Is creativity the key to survival? Ask the Neanderthals
/At COMPAS, we think about creativity a lot, which makes sense given that our mission is to deliver creative experiences that unleash the potential within all of us. In other words, creativity is in our DNA.
I recently found myself wondering how often people who aren’t in fields specifically identified as ‘creative services’ think about creativity. Like an accountant, for example, versus an advertising art director or an arts education provider.
A quick Google search on “creativity” produced millions of results, and as I waded through the first few hundred, it became very clear that creativity is top-of-mind for many people across a wide spectrum of industries and occupations. In fact, I’d say the human collective is a little obsessed with it (in a good way).
Why do I say that? Because, in addition to producing creative works like books, music, paintings, etc., people are also spending a significant amount of time thinking about and developing theories related to the act of being creative. Basically, some people are engaged in producing creative works. Some are working on strategies and processes for being creative. Others are assessing the validity of those strategies and processes and sharing their conclusions about them. A few are doing all of these things.
Why are we all thinking about creativity so much?
In 2021, an international team of scientists guided by the University of Granada announced the results of some research that helps answer this question. In a groundbreaking study that analyzed the genetic basis for the emergence of creativity in modern humans, they assessed why our homo Sapien ancestors, who lived as much as 300,000 years ago, survived and become the human race of today, while Neanderthals became extinct. In their work, the researchers identified for the first time a series of 267 genes linked to creativity that differentiate homo Sapiens from Neanderthals.
The team found that creativity among homo Sapiens has always increased and evolved in response to harsh and diverse conditions. As homo Sapiens created solutions to challenges, their DNA correspondingly altered itself. As one scientist explained: "We have the capacity to learn and adapt in light of our experience, even to the extent of modifying the expression of our genes.” Think of it as an ongoing operating system update of the psyche (also known as adaptation). The Neanderthals didn’t function like that, and their lack of reliance on creativity contributed to their demise.
All of this progressive adaptation has given us one creative capability in particular that has played a central role in our survival as a species: Our ability to tell stories. We are genetically predisposed to turn to stories when faced with challenges. That perhaps explains why, according to researchers, ninety percent of all human communication is based on storytelling
These findings are profound, and they seem to explain some other phenomena related to humans and creativity. For instance, when people listen to a piece of music together, their heartbeats synchronize. That also happens when we sing or listen to a story together. In fact, we’ve been telling and enjoying stories for so many years, it’s literally altered our biology. Consequently, when we hear narrative prompts like “once upon a time,” they serve as stimuli that synchronize the fluctuations of heart rates between the individuals listening.
Another way of saying this: Storytelling and music make our hearts beat as one.
Perhaps this is why, during the millennia of our existence, we humans have consistently turned to creativity when faced with crises, and that creativity has included producing works of art. For example, poetry has often played a central role in helping people process and express their feelings during pandemics. A few examples include:
Boccaccio’s Decameron in the 14th century
Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague in 1912
Camus’ The Plague in 1947
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera in 1985.
More recently, Amanda Gorman, the United States’ first-ever youth poet laureate, read her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ at the inauguration of President Biden. In response, more than two million people started following her Instagram account in one day. Poetry websites have also seen a dramatic increase in visitors during the pandemic. For instance, visits from readers to the poets.org website have gone up 30 percent.
Fun fact: COMPAS actually began as a poetry-focused organization called Poets in the Schools. In 1968, the National Endowment for the arts reached out to our founder, Molly LaBerge (now Molly Taylor) to create a pilot program connecting high school classes with living, breathing, professional poets. In 1974, Poets in the Schools became COMPAS and broadened its repertoire of arts to include theatre, music, drama, visual art, and spoken word among others.
A continued desire for creative experiences during this era of stress and confusion has been evident among COMPAS’ clients and collaborators, and COMPAS has focused on meeting that need. At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, COMPAS, like the rest of the world, was faced with the sudden need to provide services in an altered way, one that accommodated the needs of a socially-distanced world. This meant shifting to a virtual vs an in-person model of service delivery, which for COMPAS, with its traditional in-person-based approach, was a significant foundational shift. Yet, within weeks of the onset of the pandemic, the organization had developed and begun delivering pandemic-friendly services that included:
Virtual Teaching Artist residencies that offered various forms of engagement like scheduled digital meetings and asynchronous, pre-recorded videos for students to watch at their own pace
Artist-designed kits that serve as stand-alone activities and could also be paired with video instruction
Teaching Artist drop-ins to digital classrooms
COMPAS Home Studio, a series of short instructional videos that span multiple art forms and mediums that were created by COMPAS Teaching Artists. The videos were offered for free on compas.org, and the content was purchased from the artists by COMPAS so that the videos can be used in perpetuity.
Collectively, COMPAS teaching artists and staff produced over 300 individual videos. There were more than 5,000 minutes of asynchronous video content totaling over 80 hours of footage. More than 2,300 art kits were created, and 103 hundred different programs were delivered as asynchronous videos.
To our delight, these new offerings were met with enthusiasm by our community of students, teachers, parents, and education administrators. Ultimately, more than 40,000 participants took part in the lockdown-friendly programs and services during the first year of the pandemic. This was a clear demonstration of the desire for creative experiences during a time that has included a global public health emergency and equally devastating events like the murder of George Floyd.
Turning back to my original question of how often people outside creative services think about creativity: Clearly, the answer is they think about it often and from multiple perspectives. And now I understand why. It’s because we’re literally built for it. So while this is a particularly challenging era, we can be confident our creative abilities are continuing to grow and evolve in response to the challenges. It’s part of our genetic code. The key is to continue nurturing our creativity, which it seems many of us are doing. If we continue doing that, the answers we need will emerge.
We’ve done it before. We can do it again. After all, we’re not Neanderthals.
