Evolution and Art - The Garden of Human Nature

In the human evolution from Stone Age, thirty-five thousand years ago, to the present, all human societies have made and responded to art. At first glance, art does not seem to be essential for basic survival, like water, food and sexual behavior. Simple forms of distinctively human behavior such as tool-using, sound-communication, symbolization can be found in the behavior of animals. But only people create art. From the perspective of evolutionary biology art could therefore serve some purpose that makes it crucial for human existence. We have developed ourselves as natural storytellers. Story-telling is pleasurable as our children show. Story-making is pleasurable as we observe playing children. The fluent imaginative capacity of our brain is immense.

Stories, like works of visual art, are highly organized models of reality that the narrator and listener/viewer alike can repeat. Stories extend our experience by giving us opportunities to anticipate hypothetically the world and its dangers and possibilities. We can turn stories over in our own minds examining relations between characters acting in different social and environmental settings. We playfully can test the given information. Story-telling is a low-risk way of solving survival problems in the imagination. This capacity gives story-telling and art a survival value. Story-telling and art enable us to model our world and to communicate those models to others.

Story-telling and art foster bonds between people, like social glue. They strengthen the group as a whole. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of art in primitive societies is that it is inseparable connected to daily life. In our era daily life becomes less locally and more and more globally influenced. In my opinion there is an increasing necessity to find new ways of looking at our global human behaviors. Our local adaptations seem to need some updating. This creative updating asks for independent artists that are capable of connecting the existing different worldviews within their universal art. In an authentically artistic way they can become initiators for our era in connecting people, groups and societies worldwide.