Conrad Montell
would tend to be more fit in performing survival
tasks. Fear is a powerful emotion leading to adapta-
tions for physical protection. Fear of a kind for
which physical survival precautions could not be
taken would require a special kind of adaptation. I
suggest that with increasing awareness, the more
successful hominids would have gone through such
adaptations (and have been the beneficiaries of
other natural forces); they would thus develop
smartness and dexterity of a different kind in order
to “fabricate” the protection offered by embryonic
beliefs and spiritual presences. Imagination, I sug-
gest, would be an adaptation in that evolutionary
process. Further, this would tend to drive commu-
nication along the road of symbolic language. You
can’t communicate religious search and discovery
via calls and gestures—no matter how complex
these calls and gestures might be. Langer describes
the evolution of awareness of mortality as a still
incomplete process:
“With the rise and gradual conception of the ‘self’
as the source of personal autonomy comes, of
course, the knowledge of its limit—the ultimate
prospect of death. The effect of this intellectual ad-
vance is momentous. Each person’s deepest emo-
tional concern henceforth shifts to his own life,
which he knows cannot be indefinitely preserved...
As a naked fact, that realization is unacceptable;
there are few societies, savage or civilized, that ad-
mit it today” (Langer 1982, p103).
On that long road to awareness (which we are still
traveling), hominids would become aware of
changes in the environment and begin to detect
what they would later come to know as life cycles.
They would gain awareness of a time beyond the
immediate moment. Donald, in contrasting the
awareness of time in humans to that of apes, writes:
“Their lives are lived entirely in the present, as a
series of concrete episodes, and the highest element
in their system of memory representation seems to
be at the level of event representation. Where hu-
mans have abstract symbolic memory representa-
tions, apes are bound to the concrete situation or
episode” (Donald 1991, p149).
In order to express time beyond the immediate
moment, proto-humans had to have some conduit
for such thought, some linguistic structure. In the
iterative struggle to communicate such thought,
previously developed calls and gestures indicating
food, courtship, and other opportunities; predators,
storms, and other dangers, this utilitarian commu-
nication would need to be extended into more con-
ceptual domains, and into what would eventually
become symbolic language. Such shifting of com-
munication into symbolic language would facilitate
further conceptual awareness, culminating in
awareness of mortality: some crude “imagining” of
the possibility of one’s own death. There would now
be a greater need for symbolic language, and, un-
doubtedly, a life and death struggle to achieve it.
Although other animals have complex communica-
tive behavior, even a simple language seems impos-
sibly difficult. This poses a profound riddle in un-
derstanding the origin of language (Deacon 1997).
A possible answer to this riddle might be found
within the developing awareness of mortality and
the emergence of imagination. “Imaginative dis-
coveries” require just such a communication device
as we have—language, with its set of vocabulary and
grammar for communicating the abstractions of
imaginative discoveries. At a later stage: “Language
and awareness of personal mortality brought with
them the emergence of burial practices, rituals, and
symbols related to the death experience, along with
the origins of religions” (Langs 1996, p131). “Once
symbolic communication became even slightly
elaborated in early hominid societies, its unique
representational functions and open-ended flexibil-
ity would have led to its use for innumerable pur-
poses with equally powerful reproductive conse-
quences” (Deacon 1997, p349).
Accidentally and reluctantly aware early humans
(such awareness, I argue, emerging as an impedi-
ment to survival) would be forced to consider first
the possibility, then the likelihood, and then the yet
unthinkable fact of individual death. Imagination,
in its early development, although it would prove
to be a vital aid in dealing with awareness of death,
might also have exacerbated the awareness itself by
making it more vivid: “in the evolution of mind
imagination is as dangerous as it is essential”
(Langer 1982, p137). Good things hardly ever come
easily or without a price tag. Imagining the possibil-
ity of one’s death was (and of course still is) an awe-
some and potentially debilitating awareness, a per-
vasive “danger” for the individual that cannot, as
with specific threats to life, be guarded against. Sur-
vival now required something in addition to the
satisfaction of physical needs: structures, devices,
and processes, for the individual and then for the
group, to ameliorate that difficult-to-live-with
awareness. Initially, there might be little more than
vague feelings of something wrong or threatening.
At the very least this nascent awareness would lead
to thoughts not conducive to happy hunting. How
might that individual deal with such thoughts?
Evolution and Cognition ∣ 9 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1