Creative Globalization

ConclusionGlobalization and Innovation

C.1. An original relationship between innovation and globalization

“We wanted to show to what extent the work of art is intimately connected to the formation of humanity,” declared Georges Bataille with regard to his work on the birth of art [BAT 79, p. 9]. The conception of prehistory has greatly changed since the discovery of the Lascaux caves in 1940; however, Bataille’s intuition of an important leap separating the Middle and Upper Paleolithic has been confirmed since then. The situation in the Middle Paleolithic was one of small groups of human populations with genetic disparities, spread out in their preferred ecosystems; they had decorated tools, personal jewelry and body painting. The transition into the Upper Paleolithic was an expansion of a single group from a genetic point of view, mixing with others and spreading across all of the accessible land areas on the globe. The entire procession of the arts is much more imposing this time, and there is therefore an original link between this diversified artistic and artisanal ability of genetically modern humans and their expansion over the entire globe. When humanity began making works of art, when it translated creativity into physical realizations, it spread across the entire globe.

In this distant episode, the ability to innovate underlies globalization; causality moves from innovation to globalization. Contemporary data give examples in both directions. They emphasize the direction ...