My Big Fat Cro-Magnon Wedding

Yesterday, in a class called Evolution and Biodiversity - taught by the amazing Dr. Lenny Gannes, who is such a dedicated science professor that he even manages to make weather patterns interesting - we watched the first half of The Mind's Big Bang from PBS's seven-part Evolution series. This particular episode is about the evolutionary processes by which scientists believe we have developed the impressive minds that distinguish us from all other animal species.

There is one segment that focuses on archeological discoveries of beads from 35 thousand years ago. The narrator (Liam Neeson!) says that these ornamental artifacts are "evidence of our creative and cultural beginnings, recalling a time when bands of humans began interacting socially with one another."

Okay, so how does this have anything to do with my wedding extravaganza? Well, when planning a wedding, people often give careful consideration to traditions. Some traditions maybe only be two or three generations old; if they're religious traditions they might be a couple thousand years old. But the use of beading as a social indicator is a 35,000-year-old tradition. So with that in mind, here's a close-up of my dress and the bottom edge of my veil:



Beads as far as the eye can see. (Click on the image to see a larger version. To see the uncropped photo, taken by Kim Russo, click here.)

Later in the video, Dr. Randall White, from New York University, talks about beads and "expression in materials" as an indication of a major turning point in the evolution of brain function. He says that the earliest beads are signs of people creating more complex social identities than the ones that previously existed in other species. He talks about how these beads say, for instance, "'I am a Cro-Magnon woman, I have given birth, I have a particular history, I have a particular status within my group.' And anyone who's a member of the group will be able to see that at a glance, by the fact that she's wearing certain kinds of animal teeth, certain kinds of beads, her clothing is decorated in certain ways. It's a mode of visual expression but it's expressing social relationships."

Usually when I think about our oldest ancestors, I think about things like making fire and using spears and eating buffalo and living in caves. I think about the filthy hunched guys in cartoons who wear loincloths and hit women with clubs before dragging them home by their hair. (See, women these days really aren't doing too bad overall.) What I have certainly NEVER EVER EVER thought about as a common thread that ties 35,000 years' worth of hominids together is their use of FASHION to express social relationships. So I guess I'm outing myself as a major geek here, but does anyone else get a huge kick out of this?