FOURTEEN

Not as simple as it looks

One day, the palaeontologist took me to the Palomeras School and Cultural Centre in Vallecas, where his friend Mario García worked.

“You’ve got friends everywhere,” I said.

“Does that seem like a bad thing to you?”

“Did I sound like I was reproaching you?”

“Slightly, yes.”

It was January; it was still cold.

I was a little depressed, not for any reason but because it’s in my nature. Depressive people hate vital people, out of envy, and the palaeontologist is one of those who is always doing well. You might find him pissed off, but never sad. Perhaps, I thought, he fights sadness with annoyance.

“Do you never get discouraged?” I asked him once.

“No way,” he said. “I’m a follower of Unamuno. I have a tragic sense of existence.”

“Well, you don’t look very desperate.”

He was at the wheel of his Nissan Juke, and he turned toward me as if to say, Well, what can I tell you? Then, for a moment, he seemed like a man filled with panic. Filled with panic at not being good enough at what he does, whatever it was he did. In his panic I saw a reflection of my own, and sensed why we had formed that rare society of ours. On the radio, Luz Casal was singing “You play at loving me, I play at you believing that I love you … And I don’t care at all.”

That day, I didn’t care at all. The palaeontologist, meanwhile, was eager to show me an experiment.

“We’re off to see some three-year-old children. You’re going to be amazed.”

“Amazed at what?”

The classroom tables, low and hexagonal, were each occupied by six children. There were about twenty children altogether. Arsuaga’s friend introduced us to the teacher (Maribel), with whom we chatted by the door, unseen by the kids, who hadn’t noticed our arrival.

“This,” Arsuaga explained, “is about trying to establish what age we are when we acquire what in evolutionary psychology is called a ‘theory of mind’.”

“And what does that consist of?”

“Of you realising that other people have ideas in their heads, the same as you do, and then establishing hypotheses regarding those ideas. This is fundamental, because it’s the basis of manipulation and deception. Animals can’t lie, because they don’t have a theory of mind. Got it?”

“I think so,” I replied, trying to guess with my theory of mind what the palaeontologist was hiding in his head.

“When you have a theory of mind,” he added, as if he’d read my thoughts, “you spend your life imagining what the other thinks. If what you believe they think isn’t of interest to you, you try to impose a different idea on them.”

“How terrible!” I said.

“Manipulation,” he continued, “can be good or bad, and in general it happens completely unconsciously. But the fact you’re aware that someone else believes something that’s incorrect, or something that isn’t to your advantage, presupposes that you have acquired a theory of mind.”

The kids went on doing their thing while the palaeontologist, the teacher, and I plotted behind their backs.

“Imagine,” continued Arsuaga, “that I go into this classroom with a chocolate cake, and that at one end of the room there’s a box, and there’s another at the other end, and they’re both empty. I put the cake in the box on the right, and I go away. Soon after that, the teacher takes the cake and, with everyone watching, hides it in the box on the left. Then I come back in to get it. Where do the children think I’m going to look? In the box where I hid it, or in the one where the teacher hid it?”

“In the one where you hid it,” said the teacher.

“And where do you think they’ll be looking — at the one where I think it is, or in the one where it really is?”

“At the one where you think it is, so as not to give you any clues,” I said.

“Well, if that happens, it means these children have already acquired a theory of mind. They know that I, like them, have a mind, and because of that it’s possible to manipulate me. I am capable of being deceived. If it were otherwise, they’d expect me to look for the cake where the teacher had put it — that is, where it really is — and they would look in that direction and not realise they were giving away its true location.”

Arsuaga then asked Maribel if the pupils had a favourite toy out of all the ones we could see around the place. The teacher pointed out a spaceship, almost half a metre long.

“It arrived yesterday, and they all want to play with it,” she said.

Arsuaga took it, gave the teacher some instructions, and then called for the children’s attention. They turned toward him, suspicious of his possession of the toy.

The palaeontologist started to roam around the classroom, moving his legs and arms in an exaggerated fashion reminiscent of those evil dolls in a puppet theatre. Then, to bemused looks from the children, he hid the spaceship in a cupboard and left the room with a mischievous expression on his face.

The palaeontologist is a real performer.

Then Maribel went over to the cupboard and, gesturing for the children to be quiet, took out the toy and hid it in the furthest corner of the room, behind a bookcase. A few seconds later, Arsuaga came back in, looking as though he was about to retrieve the spaceship. The children, confirming that at the age of three they had indeed acquired a theory of mind, looked at where the palaeontologist expected to find it, not at where Maribel had hidden it.

Stunning.

The theory was stunning, and so was the performance given by the palaeontologist, who had enjoyed the dramatisation as much as the kids, if not more so.

“Until not long ago,” Arsuaga explained to Maribel and me, “people believed that a theory of mind wasn’t acquired until a child was four years old — but this lot are only three, and they’ve tried to trick me.”

After the experiment with the infants, the palaeontologist asked for us to be taken to a year four class, where the children were nine years old.

There he projected onto the whiteboard one of the hyperreal bison from fourteen thousand years ago that we’d seen in La Covaciella, when we visited Las Arenas de Cabrales. I noticed it was the most elegant of the four we’d seen, the most complex and also, as a result, the simplest. The palaeontologist explained the origin of the image before inviting the children to reproduce it on a sheet of paper they’d been provided with.

“In prehistory,” he said to them, “there were people who knew how to tell stories, others who were good at hunting, others who knew how to make fire, et cetera. And there were those who were good at painting, like the man who painted this bison. We’re going to see,” he added, “if you’re good prehistoric painters. You’ve got five minutes.”

The teacher had dimmed the classroom lights slightly so that the lines of the bison would stand out more sharply against the whiteboard backdrop. From one corner of the room, Arsuaga and I watched the intensity with which the class examined the model to try to reproduce it faithfully on their page. Close to me, there was a girl who had the tip of her tongue sticking out, and she moved it from side to side in her mouth in time with the movement of her pencil. The group’s concentration was total. Arsuaga had told them it was a competition without a prize. Or that the prize consisted of doing it well, which seemed to spur them on more than if he had offered them a real trophy.

One by one, they began to hand in their work. The teacher brought the classroom lights back up, and we looked each of them over in turn.

They were a disaster.

The palaeontologist smiled as though he had just confirmed a hypothesis.

“It’s very hot in here,” he said, taking off his grey round-neck jumper, beneath which he had a dark-blue shirt covered in a pattern of small leaves. “I take it you like my shirt,” he said.

“It’s great,” I admitted.

“It’s very botanical.”

Next, we carried out the same experiment with a prehistoric deer, twenty thousand years old.

“Now,” said the palaeontologist, “imagine we’re back in prehistory, and we’re all part of a tribe. We live in caves, whose walls we like to decorate, and we’re going to do an exercise now to choose the person in the tribe who’s best at drawing.”

While the pupils had their eyes trained on the whiteboard, and then their sheet of paper, and back again, Arsuaga explained it to me: “Traditionally, cave art was thought to have evolved toward complexity, toward perfection of a realist kind. They called that ‘stylistic evolution’. As you can see, this deer is fairly simplistic: it isn’t very detailed, there’s little relief, the sections of the body aren’t that clearly distinguished. It’s just a single outline. Neither hooves, nor eyes, nor ears are very well defined. A lot of people would say: ‘Anybody could do that, even a nine-year-old child.’ What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Its simplicity is too good.”

“Indeed. Stylistic simplicity doesn’t imply mental simplicity. This figure seems very elemental, doesn’t it? In principle, it’d be a cinch to reproduce it.”

“Yes, in principle.”

“Well, the five minutes are up — let’s go and collect their drawings.”

We gathered them up, and confirmed that not one of them had captured the spirit of the original. There hadn’t been a single child capable of reproducing the elegance of the prehistoric deer.

Still, Arsuaga insisted on a third drawing — this time of a bear from the French cave at Chauvet.

“I brought it,” he said to me, “because it seems easier than the previous one, though it would be beyond me to execute it. It’s extremely complex in its simplicity.”

“It’s fantastic,” I agreed.

“Amazing, huh?” exclaimed the palaeontologist. “Know how old it is?”

“How old?”

“Thirty-one thousand years.”

“And?”

“Either the dating is wrong, or the idea of evolving toward realism is wrong. It’s thirty-one thousand years old, and just as perfect as the pictures from fourteen thousand years ago.”

When we gathered up the work, the result was identical to the previous exercises.

The teacher sent the children off to recess, and they went enthusiastically, leaving us alone.

“All this,” said Arsuaga, “is even more amazing if you think that prehistoric artists didn’t use grids to capture the proportions, which means that to reach this level of perfection they must have practised a lot.”

“Where?”

“We don’t know — maybe in the sand on the beach, or on the banks of rivers, using a stick. They must have practised somewhere, because in order to paint a bear like the one we’ve just been looking at, you’d need to have drawn it lots of times before. You can’t do that off the cuff.”

“And?”

“And it’s a mistake to associate a child with a prehistoric being.”

We put on our coats and went out into the playground, where sleet was falling. The kids were chasing a ball from one side of the yard to the other. Arsuaga called one of them over and asked him to stand next to him. Then he looked at me.

“If you look,” he says, “I’m practically twice as tall.”

“Yes.”

“But their brains are already 95 per cent the size of mine. Their capacity for mathematics is identical to mine. In the space of a month, they’d be able to do things of an astonishing complexity. They’d know how to add a half and a third, for example. Could you do that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t there seem something out of kilter to you in the fact that these children have the brain of an adult in the body of a child? This is one of the mysteries of developmental biology.”

“Right.”

We went to the kitchen to get a coffee with the other teachers, as it seemed to be their breaktime. They asked us what we were doing there, and I told them about the experiments Arsuaga had carried out with the three- and nine-year-olds. On the way, I told them about the size of their pupils’ brains.

“In all other mammals,” added the palaeontologist, “this development is gradual. The brain and the body grow at the same rate. At the time of what we call ‘the growth spurt’, which coincides with puberty and which is a characteristic of the human species, the child’s brain is already the size of an adult one. It’s a strategy in our development: we have to socialise. And the smaller the body, the better, because it costs less: fewer calories are consumed. Children up to the age of eleven or twelve stay very small, in such a way that they don’t participate in the social game and they don’t constitute a threat to the adults. But then, in two years, they change — and how they change! Before that age, children often don’t want to eat, or they’re really bad eaters, much to their parents’ despair.

“Whereas teenagers, if you aren’t careful, they’ll empty your whole fridge. In our species, their bodies double in size over the course of two years. It’s a hell of a thing. Honestly, it’s incredible we even survive puberty. It’s a crisis — there’s no other way to put it — and some writers compare it to the metamorphosis of insects. Because of this, from a pedagogical point of view, to educate children as if they were adults would be as ridiculous as educating a caterpillar as if it were a butterfly. A caterpillar isn’t a butterfly in miniature; it’s something else altogether. Nor is a child a human being in miniature; it’s something else. Ortega, quite rightly, was opposed to the idea of forcing children to read Don Quixote, because it’s an adult book. When I hear long-suffering mothers complaining that their adolescent children are acting like cocoons, I say: ‘Don’t worry, señora, out of that cocoon a beautiful butterfly will surely emerge.’”

Back in the car, headed homeward, I shivered with cold.

“You’re cold because you’re not wearing a Timberland,” smiled the palaeontologist, showing me the label on his anorak.