Mental Fossils: A Speculation on Lost Civilizations

I’m not especially interested in the claim—made with varying degrees of confidence—that Machu Picchu was built not by the Incas but by a highly advanced civilization that predated them. That particular thesis doesn’t concern me. But the structure of the claim does. Namely, I find myself increasingly (if still slightly) inclined to believe that advanced civilizations may have existed long before the earliest ones recorded in our historical and archaeological record.

And my reasons are not archaeological. They’re psychological—more specifically, evolutionary psychological.

Let me explain.

Consider the highly developed and domain-specific aptitudes we find among humans living in the late stages of civilization: musicality, philosophical insight, mathematical prowess, artistic vision, literary fluency, and so on. Each of these, of course, has subdomains and branches so specialized they verge on the absurd. And yet we find them everywhere. People just have these abilities, to varying degrees. Not all people—but enough that entire social systems are built on them.

Now, it’s easy to assume these capacities somehow just “come with” being human. But that assumption should be interrogated. Because these are not generic survival traits. They are, in the vast majority of cases, useless outside civilization.

Mathematics, for example, is not particularly helpful when you're foraging for berries or tracking prey. Nor is counterpoint, or metaphysics, or the sonnet. These capacities are massively overengineered for life in a state of nature. They only become useful—indeed, indispensable—within a context of civilizational complexity: division of labor, symbolic systems, abstract planning, stored cultural memory.

So where did they come from?

According to the standard story, Homo sapiens have existed for about 100,000 years (or more), but “civilization,” as we define it—complex, literate, stratified societies—arose only about 8,000 years ago. That leaves a 90,000-year stretch during which our ancestors were supposedly living in pre-civilizational conditions.

And yet somehow, during that long pre-civilizational interlude, the human brain acquired (and presumably preserved through selection) a host of abilities that are only really advantageous within civilization. That seems... odd.

One would expect that such traits would either (1) never arise in the first place, or (2) quickly vanish if they did, being maladaptive or neutral at best in a non-civilized environment. But instead, we find the opposite: people have these traits. We build civilizations on them.

Which leads to a speculative but, I think, plausible hypothesis:

Perhaps civilization—real civilization, of some form—has existed for much longer than we think. Perhaps not continuously, not everywhere, and not necessarily with the same material footprints as Sumer or Egypt. But perhaps frequently enough, and for long enough stretches, to act as a selective environment for the development of these aptitudes.

This isn’t a claim about Atlantis. It’s a claim about evolutionary plausibility.

If our mental traits reflect the environments in which they were formed and refined, and if many of those traits only make sense within civilization, then perhaps civilization itself is older, deeper, and more recurrent than we currently believe.

The fossil record is incomplete. So is the archaeological record. But the psychological record—the structure of our minds—may contain its own traces. And we would do well to read them.