thin becomes beautiful. The production of enough food to make thinness beautiful has happened only in the last few centuries, which means too little time to cause significiant genetic changes; this preference must thus be learned.

RufusAtticus

A possibility is that our artistic sides are simply pleiotropic.

A good possibility is that our artistic sides are the result of sexual selection. Ladies dig artists. Groupies could have been very important for maintaining artistic genes.

~~RvFvS~~

Doubting Didymus

The human capacity for appreciating beauty of this kind is probably an 'unintentional' side effect of evolution. lpetrich's examples of healthy mate selection was probably the early selection advantage, and as humans grew to rely almost completely on brain power to survive, this basic practical function became increasingly complex.

Once you have a complex organ like the brain, it can be incidentally put to any number of uses unrelated to its original purpose. It is probably in this way that our brains can be put to uses that do not directly benifit our survival.

Richard Dawkins uses the example of the modern desktop PC. Originally made as an extraordinarily powerful calculator, it was soon discovered that the exact same unchanged object could be used for word processing, and for a horde of other things too, completely unrelated to its original purpose.

Also, the brain has an incredible capacity for learning practically anything at all, no matter how coincidental or useless. All this means that we have this powerful computing tool, with a predisposition to find certain appearances beautiful, an incidental ability to be put to various uses, and a strong tendancy to learn from others. The modern appreciation of art and natural beauty was practically a foregone conclusion.

Dr.GH

There are two points of reference here, but I am embarassed to say that I don't have them on hand.

First is a neurobio result on the human response to novelty. We really respond to novel stimuli.

The other was an article about the earliest dated 'symbolic' artifact, a geometrically incised block of ochre from S. Africa. The site was dated to around 70K YBP. I don't recall the dating method.

[ July 08, 2002: Message edited by: Dr.GH ]</p>