Stories, Then the Story of ‘I’: EToC across the Late Pleistocene and Holocene

TL;DR

• Two-phase model. Stories (language + narrative capacity) consolidate during/after the 60–70 ka dispersals; the Story of “I” (a socially taught narrative self) crystallizes during the Holocene through ritual-pedagogical systems.¹ Dispersal chronologies and archaic survivals: Timmermann & Friedrich 2016; Higham et al. 2014; Harvati et al. 2011; Xia et al. 2024.
• Language is older than the Holocene, but not infinitely old. Symbolic artifacts (engraved ochre, personal ornaments) push symbolically mediated behavior well >60 ka, compatible with language scaffolding stories: Henshilwood et al. 2002; Bouzouggar et al. 2007; review framing: Fitch 2017.
• “I” is an indexical fiction that cultures teach. Philosophically and cognitively: Dennett 1992, Gallagher 2000, Vygotsky 1962 (inner speech), Fernyhough 2016 (popular summary).
• Vehicles of transmission. (i) Rites of death–rebirth that imprint a self-model (liminal pedagogy): van Gennep 1909/1960, Turner 1969, Whitehouse 2000. (ii) Pronoun tech and indexicals that operationalize perspective (indexicality: Silverstein 1976; essential indexicals: Perry 1979).
• Why women? Why serpents? Women often lead linguistic change “from below” in complex societies (Labov 1990; syntheses: Romaine 2003), and cross-cultural serpent complexes (Rainbow Serpent; Göbekli Tepe iconography) plausibly scaffolded “death/no-birth” initiations that taught the reflexive self: Tacon 1996; Notroff & Dietrich 2015; Henley & Lyman-Henley 2019 (on Göbekli motifs). See also EToC/“Snake Cult” essays for the broader synthesis: Vectors of Mind, Vectors (v3.0), Snake Cult.
• Predictions. Correlations should be findable between (a) ritual intensity networks and indexical paradigms; (b) Holocene language-family expansions and wholesale diffusion of pronoun systems (Ross 2005, Matras & Sakel 2007).

“I is another.”
— Arthur Rimbaud, Lettres du Voyant (1871)

A two‑movement theory: stories, then the story#

Here’s the working structure of EToC:* (1) Late Pleistocene: the assemblage that makes stories—syntax, reference, recursion—becomes broadly useful and spreads with our range expansion after ~70–60 ka (there were precursors, but the synergy matters). (2) Holocene: cultures learn to teach a specific story—the reflexive “I”—via high‑arousal ritual, mythic pedagogy, and a set of grammatical “handles” (pronouns, reflexives, deictics). The upshot: language is necessary but not sufficient; a transmissible self‑model is the decisive upgrade.

Empirical scaffolding first.

1) Late Pleistocene: the rise of stories (and global reach)#

• Symbolic kit well before 60 ka. Engraved ochre at Blombos (~77–100 ka) and beadwork in North Africa (~82 ka) show routinized symbol use—not a single “revolution,” but a mosaic trajectory compatible with language supporting narratives and social indexing (Henshilwood et al. 2002; 2009, Bouzouggar et al. 2007, Tylén et al. 2020).
• Dispersals and competitive advantage. Climate‑opportunity windows and demographic pulses propel sapiens across Afro‑Eurasia after ~70–60 ka (Timmermann & Friedrich 2016). Neanderthals vanish by ~41–39 ka in a patchy, regionally staggered process with overlap/contact (Higham et al. 2014; recap: Hublin 2017). Denisovans persist at high altitude at least until ~48–32 ka at Baishiya Karst Cave (Tibet), giving us a late fossil and proteomic anchor for their survival window (Zhang et al. 2020; Xia et al. 2024).
• Archaic residues into the terminal Pleistocene. The Iwo Eleru calvaria (Nigeria) retains archaic morphology despite a terminal Late Stone Age date (~13 ka), suggesting structured population complexity into the Holocene on the African continent (Harvati et al. 2011).
• Admixture as the rule. Genomes imply multiple Denisovan introgression episodes—at least two distinct pulses into Papuans/East Asians (Browning et al. 2018; Jacobs et al. 2019). The “cousins” didn’t just lose; they merged and lingered—in our blood and, arguably, in our stories.

So: language‑ready brains and symbolic ecologies precede 60 ka; dispersal amplifies the payoff. But that’s the infrastructure for stories in general. Where does the story of ‘I’ come from?

Holocene: the narrative self is taught#

The “I” that says I am is an indexical center—a point of view stabilized in language and ritual. Philosophers and cognitive scientists long ago noticed that I is not just a name; it’s a role anchored to a perspective (indexicality: Silverstein 1976; Perry 1979). The self—notoriously—functions well as a narrative construct: a “center of narrative gravity” (Dennett 1992), continuously furnished by inner speech (Vygotsky 1962; synthesis: Fernyhough 2016).

Hypothesis (EToC): during the Holocene’s socioecological churn—agriculture, settlement webs, interregional cults—humans learned to teach the self as a transmissible story using ritual technologies of death and rebirth. The mechanics are known:

• Rites of passage formalize separation → liminality → re‑aggregation, bending identity and then reinstalling it (van Gennep 1909/1960, Turner 1969).
• Memory encoding by arousal. High‑arousal, dysphoric ritual consolidates rare, long‑term memories and “packageable” teachings—Whitehouse’s imagistic mode (Whitehouse 2000).
• Written first persons arrive late. When writing appears, first‑person autobiographies spring up (e.g., Weni and Harkhuf, Old Kingdom Egypt, 24th–22nd c. BCE), showing an already‑mature narrative “I” in cultural circulation (Lichtheim 1973; overviews: Weni, Harkhuf).

A serpent‑shaped pedagogy (women at the helm)#

Cross‑culturally, serpents are everywhere—cosmogonic, chthonic, medicinal, initiatory. This by itself proves nothing; culture loves snakes. But three convergences are suggestive:

1. Iconography and antiquity. Therianthropic ritual imagination is attested by ~40 ka (e.g., the Lion Man; see cognitive‑archaeological syntheses: Lewis‑Williams 2002; object background: Ulm Museum coverage). Göbekli Tepe (PPNA/PPNB) contains prominent serpentiforms in curated ritual spaces, likely embedded in a complex of initiatory performances (Notroff & Dietrich 2015; see Neolithic context: Henley & Lyman‑Henley 2019).
2. Serpents as creators and transformers. The Australian Rainbow Serpent complex—continent‑scale, myth‑ritual integration—ties serpents to water, country, law, and personhood (Tacon 1996; broader syntheses summarized in museum and ethnographic literature).
3. Gendered ritual lineages. Ethnography shows robust gendered control of secret ritual, often with myths that women once owned the cult (e.g., Melanesian sacred flutes; even when male‑guarded in the present, the origin‑myth points to female primacy). This is not proof of Paleolithic facts, but it is a conserved narrative about ritual transmission and power (Herdt 1982/2008).

Add a linguistic fact with evolutionary bite: in complex societies, women disproportionately lead change—especially prestige‑neutral “from below” innovations (Labov’s generalization; refined in later work) (Labov 1990; summaries: Romaine 2003, Eckert 1989). If self‑pedagogy and indexical tech diffuse via ritual‑linguistic networks, female‑led networks are a plausible engine.

EToC’s working claim: women‑centered serpent cults solved the teaching problem of selfhood, exporting a kit of rites, metaphors, and—critically—pronoun paradigms that made a reflexive “I” portable.

Pronouns: the world’s smallest self‑machines#

Pronouns are indexical hardware—they bind utterances to persons and roles. Two points matter:

1. They vary richly and matter psychologically. Languages carve person space differently (inclusive/exclusive we, honorific layers, reflexives). Typological maps (WALS) show systematic Holocene spreads of such systems as language families expanded (WALS 39A/45A, Dryer & Haspelmath 2013, (https://wals.info/chapter/45)).
2. They can diffuse, but reluctantly. Classic view: pronouns are borrowing‑resistant; reality: borrowing does occur under intense contact; entire pronominal paradigms serve as diagnostics for Papuan groupings (and are contested as only genetic signals—precisely because contact is powerful) (Matras & Sakel 2007; Ross 2005; critique of overconfidence: Dunn 2014).

Holocene megadiffusions—Austronesian, Bantu, Indo‑European—reliably moved packages of grammar and lexicon (and with them, person‑systems) across continents (Bellwood 2011; Bantu overviews: Oxford Research Encyclopedia 2018, Russell et al. 2014; IE genetics: Lazaridis 2024/2025). EToC does not claim pronouns were invented late; rather, that particular indexical regimes—reflexives, bound anaphors, culturally salient first‑person registers—spread with Holocene networks, making the story of “I” easier to install.

A concise working timeline#

The bullroarer as an acoustic courier#

If you wanted to build a portable ritual transmitter, you’d likely invent a cheap, awe‑inducing, secrecy‑coded instrument usable in open air and caves alike. You’d get the bullroarer—rhombos to Greeks, taboo‑charged in Australia, restricted in many initiation systems, and explicitly tied to “voice‑of‑the‑ancestors/gods” semantics. The thing is a sonic indexical: it binds sound to an unseen agent, in situ. That is precisely how you teach about invisible selves. Cross‑cultural attestations support its initiatory and secrecy functions (e.g., Mitchell 2019; museum/gazetteer sources cited therein; classical references to the rhombos). The instrument is not evidence of a snake cult by itself; it is evidence that Holocene ritual had the right transmission affordances.

Objections, caveats, and how to break the theory#

• “Language is far older than 60 ka.” Probably. EToC doesn’t hinge on a strict threshold; it needs only that portable story‑weaving reached a critical mass in the Late Pleistocene. Symbolic behavior attests deep roots (Henshilwood 2002; 2009; Bouzouggar 2007). The two‑movement claim is about function (stories) vs content (the specific self‑story), not about a sharp speciation event.
• “Pronouns are universal; you can’t ‘spread’ the idea of ‘I’.” Yes and no. Indexicals are universal, but which indexicals and how they are grammaticized varies. Pronoun paradigms (inclusive/exclusive, reflexives, honorification) do diffuse with families/contact (Ross 2005; Matras & Sakel 2007). EToC claims that specific packages of indexical tech made teaching a stable ‘I’ easier and that Holocene networks accelerated this.
• “Women‑led serpent cults?” The serpent is a supported cross‑cultural attractor; women’s leadership is argued via (i) gendered ritual origin‑myths (e.g., Melanesia: Herdt 1982/2008) and (ii) women’s documented leadership in linguistic change (Labov 1990). That’s convergent plausibility—not proof. The claim is presented as a working theory.
• “Denisovans in New Guinea to 15 ka?” Genetic data place admixture pulses earlier than that and late physical presence is now strongest in Tibet (~48–32 ka). There’s currently no secure fossil for Late Holocene Denisovans in PNG; EToC remains agnostic and updates with each new find (Browning 2018; Jacobs 2019; Xia 2024).

Falsification hooks.

• If we find early Holocene societies with elaborate initiatory regimes but no stable first‑person narrative practices (e.g., autobiographic speech genres) in ethnography and minimal indexical machinery, that’s a dent.
• If typological surveys show no association between ritual transmission networks and pronoun paradigm diffusion, the pronoun‑vector story weakens.
• If Paleolithic art/ritual ecologies prove uniformly non‑serpentine across primary centers (Anatolia, Nile, Indus, Australia), the serpent attractor fades.

What this reframes#

The EToC lens tells a tidy story: grammar built the ghost. First, we got good at sharing stories. Then, in the Holocene, we engineered a transferrable self‑story and multiplied it through rites and the smallest tools of personhood—pronouns and reflexives. Oral traditions’ time‑depth (e.g., sea‑level memories >7 ka: Nunn & Reid 2016) demonstrates that big stories can last. Few stories are bigger than “I am.”

FAQ#

Q1. Doesn’t the Blombos/ochre evidence already imply “self”?
A. It implies symbolism and convention, not necessarily a reflexive narrative self. EToC says the content “I” becomes a teachable doctrine later; the capacity for stories is earlier (Henshilwood 2002).

Q2. Are pronouns really portable enough to matter?
A. Yes—under intense contact and family expansions, pronominal systems travel and reshape person space; Papuan classification uses pronouns precisely because they pattern across lineages (Ross 2005; Matras & Sakel 2007).

Q3. What empirical prediction would most decisively help EToC?
A. Show a positive association between initiatory cult density and complex person/indexical morphology across contact zones, controlling for genealogy (Papua, the Sahel, the Aegean). That’s testable.

Q4. Why serpents rather than mushrooms?
A. EToC doesn’t exclude pharmako‑rituals; it argues serpents have deep myth‑ritual affordances and global persistence (Rainbow Serpent; Göbekli iconography), making them unusually effective carriers of self‑pedagogy (Tacon 1996; Notroff & Dietrich 2015).

Q5. Do we have direct prehistoric statements of “I am”?
A. Not until writing; when it arrives, first‑person genres show up quickly (Old Kingdom autobiographies), implying the oral technology had already matured (Lichtheim 1973).

Footnotes#

Sources#

• Bellwood, Peter. “Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals.” Current Anthropology 52(S4) (2011).
• Bouzouggar, A. et al. “82,000‑Year‑Old Shell Beads from North Africa.” PNAS 104 (2007).
• Dennett, Daniel. “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” (1992).
• Dietrich, O., Notroff, J. “The Goddess and the Snake?” DAI Blog (2015).
• Dunn, M. “Pronouns and the (Preliminary) Classification of Papuan Languages.” (2014).
• Eckert, Penelope. “The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation.” (1989).
• Fernyhough, Charles. “What Our Internal Voices Say About Ourselves.” TIME (2016).
• Fitch, W. Tecumseh. “Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2017).
• Gallagher, Shaun. “Philosophical conceptions of the self.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (2000).
• Harvati, K. et al. “The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology.” PLOS ONE 6 (2011).
• Herdt, Gilbert. Guardians of the Flutes (reissue 2008). University of Chicago Press.
• Henshilwood, C. et al. “Emergence of Modern Human Behavior.” Science 295 (2002); “Engraved Ochres…” J. Hum. Evol. 57 (2009).
• Higham, T. et al. “Timing and Spatiotemporal Patterning of Neanderthal Disappearance.” Nature 512 (2014).
• Hublin, J‑J. “The Last Neanderthal.” P. Roy. Soc. B (2017).
• Jacobs, G. et al. “Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans.” Cell 177 (2019).
• Labov, William. “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change.” Language Variation and Change 2 (1990).
• Lazaridis, I. “The Genetic Origin of the Indo‑Europeans.” (2024).
• Lewis‑Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave (2002). Reviews: Cambridge.
• Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. I (1973). Open access.
• Matras, Yaron; Sakel, Jeanette. “Investigating the Mechanisms of Pattern Replication in Language Convergence.” Studies in Language 31 (2007).
• Notroff, J.; Dietrich, O.; Schmidt, K. (DAI). “The Goddess and the Snake.” (2015).
• Nunn, P.; Reid, N. “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation…” Australian Geographer 47 (2016).
• Perry, John. “The Problem of the Essential Indexical.” Noûs 13 (1979).
• Ross, Malcolm. “Pronouns as a Preliminary Diagnostic for Grouping Papuan Languages.” In Papuan Pasts (2005).
• Silverstein, Michael. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” (1976).
• Tacon, P.S.C. “The Rainbow Serpent Hypothesis.” Rock Art Research 13 (1996).
• Timmermann, A.; Friedrich, T. “Late Pleistocene climate drivers of early human migration.” Nat. Comm. 7 (2016).
• Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process (1969).
• Tylén, Kristian et al. “The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens.” Phil. Trans. B 375 (2020).
• Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language (1962).
• Whitehouse, Harvey. Arguments and Icons (2000).
• Xia, H. et al. “Middle and Late Pleistocene Denisovan subsistence at Baishiya Karst Cave.” Nature (2024).
• Zhang, D. et al. “Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments…” Science 370 (2020).

Internal context & prior syntheses

• Cutler, Andrew. “The Eve Theory of Consciousness.” (2022); “v3.0.” (2024).
• Cutler, Andrew. “The Snake Cult of Consciousness.” (2023); Two Years Later. (2025).

Where to go next: formalize the pronoun‑ritual prediction with typological + ethnographic datasets (Papua, Sahel, Aegean); specify which indexicals best predict stable first‑person narratives (reflexives? logophors?). Also, chase the bullroarer distribution with mapped serpent iconography layers. If the correlations survive contact/genealogy controls, the “grammar built the ghost” thesis gets teeth.