Why can we imagine things that don’t exist?
The Löwenmensch (Lion Man) and various Venus figurines are evidence of human symbolic thinking around 40,000 years ago. It is unlikely any of them are veridical representations of something that actually existed. The same is true of cave paintings, which go back even further.
They are certainly evidence of human symbolic representation, and they are probably evidence of human symbolic thought. It might be argued that those early artists were just doing their best at making true representations, but that’s not easy to support. It is more likely that those early humans saw no particular value in making true representations of things they saw in real life on a regular basis.
Symbolic perception and representation are fundamental to who we are as human beings. We have no evidence of any other animal expressing a symbolic representation of the world, though we know some animals can respond to our symbolic presentations (birds, chimps, etc.), and some birds can makes symbolic displays (e.g., bowerbirds.)
Human symbolic representation consists of mentally deconstructing our perceptions into pieces, manipulating those pieces, and constructing representation using those pieces. We also take in our perceptions as whole images, for instance, a real bear, but those images are not so easily manipulated as a collection of symbols, so we do both. Careful studies of people with lesions to one hemisphere or the other, along with evidence from split brain patients, have shown that the symbolic representation is primarily a product of the left hemisphere and holistic representation is primarily a product of the right hemisphere.
It makes sense that the left hemisphere would hold the symbolic representation since it also holds much of our understanding of language, which also benefits from the deconstruction and symbolic mapping of sounds. The sounds of words, like the arms of the Lion Man, are recognizable as having meaning even though that meaning is not something obviously recognizable in the world.
I’m sure that the artist who made the Lion Man was aware that it wasn’t a true representation of anything in this world. I suspect she was proud of her ability to create something that didn’t exist before her work appeared, perhaps related to something that had been represented in words before her work.
We don’t know how humans developed our symbolic understanding of the world, though it’s apparent that it now resides primarily in the left hemisphere. There is evidence that the right hemisphere processes its perceptions much as other animals do, giving us two complementary ways of interpreting the world. What we have found recently is that our cerebral cortex has about twice as many neurons as any other animal’s, allowing us to be just as smart as any other animal in an animal sense while we are equally smart in a uniquely human sense.
We also don’t know when the transition took place. Since we see little or no evidence of symbolic cognition or representation in chimps, it is likely the new cognition appeared after the last hybridization between chimps and Australopithecus about 5.5 million years ago.
The Lion Man seems clear evidence of symbolic cognition about 40,000 years ago. Perhaps the transition started in earnest in Homo Erectus, about 1.5 million years ago, when many other characteristics of modern humans became apparent. Along with all the other changes since then, maybe it took until 40,000 years ago for our bonus symbolic understanding of the world to evolve to the point of artistic expression.
