Landscape of the Mind: Human Evolution and the Archaeology of Thought by John F. Hoffecker

Author:John F. Hoffecker [Hoffecker, John F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780231147040

The house floors in the Isle River sites illustrate a pattern that becomes increasingly obvious and even somewhat oppressive in the millennia following the end of the Paleolithic-the imposition of geometric forms on the landscape.104 Rectangles, squares, pyramids, and even the true, or Euclidian, circle are unknown in the natural world-biotic or abiotic.105 Evolutionary biology yields symmetrical forms, but not geometric shapes (organisms tend to be lumpy and uneven). Simple geometric shapes are creations of the modern mind. From the late Upper Paleolithic onward, modern humans began to reconstruct the natural landscape in accordance with these mental creations, remaking the world in the form of the mind. So pervasive is the contemporary landscape of this externalized geometry that most of the global population now dwells largely within its own mind.

Geometry is a common theme in later Upper Paleolithic art. Although some of most impressive examples of representational cave paintings and sculptures-date to after 20,000 years ago, abstract designs and geometric forms predominate in places like central and eastern Europe.106 The meanings attached to the visual art of the later Upper Paleolithic remain unknowable, but the change in content and style from the EUP and the Gravettian is undeniable and suggests a shift in worldview. Later Upper Paleolithic people had acquired considerably more knowledge of and greater control over the external world than their predecessors, which surely was reflected in how they interpreted it. Perhaps they felt that they lived in a more orderly and manageable universe than had their ancestors. If so, they were indeed laying the foundation for the post Paleolithic civilizations that would obsessively reconstruct that universe with numbers.

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