Falk is not attempting to pin down the GPS coordinates of the Garden of Eden. Instead, he argues that, in the mindset of the original author of Genesis, Eden is “not located somewhere on Earth but represents the whole earth.” If Eden is reimagined as the whole earth, then the artistic spirit may have awakened on opposite sides of the globe 50,000 to 40,000 years ago. The cave art could be both cause and effect: the artist who imagines invites others to see what she has painted and provokes the imagination of anyone who enters the cave and sees the painted images moving in the flickering light.

Cave paintings and rusty ochre brushstrokes appear on the cover of Darrel R. Falk’s recently  published book, On the (Divine) Origin of Our Species.1 These earliest examples of art call out to us today. Falk describes the European cave paintings in the Chauvet caves, of horses, rhinos, and lions, which were discovered in the twentieth century. As a Christian and a biologist, Falk asks what the European artworks mean.

I have asked the same questions, as a Christian and a chemist, about similar cave paintings that likewise merge art, biology, and chemistry. My starting point is the Sulawesi Warty Pig, which is part of a set of very old cave paintings, discovered very recently. My ending point is similar to Falk’s in almost every respect – but for one. Part 1 describes how my chemical imagination and Falk’s biological imagination coincide as we look at the earliest art as scientists. Part 2 will discuss the one way in which we differ.

My starting point is late-breaking news – it has only been known since 2017, when an Indonesian grad student named Basran Burhan, exploring the island of Sulawesi, followed a hunch and found a hidden valley.2 There the cave walls preserved remarkable works of art, displaying purple and red strokes of pigment that formed the shape of the local wild “warty pig.” These artistic treasures were close to the surface, not too deeply buried, peeking out from the rock like the colors of an Easter egg, or like the treasure hidden in the field in the parable. It’s like someone wanted us to find these out.

This Indonesian cave art turns out to be the oldest representational art found so far, older than European cave art. Human hands painted the warty pig 45,500 years ago as opposed to the 30,000-year-old European paintings.3 Burhan and colleagues recently found other paintings more than 50,000 years old depicting more pigs and “therianthropes” (human figures with composite animal features).4 These “imaginary” creations are the oldest evidence of the human imagination. A mind that could imagine gods could one day imagine the Kingdom of God.

I’m compelled by love of my own discipline to point out how both the European and Indonesian caves were preserved by chemistry. Limestone, which easily dissolves in water, laid down a thin, transparent layer of rock over the pigments, like a windowpane. This limestone served as a natural varnish, protecting the art from the elements while letting light through. Without the special chemical properties of limestone, the paintings would have been lost, so we owe this insight into our own evolution to chemical mechanisms that we can imagine.

The imagination that led the artists to paint and the post-doc to explore his hunch, this same imagination lets chemists calculate the paintings’ age from the uranium isotopes. Throughout his book, Falk shows how, as a biologist, he imagines the evolution of imagination itself. All of these forms of imagination are windows through time and into a deeper reality that the mind can perceive and represent.

Falk’s book is all about our window into this deeper reality: when our species began (Chapter 3); when imagination began (Chapter 4); when the intentions of others were imagined, resulting in cooperation (Chapter 5); when the past is imagined in terms of God’s intentions (Chapter 6); and when the future is imagined in terms of God’s purposes (Chapter 7).

In Chapter 4, Falk describes the origin of artistic imagination by quoting another scholar: “’It was not a primitive beginning or slow evolution, it burst onto the scene like a sudden explosive event. It is as if the modern human soul has awakened here.’ … By this time, 35,000 to 37,000 years ago, members of our species were reaching out beyond themselves. Given our faith in the God who is love, we can safely assume that the Spirit in turn was reaching out to them – however opaque their understanding of the spiritual reality that they were seeking to take hold of.”5

Through his book, Falk works to reconcile the sudden explosive event, the creation of creativity, with the slow, incremental changes of genes found by biological science. This “horizontal” reconciliation coincides with Falk’s work toward a “vertical” reconciliation, between humans and God.

Read More