Theory of Evolution.

[warpus]

I would say that art is probably an application of a skill that can have an evolutionary advantage - the ability to paint symbols or drawings of animals (or of something else) on a wall or on a parchment or on whatever.

It's also probably an indicator of a social structure or social groups - and maybe socially driven rituals as well, perhaps religious/spiritual ones. These things have evolutionary advantages as well.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I would say that art is probably an application of a skill that can have an evolutionary advantage - the ability to paint symbols or drawings of animals (or of something else) on a wall or on a parchment or on whatever.

It's also probably an indicator of a social structure or social groups - and maybe socially driven rituals as well, perhaps religious/spiritual ones. These things have evolutionary advantages as well.

It also gave us something else to do with our very capable hands.

 

[Agent327]

I would say that art is probably an application of a skill that can have an evolutionary advantage - the ability to paint symbols or drawings of animals (or of something else) on a wall or on a parchment or on whatever.

It's also probably an indicator of a social structure or social groups - and maybe socially driven rituals as well, perhaps religious/spiritual ones. These things have evolutionary advantages as well.

Rituals are not limited to the human species, art or no art.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Art is an indication that a species is capable of abstract thought.

 

[Perfection]

That's not just probable, it is exactly what happened.

I'm not sure whow you would have Mesoarmericans copy agriculture from a continent they had no contact with (and fail to copy the wheel). Also, Mesoamericans grow corn (and maize) because it grows there. Sort of like how rice is the prime crop in Asia - and always has been.

I'm sorry I thought when you said

Then, all of a sudden, about 10,000 years ago: organized agriculture. Now that pretty much spread like wildfire. Evolutionary changes, however, do not.

You were implying the starting of agriculture was a single event that spread over the globe. Which we both appear to agree was not the case.

This is quite important to note because the fact that agriculture arose multiple times on a evolutionary small timescale means that there must have been a common cause.

Did this art have or result from any evolutionary advantages? Did it allow an increase in population? Any other evolutionary advantage?

Well it gives a hint as to what that common cause might be, perhaps some intellectual capability (as Valka suggested) that allowed for complex agricultural societies to develop.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Once humans figured out that particular plants could be eaten and that harvesting was easier than hunting, it is only a few steps to figuring out how to grow things on a larger scale. Humans already understood seasons and the migration/life patterns of animals. So, if you know that a plant is useful and can watch it grow, figuring out how to grow more of it is not so difficult. We have exceptional powers of observation. Growing more near where your original source is found would be the first step; growing the plant under new conditions would be more difficult. Wheat, barley, rice, and maize all are uncomplicated to grow in their original locations and once someone figured out how to grow more, everyone wanted to join the party. The same thing happened with writing.

 

[Narz]

everyone wanted to join the party.

More like everyone who didn't want to join the party got annihilated by those that did. Agriculture created a lot more work, less leisure time & worse nutrition but it did make more calories available within the group allowing for greater populations & larger armies to conquer neighbors.

 

[Agent327]

I'm sorry I thought when you said

[...]

You were implying the starting of agriculture was a single event that spread over the globe. Which we both appear to agree was not the case.

I was just mocking the wildfire analogy...

Well it gives a hint as to what that common cause might be, perhaps some intellectual capability (as Valka suggested) that allowed for complex agricultural societies to develop.

Art has very little to do with growing food AFAIK.

Once humans figured out that particular plants could be eaten and that harvesting was easier than hunting, it is only a few steps to figuring out how to grow things on a larger scale. Humans already understood seasons and the migration/life patterns of animals. So, if you know that a plant is useful and can watch it grow, figuring out how to grow more of it is not so difficult. We have exceptional powers of observation. Growing more near where your original source is found would be the first step; growing the plant under new conditions would be more difficult. Wheat, barley, rice, and maize all are uncomplicated to grow in their original locations and once someone figured out how to grow more, everyone wanted to join the party. The same thing happened with writing.

Actually, agrculture isn't easier than hunting at all: it's a lot more labour intensive. For which reason in reality it didn't 'spread like wildfire' at all, but expanded rather slowly. It takes quite a few adjustments to change from a (semi-)nomadic to a sedentary community. Grains are also not 'ucomplicated to grow': they take close attention and care for most of the year - not to mention the possible soil exhaustion as a rseult of monocultures. There's nothing 'simple' about agriculture.

'The same happened with writing'. Yes, that also spread rather slowly. For one, you have to get a group of people to agree on what certain symbols stand for, so it's closely connected to the discovery of symbolism. (And here we have art coming in: it's quite a big step from picturing something - picture of animal represents animal - to pcituring something abstract - picture of certain animal/plant represents 'food'.)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Art has very little to do with growing food AFAIK.

Uh-huh. That's why there are no jigsaw puzzles and paint-by-number kits of John Deere tractors...


Seriously, before agriculture, there wasn't a lot of time or resources available for art. Most of the peoples' time was spent either acquiring food through hunting and gathering, or preparing it for eating after it was hunted or gathered. If anyone wanted to indulge in artistic stuff, they were limited to the supplies that were available locally or what they could carry.

An agricultural society means not everyone has to participate in the acquisition and preparation of food. Some degree of specialization is possible, and when you're not constantly on the move or migrating, you can set up a shop and store things, you've got room to work, and a place for bartering/selling. And once you've got that, along comes experimentation with new ideas and standardization of the ideas that find the most favor.

Art isn't just found in drawings and paintings. Archaeologists have been able to figure out a lot about a society just by studying the form and aesthetics of their pottery, baskets, and cloth.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Seriously, before agriculture, there wasn't a lot of time or resources available for art. Most of the peoples' time was spent either acquiring food through hunting and gathering, or preparing it for eating after it was hunted or gathered. If anyone wanted to indulge in artistic stuff, they were limited to the supplies that were available locally or what they could carry.

An agricultural society means not everyone has to participate in the acquisition and preparation of food. Some degree of specialization is possible, and when you're not constantly on the move or migrating, you can set up a shop and store things, you've got room to work, and a place for bartering/selling. And once you've got that, along comes experimentation with new ideas and standardization of the ideas that find the most favor.

Art isn't just found in drawings and paintings. Archaeologists have been able to figure out a lot about a society just by studying the form and aesthetics of their pottery, baskets, and cloth.

Well that (bolded) is not necessarily true.

At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition.

At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.[25] These people met the same requirements as their sedentary neighbors through much less complex means. Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, where as people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.[26]

Recent research also indicates that the life-expectancy of hunter-gatherers is surprisingly high.[27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well that (bolded) is not necessarily true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer

There's not one word I could see in that article about the professional artist or individual who employs artistry in making otherwise utilitarian objects as a primary occupation.

 

[Narz]

Even artists have to hunt for food, albeit @ the grocery store nowadays.

 

[Birdjaguar]

It is about time. You said that there wasn't enough time or resources for art when in fact there might have been more time. Pre-agricultural art could have involved tattooing, jewelry making, decorating clothing with beads or other decorations, cave painting, carving objects, singing, story telling, or dancing. Agriculture mainly added less portable art to the mix.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's not like a person doing cave painting could take the cave wall with him or her when the group moved on somewhere!

Yeah, some forms of artwork are more portable than others. I can fit some of my sewing and craft projects into a very small space... until the finished object is complete. At that point it's too big to tuck into a pocket or pouch.

I mentioned available resources. If the artist wants to use a particular kind of clay, plants, or other item on an ongoing basis, it either has to be plentiful everywhere, or easily transported for the artist to make more than a relative few of the finished product. But if the artist is able to settle in the area, ideally within a society where not everyone is responsible for using most of their working time gathering food, it's possible to devote that working time to setting up the means to produce those artistic items.

I've been a crafter, Birdjaguar. I've spent 12-14 hours a day for weeks on end getting ready for seasonal craft fairs, plus the regular stuff I made to sell year-round in the craft stores in town, in addition to the special orders. Some of the items I've made have traveled many thousands of miles farther around this planet than I'll ever get myself. If I'd lived in a society where I had to spend any of those 12-14 hours/day doing hunting, gathering, or cooking, I wouldn't have had even half the inventory I did, or the time to design new patterns and experiment with different kinds of stitching techniques (all hand-sewn - no sewing machines, glue, or other shortcuts involved in my stuff).

Do you remember those amazing MS Paint designs Bozo Erectus posted years ago? They're in the A&E forum. He gave me permission to turn them into needlepoint pictures or rugs if I wanted (not to sell; I wouldn't steal his ideas). I haven't done any yet because it would be a HUGE project to do right, and I'd want to do them justice. They're the kind of project that would involve a lot of supplies, not to mention the tools to properly deal with the canvas, whether needlepoint canvas, rug canvas, or Aida cloth. If I chose the rug option, good luck carting that around! I've worked on huge rugs and banners in the SCA, and it took a whole group of us the better part of a year to finish one banner. Several weeks of that time was spent with it stretched out on my rug hooking frame (large enough to do a quilt on), and two people sitting side-by-side working.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Now you're just moving the goalposts though Valka.

First it's: Pre-Agricultural societies didn't have time for art.

Now it's: Pre-Agricultural societies didn't have time for these specific kinds of art (which we, as a Post-Agricultural society view as most valid.)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Now you're just moving the goalposts though Valka.

Or it could just be that I realized I hadn't explained myself clearly enough the first time around. I didn't realize I had to get so specific.

It's not "moving goalposts" to clarify earlier posts.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

What is it in the human condition that demands a creation myth?

 

[Domen]

Art is actually much older than agriculture:



Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohne6LpKFKk&list=PL142715B39745054C#t=942

 

[Birdjaguar]

What is it in the human condition that demands a creation myth?

Humans seem to have a strong need to organize and explain (=storytelling?). Creation stories are all about organizing and explaining the unknown. Such tales, as well as other tales, provide a foundation for culture and social norms. The actual truth of the matter is less important than having the foundation.

 

[Domen]

The actual truth of the matter is less important than having the foundation.

This applies to many myths, not just creation myths. For example a feminist myth that gender difference is socially constructed, not biological:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_gender_difference

http://scentednectar.blogspot.com/2012/01/swedens-gender-war-konskriget.html

"Sweden's Gender War" documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn3cHsHnUPM

Another "taboo" field where the foundation myth has become more important than actual truth is this - here 2014 articles by Nicholas Wade:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/nicholas-wade-race-has-a-biological-basis-racism-does-not-1403476865

http://thoughtsonliberty.com/no-inq...gical-basis-for-race-is-not-scientific-racism

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/155938

These foundation myths have become new quasi-religious dogmas in many modern societies.

To the point that people who argue over these foundation myths are targeted by modern equivalents of witch hunters and the holy inquisition.