As a Christian theologian interested in human origins, the origin of religion, and the controversial issue of human ‘uniqueness’, I have been increasingly drawn to the contributions of paleoanthropologists and archeologists to this challenging problem. In my recent Gifford Lectures I have been deeply involved in trying to construct plausible ways for theology to enter into this important interdisciplinary conversation (cf. van Huyssteen 2006: forthcoming). As a way of facilitating this kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue I have argued for a postfoundationalist approach to interdisciplinary dialogue, which implies three important moves for theological reflection. First, as theologians we should acknowledge the radical contextuality of all our intellectual work, the epistemically crucial role of interpreted experience, and the way that disciplinary traditions shape the values that inform our reflection about God and what we believe to be God’s presence in the world. Second, a postfoundationalist notion of rationality should open our eyes to an epistemic obligation that points beyond the boundaries of our own discipline, our local communities, groups, or cultures, toward plausible forms of interdisciplinary dialogue (cf. van Huyssteen1999). Against this background I have argued for distinct and important differences between reasoning strategies used by theologians and scientists. I have also, argued, however, that some important shared rational resources may actually be identified for these very different cognitive domains of our mental lives (cf. van Huyssteen 2006, forthcoming). Thirdly, it is precisely these shared rational resources that enable interdisciplinary dialogue, and are expressed most clearly by the notion of transversal rationality. In the dialogue between theology and other disciplines, transversal reasoning promotes different but equally legitimate ways of viewing specific topics, problems, traditions, or disciplines, and creates the kind of space where different voices need not always be in contradiction, or in danger of assimilating one another, but are in fact dynamically interactive with one another. This notion of transversality thus provides a philosophical window to our wider world of communication through thought and action (cf. Schrag 1992:148ff.; Welsch 1996:764ff.), and teaches us to respect the disciplinary integrity of reasoning strategies as different as theology and the sciences.¹

This way of thinking is always concrete, local, and contextual, but at the same time reaches beyond local contexts to transdisciplinary concerns. The overriding concern here is as follows: while we always come to our interpersonal and cross-disciplinary conversations with strong personal beliefs, commitments and even prejudices, a postfoundationalist approach enables us to realize that, in spite of our radically different reasoning strategies, there is also much that we share in terms of our rational resources. An interdisciplinary approach, carefully thought through, can help us to identify these shared resources in different modes of knowledge so as to reach beyond the boundaries of our own traditional disciplines in cross-contextual, cross-disciplinary conversation. It can also enable us to identify possible shared conceptual problems as we negotiate the porous boundaries of our different disciplines.

One such shared interdisciplinary problem is the concern for human uniqueness, and how that may, or may not, relate to human origins and the evolution of religious awareness. It is, therefore, precisely in the problem of ‘human uniqueness’ that theology and the sciences may find a shared research trajectory. Our very human capacity (or mania?) for self-definition can most probably be seen as one of the ‘crowning achievements’ of our species. As we all know today, however, no one trait or accomplishment should ever be taken as the single defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Morever, what we see as our humanness, or even our distinct human ‘uniqueness’, ultimately implies a deeply moral choice: we are not just biological creatures, but as cultural creatures we have the remarkable but dangerous ability to determine whom we are going to include, or not, as part of ‘us’(cf. Proctor 2003:228f.). Talking about human uniqueness in reasoning strategies as different as theology and the sciences, therefore, will always have a crucially important moral dimension. We do seem to have a profound moral responsibility when defining ourselves, for naming ourselves always assumes a specific kind of reality that gives shape to the worlds we create and experience. It is also important to ask, however, how reasonable (or not) it might be for a theologian, after immersing him/herself in the challenging contemporary debates in paleoanthropology and archeology, to expect scientists to provide a starting point, or important links, for an interdisciplinary discussion of issues like human origins, human nature, human uniqueness, and even human destiny. And last but not least: how realistic is it for a Christian theologian to expect scientists to take theological contributions to these crucially important topics seriously?

An interesting part of our self-perception is that it is often the less material aspects of the history of our species that fascinates us most in the evolution of modern humans. We seem to grasp at an intuitive level that issues like language, self-awareness, consciousness, moral awareness, symbolic behavior and mythology, are probably the defining elements that really make us human (cf. Lewin 1993:4). Yet exactly these elements that most suggest humanness are often the least visible in the prehistoric record. For this reason paleoanthropologists correctly have focused on more indirect, but equally plausible material pointers to the presence of the symbolic human mind in early human prehistory. Arguably the most spectacular of the earliest evidences of symbolic behaviour in humans are the paleolithic cave paintings in South West France and the Basque Country, painted toward the end of the last Ice Age. The haunting beauty of these prehistoric images, and the creative cultural explosion that they represent, should indeed fascinate any theologian interested in human origins.

At first blush there does in fact seem to be a rather remarkable convergence between the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens, and Christian beliefs in the origins of the human creature (cf. García-Rivera 2003:9). In a sense the famous ‘cultural explosion’ of the Upper-Paleolithic, although in no sense the ‘beginning of a new species’, does exemplify the most distinctive traits of our species much as the creation myths of the Abrahamic religions refer to the arrival of a new species, created in the ‘image of God’². But easy comparisons stop here, for in the classic religious texts of the ancient Near East the ‘primal human being’ is seen as the significant forerunner of humanity, and as such defines the emerging relationship between humanity and the deity. The theologian, therefore, needs to be aware that the Genesis 1 texts are meant as clear expressions of the uniqueness of the primal human being, who occupies a position between the deity and humanity, and who is the only one who can lay claim to this distinction (cf. Callender 2000:206f.). Theologically, then, being created ‘in the image of God’ highlights the extraordinary importance of human beings: human beings are in fact walking representations of God, and as such of exquisite value and importance (cf. Towner 2001:26), a tradition that has been augmented centuries later by a very specific focus on the rational abilities and moral awareness of humans.

Over against two thousand years of complex conceptual evolution in the history of ideas of theological thought, the prehistoric treasures from the Upper-Paleolithic today seem to have become almost impossible to interpret, their ‘true meaning’ so elusive that it is virtually impossible to recreate any ‘original’ context of meaning in which they were first created. Yet we join paleoanthropologists in sensing that these products of ancient imagery may hold the key to what it means to be human, which for theology may significantly broaden and enrich what is meant today by ‘human uniqueness’, especially if we shift our focus of inquiry to accommodate more contextual and particularist interpretations.

For a theologian like myself, interested in interdisciplinary dialogue, precisely arguments for more local and contextual interpretations of paleolithic art are especially intriguing, and it is these more contextual approaches that will resonate with my own postfoundationalist approach to interdisciplinary discourse. A more contextual, local approach would imply that, rather than asking what the enduring meaning of these images may be, we should rather try to understand what made them meaningful for our early modern ancestors (cf. Conkey 1997:343ff.). What is undoubtedly clear is that a full century of the study of Paleolithic art has not produced any definite or final theory about this ‘art’, but rather has brought forth a number of truly conflicting claims. As a serious advocate of a radically contextual approach to interpreting paleolithic imagery, Margaret W. Conkey has warned against too glibly calling Upper-Paleolithic image-making ‘art’, since this superimposes a contemporary Western aesthetic perspective onto our evaluation of these mysterious images. For this reason Conkey and Soffer have recently suggested that our understanding of prehistoric imagery will be greatly advanced if we can manage to decouple this body of archeological evidence about past lifeways from its categorization as ‘art’ (cf. Soffer and Conkey 1997:1f.). These scientists believe that precisely the understanding of this material as ‘art,’ based on unwarranted Western aesthetic assumptions, has greatly constrained our subsequent understanding of the subject matter. For this reason they propose to term this corpus of paleolithic data as prehistoric imagery and, when using the term, put ‘art’ in quotation marks.

This growing, and typically postfoundationalist, dissatisfaction with past approaches to prehistoric imagery should be seen as a direct result of prior insufficient attention to the concrete time and places when the images were actually produced and used, and Soffer and Conkey’s views, therefore, embody a strong reaction against unwarranted uniformitarian assumptions and broad ahistoric, abstract, and often decontexualized frames of reference (cf. Soffer and Conkey 1997:1f.). For Soffer and Conkey there are various problematic assumptions at work behind the generally used term ‘art’ for prehistoric images. As defined in the past century, art is a cultural phenomenon that is assumed to function in what we recognize, and even carve off separately, as the aesthetic sphere. It is exactly this aesthetic function that we cannot assume to have existed or functioned similarly in prehistory, and so we cannot assume that the so-called ‘artists’ of 30,000 years ago discovered something that is enduring and true for all humans at all times in all places (cf. Soffer and Conkey 1997:2.). The deeper and more abstract assumption, then, that somehow a trans-historic level of the meaning of this prehistoric ‘art’ may exist, and that this may be ‘true for all humans at all times and at all places’ does seem to be troublesome and highly a-contextual in its own right. Soffer and Conkey’s more particularist and pro-mosaic, contextual approach with its clear transversal intent does seem to resonate well with my own postfoundationalist approach for discerning meaning through interdisciplinary dialogue. Exactly for this reason I have found the notion of transversal reasoning helpful to bring the shifting mosaic of current interpretations in paleoanthropology into direct dialogue with the equally chequered and fragmented history of notions of ‘human uniqueness’ in Christian theology (cf. van Huyssteen 2006, forthcoming).

In the interdisciplinary conversation between theology and the sciences the boundaries between our disciplines and reasoning strategies are indeed shifting and porous, and deep theological convictions cannot be easily transferred to philosophy, or to science, to function as ‘data’ in foreign disciplinary systems. In the same manner, transversal reasoning does not imply that scientific data, paradigms, or worldviews, can be transported into theology to there set the agenda for theological reasoning. Transversal reasoning does mean that theology and science can share concerns and converge on commonly identified conceptual problems such as the problem of human uniqueness. By also recognizing the limitations of interdisciplinarity, however, the disciplinary integrity of both theology and the sciences will be protected (cf. van Huyssteen 2003:161ff.). On this view, for instance, the theologian can caution the scientist to recognize the danger of materialist reductionism in scientistic worldviews, even as the scientist can caution the theologian against constructing esoteric and imperialistic worldviews, totally disconnected from the reality of the results of scientific research.

These mutually critical tasks presuppose, however, the richness of the transversal moment in which theology and paleoanthropology may indeed find amazing transversal connections on issues of human origins and uniqueness. Furthermore, I believe that the most responsible Christian theological way to look at human uniqueness requires, first of all, a move away from esoteric and baroquely abstract notions of human uniqueness, and second, a return to embodied notions of humanness, where our sexuality and embodied moral awareness are tied directly to our embodied self-transcendence as creatures who are predisposed to religious belief. I would further argue that, also from a paleoanthropological point of view, human uniqueness has emerged as a highly contextualized, embodied notion and is directly tied to the embodied, symbolizing minds of our prehistoric ancestors as physically manifested in the spectacularly painted cave walls of the Upper-Paleolithic. This not only opens up the possibility for converging arguments, from both theology and paleoanthropology, for the presence of religious awareness in our earliest Cro-Magon ancestors, but also for the plausibility of the larger argument: since the very beginning of the emergence of Homo sapiens, the evolution of those characteristics that made humans uniquely different from even their closest sister species, i.e., characteristics like consciousness, language, imagination, symbolic minds and symbolic behavior, has always included religious awareness and religious behavior.

Ian Tattersall has recently argued exactly this point: because every human society, at one stage or another, has possessed religion of some sort, complete with origin myths that purportedly explain the relationship of humans to the world around them, religion cannot be discounted from any discussion of typically human behaviors (1998:201). More importantly, in a very specific sense religious belief may be one of the earliest special propensities or dispositions that we are able to detect in the archeological record of modern humans. It is in this sense, then, that neither history, nor anthropology knows of societies from which religion has been totally absent (cf. Rappaport 1971:23ff.). There is indeed a naturalness to religious imagination that challenges any viewpoint that would want to see religion or religious imagination as an arbitrary or esoteric faculty of the human mind. Therefore, even if we are not certain what exactly the spectacular prehistoric imagery of the Cro-Magnons represented to the people who made them, it is nonetheless clear that this early ‘art’ reflected a view held by these people of their place in the world and a body of narrative mythology that explained that place. One of the major functions of religious belief has indeed always been to provide explanations for the deep desire to deny the finality of death, and the curious reluctance of our species to accept the inevitable limitations of human experience. This is exactly the reason why it is possible for us to identify so closely with Cro-Magnon rock ‘art’, and to recognize that it goes beyond mere representation and as such often also embodies a broadly religious, if elusive, symbolism (cf. Tattersall 1998:201)³.

Against this background it is already clear that certain themes naturally emerge as seminal for the interdisciplinary dialogue between paleoanthropology and theology. It is in these scientific discussions that theologians need to find transversal connections to their own discipline(s). Scholars like Steven Mithen (1996), Ian Tattersall (1998), Merlin Donald (1991; 2001) and Paul Mellars (1990) have all argued that knowing the prehistory of the human mind will provide us with a more profound understanding of what it means to be uniquely human. It certainly helps us to understand a little better the origins of art, technology, and of religion, and how these cultural domains are inescapably linked to the ability of the cognitively fluid human mind to develop creatively powerful metaphors by crossing the boundaries of different domains of knowledge. Iain Davidson has argued that early humans worked out their relationship with their environment and with each other precisely through paleolithic ‘art’, and he sees the burst of image making after 40,000 BP as reflecting the way that these ancestors of ours explored the limits and possibilities of the power of their recently discovered symbolically based communication. Because of this, most scholars in the field would take the Upper Paleolithic as the standard for recognizing symbolism (cf. Davidson 1997:125; cf. also Diamond 1998), although powerful and convincing arguments have now been made by Christopher Henshilwood and his team for a more gradual emergence of modern human behavior in Africa, most notably by the discovery of personal ornaments from around 75 thousand years ago at the Blombos Cave in South Africa (cf. Henshilwood, C., d’Erico, F., Vanhaeren, M., van Niekerk, K., Jacobs, Z., 2004:404f.). For Iain Davidson any kind of symboling power is tied directly to the origins of language: it would have been impossible for creatures without language to create symbolic artifacts, or to hold opinions about the making or marking of surfaces that would eventually turn them into imagery or ‘art’. For this reason Davidson argues that it is precisely the exceptional artistic artifacts from the Upper Paleolithic that give us unique insights into evolutionary processes, into the evolution of human behavior, and into the very nature of what it might have meant to become a modern human.

The important question now is, what does the origin of language mean for our understanding of prehistoric imagery? For Davidson one of the most distinctive features of language is the arbitrariness of symbols, and how that necessarily results in inherent ambiguity, especially when compared to pre-linguistic communication systems (cf. the complex calls of Vervet monkeys) which have no possibility of ambiguity because they have been honed by natural selection. One way to cope with the proliferation of this kind of ambiguous creativity was to produce emblems or signs which we, even today, can recognize as in some sense iconic (cf. Davidson 1997:126f.). I believe that successful communication, therefore, requires means of identification that the utterances or images are trustworthy, and in some sense represent a recognizable continuity. We should, therefore, not be surprised to find these kinds of emblems among early language users. We should also not be surprised, I think, that we too are still fascinated by the enigmatic character of these symbolic images and signs, especially since they still appeal to our own aesthetic and symbolic capacities.

This argument that paleolithic imagery or ‘art’ is symbolic, and not just decorative, is considerably strengthened by Margaret Conkey’s persuasive arguments against trying to capture the generic ‘meaning’ of paleolithic art as a single, inclusive metatheory, and for a more contextual understanding of the ‘meaning’ of this art as enmeshed in the social context of its time. On this view, the original meaning can only be said to have existed through the contexts in which it was first produced as individual paintings or parts of paintings (cf. Davidson 1997:128). ‘Meaning’, therefore, is not a timeless property of paleolithic imagery in itself, but, as in the case of religious texts, is the result of the interaction, then and now, between the human agents and the material. We also, in our own relational, interactive interpretations of this imagery, discover and produce meaning. Therefore, the symbolism or ‘meaning’ we find in the earliest ‘art’ produced by people like us clearly is a product of our own interpretative interaction with this stunning imagery. What emerges here is an important convergence between theological and paleoanthropological methodology, a postfoundationalist argument for the fact that we relate to our world(s) through highly contextualized, interpreted experience only.

For theology, the most important lesson learnt is that, from a paleoanthropological point of view, all talk of symbolism should be seen as part and parcel of turning communication into language, but the use of symbols separate from language could only have been a product of language (cf. Davidson 1997:153). What this implies is that the prehistoric cave paintings in southwestern France and in the Basque Country of Northern Spain could only have had whatever symbolic, expressive quality they did because of the linguistic, symbolic context in which they must have been created. Hence the imagination, productivity and creativity we associate with humans are very much a product of language, which, in both theology and the sciences, make language and expressive symbolic abilities central to a definition of embodied human uniqueness.

Throughout the history of paleoanthropological research, one of the primary questions has always been, when did humans begin to think, feel, and act like humans? Central to this question has always been the issue of cognition or creative self-awareness, and how it might be recognized in its initial stages (cf. Donald 1991; 2001). Steven Mithen’s answer to this question is an evolutionary approach to the origins of the human mind, and the development of a three stage typology of cognition that follows the evolution of domains of intelligence from the earliest members of the genus Homo through to their final integration in modern humans. Only in the final phase, in Homo sapiens, do we find a dramatic behavioral break, a ‘big bang’ of cognitive, technical and social innovation with the rise of cognitive fluidity as the final phase of mind development (cf. Mithen 1996). William Noble and Iain Davidson, in a slightly different approach, see one development, namely language, as pivotal in the evolution of human cognition. Here social context is seen as a primary selective force, and language, symbolization and mind are integrated into an explanatory framework for the evolution of human cognition, centered on the human ability to give meaning to perceptions in a variety of ways. Ultimately Noble and Davidson see language as emerging out of socially defined contexts of communication, encouraged as a more efficient form of gesture, with the selection of language occurring because of its efficiency and flexibility (cf. Noble and Davidson 1996; also, Simek 1998:444f.).

For Terence Deacon, arguing from a neuroscientific point of view, early symbolic communication would not have been just a simpler form of language; it would have been different in many respects as a result of the state of vocal abilities. Deacon argues that our prehistoric ancestors used languages that we will never hear and communicated with symbols that have not survived the selective sieve of fossilization. And as far as specific Upper-Paleolithic imagery goes, Deacon seems to be in complete agreement with Iain Davidson: it is almost certainly a reliable expectation that a society which constructed complex tools and spectacular artistic imagery also had a correspondingly sophisticated symbolic infrastructure (cf. Deacon 1997:365). Deacon’s argument confirms the transversal impact of paleoanthropology on the interdisciplinary dialogue with theology: a society that leaves behind evidence of permanent external symbolization in the form of paintings, carvings, and sculpture, most likely also included a social, iconic function for this activity. As far as paleolithic imagery goes, then, the first cave paintings and carvings that emerged from this period may not be the first direct expression of a symbolizing mind, but it certainly emerged as one of the most spectacular expressions of the symbolic human mind..

What has emerged from the work of Mithen, Noble and Davidson, Donald, Tattersall and Deacon, and should be of primary interest to theologians working on anthropology, is that human mental life includes biologically unprecedented ways of experiencing and understanding the world, from aesthetic experiences to spiritual contemplation. In a recent article, Terence Deacon makes the important point that the spectacular paleolithic imagery and the burial of the dead, though not final guarantees of shamanistic or religious activities, do suggest strongly the existence of sophisticated symbolic reasoning and a religious disposition of the human mind (cf. Deacon 2003:504ff.). The symbolic nature of Homo sapiens also explains why mystical or religious inclinations can even be regarded as an essentially universal attribute of human culture (cf. Deacon 1997:436), and opens up an important space for David Lewis-William’s persuasive argument for a shamanistic interpretation of some of the most famous of the paleolithic imagery (cf. Lewis-Williams 1997; 2002; Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1996).

In trying to find an adequate explanation for modern human behavior during the Upper-Paleolithic, Lewis-Williams has been highly critical of any over-emphasis on intelligence, and the evolution of intelligence, that might marginalize the importance of the full range of human consciousness in human behavior. This reveals a one-sided focus on ‘the consciousness of rationality’, and has marginalized the fuller spectrum of human consciousness by suppressing certain forms of consciousness as irrational, marginal, aberrant, or even pathological. This is especially true in the case of altered states of consciousness, which in science and even within mainstream religion often has been eliminated from investigations of the deep past (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:121).

In a move closely resonating with Antonio Damasio’s recent work, Lewis-Williams suggests that we think of consciousness not as a state, but as a continuum, or spectrum of mental states that includes a trajectory from shifting wakefulness to sleeping (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:122). In addition to this spectrum of consciousness from shifting wakefulness to sleep, Lewis-Williams also suggests another trajectory that passes through the same spectrum but with different effects. He calls this an intensified trajectory, and it is more profoundly concerned with inward-direction and fantasy. Lewis-Williams argues that dream-like autistic states may be induced by a wide variety of means other than normal drifting into sleep: fatigue, pain, fasting, and the ingestion of psychotropic substances are all means of shifting consciousness along the intensified trajectory towards the release of inwardly generated imagery. At the end of this trajectory there emerges pathological states, such as schizophrenia and temporal lobe epilepsy, that take consciousness along the intensified trajectory. Hallucinations may thus be deliberately sought, or may emerge unsought (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:124).

For Lewis-Williams this second trajectory has much in common with the one that takes us into sleep and dreaming, but there are also important differences. Dreaming gives us an idea what hallucinations are like, but the states toward the far end of the intensified trajectory - visions and hallucinations that may occur in any of the five senses - are generally called altered states of consciousness (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:125). Lewis-Williams argues that this phrase can equally be applied to dreaming and to ‘inward’ states on the normal trajectory, even if some prefer to restrict its use to extreme hallucinations and trance states. Importantly, all the mental states described here are generated by the neurology of the human nervous system, and they are thus part and parcel of what it is to be fully human. In this sense they are literally ‘wired into the brain’, although we have to remember the mental imagery humans experience in altered states are overwhelmingly, although not entirely, derived from memory and thus culture specific. This is the reason why Inuits will see polar bears in their visions, the San see eland, and Hildegard from Bingen experienced the Christian God (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:126). The spectrum of consciousness, therefore, is indeed wired, but its content is mostly cultural.

For Lewis-Williams the concept of a spectrum of consciousness will indeed help us to explain many specific features of Upper-Paleolithic imagery. In fact, it provides us with a neurological bridge that leads back directly to the Upper-Paleolithic, especially if we take a careful look at the visual imagery of the intensified spectrum and see what kinds of percepts (the representation of what is perceived) are experienced as one passes along it. Lewis-Williams identifies three stages on the intensified spectrum of consciousness, each of which is characterized by particular kinds of imagery and experiences (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:126):

- in the first or ‘lightest’ stage people may experience geometric visual percepts that include dots, grids, zigzags, and meandering lines. Moreover, because these percepts are wired into the human nervous system, all humans, no matter what their cultural background, have the potential to experience them. They flicker, scintillate, expand, contract, and combine with one another, and importantly, they are independent of an exterior light source. Lewis-Williams also argues that such percepts cannot be consciously controlled: they seem to have a life of their own. These entopic phenomena (from the Greek ‘within vision’) may originate anywhere between the eye itself and the cortex of the brain. Entopic phenomena should be distinguished from hallucinations, the forms of which have no foundation in the actual structure of the optic system. Unlike neurologically ‘wired’ entopic phenomena, hallucinations include iconic imagery of culturally controlled items such as animals, as well as somatic (bodily), aural (hearing), gustatory (taste), and olfactory (smell) experiences (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:126f.).

- in stage two of the intensified trajectory, subjects try to make sense of entopic phenomena by elaborating them into iconic forms, i.e., into objects that are familiar to them from their daily life. In addition, in altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images, including entopic phenomena (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:128).

- as subjects move into stage three, marked changes in imagery may occur: at this point many people experience a swirling vortex or rotating tunnel that seems to surround them and to draw them into its depths. In fact, there is a progressive exclusion of information from the outside as the subject moves into a more and more autistic state. This tunnel hallucination is often associated with near-death experiences, and sometimes a bright light in the center of the field of vision creates this tunnel-like perspective. In non-Western cultures shamans typically speak of reaching the spirit world via this kind of vortex of hole in the ground. From this Lewis-Williams can then plausibly conclude that the vortex, and the ways in which its imagery is perceived, are clearly universal human experiences (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:129). Furthermore, in this third and final stage iconic images derive from memory and are often associated with powerful emotional experiences. In this stage subjects may also enter and participate in their own imagery, and it is in this sense that people sometimes feel themselves to be turning into animals and undergoing frightening or exalting transformations.

All anatomically modern people, not only from the Upper-Paleolithic but also from our own time, had, or still have the same nervous system and, therefore, cannot avoid experiencing the full spectrum of human consciousness, refrain from dreaming, or escape the potential to hallucinate. And exactly because our Paleolithic ancestors were fully human, we can confidently expect that their consciousness were as shifting and fragmented as ours, though the ways in which they regarded and valued various states would have been largely culturally determined⁴. It is in this sense, then, that we have a neurological bridge to the Upper-Paleolithic: the capacity to experience altered states of consciousness is a universal psychobiological capacity of our species. And even if its patterning is always culturally determined, ecstatic experience is a part of all religions (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:132). Among hunter-gatherer communities this sort of experience is called shamanism. But we must beware of stipulating some naively simple altered state of consciousness as the shamanistic state of mind. Lewis-Williams puts it well: the shamanistic mind is a complex interweaving of mental states, visions and emotions (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:135).

At the heart of this argument lies the conviction that altered states of consciousness are directly related to the genesis of religion. The practice of shamanism, although we may never be able to conclusively prove it, seems to be related to the very origins of human religious practices and beliefs. It is important to keep in mind, furthermore, that Upper-Paleolithic image-making did not originate in only one place and then diffused through the world: once higher-order human consciousness evolved, it emerged differently in different places in the world. Lewis-Williams, therefore, does not present this shamanistic view if the origins of image-making and religion as a universal explanation for the origins of all human image making. This explanation does highlight, nevertheless, certain universals in human neural morphology, shifting consciousness, and the ways people have no option but to rationalize and socialize the full spectrum (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:203). We should be aware, then, of the ancient, universal, human neurological inheritance that includes the capacity of the nervous system to enter into altered states and the need to make sense of the resultant dreams and hallucinations within a foraging way of life. There seem to be no other explanation for the remarkable similarities between shamanistic traditions worldwide (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:206). In the Upper-Paleolithic, however, the socializing of the autistic end of the spectrum of higher-order consciousness resulted in spectacular image-making.

The Upper-Paleolithic subterranean passages and chambers were therefore places that afforded close contact with, even penetration of a very specific spiritual tier of the cosmos. But this hallucinatory, spiritual world, together with its painted and engraved imagery, was thus invested with materiality and was precisely situated cosmologically. It certainly was not something that existed merely in human minds: the spiritual world was there, tangible and material, and some could empirically verify it by entering the caves and seeing for themselves the ‘fixed’ visions of the spirit animals that empowered the shamans of the community (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:210). But by entering the caves, the sensory deprivation afforded by remote, silent, and totally dark chambers and the experience of the images on cave walls could also induce visions and altered states of consciousness. It is as if the rock surface was a living membrane or veil, and behind the veil lay a realm inhabited by spirit animals and spirits themselves, and the passages and chambers of the caves penetrated deep into that realm (cf. Lewis-Williams 2002:214).

Against this background of this kind of shamanistic explanation of religious origins, it becomes clearer why it is fairly generally accepted that there is in fact no culture that lacks a rich mythical, mystical, and religious tradition. The co-evolution of language and brain, as argued for by Terence Deacon, not only implies, however, that human brains could have been reorganized in response to language, but should also alert us to the fact that the consequences of this unprecedented evolutionary transition for human religious and spiritual development must be understood on many other levels as well. Terrence Deacon argues that the way language can symbolically refer to things provides the crucial catalyst that initiated the transition from a species with no inkling of the meaning of life into a species where questions of ultimate meaning have become core organizers of culture and consciousness. It is these symbolic capacities that are ubiquitous for humans, and largely taken for granted when it comes to spiritual and ethical realms. In this sense one can say that the capacity for spiritual experience itself can be understood as an emergent consequence of the symbolic transfiguration of cognition and emotions (cf. Deacon 2003:504ff.). Along similar lines Antonio Damasio has made a powerful argument for the emergence of religious awareness and religious narratives as a result of the strong pressures of basic human emotions like joy and sorrow (cf. Damasio 2003:158f.;284ff.). In this sense there is a naturalness to religious awareness: spiritual experiences, religious or otherwise, are embodied mental processes, and should be recognized as biological processes of the highest level of complexity

The idea that religious imagination might not be an isolated faculty of human rationality, and that mystical or religious inclinations can indeed be regarded as an essentially universal attribute of the human mind, has recently also been taken up in interdisciplinary discussion by some theologians. In a recent paper Niels Gregersen argues that imagination, and therefore also religious imagination, is not an isolated faculty of human rationality, but can be found at the very heart of human rationality. On this view, then, the same ‘naturalness’ of imagination also applies to religious imagination, and religious imagination should not be seen as something extra or esoteric that can be added, or subtracted, from other mental states (cf. Gregersen 2003:1f.,23). More importantly, though, a theory about the emergence of religious imagination and religious concepts does not at all answer the philosophical question about the validity of religion, or the even more complex theological question whether, and in what form, religious imagination refers to some form of reality or not. As an interdisciplinary problem, however, the reasons that may undergird the unreasonable effectiveness of religious belief and thought may transcend the scope of any one discipline when it comes to evaluating the integrity of religious belief. In this specific conversation we can hopefully reach an interdisciplinary agreement that religious imagination and religious concepts should be treated equally with all other sorts of human reflection. Religious imagination should, therefore, be treated as an integral part of human cognition, not separable from our other cognitive endeavours. Moreover, I also believe that religious imagination should not just be treated as a generic given, but at some point can only be discussed and evaluated contextually within the very specific contexts of specific religions. On this view the crucial role of human imagination in modern human behavior can in fact be an important interdisciplinary link in the dialogue on human uniqueness.

In my recent work I have concluded that, if we have inherited from the co-evolution of nature and culture a dependable framework of mind by which to recognize credibly the intentions of others, why would this cognitive and emotive ability let us down when we try to relate to the iconic signals and messages communicated by our own paleolithic ancestors through paintings, carvings, and ritual practices? In fact, in the case of our Cro-Magnon ancestors, we are of exactly the same species, with the same symbolic minds, and the same religious propensities. No wonder, then, that we might feel compelled to interpret the cave paintings of the Upper-Paleolithic as embodied expressions of the religious and aesthetic imagination of our direct, but distant, ancestors (cf. van Huyssteen 2006, forthcoming). If being human implies the unique ability to create symbolic meaning, and if our paleolithic ancestors were indeed fully human, then we can also assume the following about these ancestors and their life-world: the dimension of meaning that is so irrevocably indigenous to being human, was also a crucial component of these distant, enigmatic people and their world. Our Cro-Magnon ancestors could not have been fully human without having the symbolic capacity to imagine, to create, and thus to exist in a dimension of meaning covering the full spectrum of human consciousness. And even if we may never know what these prehistoric images might have meant in those distant times and dark places, our only access to those elusive levels of narrative, symbolic meaning are the images themselves.

While respecting the integrity of science and the boundaries of the scientific approach, we theologians may now discover how asymmetrical reasoning strategies like theology and paleoanthropology can actually intersect transversally on carefully identified issues like human uniqueness and human symbolic propensities. Here a dimension of prehistoric symbolic existence is revealed in which all contemporary religious belief and behavior is deeply and richly embedded. Beyond sharing these transversal moments on religious imagination, however, a contextual approach calls upon Christian theology to offer its own comprehensive, complementary perspective on the deeper philosophical/theological meaning of what it means to be human. For such a concrete proposal from theology, there is no blueprint for how science should or could respond on religious issues of ultimate meaning. On a postfoundationalist view, the acceptance of the theological perspective as meaningful and enriching, or as irrelevant and speculative, will in the end depend on the specific scientist and his or her worldview.

In Conclusion

In the prehistoric imagery of the Upper Paleolithic we are clearly dealing with the origin, and expression, of something that is so quintessentially human that it sets us apart from other animals and even from our closest pre-human ancestors. Paleoanthropologists have linked this full emergence of consciousness and symbolic behavior directly to the emergence of religious behavior. This obviously is not an argument for the truth of any specific religion, nor for the existence of God. It is, however, an argument for the integrity of the earliest forms of religious awareness and behavior, and points to evolutionary reasons for the naturalness and the integrity of religious faith, as well as the possibility of ritual behavior in our earliest human ancestors.

As far as Christian theology specifically is concerned, I have recently argued that Christian theology traditionally always assumed a radical split between human beings, created ‘in the image of God’, and the rest of creation. This split was mostly justified by cognitive traits like human rationality or intelligence, or in contemporary forms of theology by even more abstract notions of relationality which served to define what was meant by ‘human uniqueness,’ even as it floated free above nature and the human body (cf. van Huyssteen 2006). Within the transversal space of interdisciplinary conversation, however, theology quickly learns that, crucial to the prehistory of the human mind, is the amazing emergence of what Steven Mithen has called ‘cognitive fluidity’. And products of cultural evolution like science, art, and religion are all indeed deeply embedded in the embodied cognitive fluidity of the human mind/brain. As such these rich cultural expressions rely on psychological processes which originally evolved in specialized cognitive domains and only emerged when these processes could actually work together. Of perhaps even greater significance, the cognitive fluidity of our minds allowed for the possibility of powerful metaphors and analogy, without which science, religion and art could not exist (Mithen 1996). What became clear, then, is that the potential arose in the mind to undertake science, create art, and to discover the need and ability for religious belief. Clearly early human behavior is not understood if we do not take this religious dimension into account.

I suggest that a theological appropriation of these rich and complex results of science at the very least should inspire the theologian carefully to trace and rethink the complex evolution of the notion of human uniqueness, or the imago Dei, in theology. Interpretations of the doctrine of the imago Dei have indeed varied dramatically throughout the long history of Christianity. Theologians are now challenged to rethink what human uniqueness might mean for the human person, a being that has emerged biologically as a center of self-awareness, identity, and moral responsibility. Personhood, when reconceived in terms of embodied imagination, symbolic propensities, and cognitive fluidity, may enable theology to revision its notion of the imago Dei as an idea that does not imply superiority or a greater value than animals or earlier hominids, but which might express a specific task and purpose to set forth the presence of God in this world (cf. Hefner 1998:88). I would therefore call for a revisioning of the notion of the imago Dei in ways that would not be overly abstract and exotically baroque, that instead acknowledges our embodied existence, our close ties to the animal world and its uniqueness, and to those hominid ancestors that came before us, while at the same time focusing on what our symbolic and cognitively fluid minds might tell us about the emergence of an embodied human uniqueness, consciousness, and personhood, and the propensity for religious awareness and experience.

Since the sciences today so much determine our cultural views of human origins and human nature, this specific case study on human uniqueness developed by exploring the possibilities of transversal intersections between theology and paleoanthropology. In conclusion we have to ask what kind of dialogue resulted between these disciplines, and what kind of challenges were revealed, as we uncovered some shared concerns, some overlapping interests between these very diverse reasoning strategies? We already know that the important notion of the imago Dei does represent something that is at the canonical heart of the Christian tradition, but we also know now that the core of the notion of human uniqueness in theology can turn out to be fluid and changing, so what would be the limits and boundaries that this galaxy of meaning would allow? Finally, and maybe most importantly, in our pursuit of the intelligibility and integrity of the doctrine of the imago Dei, is theologyhelped, or hindered, by ever increasing interdisciplinary voices from the sciences?

A careful analysis of the Genesis texts reveals that these texts not only recognize the primal human symbolically as the first human and as the significant forerunner of humanity, but, and more importantly, as the link that as such defines the relationship between God and humanity. Against this background every human is created in the image of God, and these ancient texts are clear expressions of the uniqueness of human beings as walking representations of God on earth. In this ancient creation story we humans are indeed the culminating achievement of God: alone of all creatures we are said to be made in God’s image and invited into a personal relationship with God.

When read within the rich context of other Genesis texts (Gen. 3:22; Gen. 9:1-7) and Psalm 8, the notion of the human as the imago Dei, crowned in glory, also emerges as deeply distorted, affected by hostility, affliction, arrogance, ruthlessness and cunning, inescapably caught between good and evil. In the Old Testament texts the first humans thus emerge as real-life, embodied persons of flesh and blood, and within the holism of Hebrew anthropology (cf. Fergusson 1998:14) the notion of the imago Dei finally functions almost like a hologram, where the original image is visible from certain perspectives, but at other times reveal the reality of sin and evil, and the tragic dimensions of human existence. This is also the reason why I argued that the meaning of the ‘image of God’ texts are not only powerfully interactive with one another, but have to be linked directly to Gen 3:22 (cf. van Huyssteen 2006: forthcoming). Here the image of God, theologically at least, achieves a new and powerful level of meaning, when in addition to the original created likeness, ‘knowing good and evil’, a ‘falling upwards’ into moral awareness now emerges as a new way of imaging God.

In the New Testament the image of God is tied directly to Jesus Christ. Moreover, Jesus so absolutely preempts the role of the image of God that the vocation and destiny of human beings can be realized only through a redemptive transformation of their spirit. In the long history of theological thought this complex notion of the imago Dei had a mosaic, chequered history that sometimes expressed important dimensions of the original ancient texts, and sometimes soared free from the deepest intentions of these texts as it progressively evolved from substantive interpretations that highlight reason, intellect, and rationality; functionalist interpretations that express our tasks as humans to be God’s stewards on earth; androcentric interpretations that ignore the role and place of women; existentialist or relational interpretations that focus on our relationship with God and with one another; trinitarian notions that claim to ground this relationality though remote metaphysics, and eschatological notions that focus on our openness to others and on the proleptic destiny of our finally becoming the image of God in the arrival of God’s future (cf. van Huyssteen: 2006: forthcoming).

In my critique of these many interpretations of the imago Dei in the history of Christianity, I tried to highlight the continuity of the core ideas of this central Christian doctrine, and how they functioned as the gravitational pull of this powerful tradition. At the same time I tried to show how many of these notions lured us into a ‘twilight zone of abstraction,’ where unembodied theological notions of human uniqueness floated above text, body and nature in exotically baroque, overly abstract, metaphysical speculations. I also argued, however, that exciting recent developments in theological anthropology point to a retrieval of exactly the earthy, embodied dimensions of humanness that we encountered in the ancient texts (cf. van Huyssteen 2006:forthcoming). In a striking image Robert Jenson sees Homo sapiens as the praying animal, and Adam and Eve as the first hominid group that, in whatever form of religion or language, by ritual action were embodied before God (cf. Jenson 1999:59). In Philip Hefner’s work, the human being, as a product of biocultural evolution, emerges within the natural evolutionary processes as a symbiosis of genes and culture, as a fully embodied being, as God’s created co-creator (cf. Hefner 1993:277). In Phyllis Bird and Michael Welker’s writings there is a very conscious move away from theological abstraction towards seeing the imago Dei in a highly contextualized, embodied sense that respects the sexual differentiation between men and women, even as they exercise responsible care and multiply and spread over the earth (cf. Welker 1999:68).

But we also know that it is our embodied existence that confronts us with the realities of vulnerability and affliction, in fact this vulnerability is deeply embedded in our bodily existence. For this reason the image of God is not found in some intellectual or spiritual capacity, but in the whole human being, ‘body and soul’. In fact, the image of God is not found in humans, but the image is the human, and for this reason imago Dei can only be read as imitatio Dei: to be created in God’s image means we should act like God, and so attain holiness. What we find, then, is a rediscovery of the meaning of embodiment for theological anthropology, and the beginnings of a revisioning of notions of human uniqueness and the imago Dei that resonates powerfully with the embodied, flesh-and-blood humans we encounter in the Genesis texts. But what happens if we connect transversally these conclusions about theological notions of human uniqueness with some of the results gleaned from the sciences on human uniqueness?

The most important aspect of my interdisciplinary conversation with the sciences on human uniqueness, was found in the attempt to establish transversal links with those sciences that deal directly with human origins, i.e., paleoanthropology and archeology. Here we saw that our most basic intuitions about those characteristics that makes us really human, i.e., language, self-awareness, moral awareness, consciousness, mythology, are precisely those that are often the least visible in the prehistoric record. What is available to us for interpretation, however, is some of the most spectacular and earliest evidence of symbolic behavior in humans, the paleolithic cave paintings from France and the Basque Country in Northern Spain, all painted toward the end of the last Ice Age. Various scholars argued for the fact that the explicitly symbolic behavior of our Cro-Magnon ancestors should be seen as the hallmark of the behavioral transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic in Western Europe. This spectacular cave art, along with portable art, personal ornamentation, and the design and form of advanced stone tools, all reflect the newly arrived human symbolic component that in time would come to define what it means to be human. The fact that human uniqueness furthermore emerges in paleoanthropology as a highly contextualized and embodied notion, where the symbolizing minds of our distant ancestors are stunningly and physically revealed in material, prehistoric cave art, also explains why paleoanthropologists have linked the emergence of consciousness and of symbolic behavior directly to the emergence of religious awareness. These convergent arguments were strengthened by recent contextualized arguments for linking shamanistic explanations to the possible meaning and religious dimensions of prehistoric imagery.

As became clear earlier, some paleonthropologists have argued that symbolic behavior should be seen as part and parcel of turning communication into language. Even more importantly, though, the use of symbols separate from language, as in the case of the famous imagery from the Upper-Paleolithic, could only have been the product of a creature who already possessed a fully developed language (cf. Davidson 1997:153). Exactly this idea was developed further by Terence Deacon in his argument that we are the only species to have evolved the ability to communicate symbolically. Having symbolic minds, therefore, includes biologically unprecedented ways of experiencing and understanding the world, from aesthetic experience to spiritual contemplation. Precisely the symbolic nature of Homo sapiens also reveals language as our most distinctive human adaptation, and of crucial importance for the origins of moral and spiritual capacities. This is also the reason why mystical or religious inclinations can indeed be regarded as an essentially universal attribute of human culture (cf. Deacon 1997:436).

This brings me to what I see as the probably the most important interdisciplinary result of the multidisciplinary conversation between theology and the sciences, especially paleoanthropology: if science in this way is taken seriously on the issue of human uniqueness, the notion of the imago Dei finally is strikingly revisioned as emerging from nature itself. This interdisciplinary move is validated by the significant discovery that the focus by some contemporary theologians on the radical embodied nature of our human condition, stunningly intersects with transversally converging arguments about human uniqueness from paleoanthropology and also from the neurosciences. In all of these very diverse disciplines embodied human existence has emerged as of crucial importance for defining human uniqueness in the sciences and the imago Dei in theology. Therefore, I would conclude that interdisciplinary reasoning has here negotiated a shared, transversal space where theologians and scientists can explore the wide reflective equilibrium of agreement on what embodied human existence means, and why it may have different, but equally important consequences for different disciplines. In sharing this transversal moment, the theologian may be immeasurably enriched by taking on board the scientific implications of human embodiment for imagination, creativity, and our symbolic propensities for theological anthropology. The scientist may be enriched by learning how these powerful symbolic and religious propensities cannot be discussed generically for all religions in general, but only comes alive in the living faith of specific religious systems, where they are augmented in ways that scientific methodology cannot anticipate. On this view the nuanced, sympathetic scientist would want to acknowledge that there is more to human uniqueness than paleoanthropology or neuroscience could explain, and the theologian should have learned that overly abstract, disembodied notions of human uniqueness not only betrays the heart of his or her own canonical, textual traditions, but also dangerously isolates theological discourse by destroying the possibility of interdisciplinary dialogue.

The most challenging aspect of an interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and paleoanthropology, however, may be for theology to also acknowledge the specific limitations of this conversation. This implies a quite specific appeal from theology to the sciences: an appeal for a sensitivity to that which is particular to the broader, non-empirical or philosophical dimensions of theological discourse. This kind of disciplinary integrity means that Christian theology has an obligation to explore other issues that are crucial for understanding human uniqueness, issues that may not be empirically accessible. My argument for interdisciplinarity has been precisely about the fact that Christian theology is answerable to canons of inquiry defensible within the various domains of our common discourse (cf. Brown 1994:4ff.). And in this open, interdisciplinary dialogue we can learn that criteria for human uniqueness, whether in theology or the sciences, should never be the sole possession of a single perspective or discipline. Because of the transversal rationality of interdisciplinary discourse, not only shared interests and common concerns, but also criteria from other reasoning strategies can be appropriated. This certainly is one way in which a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of human uniqueness can lead to interdisciplinary results when we discover that criteria not only overlap, but can ultimately be shared in reasoning strategies as diverse as theology and science.

In this kind of interdisciplinary conversation theology can actually help to significantly broaden the scope of what is meant by ‘human uniqueness.’ Homo sapiens is not only distinguished by its remarkable embodied brain, by a stunning mental cognitive fluidity expressed in imagination, creativity, linguistic abilities, and symbolic propensities. As real-life, embodied persons of flesh and blood we humans are also affected by hostility, arrogance, ruthlessness and cunning, and therefore are inescapably caught between what we have come to call ‘good and evil’. This experience of good and evil, and theological distinctions between evil, moral failure, sin, tragedy, and redemption, lie beyond the empirical scope of the fossil record, and therefore beyond the scope of science. It certainly is our evolutionarily developed bodies that are the bearers of human uniqueness, and it is precisely this embodied existence that confronts us with the realities of vulnerability, tragedy, and affliction. For the scientist drawn to the more comprehensive, complementary picture of the dimension of meaning in which Homo sapiens has existed since its very beginning, theology may provide a key to understanding the profound tragic dimensions of human existence, but also why religious belief has provided our distant ancestors, and us, with dimensions of hope, redemption and grace.

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