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 trajector…
Read moreThe 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.
