In his latest work ⁽¹⁾, Marcel Otte offers us an alternative narrative of prehistory. Certainly, the bones and the tools retain all their significance. But it is above all the symbols, the works of art and other vestiges of the intellectual capacities of prehistoric man that the University of Liège prehistorian interrogates. With, implicitly and between the lines, a question: what was this spirit which prompted our ancestors? What was it that motivated them to set off on the path which led to the humanity of today?

The book begins in a somewhat violent manner, with apologies to Charles Darwin: ‘Forgive us Charles Darwin, because your so courageous theory will here be much maligned: we have decided to set aside the bones in order to consider their function and, beyond that, the framework of thought which brought them to life, made them love, open up pathways, test, dare, dream.’ There you have it: something which will doubtless not be to everyone’s liking, the biologists first and foremost. For Marcel Otte, Professor of Prehistory at the University of Liège, the first human beings never stopped making decisions, but decisions which did not owe everything to natural selection. One doesn’t become a poet, explorer or savant in responding to the laws of genetics: ‘the argument drawn from flesh and bone does not hit the essential: it says nothing about who I am, it does not explain why I listen to Bach or Bruce, nor why the Mona Lisa smiles at me.’ No biological ‘law’ – Marcel Otte always places this term in quotation marks! –, no environmental determinism, can explain the journey we have taken. Humans have always felt the call of elsewhere, of other horizons and there are always individuals to pick up this challenge, exploring the unknown. And that continues today. Following this argument, from Marcel Otte’s pen surges this key-word: audacity. ‘At every stage of development we see audacity coming to the fore,’ he thunders.

From the forest to the savannah

Mapping in broad brushstrokes the origins of humanity, Marcel Otte reminds us first of all that whilst the ancestors of today’s great apes chose to stay in the Equatorial forest, an environment favourable to them, it is true, but which was undergoing regression, both in Africa and South-East Asia, other species chose to spread into the fledgling savannahs. Amongst them our ancestors, the only ones to have survived this challenge. For this to have happened bipedality was necessary, of course. But other animal species are bipeds, without that having impacted on their intellectual development. Bipedality is thus a requisite, but it is not a triggering factor, according to Marcel Otte. On the other hand, behavioural acquisitions aided the survival of the species, such as a growth in a meat-based diet, which strengthened the social organisation of groups as well as their coherence and thus favoured the appearance of language in all its forms as well as solidarity.

(1) A l’aube spirituelle de l’humanité. Une nouvelle approche de la préhistoire. Marcel Otte, Paris, 2012, Odile Jacob, 190 pages.