14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that the earliest cave paintings were estimated to be just 16,000 years old, anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists say that the origins of crafts such as music, painting, and writing may be found in the Pleistocene epoch, a period that started more than 1.6 million years ago. Philosophy of art professor Denis Dutton, from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, says that some bits of our behavior have been genetically-programmed into our brains since the dawn of evolution, and that they are best adapted to the times humans evolve.
And while this is true for arts, it's also true for behavior, which more and more researchers say was shaped by our environment more than one million years ago. In Dutton's opinion, the behavior our ancestors in the primordial days, learning to exhibit, is the main factor responsible for the appearance of arts as we know them in more “recent” times. The researcher termed this phenomenon “Darwinian aesthetics,” although the term is subjected to a vivid debate among scholars.
It's pretty interesting to imagine that all the beautiful arts we are capable of today are founded on actions that people 80,000 generations before us took, not because they had a previous experience on the matter, but simply because they felt like it. Nowadays, children are subjected to art ever since they are born, staying in cradles listening to music from CD players, or sung by their own parents, having their rooms adorned with pretty colors and playing with beautiful toys.
But in the Pleistocene, when not even the biped walk was very well mastered, some humanoids may have set the basis for the Dalis, the Mozarts and the Hemingways of our days. One might argue that, even to this day, the wiring in our brain continues to develop, generating effects that may only become visible over thousands of years. By that time, probably, our successors will look back and wonder how we managed to live without the inventions that will most likely light up their world.