Original research

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Norman Pedersen has visited many of the noted caves  which have prehistoric art: Altamira II, Lascaux II, Rouffignac, Bernifal, Font de Gaume, Les Combarelles, Pech-Merle, Cougnac, and l’Abri de Cap Blanc. He has read extensively about Ice Age art.

Pedersen’s study and analysis of Paleolithic cave art reveals that the graphic works were not created by any emotional or intellectual inspiration of the artist. Magic or invocation to gods for bountiful hunting was never an intent. 

The artists worked in dark caves that were lighted artificially by tallow lamps. This lighting produced hundreds of shadows on the uneven parietal surface.  It was by looking at these shadows that Ice Age artists’ imaginations were stirred. Almost every animal portrait reveals crevices, bumps and lumps, or rocky textures that are incorporated into the work. Pebbles for eyes, jagged edges for facial profiles, and bulged outcroppings for anatomical mass make it quite evident that the artist used pre-existing features to inspire his work.

All portraits of Ice Age fauna were executed in a realistic style. They had correct proportions and good anatomical detail. This is significant because all other artwork done thereafter by primitive peoples was symbolic in rendering: stick-figures and ambivalent anatomies. Even into the era of Ancient Greece less than 3,000 years ago figures were stylized, abstract representational graphic works.

Pedersen found significance in the realization that less than 1% of the artistic works in the caves are attempts at human figures. The prehistoric cave portraits of animals were rendered in a realistic, proportionally accurate style, yet any attempt at human anatomy was unconvincing. While certainly intelligent and creative, our ancient ancestors seemed unable to graphically render abstract, symbolic images regarding human beings. Our ancestors were not anthropocentric in their observations.

It is very, very difficult to get unbiased accounts of nomadic hunter-gatherer societies untouched by modern civilization. Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos about Polar Eskimos and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ The Old Way about the Ju/wasi bushmen of the Kalahari are reliable, first-hand accounts of two such societies. Norman Pedersen’s research began with these works and these societies. His observations were later bolstered by accounts of the Pygmy people of the Ituri rainforest and other simple hunter-gatherer societies.

Key to Pedersen’s research was his awareness of the cultural biases inherent in modern anthropological analyses. These analysis techniques attempt to impose Civilization’s social patterns on people who live simply and without rules. Systems of kinship, for example, are diligently pursued by anthropologists. In simple hunter-gatherer societies these relationships often have no relevance. Yet anthropologists create highly complex patterns from the answers given to their persistent questioning. They often relate how confusing the answers are and how kinship relationships seem to change on various occasions. Still, researchers insist they have unraveled extremely convoluted kinship connections and the rigid patterns of social behaviors dictated by these relationships. Simple hunter-gatherer societies do not have rigid rules about anything.

Pedersen’s research confirmed what is considered to be common knowledge: 

All nomadic hunter-gatherers have certain things in common. They are egalitarian. They are non-confrontational. They have no leadership. They share food with all. They live pragmatically without imposing rigid moral or ethical laws. They are noncompetitive physically, mentally, or psychologically.

For 150,000 years our homo sapiens ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. It is very reasonable to equate early human societies with known hunter-gatherer societies and assume similar lifestyles and behaviors. In fact, Pedersen’s further research and analysis gives rational explanation for why all hunter-gatherer societies are alike and why they are so different from Civilized cultures.

Pedersen developed his ideas based on Margaret H. Mahler’s The Psychological Development of the Human Infant which defines early stages of infant development through the first three years. The most relevant part of this early development is named the Separation-Individuation process whereby individuals separate from their mothers and begin to define themselves by establishing an ego. It is a traumatic, stressful time.

Every human being develops physically, mentally, and psychologically from the day he or she is born into this life. We have always assumed this process to be similar for all of our species, believing that we are essentially the same human beings who have ever lived. 

Surprisingly, the psychological development of nomadic hunter-gatherers is done under importantly different circumstances. Hunter-gatherer infants develop in closer proximity to their mothers. They are continuously carried and freely nursed for the first year or more. They pass the critical first few years without siblings. (The birthrate for hunter-gatherer women is one child every four or five years.) They are never left alone for a minute. They have complete care and support during their formative years.

All nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer individuals develop their personalities in a healthy psychological environment. Every human being who lived before 10,000 years ago had a carefully nourished, trauma-free psychological gestation period. That is why they were capable and confident. That is why they were able to live cooperatively and unselfishly without competition or confrontation or rigid rules.

The Name of God event — Because our early hunter-gatherer ancestors had no understanding of magic or supernatural, speaking the Name of God was an event that represents the dramatic transition to Modern, Civilized thinking. It reveals complex abstract symbolic language (not merely representative language). It reveals a belief in supernatural things that are not of this physical world. It also reveals a desire to control the natural world or alter the natural course of events.

The Psychological Shift was the actual mechanism that altered human behaviors and human thinking 10,000 years ago. For 150,000 years human psychological development had been under ideal conditions: an ever-present mother, no close siblings to compete against, and a cohesive social  group to observe. Then came the dramatic change in each infant’s psychological environment: a fixed domicile, a rival sibling, and a weakly bound society. The psychological shift gave rise to self-centered, traumatized, needy adults. 

The Archaic Secure-Identity process is the term given to the normal psychological development of human infants for 150,000 years before the Psychological Shift. It is in contrast with the Modern Separation-Individuation process defined by Dr. Margaret Mahler. It nurtured infants to become secure, selfless members of a close cooperative society. It was devoid of the traumatic need for ego or the need to define that ego in comparison to others.

Anthropocentric bias is the acquired bias of human thinking that places homo sapiens at the pinnacle of all living things and gives them priority in all decision making. It is the foundation that has allowed human thinking and philosophy to define all things in the natural world by intellectual verbal abstraction. This prejudice is only found in Modern Civilized humans. Simple hunter-gatherer societies did not have this prejudice. For 150,000 years of prehistory, no human beings had this prejudice.