Paleontology takes it for granted that we do not have reliable records from the period before the Palaeolithic. While fossil research based on mitochondrial ancestry now pushes the ascent of homo sapiens some 300.000 years back from now, with speculations that it could even be 500.000 years back, cultural artifacts that could tell us about the memetic environment in the Paleolithic or even pre-Paleolithic period are incredibly scarce.

Are they?

Fossilization of memes?

Mircea Eliade’s work (A History of Religious Ideas, 1978) presents us a series of examples from the Upper Paleolithic, like burials, the appearance of red ocher on human remains, skull mutilation, and similar, that undoubtedly prove the existence of rituals already that period and from 30.00years back also shamanistic practice. Nevertheless, Eliade in that same book clearly states on location 417 of that book that »beliefs and ideas cannot be fossilized«.

Science accepts this as a fact. Together with Eliade, it believes that fossils can only be physical entities. So paleontologists excavate, search for such fossils, and create stories around them.

But wait? What is the basis on which they create stories? Stories are memetic structures, meaning that certain memes, by the power of the human mind, rearrange themselves to make sense of a particular physical entity. Until such a physical entity is not “understood” by such sensemaking activity, it is only a piece of carbon, an ensemble of quantum particles, each in a superposition until observed. The memetic activity of the brain is a sensemaking activity.

When we ask ourselves what is the basis of such stories, we ask where the memes are coming from. Where do they originate? Where does a particular meme begin to exist? If we can trace human genes back to mitochondrial Eve, what path would lead us to the very first meme?

Let me put it straight: rituals and all other human activities from times when humans emerged? As such, memes are units of ancestry, and as such, they are, in fact, relics from that period.

Suppose we start to consider memes as relics. In that case, there is an option at least to dig into cultures of most ancient times of human history, as does Merciel Eliade, despite his belief that he can only rely on physical objects excavated. 

But how? 

Memes as mitochondria?

First of all, we should take memes as relics seriously. To take them seriously means that we finally understand that their primary role is not to enable communication. As already explained, they enable us to make sense of the physical and all other environments. They perform their duty in a rather Munchausian fashion by pulling themselves from the mud with the help of their hands only.

But how?

We do this by simple twist: by understanding a meme of the present time as a direct descendant of a past one. Alternatively, we can see the whole lineage of that same meme frozen at this very moment. Each meme carries its entire history in itself. As much as we can trace genes back to mitochondrial Eve, memes allow us to trace our ancestral cultural past within each meme of the present time.

If we take memes seriously, then a cultural artifact, a particular statue of Venus from the last Ice Age, for instance, should not be understood as carrying memes from that period only but of the whole lineage of attached memes from times after the statue’s creation. For that reason, we say that we see not only the past in ancient art but also in ourselves. We make sense of a particular artifact by realigning the whole lineage of memetic mutations attached to it, and then we also add our personal mutation.

Memes from a blockchain perspective

Seen as such, we can safely say that sensemaking activity, necessarily based on memes, is performed as in a blockchain. Each user repeats the whole chain of meanings and adds his own at the end of the block. That way, the sense becomes more abundant and richer, meaning that the memetic environment becomes exponentially more complex.

What makes the paleontology of memes difficult is that each copying of an existing block of memes mutates that block at least a bit. Memetic copying is not as precise as it occurs in contemporary blockchain software solutions. However, that does not mean that we do not have reliable memetic relics from the past; only that due to their nature, memetic relics actualize themselves as symbols and not as signs.

Memes in time

Let me conclude the short introduction to memetic paleontology by summarizing that memes as relics tell us the very nature of human culture, which makes a change for humans in contrast to all known biosphere. A peculiarity of that nature (human culture is a part of nature!) is synchronicity in time. Through memes, we live all our history, all our (hi)stories, in this very moment. Memes evolve; culture does not!

I do not want to enter here into a highly controversial issue of whether time exists per se (as an otological prime) or only as a convenient side-effect of observation. Taking time as a function of space (time-space) brings us closer to a more intuitive conception. However, taking memes as they should be taken, as a special kind of cultural mitochondria, also the time evolves into something much more approachable. Yet, it is not approachable within a traditional, linear framework but in a recursive one.