Pietro Allegretti

Art making, understood as making music, dancing, and producing visual artworks, has a deep evolutionary history. Traces of musical instruments, figurative arts, and rock art, like engravings and cupules, are found all around Europe, Asia, and Africa since the Pleistocene. The debate about the evolution of art making has produced many theories of how arts evolved in humans’ deep past. In this article, I add my contribution to one of the debate’s most influential positions, Ellen Dissanayake’s account of art making, focusing in particular on her explanation of the antecedents of arts, i.e., mother–infant interaction. I first integrate Dissanayake’s account of ape infant behavior with new evidence from comparative studies and develop a new approach to build an account of the hominin _suite_ of behaviors in the context of parental care using evidence from cognitive paleoanthropology and comparative neurobiology. I then propose a novel method to identify, in the fossil record, the evolution of arts as described by Dissanayake. These two lines of research are importantly intertwined: I suggest that changes in hominin parental care may help identify new cognitive skills relevant for tracing the origin and early developments of arts. I conclude that the capacity of art making may have evolved multiple times since the Middle Pliocene (≈4 mya) in different hominin lineages.

The anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake provides an evolutionary account of the universal human characteristics of making music, dancing, and producing artworks. She suggests that art-making behavior is a cross-cultural phenomenon that evolved as participative group performances for fostering group cohesion. This phenomenon evolved from a biological adaptation of hominins for increased parental care. In this paper, I will motivate Dissanayake’s concept of artification and the evolutionary trajectory of it from Pleistocene hominins ≈ 2.5 mya, focusing on the inference of the socio-cognitive conditions required for the evolution of ritual ceremonies and the proxies to infer the timeline of these components in the fossil record offered by Dissanayake. Then, I will suggest that Dissanayake’s account provides the wrong chronology of the origin of parental care. I will then propose a solution to the origin of parental care and suggest it is at the origin of hominin evolution of prosociality. Based on this claim, I will suggest using evidence from comparative studies and cognitive paleoarcheology that the socio-cognitive conditions for ritual ceremonies evolved earlier in time than suggested by Dissanayake, highlighting gradual, multi-species developments.