ABSTRACT
Significant archaeological research has focused on the appearance of “cognitively modern” humans, yet one aspect of cognition, emotion, has largely been ignored. I argue that emotional modernity, as a component of our cognitive evolution, was only achieved when the full range of human emotions appeared; specifically, when mental illness had developed within the human population. Mood disorders, as a class of mental illness, were widely associated with ethnographic shamans: religious practitioners who experienced direct interactions with the supernatural through visionary experiences. Mood disorders were also correlated with unusual creativity, especially artistry, a trait likewise expressed by shamans through their creation of rock art. It is possible to identify the first shamanic rock art archaeologically using a neuropsychological model of the mental imagery of trance combined with a defined set of embodied altered states metaphors. This shamanic art first appears in the Western European Upper Palaeolithic period, approximately 35,000–40,000 years ago. Although this is not the initial appearance of cave paintings and engravings, the early shamanic art is notable because of its artistic mastery: Certain of the Upper Palaeolithic paintings represent true artistic genius. Although speculative, I argue that this appearance of unusual creativity was due to the development of mood disorders, initially in a Western European Homo Sapiens sapiens population and partly due to introgressive hybridization with Neanderthals. As genetic research has shown, this hybridization contributed genes that are associated with mood disorders to the human population, and various processes have subsequently spread these genes worldwide.
