How old is poetry? Short answer: As old as our species. Of course we don’t know all that much about how long ago humans started using language, or whether early language use included composing pre-historic raps about the challenges of wandering out of Africa to explore the rest of our planet. Spoken words leave little evidence behind once we go beyond our written records. However, when we turn to other forms of art, it quickly becomes clear that humans have made art for a very long time.

Personal adornment with beads and pigments goes back 100,000 years, and both humans and our cousins the Neanderthals left behind cave paintings, rock art, and hand prints going back 40,000 years across Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Finally, talismanic carvings in ivory, bone, and stone, such as the Venus of Willendorf, have been dated as far back as 25,000 years.

Making art also appears deeply intertwined with humanity’s shift from hunters and gatherers to more settled communities. About two decades ago, University of Cambridge scholar Dr. Nigel Spivey proposed that “Art Made the World” in a series that explored human creativity spanning 100,000 years and five continents.[i] Catching the series on my local PBS station, I found my grand narrative of human evolution completely upended in a most delightful way. No longer did human societies evolve in response to economic imperatives. Instead, it was their need to make art and celebrate community in the face of death that led to the creation of Gobekli Tepe on the hills of southeast Turkey some 11,000 years ago. Proposed as the world’s earliest temple by archeologist Klaus Schmidt, what may be the earliest human monumental architecture brims with images of scary creatures like scorpions and vultures on huge megaliths and stone pillars.[ii] Art turns out to be as critical to human survival as food and shelter, so crucial in fact that we may be ‘hardwired’ to create, to engage in symbolic imagery, and to  sing and dance in collective performances dedicated to storytelling.

In his series, Spivey discusses the Epic of Gilgamesh as the ‘oldest’ known literature to have survived into our present. The Mesopotamian Epic is about one millennium ahead of Homer’s two epic poems, The Illiad and The Odyssey, but all three are thought to have been performed and passed down through generations of poets who sang about heroes battling fate and battling death, and thus likely are as old as their respective civilizations.

What makes poetry such an enduring human practice? Poetic compositions make full use of features of human language that extend our communications across time and space. Using rhythm and rhyme, imagery and memorable language, poetry allows us to remember, transforms memory into performances that can cycle on and on through centuries, even millennia. Poems become one tool that get us a little closer to immortality.