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Believers assume that humanity could access to invisible since his appearance on earth: a primary Revelation must have accompanied the Creation in order, for the man, to know how to behave.
Anthropologists, on the other hand, believe that the first man is the homo habilis who, deprived of both Broca’s and Wernicke’s cerebral areas, had a larynx and pharynx that did not permit him to produce those sounds that constitute our current phonetic system.
Theology, on its part, does not tell us who the first man was: theologians do not need to ask for clarifications to anthropologists, which define the homo as utensil manufacturer. Man as described by theologians might have had a more recent appearance than the man in zoological terms, and his story may begin when men started to communicate through an advanced phonetic system, or even when man initiated to use complex logic-and-conceptual categories (this is a topic that was not addressed even by Teilhard de Chardin).
It is however undoubted that, starting from a specific moment, man showed signals of access to a world that was hidden to his senses. I will not deal, on this occasion, with the issue of the deceptive access that occurs during dreams, when the living and the dead appear to us and when it is possible for those events, that we fear or desire the most – and which we never witnessed when awake – to happen.
For 300.000 years, men have taken care of their dead. Is that a sign? Most importantly, men have performed visual arts for 35.000 years at least: from 35.000 to 10.000 B.C. Cro-Magnons disseminated in Europe – in particular, France and Spain – parietal paintings of exceptional importance and beauty (Lascaux Caves, Pech Merle, Niaux, Trois Frères, Mas d’Azil, Altamira, etc.) and significant sculptures. Important paintings and graffiti may be also found in the Sahara desert, and elsewhere.