The worldview throughout the period of the Great Migrations had been animistic. The whole realm of nature was animated by spirits. During the later stages of this period, nature, while still animistic, was more and more seen as female – represented by the Venus figurines found in the 35,000-year-old caves of Cro-Magnon Man. Now with the dawn of the Neolithic era 14,000 years ago, the feminisation of nature became increasingly focused in the Mother Goddess, worshiped by these early villagers as the fruitful giver of life and of all that was needed to sustain them. She would become more central still in the worldviews yet to emerge in the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Crete. We have no record of the names by which she was known prior to the invention of written language 5000 years ago – but some that were recorded after that date are Nammu, Utu, Inanna, Ishtar, Iahu, Astarte, Kali, Isis and Matrona. In ancient Greece they called her Gaia.
By whatever name, she was the bountiful goddess Earth – the mother and nourisher of life, and receiver of the dead for rebirth. She was not the supernatural creator of nature, but the creative force of nature itself. All nature was alive, engaged in the creative-destructive dance of life and death. Nature loved and raged at her human children, giving them ample reason to love, fear, and respect her. The plants and animals belonged to her. The forces of nature – sun and moon, winds and seas, mountains and rivers – were members of her holy family. The universe was not a mechanism as we think of it today, but a vast dramatic enterprise manifested primarily in the seasonal cycles on which these early farmers had come to depend. And it was all an expression of the abiding presence of the Great Mother.
The oldest-known man-made place of worship, dated to 9000 BCE, was the hilltop sanctuary of Gobekli Tepe in what is now southeast Turkey. And Jericho, one of the earliest Neolithic villages, grew up about 8000 BCE around a still-earlier shrine to the mother-goddess, where she was venerated through the offerings of fruits and flowers. From that time, and throughout the Neolithic era, she was many goddesses rolled into one – guardian of childbirth, dispenser of healing, fount of prophecy, lady of the beasts, giver of life and death – all different facets of a single power. But above all she was the goddess of fertility.
The miracle of the planted seed and fruitful earth, wherein death is transformed into life, was, to the Neolithic villager, the great mystery. And the myth that grew up around this mystery yielded a practice that would remain at the core of human culture for thousands of years – the practice of sacrifice. The thinking went like this. As rotting vegetation gives rise to new shoots, so death must be the giver of life. And if that is so, then the way to increase life is to increase death. Hence, in all planting cultures, we find the rites of human sacrifice by which this primal mythic scene is enacted literally.
The sacrifice, moreover, had to be a blood sacrifice, because blood was the substance of new life. According to the Neolithic understanding of reproduction, it was not the male semen but a transformation of blood that caused pregnancy. Observing that the menstrual blood flow continues each month except when the woman is pregnant, it must be this withheld blood that is being converted into new life – an idea supported by the obvious fact that the loss of blood leads to death. Just as the earth needs rain to bring forth crops, so the Great Mother needs blood to bring forth new life. Such is the logic behind the rites of human and animal sacrifice. The way to appease the Great Mother is to give her what she demands – blood! And invent a precise way in which to do it – ritual! In this way we can cooperate with the Great Mother to ensure fertility and life itself.
Over the course of time, human sacrifice became replaced by animal sacrifice – a change related in the Biblical account of God demanding that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac and then changing his mind to allow a ram to be sacrificed instead. Later still, barter sacrifice became acceptable, as in the ritual of chopping off one’s finger joints. “I give you this joint,” ran a Crow Indian prayer to the Morning Star. “Give me something good in exchange.” But whatever the sacrifice, the intent was always the same – to appease the Great Mother or whatever deity was appropriate to the occasion.
The same thinking influenced the burial rituals of this time. As life springs from death in the plant world, so it is in the human world. The dead are buried to be born again. So this is the first era in which we find ceremonial graves as a common practice.
Between 4000 and 5000 BCE, we find the first evidence, especially in the Middle East, of fortified walls being built around these hitherto peaceful, goddess-worshiping villages. They were an unsuccessful defense against invading waves of nomadic hunters who came from desert regions in search of a better life and who brought with them their warring male sky deities. These invasions were the first expression of large-scale violence among humans. The conquering tribes, ruled by men and their male gods, stayed to form more complex social orders, strip women of their equal status, pursue their competitive interests, and build their kingdoms. As the villages grew into warring city states, the dominant cities so extended their control and imposed their customs on the surrounding territory as to become centres of power and government in what would become the great civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Persia, and Egypt – ruled of course by male kings and pharaohs who had been anointed in their role by none other than the gods themselves. But that’s another story that we’ll leave for the next post.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
The Neolithic Revolution
For more than 90% of our species’ existence, from the time of our emergence in Africa 200,000 years ago until as recently as 14,000 years ago, we lived as hunter-gatherers in small familial bands. During that entire span of time, changes in our worldview and lifestyle were minimal. We made modest advances in technology from primitive hand axes to bone-tipped spears and harpoons. The so-called Great Leap Forward of 60,000 years ago saw a breakthrough into syntaxed language and a more symbolic mode of thinking. And our exodus from Africa at about the same time required us to adapt to some dramatically different climatic conditions. By 30,000 years ago, our developing cognitive abilities had found expression in the representational art and Venus figurines with which we decorated our caves in Europe. And we were by then beginning to bury our dead with something resembling a religious mode of consciousness. But we were still just nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherers, dressed in animal skins, living for the most part in caves, and maintaining a precarious existence in a world animated by nature spirits whom we did our best to keep happy.
Now all that was about to change – dramatically! Beginning about 14,000 years ago and gaining momentum quickly over the next few millenia, the Neolithic Revolution marked the single greatest transition in human history. We went from the only life we had known as wandering hunter-gatherers to that of settled villagers tending crops and herding domesticated animals.
We can only guess at how it began. We had already discovered a cooperative hunting partnership with dogs. Now, in northern Europe, as early as 12,000 BCE, we formed a different kind of partnership with reindeer – raising and herding them in exchange for their milk and meat. About the same time we seem to have noticed that the pits and seeds dropped along our habitual tracks were sprouting into the very plants that we worked so hard to gather. Aha! What if we deliberately planted these seeds and then stayed around to harvest their fruit? And instead of hunting down wild animals, what if we could domesticate them to our mutual advantage? Then we could have milk and meat and wool whenever we wanted.
It was an idea whose time had come. Comparatively quickly we went from nomadic to semi-sedentary to settled. We moved from simple gathering, to planting seeds with a pointed stick, to cultivating the ground with a hoe, and eventually to turning the earth with an ox-drawn plough. We evolved from simply planting seeds to selecting the best seeds from each harvest, to storing the harvests against times of need. In short, we added to our prowess as hunters the know-how required to grow reliable food supplies, raise captive animals, and, where climate and soil permitted, organise ourselves into self-sustaining villages.
Muraybet is the earliest known such agricultural-based settlement. Located on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Syria, it was occupied from 12,500 to 9500 BCE by villagers who left behind evidence of their domesticated plants, harpoons and fish-hooks, flint-bladed sickles for harvesting, mortars for grinding, and the ever-present goddess figurines. Jericho, in what is now the West Bank of Palestine, is another example. Today it is the one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – but its origin as a Neolithic village, built around an earlier shrine to the mother-goddess, dates to 9000 BCE. From sites such as these the revolution quickly spread to North Africa and northern Mesopotamia, to Asia and India by 8000 BCE, and finally to North America by 2500 BCE. In all these locations we find an expanding cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals such as dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, oxen, and pigs.
Farming quickly led to the production of surplus food, and with that to growing population centres. By 9000 BCE, we were living in villages of 200, and by 5000 BCE in cities of up to 10,000 residents. Swelling populations in turn required a form of social organisation and control more complex than that of simple hunting bands. Just as eukaryote cells evolved nuclei and animal bodies evolved brains millions of years earlier, so our expanding human communities now required some way of organising themselves and managing their complexity. One solution was the ascription of ruling power to a monarch. A king’s tomb at Eynan, a dozen miles north of the Sea of Galilee, dated to 9000 BCE, is the earliest yet found.
As farming became more efficient, some members of these towns and villages could occupy themselves with concerns other than food production. They learned to spin yarn and weave cloth, fashion flint tools and weapons, mould decorative pottery and religious figures, build mud-brick buildings and wooden furniture, make musical instruments and lead others in worshiping their deities. By 6000 BCE we had developed clearly defined specialist classes – craftsmen, priests, administrators, etc. Just as insect colonies depend on the performance of specialised functions, so it is too for human communities beyond a certain size and level of complexity.
The Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey exemplifies the peaceful lifestyle of such communities. There is no evidence of fortification, warfare, conquest, slavery, or significant social inequality. Men and women worked as partners. Women’s roles were no less important than men’s. There is even evidence that those in need were provided for from public stores of food or from the goddess's temple gardens.
However idyllic that may sound, life was not all candlelight and roses (or whatever the Neolithic equivalent of that may have been). They faced floods, droughts, malnutrition, and epidemics unknown to their hunter-gatherer forebears who had enjoyed a more nutritious diet and considerably less risk of famine. The downside of farming was that we became dependent on a smaller variety of crops that could fail; the downside of living in larger population centres was that we became vulnerable to infectious epidemics. The upside was that such challenges pushed us to be more inventive. We learned to extract medicine from plants, store food against times of need, agree on rules for sharing land, create canals to bring water from the river to our fields, and build boats to trade with neighbouring towns and villages.
All these revolutionary developments are linked to a very different sense of time. Prior to this era, we had wandered the earth, gathering and hunting as the need arose, with little or no thought for tomorrow. But the world of farming is the world of extended time. It requires making preparations for a future harvest, investing effort now for the sake of long-term goals, delaying present impulses to reap a future reward. This is a quite different mode of consciousness. It ushers us into a non-present world. Now we imagine the future with anticipation and anxiety, and confront our mortality with a deeper shudder. So this is the first era in which ritual burial and ceremonial graves became common practice.
This era corresponds to a stage in our individual development (age 7 – 12 years) that I call The Responsible Participant. Erik Erikson defined the key developmental task of this stage as “Industry versus Inferiority.” Children now work hard at being responsible. They are keen to share and cooperate – to join with others in being productive. Indeed the desire to be productive supersedes the whims of play. They are eager to learn and develop more complex skills. They now grasp calendar time and have a much better understanding of cause and effect. Jean Piaget described this as the “Concrete Operations Stage” during which the child engages in concrete problem-solving. Thinking is logical, but not yet abstract. The child can now imagine future scenarios, but his focus remains practical and concrete. Interestingly, belief in animism declines during this stage, though remnants of it may continue into later years.
All these developmental features are clearly expressed in what emerged during this Neolithic era of our collective history. It was a peaceful and productive time – akin to what Freud called the “latency period” in our individual development – the calm before the testosterone-crazed storm of adolescence that was soon to erupt in the ensuing age of Civilizations and Empires.
Now all that was about to change – dramatically! Beginning about 14,000 years ago and gaining momentum quickly over the next few millenia, the Neolithic Revolution marked the single greatest transition in human history. We went from the only life we had known as wandering hunter-gatherers to that of settled villagers tending crops and herding domesticated animals.
We can only guess at how it began. We had already discovered a cooperative hunting partnership with dogs. Now, in northern Europe, as early as 12,000 BCE, we formed a different kind of partnership with reindeer – raising and herding them in exchange for their milk and meat. About the same time we seem to have noticed that the pits and seeds dropped along our habitual tracks were sprouting into the very plants that we worked so hard to gather. Aha! What if we deliberately planted these seeds and then stayed around to harvest their fruit? And instead of hunting down wild animals, what if we could domesticate them to our mutual advantage? Then we could have milk and meat and wool whenever we wanted.
It was an idea whose time had come. Comparatively quickly we went from nomadic to semi-sedentary to settled. We moved from simple gathering, to planting seeds with a pointed stick, to cultivating the ground with a hoe, and eventually to turning the earth with an ox-drawn plough. We evolved from simply planting seeds to selecting the best seeds from each harvest, to storing the harvests against times of need. In short, we added to our prowess as hunters the know-how required to grow reliable food supplies, raise captive animals, and, where climate and soil permitted, organise ourselves into self-sustaining villages.
Muraybet is the earliest known such agricultural-based settlement. Located on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Syria, it was occupied from 12,500 to 9500 BCE by villagers who left behind evidence of their domesticated plants, harpoons and fish-hooks, flint-bladed sickles for harvesting, mortars for grinding, and the ever-present goddess figurines. Jericho, in what is now the West Bank of Palestine, is another example. Today it is the one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – but its origin as a Neolithic village, built around an earlier shrine to the mother-goddess, dates to 9000 BCE. From sites such as these the revolution quickly spread to North Africa and northern Mesopotamia, to Asia and India by 8000 BCE, and finally to North America by 2500 BCE. In all these locations we find an expanding cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals such as dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, oxen, and pigs.
Farming quickly led to the production of surplus food, and with that to growing population centres. By 9000 BCE, we were living in villages of 200, and by 5000 BCE in cities of up to 10,000 residents. Swelling populations in turn required a form of social organisation and control more complex than that of simple hunting bands. Just as eukaryote cells evolved nuclei and animal bodies evolved brains millions of years earlier, so our expanding human communities now required some way of organising themselves and managing their complexity. One solution was the ascription of ruling power to a monarch. A king’s tomb at Eynan, a dozen miles north of the Sea of Galilee, dated to 9000 BCE, is the earliest yet found.
As farming became more efficient, some members of these towns and villages could occupy themselves with concerns other than food production. They learned to spin yarn and weave cloth, fashion flint tools and weapons, mould decorative pottery and religious figures, build mud-brick buildings and wooden furniture, make musical instruments and lead others in worshiping their deities. By 6000 BCE we had developed clearly defined specialist classes – craftsmen, priests, administrators, etc. Just as insect colonies depend on the performance of specialised functions, so it is too for human communities beyond a certain size and level of complexity.
The Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey exemplifies the peaceful lifestyle of such communities. There is no evidence of fortification, warfare, conquest, slavery, or significant social inequality. Men and women worked as partners. Women’s roles were no less important than men’s. There is even evidence that those in need were provided for from public stores of food or from the goddess's temple gardens.
However idyllic that may sound, life was not all candlelight and roses (or whatever the Neolithic equivalent of that may have been). They faced floods, droughts, malnutrition, and epidemics unknown to their hunter-gatherer forebears who had enjoyed a more nutritious diet and considerably less risk of famine. The downside of farming was that we became dependent on a smaller variety of crops that could fail; the downside of living in larger population centres was that we became vulnerable to infectious epidemics. The upside was that such challenges pushed us to be more inventive. We learned to extract medicine from plants, store food against times of need, agree on rules for sharing land, create canals to bring water from the river to our fields, and build boats to trade with neighbouring towns and villages.
All these revolutionary developments are linked to a very different sense of time. Prior to this era, we had wandered the earth, gathering and hunting as the need arose, with little or no thought for tomorrow. But the world of farming is the world of extended time. It requires making preparations for a future harvest, investing effort now for the sake of long-term goals, delaying present impulses to reap a future reward. This is a quite different mode of consciousness. It ushers us into a non-present world. Now we imagine the future with anticipation and anxiety, and confront our mortality with a deeper shudder. So this is the first era in which ritual burial and ceremonial graves became common practice.
This era corresponds to a stage in our individual development (age 7 – 12 years) that I call The Responsible Participant. Erik Erikson defined the key developmental task of this stage as “Industry versus Inferiority.” Children now work hard at being responsible. They are keen to share and cooperate – to join with others in being productive. Indeed the desire to be productive supersedes the whims of play. They are eager to learn and develop more complex skills. They now grasp calendar time and have a much better understanding of cause and effect. Jean Piaget described this as the “Concrete Operations Stage” during which the child engages in concrete problem-solving. Thinking is logical, but not yet abstract. The child can now imagine future scenarios, but his focus remains practical and concrete. Interestingly, belief in animism declines during this stage, though remnants of it may continue into later years.
All these developmental features are clearly expressed in what emerged during this Neolithic era of our collective history. It was a peaceful and productive time – akin to what Freud called the “latency period” in our individual development – the calm before the testosterone-crazed storm of adolescence that was soon to erupt in the ensuing age of Civilizations and Empires.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Spirits, Shamans, and Goddesses
There is a kind of consciousness that is uniquely human. Known as reflexive consciousness, it refers to our ability to think about ourselves, ponder our existence, and wonder about our destiny. Most of what we do – getting dressed, preparing breakfast, driving to work, and so on throughout the day – does not require reflective thought. We do these things automatically. But there are also times when we reflect on our lives and make choices based on such reflection. This kind of consciousness seems linked to our equally unique ability to express ourselves in syntaxed language, tensed verbs, and creative art – all of which were in full play from at least 35,000 years ago when the Cro-Magnon people were busy inventing more sophisticated technologies and painting the walls of their caves with representational art. It also seems linked to a heightened awareness of our mortality, a consciously embraced worldview, and the emergence of religious practice at about this same time in our collective history.
Many of these features of reflexive consciousness make their appearance in our individual development during that stage (age 4-7) that I have called The Curious Explorer. It is also the stage during which, according to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, the young child attributes conscious intention to objects and events in the natural world – or what is known as animism.
According to the animistic worldview that developed during humanity’s migratory era and that still prevails today in many indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures, the entire universe is alive and interconnected. Everything is animated by spirits. They exist in humans, animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, and geographic features such as mountains and rivers – and everything that happens is under their control. They can be influenced, however, by rituals, often with sacrificial aspects, designed to win their favour or to keep malevolent spirits at bay.
The spirit that indwells all animals and humans survives physical death. In the case of humans, it may pass on to an easier world of abundant game, or it may remain on earth as a malignant ghost. Those who die a violent death may become malignant spirits that, intent on avenging their death, endanger those who come near the haunted spot. Many traditional Native American religions are fundamentally animistic. In some, such as the Navajo, the departed soul embarks on a journey to the spirit world that requires certain rituals to be performed by the survivors if it is not to become lost and wander forever as a ghost. Only in later cultures did the simple practice of offering food or lighting fires at the grave become elaborated to include the sacrifice of wives, slaves, and animals to provide the departed with such necessities in the future life.
In the animistic worldview, humans are very much a part of nature rather than separate from or superior to it. And because they are on a roughly equal footing with other animals, it is imperative to treat them with respect – especially since an animal may be the spiritual abode of one of your dead ancestors. Animal worship was sometimes intertwined with hunting rites. Archaeological evidence from both cave paintings and animal remains suggests that the bear cult involved a sacrificial ritual in which a bear was shot with arrows and then ritualistically buried near a clay bear statue covered by a bear fur with the skull and the body of the bear buried separately. Other rituals and taboos were designed to please the souls of slain animals so that they would tell other still-living animals that they need not resist being caught and killed.
The practice of shamanism is closely linked to the animistic worldview. A shaman is an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds, capable of leaving his or her body to travel throughout a layered cosmos - flying above the earth to the spirit world or descending into the underworld – to negotiate with good and evil spirits on behalf of the tribe. By entering a trance, the soul of the shaman ventures into other worlds to seek out the underlying causes of mundane earthly events – and then fights, begs, or cajoles the spirits to offer guidance, ameliorate illness, or otherwise intervene in human affairs down here on the ground. It’s a risky business. The spirits themselves may be less than happy with the shaman’s interference; the plant materials used to induce the trance can be toxic or fatal if misused; and failure to return from an out-of-body journey can lead to death. To assist in the work, therefore, the shaman may have “spirit helpers” (usually the spirits of powerful or agile animals) who enable him or her to fly high like a hawk or dive deep like a fish into the spirit world.
Shamans perform a variety of functions – healing the sick, delivering solutions to community problems, predicting the future, leading sacrifices, and guiding the souls of the dead to their proper abode. Healing is accomplished by retrieving lost parts of the person’s soul or by cleansing the soul of the negative energies polluting it. The shaman’s spirit may enter the body of the patient to confront the spiritual infirmity and banish the infectious spirit. Sometimes medicinal herbs may be prescribed. And in the case of an infertile woman, the problem can be cured by contacting the soul of the wished-for child.
Given the value of these functions and the risks involved in performing them, the shaman usually enjoyed great power and prestige in his or her community – as evidenced by a 12,000 year old shaman burial site in a cave in Galilee. The elderly woman’s body had been arranged with ten large stones placed on her head, pelvis and arms. Among her unusual grave goods were 50 complete tortoise shells, a human foot, and body parts of assorted animals with whose spirits the woman had been in close relationship.
It seems clear that shamanism was practiced as early as 30,000 years ago – the date assigned to the earliest known undisputed shaman burial site in what is now the Czech Republic. Many of the cave paintings from this time – such as the half-human half-animal images, and images of humans wearing animal masks – are suggestive of shamanic practices. And the discovery of bone flutes and drums made of animal skins found in the graves of shamans from this time are in keeping with the use of music to induce shamanic trances.
To this day, shamanism is strongest in societies that still rely on hunting and gathering. It is only when agricultural societies became established that shamanism evolved into a priestly class and animism gave way to more institutionalised forms of religion.
One final feature of the worldview prevalent at this time is the emergence of the first goddesses. Along with the cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon people, we find an abundance of female figurines, naked and unadorned, carved of stone or of mammoth bone or ivory. She was far and away the chief object of sculpture for these cave dwellers. Although some anthropologists have suggested that they may depict actual women, or represent a kind of stone-age pornography, the wider consensus is that they point towards the mythic role of woman as a mother-goddess, experienced as the source and giver of life. Many of these figurines have been found pressed into the earth in sacred settings in household shrines. One, known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, was found in Germany and dated to 35,000 BCE. Made of mammoth tusk, it so emphasizes the vulva and breasts as to make it clear that this was a fertility amulet, almost certainly used in rituals of sympathetic magic to ensure the fertility of women and the land.
To the people of this time, nature was not only animated by spirits but clearly female – a fruitful mother-goddess who gave them life and all that was needed to sustain them, She would more and more come to be symbolised as the Great Goddess of whom these early Venus figurines were the forerunner – the Magna Mater who would become central in the worldviews still to emerge in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete.
Many of these features of reflexive consciousness make their appearance in our individual development during that stage (age 4-7) that I have called The Curious Explorer. It is also the stage during which, according to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, the young child attributes conscious intention to objects and events in the natural world – or what is known as animism.
According to the animistic worldview that developed during humanity’s migratory era and that still prevails today in many indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures, the entire universe is alive and interconnected. Everything is animated by spirits. They exist in humans, animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, and geographic features such as mountains and rivers – and everything that happens is under their control. They can be influenced, however, by rituals, often with sacrificial aspects, designed to win their favour or to keep malevolent spirits at bay.
The spirit that indwells all animals and humans survives physical death. In the case of humans, it may pass on to an easier world of abundant game, or it may remain on earth as a malignant ghost. Those who die a violent death may become malignant spirits that, intent on avenging their death, endanger those who come near the haunted spot. Many traditional Native American religions are fundamentally animistic. In some, such as the Navajo, the departed soul embarks on a journey to the spirit world that requires certain rituals to be performed by the survivors if it is not to become lost and wander forever as a ghost. Only in later cultures did the simple practice of offering food or lighting fires at the grave become elaborated to include the sacrifice of wives, slaves, and animals to provide the departed with such necessities in the future life.
In the animistic worldview, humans are very much a part of nature rather than separate from or superior to it. And because they are on a roughly equal footing with other animals, it is imperative to treat them with respect – especially since an animal may be the spiritual abode of one of your dead ancestors. Animal worship was sometimes intertwined with hunting rites. Archaeological evidence from both cave paintings and animal remains suggests that the bear cult involved a sacrificial ritual in which a bear was shot with arrows and then ritualistically buried near a clay bear statue covered by a bear fur with the skull and the body of the bear buried separately. Other rituals and taboos were designed to please the souls of slain animals so that they would tell other still-living animals that they need not resist being caught and killed.
The practice of shamanism is closely linked to the animistic worldview. A shaman is an intermediary between the human and spirit worlds, capable of leaving his or her body to travel throughout a layered cosmos - flying above the earth to the spirit world or descending into the underworld – to negotiate with good and evil spirits on behalf of the tribe. By entering a trance, the soul of the shaman ventures into other worlds to seek out the underlying causes of mundane earthly events – and then fights, begs, or cajoles the spirits to offer guidance, ameliorate illness, or otherwise intervene in human affairs down here on the ground. It’s a risky business. The spirits themselves may be less than happy with the shaman’s interference; the plant materials used to induce the trance can be toxic or fatal if misused; and failure to return from an out-of-body journey can lead to death. To assist in the work, therefore, the shaman may have “spirit helpers” (usually the spirits of powerful or agile animals) who enable him or her to fly high like a hawk or dive deep like a fish into the spirit world.
Shamans perform a variety of functions – healing the sick, delivering solutions to community problems, predicting the future, leading sacrifices, and guiding the souls of the dead to their proper abode. Healing is accomplished by retrieving lost parts of the person’s soul or by cleansing the soul of the negative energies polluting it. The shaman’s spirit may enter the body of the patient to confront the spiritual infirmity and banish the infectious spirit. Sometimes medicinal herbs may be prescribed. And in the case of an infertile woman, the problem can be cured by contacting the soul of the wished-for child.
Given the value of these functions and the risks involved in performing them, the shaman usually enjoyed great power and prestige in his or her community – as evidenced by a 12,000 year old shaman burial site in a cave in Galilee. The elderly woman’s body had been arranged with ten large stones placed on her head, pelvis and arms. Among her unusual grave goods were 50 complete tortoise shells, a human foot, and body parts of assorted animals with whose spirits the woman had been in close relationship.
It seems clear that shamanism was practiced as early as 30,000 years ago – the date assigned to the earliest known undisputed shaman burial site in what is now the Czech Republic. Many of the cave paintings from this time – such as the half-human half-animal images, and images of humans wearing animal masks – are suggestive of shamanic practices. And the discovery of bone flutes and drums made of animal skins found in the graves of shamans from this time are in keeping with the use of music to induce shamanic trances.
To this day, shamanism is strongest in societies that still rely on hunting and gathering. It is only when agricultural societies became established that shamanism evolved into a priestly class and animism gave way to more institutionalised forms of religion.
One final feature of the worldview prevalent at this time is the emergence of the first goddesses. Along with the cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon people, we find an abundance of female figurines, naked and unadorned, carved of stone or of mammoth bone or ivory. She was far and away the chief object of sculpture for these cave dwellers. Although some anthropologists have suggested that they may depict actual women, or represent a kind of stone-age pornography, the wider consensus is that they point towards the mythic role of woman as a mother-goddess, experienced as the source and giver of life. Many of these figurines have been found pressed into the earth in sacred settings in household shrines. One, known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, was found in Germany and dated to 35,000 BCE. Made of mammoth tusk, it so emphasizes the vulva and breasts as to make it clear that this was a fertility amulet, almost certainly used in rituals of sympathetic magic to ensure the fertility of women and the land.
To the people of this time, nature was not only animated by spirits but clearly female – a fruitful mother-goddess who gave them life and all that was needed to sustain them, She would more and more come to be symbolised as the Great Goddess of whom these early Venus figurines were the forerunner – the Magna Mater who would become central in the worldviews still to emerge in the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Crete.
Friday, September 24, 2010
The World of the Great Migrations
Here’s a quick recap of what in the previous post we called “The African Exodus”.
Because they survived by hunting large animals, their lifestyle was chiefly nomadic. Those living near the ice in northern Europe followed the herds of reindeer and caribou. Those living in warmer climes hunted mammoths. It was dangerous work, but they were sufficiently skilled to hunt many large animal species to extinction. The Cro-Magnon people in Europe invented a lunar calendar with which to predict the migration of their prey animals. And as early as 30,000 years ago, both in Europe and Asia, our forbears entered a partnership with dogs. Still evolving from wolves, these animals helped in herding and bringing down game, and were rewarded by scavenging what their human partners left behind. Evidence of humans and dogs being buried together at a site in Israel 14,000 years ago is testimony to the deepening bond that subsequently developed and has continued between man and his best friend to this day.
Like their African ancestors, the migrants lived and moved about in small groups, finding shelter in caves and sometimes in purpose-built huts or pits dug into the earth. Rarely would one group encounter another. Mostly they had to deal only with other animals – many of them extremely dangerous. In coastal areas where they could rely on fishing, their lifestyle would have been somewhat more settled.
These nomadic or semi-nomadic groups were neither large nor complex. Kinship and proximity were the binding elements. There was no significant inequality or distinction of rank. Possessions were simple, with no real difference in wealth. War as we know it didn’t exist. While some division of labour by gender may have existed for the sake of efficiency in acquiring food, this was probably the most gender-equal time in all of history. Some women were very highly regarded, as indicated by the burial, 30,000 years ago in what is now the Czech Republic, of one who was a shaman. And it seems likely that family groups at this time followed a pattern of matrilineal descent.
A diet of meat, roots and fruit became supplemented with wild cereal grains as early as 23,000 years ago. Bananas and tubers may have been cultivated in a rudimentary form of horticulture even earlier. Nor were they slow to learn the secrets of getting high. Wine making and the consumption of hallucinogenic plants seems to have originated during this same period. The widespread use of cooking and other food-processing is reflected in a trend towards smaller teeth in humans over the last 100,000 years. Our face, jaw, and teeth today are about 10% less robust than was the case 10,000 years ago, and 25% less robust than 30,000 years ago.
The Cro-Magnon people brought with them to Europe an inventive genius previously unknown. Fishing nets, harpoons, the bow and arrow, spears that could be thrown, skilfully crafted stone blades, lamps fuelled with animal fat, tailored garments decorated with beads, sewing needles, fireplace cooking utensils, and a variety of containers, some made with wood – all these were in use 30,000 years ago.
Most impressive, however, is the art that decorated the walls of caves such as Chauvet Cave in France. Dated to 30,000 years ago, it is a veritable gallery of prehistoric art, depicting animals and humans, risky hunting scenes, creatures that are half-human and half-animal, as well as assorted symbolic shapes and patterns. There are also engravings, jewellery, animal carvings, sculptures made of bone and ivory, Venus figurines, and the oldest example of ceramic art – the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, dated to about 27,000 years ago. Artistic creations such as these reflect a new capacity for abstract thought, conceptual understanding, and spoken language. While these had been evolving gradually over time, the pace quickened during this Upper Paleolithic period. And with them would have come as well greater emotional capacities for intimacy and sympathetic response to the needs of others.
These cognitive and emotional developments, together with an awakening curiosity about the larger world and a willingness to venture into it at greater risk, correspond with what is typical of early school-age children (aged 4 – 6) – the stage of development that I call “The Curious Explorer”. It is what Jean Piaget described as the “conceptual pre-operations” stage (4-7 years), and the stage in which the key developmental task described by Erik Erikson is “Initiative versus Guilt” (3-6 years). During this stage, initiative adds the element of planning to the tasks we undertake. In learning new skills, the child is also learning to master the world around him. He learns to take initiative for the sake of achieving goals. And his growing courage and independence leads to more risky behaviour. Whether such behaviour is the child’s crossing a street on his or her own, or the early migrants venturing across the Coral Sea to Australia, it is classic exploratory behaviour that characterises this stage.
At the heart of these developments is an emerging sense of self. While still centered primarily on the body rather than being a mental-ego, the self is nonetheless now very much separate from the world and seems central to it. And with that sense of separateness comes a heightened awareness of our mortality and of the threats against which the self must now be defended. Sometime around age four in our individual development, and during this migratory era in our collective development, we awaken to the finiteness and vulnerability of our separate existence. No longer protected from the vision of our mortality, we start defending our now-separate self against death and do what we can to make it seem enduring and immortal. In short, we begin to devise the innumerable strategies of death-denial that distinguish our species, that shape our worldviews, and that lie near the heart of our religious beliefs and rituals.
Just how that was expressed for our ancestors during this particular period of our history I will put on hold until my next Post.
- 60,000 years ago, a first wave of migrants journeyed from Africa to Australia, leaving pockets of population scattered en route along the coasts of Pakistan, India, and the islands of Southeast Asia.
- 50,000 years ago, as this coastal clan reached China, a second wave left Africa, settled in the Levant, and followed the steppe highway eastward.
- 35,000 years ago, these steppe migrants reached southern Siberia and entered China from the north.
- At the same time, a separate group of the steppe clan (the Cro-Magnon people) travelled west from central Asia into Europe.
- 20,000 years ago, the steppe clan that was still travelling northeast crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska and then, 15,000 years ago, expanded south into North, Central, and South America.
- Only 4000 years ago did descendants of the coastal clan who had settled in Southeast Asia venture across vast expanses of the Pacific to colonise Polynesia.
Because they survived by hunting large animals, their lifestyle was chiefly nomadic. Those living near the ice in northern Europe followed the herds of reindeer and caribou. Those living in warmer climes hunted mammoths. It was dangerous work, but they were sufficiently skilled to hunt many large animal species to extinction. The Cro-Magnon people in Europe invented a lunar calendar with which to predict the migration of their prey animals. And as early as 30,000 years ago, both in Europe and Asia, our forbears entered a partnership with dogs. Still evolving from wolves, these animals helped in herding and bringing down game, and were rewarded by scavenging what their human partners left behind. Evidence of humans and dogs being buried together at a site in Israel 14,000 years ago is testimony to the deepening bond that subsequently developed and has continued between man and his best friend to this day.
Like their African ancestors, the migrants lived and moved about in small groups, finding shelter in caves and sometimes in purpose-built huts or pits dug into the earth. Rarely would one group encounter another. Mostly they had to deal only with other animals – many of them extremely dangerous. In coastal areas where they could rely on fishing, their lifestyle would have been somewhat more settled.
These nomadic or semi-nomadic groups were neither large nor complex. Kinship and proximity were the binding elements. There was no significant inequality or distinction of rank. Possessions were simple, with no real difference in wealth. War as we know it didn’t exist. While some division of labour by gender may have existed for the sake of efficiency in acquiring food, this was probably the most gender-equal time in all of history. Some women were very highly regarded, as indicated by the burial, 30,000 years ago in what is now the Czech Republic, of one who was a shaman. And it seems likely that family groups at this time followed a pattern of matrilineal descent.
A diet of meat, roots and fruit became supplemented with wild cereal grains as early as 23,000 years ago. Bananas and tubers may have been cultivated in a rudimentary form of horticulture even earlier. Nor were they slow to learn the secrets of getting high. Wine making and the consumption of hallucinogenic plants seems to have originated during this same period. The widespread use of cooking and other food-processing is reflected in a trend towards smaller teeth in humans over the last 100,000 years. Our face, jaw, and teeth today are about 10% less robust than was the case 10,000 years ago, and 25% less robust than 30,000 years ago.
The Cro-Magnon people brought with them to Europe an inventive genius previously unknown. Fishing nets, harpoons, the bow and arrow, spears that could be thrown, skilfully crafted stone blades, lamps fuelled with animal fat, tailored garments decorated with beads, sewing needles, fireplace cooking utensils, and a variety of containers, some made with wood – all these were in use 30,000 years ago.
Most impressive, however, is the art that decorated the walls of caves such as Chauvet Cave in France. Dated to 30,000 years ago, it is a veritable gallery of prehistoric art, depicting animals and humans, risky hunting scenes, creatures that are half-human and half-animal, as well as assorted symbolic shapes and patterns. There are also engravings, jewellery, animal carvings, sculptures made of bone and ivory, Venus figurines, and the oldest example of ceramic art – the Venus of Dolni Vestonice, dated to about 27,000 years ago. Artistic creations such as these reflect a new capacity for abstract thought, conceptual understanding, and spoken language. While these had been evolving gradually over time, the pace quickened during this Upper Paleolithic period. And with them would have come as well greater emotional capacities for intimacy and sympathetic response to the needs of others.
These cognitive and emotional developments, together with an awakening curiosity about the larger world and a willingness to venture into it at greater risk, correspond with what is typical of early school-age children (aged 4 – 6) – the stage of development that I call “The Curious Explorer”. It is what Jean Piaget described as the “conceptual pre-operations” stage (4-7 years), and the stage in which the key developmental task described by Erik Erikson is “Initiative versus Guilt” (3-6 years). During this stage, initiative adds the element of planning to the tasks we undertake. In learning new skills, the child is also learning to master the world around him. He learns to take initiative for the sake of achieving goals. And his growing courage and independence leads to more risky behaviour. Whether such behaviour is the child’s crossing a street on his or her own, or the early migrants venturing across the Coral Sea to Australia, it is classic exploratory behaviour that characterises this stage.
At the heart of these developments is an emerging sense of self. While still centered primarily on the body rather than being a mental-ego, the self is nonetheless now very much separate from the world and seems central to it. And with that sense of separateness comes a heightened awareness of our mortality and of the threats against which the self must now be defended. Sometime around age four in our individual development, and during this migratory era in our collective development, we awaken to the finiteness and vulnerability of our separate existence. No longer protected from the vision of our mortality, we start defending our now-separate self against death and do what we can to make it seem enduring and immortal. In short, we begin to devise the innumerable strategies of death-denial that distinguish our species, that shape our worldviews, and that lie near the heart of our religious beliefs and rituals.
Just how that was expressed for our ancestors during this particular period of our history I will put on hold until my next Post.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The African Exodus
Sixty thousand years ago, somewhere on the African coast of the Red Sea, a tribal band of probably not more than 150 people left Africa and headed east. Following the coasts of Arabia and India, they quickly reached southeast Asia, crossed 60 miles of open sea to Australia without any way of knowing that a hospitable landfall awaited them, and then proceeded to colonise central and east Asia. Considering that Homo sapiens, not long before, had been reduced almost to the point of extinction, it was a remarkable accomplishment to say the least.
What drove them to leave Africa after staying close to home for more than a millennium? We can only speculate. The developments in language and symbolic thought that had marked “the great leap forward” and were accelerating at the time of the African exodus would have contributed to their ability to navigate such a journey – as would their developing skill in producing more refined stone and bone tools. The last Ice Age was also accelerating, driving early humans out of Africa’s drought-stricken interior to the coastal areas where they had learned to gather food from the sea. Tools from this period found at coastal sites indicate that they could migrate over long distances along the coast of eastern Africa. There was no reason why they couldn’t do the same between continents. All they had to do was cross the narrow strait between present-day Djibouti and Yemen and they had relatively easy access to the endless beaches of southeast Asia.
Were they, like early school-age children, prompted by a growing confidence and curiosity to explore the world beyond what had become familiar? Or was the exodus just a gradual and unwitting expansion of range driven by local conditions? Certainly the speed with which they completed their migration to Australia suggests that they were driven by more than a careless meandering.
Human artefacts from the Northern Territory of Australia (where they landed after crossing from New Guinea) as well as at Lake Mungo (1000 kilometres west of Sydney) are clear evidence that humans were there 60,000 years ago. They would have arrived in sufficient numbers to start a breeding population and then found their way 2000 miles inland from Australia’s north coast to a lush oasis known as the Willandra Lakes. These presumably were descendants of the same people who left Africa, on the other side of the planet, at more or less the same time – 60,000 years ago. Whatever their route from Africa, it allowed for very rapid movement. Exactly how they got there, why they came, and what was driving them are questions we may never be able to answer. We do know, however, that Australia had to be colonised from elsewhere. It had been disconnected from the continents of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas for 100 million years. So it missed out on all the mammalian, primate, and hominid species that evolution had delivered elsewhere – pursuing instead its own path of placental species like kangaroos. And since humans most assuredly did not evolve from kangaroos, they must have come from somewhere beyond Australia.
Then 10,000 years later, according to the genetic and archaeological evidence, a second wave of migrants followed their curiosity and probably herds of grazing antelope out of Africa – this time to the Middle East. We know the Sahara as the largest desert in the world and a distinctly inhospitable place. But during certain periods of early human history it was a relatively moist region that allowed for human habitation. This had been true from 100,000 to 80,000 years ago – and again for a few thousand years some 50,000 years ago. This would have opened a route along the Red Sea, down the Nile to the Mediterranean, and then eastward across the Sinai to the Levant. Or perhaps this second wave of migrants made their exit, as the first wave probably had, across the 20-kilometre-wide strait of Bab al Mandab into southern Arabia.
However they got there, this was the last substantial exchange between Africa and Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. Another period of glaciations, the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, turned the Sahara into desert again, effectively closing the door between the two continents and dividing the human world into its African and Eurasian constituents.
The path was now open, however, to the rest of the Eurasian continent and beyond. While the first wave of migrants had taken the southern coastal route of Pakistan and India, this second wave could travel a virtual highway of steppe from the Gulf of Aqaba to northern Iran and on into central Asia and Mongolia. So East Asia was settled by modern humans from both the south and north. Those who took the southern coastal route arrived as early as 50,000 years ago, while those who took the northern route probably entered about 15,000 years later from the steppes of southern Siberia.
About the same time that those on the northern route reached East Asia (i.e. 35,000 years ago), another group from that same route took advantage of a climatic window of opportunity to head west from the central Asian steppes into Europe – into the territory that, until then, had been the preserve of the Neanderthals. Just 5000 years later, they had so dominated the region that their Neanderthal cousins were all but extinct. Known as the Cro-Magnon people (named after the cave in southwest France where some of their bones were first unearthed), they mostly inhabited southern Europe and the Balkans during the depths of the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, and expanded northward during the post-glacial period. They were notable for their advanced culture – called the Aurignacian culture – characterised by a new artistic and inventive genius that found expression in skilfully crafted stone and bone tools, antler-tipped spears, bows and arrows, woven clothing, cooking utensils, musical instruments, and above all in spectacular cave paintings and ivory sculptures.
Meanwhile, those who were following the northern steppe highway eastward had already reached southern Siberia by 40,000 years ago. Their journey seems to have stalled there for the next 20,000 years as they adapted to the frighteningly harsh conditions of the Asian Arctic during the Wisconsin glaciation. So the earliest sites in northeast Siberia date from 20,000 years ago. Considering that they had only relatively recently come from their tropical homeland, one can only imagine the hardships they would have endured in this frozen wilderness. Having honed their hunting skills on the central Asian steppes, they survived mainly on large mammals such as musk ox, reindeer, and mammoths, and eventually followed these herds eastward across the land bridge that had been exposed between Siberia and Alaska. Sea levels had dropped so dramatically during the ice age that the Bering Strait had dried up, allowing these northern pioneers to live a dual Asian-American existence.
At first, it would have been impossible for them to expand southward. A continuous sheet of ice covered most of northern Canada and eastern Alaska, keeping them locked in their northern home. Only when the ice began to retreat some 15,000 years ago were they able to enter the North American plains. Initially it may only have been a few dozen, or a few hundred at most, who made the journey into what must have been happy hunting grounds beyond their wildest dreams – a vast grassland teeming with large grazing animals. Almost immediately their population exploded, and within a thousand years they had journeyed all the way to the tip of South America and driven 75% of all the large mammals in the Americas to extinction. So much for any romantic notion that our indigenous forbears were naturally eco-friendly!
The last chapter in our populating this planet was not written until much later – some 4000 years ago. It was then that those who had long since peopled the islands of southeast Asia, and over thousands of years become both agriculturalists and consummate seafarers, pursued their island-hopping curiosity far out into the Pacific into what would become Polynesia. Despite Thor Heyerdahl’s contention that the Polynesians originated in South America, the linguistic evidence seems clear: Hawaii was settled from southeast Asia. But for all that this last chapter was written relatively recently, it is no less heroic than the exploits of those who first undertook this exodus from Africa 60,000 years ago. Even the most direct route to Hawaii by island-hopping would have required at least two enormous sea passages of a few thousand miles – a voyage on which they would have had to take their own crops, confident in their ability to survive wherever they might find land again. What greater testimony could there be to the irrepressible curiosity of this relatively hairless hominid who left his African homeland so long ago!
What drove them to leave Africa after staying close to home for more than a millennium? We can only speculate. The developments in language and symbolic thought that had marked “the great leap forward” and were accelerating at the time of the African exodus would have contributed to their ability to navigate such a journey – as would their developing skill in producing more refined stone and bone tools. The last Ice Age was also accelerating, driving early humans out of Africa’s drought-stricken interior to the coastal areas where they had learned to gather food from the sea. Tools from this period found at coastal sites indicate that they could migrate over long distances along the coast of eastern Africa. There was no reason why they couldn’t do the same between continents. All they had to do was cross the narrow strait between present-day Djibouti and Yemen and they had relatively easy access to the endless beaches of southeast Asia.
Were they, like early school-age children, prompted by a growing confidence and curiosity to explore the world beyond what had become familiar? Or was the exodus just a gradual and unwitting expansion of range driven by local conditions? Certainly the speed with which they completed their migration to Australia suggests that they were driven by more than a careless meandering.
Human artefacts from the Northern Territory of Australia (where they landed after crossing from New Guinea) as well as at Lake Mungo (1000 kilometres west of Sydney) are clear evidence that humans were there 60,000 years ago. They would have arrived in sufficient numbers to start a breeding population and then found their way 2000 miles inland from Australia’s north coast to a lush oasis known as the Willandra Lakes. These presumably were descendants of the same people who left Africa, on the other side of the planet, at more or less the same time – 60,000 years ago. Whatever their route from Africa, it allowed for very rapid movement. Exactly how they got there, why they came, and what was driving them are questions we may never be able to answer. We do know, however, that Australia had to be colonised from elsewhere. It had been disconnected from the continents of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas for 100 million years. So it missed out on all the mammalian, primate, and hominid species that evolution had delivered elsewhere – pursuing instead its own path of placental species like kangaroos. And since humans most assuredly did not evolve from kangaroos, they must have come from somewhere beyond Australia.
Then 10,000 years later, according to the genetic and archaeological evidence, a second wave of migrants followed their curiosity and probably herds of grazing antelope out of Africa – this time to the Middle East. We know the Sahara as the largest desert in the world and a distinctly inhospitable place. But during certain periods of early human history it was a relatively moist region that allowed for human habitation. This had been true from 100,000 to 80,000 years ago – and again for a few thousand years some 50,000 years ago. This would have opened a route along the Red Sea, down the Nile to the Mediterranean, and then eastward across the Sinai to the Levant. Or perhaps this second wave of migrants made their exit, as the first wave probably had, across the 20-kilometre-wide strait of Bab al Mandab into southern Arabia.
However they got there, this was the last substantial exchange between Africa and Eurasia for tens of thousands of years. Another period of glaciations, the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, turned the Sahara into desert again, effectively closing the door between the two continents and dividing the human world into its African and Eurasian constituents.
The path was now open, however, to the rest of the Eurasian continent and beyond. While the first wave of migrants had taken the southern coastal route of Pakistan and India, this second wave could travel a virtual highway of steppe from the Gulf of Aqaba to northern Iran and on into central Asia and Mongolia. So East Asia was settled by modern humans from both the south and north. Those who took the southern coastal route arrived as early as 50,000 years ago, while those who took the northern route probably entered about 15,000 years later from the steppes of southern Siberia.
About the same time that those on the northern route reached East Asia (i.e. 35,000 years ago), another group from that same route took advantage of a climatic window of opportunity to head west from the central Asian steppes into Europe – into the territory that, until then, had been the preserve of the Neanderthals. Just 5000 years later, they had so dominated the region that their Neanderthal cousins were all but extinct. Known as the Cro-Magnon people (named after the cave in southwest France where some of their bones were first unearthed), they mostly inhabited southern Europe and the Balkans during the depths of the Wisconsin Ice Epoch, and expanded northward during the post-glacial period. They were notable for their advanced culture – called the Aurignacian culture – characterised by a new artistic and inventive genius that found expression in skilfully crafted stone and bone tools, antler-tipped spears, bows and arrows, woven clothing, cooking utensils, musical instruments, and above all in spectacular cave paintings and ivory sculptures.
Meanwhile, those who were following the northern steppe highway eastward had already reached southern Siberia by 40,000 years ago. Their journey seems to have stalled there for the next 20,000 years as they adapted to the frighteningly harsh conditions of the Asian Arctic during the Wisconsin glaciation. So the earliest sites in northeast Siberia date from 20,000 years ago. Considering that they had only relatively recently come from their tropical homeland, one can only imagine the hardships they would have endured in this frozen wilderness. Having honed their hunting skills on the central Asian steppes, they survived mainly on large mammals such as musk ox, reindeer, and mammoths, and eventually followed these herds eastward across the land bridge that had been exposed between Siberia and Alaska. Sea levels had dropped so dramatically during the ice age that the Bering Strait had dried up, allowing these northern pioneers to live a dual Asian-American existence.
At first, it would have been impossible for them to expand southward. A continuous sheet of ice covered most of northern Canada and eastern Alaska, keeping them locked in their northern home. Only when the ice began to retreat some 15,000 years ago were they able to enter the North American plains. Initially it may only have been a few dozen, or a few hundred at most, who made the journey into what must have been happy hunting grounds beyond their wildest dreams – a vast grassland teeming with large grazing animals. Almost immediately their population exploded, and within a thousand years they had journeyed all the way to the tip of South America and driven 75% of all the large mammals in the Americas to extinction. So much for any romantic notion that our indigenous forbears were naturally eco-friendly!
The last chapter in our populating this planet was not written until much later – some 4000 years ago. It was then that those who had long since peopled the islands of southeast Asia, and over thousands of years become both agriculturalists and consummate seafarers, pursued their island-hopping curiosity far out into the Pacific into what would become Polynesia. Despite Thor Heyerdahl’s contention that the Polynesians originated in South America, the linguistic evidence seems clear: Hawaii was settled from southeast Asia. But for all that this last chapter was written relatively recently, it is no less heroic than the exploits of those who first undertook this exodus from Africa 60,000 years ago. Even the most direct route to Hawaii by island-hopping would have required at least two enormous sea passages of a few thousand miles – a voyage on which they would have had to take their own crops, confident in their ability to survive wherever they might find land again. What greater testimony could there be to the irrepressible curiosity of this relatively hairless hominid who left his African homeland so long ago!
Sunday, September 19, 2010
The Great Leap Forward
We seem to like very much the idea of making a “great leap forward.” In 1958 Chairman Mao used the phrase to describe his plan to modernise China’s economy. And “New Age” enthusiasts like to think that humanity is now making a “quantum leap” in consciousness. But the original “great leap forward”, according to many anthropologists, occurred sometime between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago when Homo sapiens became a species driven by language and culture. An explosion in our capacity for symbolic thought and self-awareness, accompanied by breakthrough developments in spoken language, brought with it an accompanying explosion in cultural creativity.
Over what period of time these advancements took place remains a matter of debate among anthropologists. One theory holds that a leap into “behavioural modernity,” or what is sometimes called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred almost suddenly some 50,000 years ago – perhaps as a result of a genetic mutation or a reorganization of the brain that led to a major advance in language. Proponents of this theory, known as the “big bang” theory of human mental evolution, base their evidence on the abundance of artefacts, such as artwork and bone tools, that appear in the fossil record after 50,000 years ago – indicating, they suggest, that prior to this date Homo sapiens lacked the cognitive skills required to produce such artefacts. Jared Diamond, an evolutionary scientist at UCLA, contends that, prior to this time, there is little evidence of cultural change. But then, coinciding more or less with our exodus from Africa to colonise the world, there is a sudden flowering of tool-making, sophisticated weaponry, sculpture, cave painting, body ornaments, and long-distance trade
An alternative theory known as the Continuity Theory holds that “behavioural modernity” has resulted from a gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills, and culture occurring over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Advocates of this view, such as geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, contend that evidence of modern behaviour can be found at a number of sites in Africa and the Levant from a much earlier time. A ritual burial with grave goods, for example, has been uncovered at Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 90,000 years ago. Continuity theorists believe that what appears to be a later technological revolution is probably the result of increased cultural exchange within a growing human population.
The truth may lie somewhere between the extremes of these two theories. From about 75,000 years ago there appears to have been a marked acceleration in the development of human language, cognition, and culture. The evidence for this consists primarily of artefacts found at Blombos Cave, 30 meters above the sea on the southern tip of South Africa. Here we find the earliest undisputed evidence of art in the form of bracelets, beads, rock art, and ochre used as body paint.
Beads made from the shells of tiny molluscs, dating from 76,000 years ago, were found in clusters. Pierced holes in the shells, together with smooth worn patches, suggest that the beads were strung together into necklaces or bracelets which may have rubbed against clothing. Blombos cave is also famous for its abstract engravings on red ochre from the same time. Together with the beadwork, it suggests that inhabitants of the cave had a complex sense of symbolism and a sufficiently developed language to describe the symbolic meaning that the beads and engravings represent. Here was the first tangible evidence of advanced, abstract thought.
Why should our ancestors have gone out of their way to collect high-quality red iron oxides? The red ochre has got to be culturally significant. At first it looks like any lump of pinkish rock. But look more closely and you see a cross-hatched pattern carefully etched onto its surface. It is regarded as the first evidence of Stone Age lipstick – as if, almost suddenly, people wanted to paint their bodies. Coincident with this is evidence that clothing also originated in Africa 75,000 years ago. It would of course have been useful when Homo sapiens left Africa and ventured into colder climes – but that migration did not take place until some 15,000 years later. It would seem that our taste for jewellery, fashion, art and cosmetics all emerged at about the same time. But why? Was it all about sexual attraction and signaling one’s genetic fitness with rare adornments? Or was it evidence of prestige and status? Even in this egalitarian society, some people would be more successful than others, and they may have wanted to signal their success with prized material items. This could, in other words, be the first evidence of social ranking marked by material possessions.
There were also significant advances in tool-making at this time. The harpoon had been invented 90,000 years ago. But now, just 70,000 – 65,000 years ago, using the earlier technology of heating silcrete to temperatures of 450-degrees Fahrenheit, small stone tools and points were invented, making possible the manufacture of lightweight bows and arrows and projectile spears.
Considering all these developments, along with the evidence of more permanent dwellings, hearths, and group living, and we begin to see the first signs of an organised society, communicating through language, symbolism, and rituals. Whether such developments occurred abruptly or more gradually, it seems clear that there was a significant advance in human cognition and culture from 75,000 years ago, leading to the African exodus of 60,000 years ago. The question is “Why?”
Climate was almost certainly a factor. With the onset of a new Ice Age some 80,000 years ago, our relatively settled life on the African savannah was forced to change. By 70,000 years ago it was getting downright nippy in the northern hemisphere. Great sheets of ice were bearing down on what would later be Seattle and New York. In Africa a 10-degree Celsius drop in the average world temperature, as well as the fallout from the eruption of a super-volcano in Sumatra, brought extensive drought to the interior, forcing early humans to coastal regions where they could survive on seafood. Genetic evidence, however, suggests that they nonetheless suffered a massive decline in population at this time – dwindling to as few as 2000 individuals. Homo sapiens was literally on the brink of extinction. The upside was that, in adapting to these new and difficult conditions, our species also became a whole lot smarter. The deep-freeze and drought may have been the catalyst for the Great Leap Forward, favouring intelligence and more complex social structures as life became more difficult.
It may also be that just a few small genetic mutations at this time gave us these amazing minds and the power of abstract conceptual thought. Whatever the trigger, none of these changes could have occurred without the development of language and the social networks that language makes possible. More specifically, the Great Leap Forward depended on our mastery of syntax – the ability to create multi-word sentences that are structured with a subject, verb, and object. How those parts of speech are arranged varies from one language to another. English and most other languages are characterised by a subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax. An SOV structure is used by a few languages; VSO and VOS are used by about 15% of languages; and OSV is the rarest of all. But whatever the structure, our ability to communicate complex meaning depends on our understanding and use of syntax. It’s what distinguishes human from ape communication.
Just why we should have crossed the syntax barrier at this point in our history remains unclear. It parallels the development of language in children and seems to require the maturation of certain brain structures. Children begin to speak by babbling. At about 12 months, they begin to use actual words. Over the next year there is a massive expansion of single-word vocabulary and the emergence of two-word sentences. Between two and three years of age, children begin to put together three-word sentences with syntax. This is the stage in individual development that corresponds with the Great Leap Forward in humanity’s development.
It was all necessary in order to make possible the next stage in our development when, some 60,000 years ago, we began to leave our African homeland and spread into Europe and Asia. During the next couple of thousand years we had walked around the coast of South Asia and reached Australia. A later wave of expansion took us into the Middle East and then on into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A species that had almost been made extinct rallied to populate the entire world. And what set it all in motion happened first in Africa – this Great Leap Forward that marked our initiation as modern humans
Over what period of time these advancements took place remains a matter of debate among anthropologists. One theory holds that a leap into “behavioural modernity,” or what is sometimes called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, occurred almost suddenly some 50,000 years ago – perhaps as a result of a genetic mutation or a reorganization of the brain that led to a major advance in language. Proponents of this theory, known as the “big bang” theory of human mental evolution, base their evidence on the abundance of artefacts, such as artwork and bone tools, that appear in the fossil record after 50,000 years ago – indicating, they suggest, that prior to this date Homo sapiens lacked the cognitive skills required to produce such artefacts. Jared Diamond, an evolutionary scientist at UCLA, contends that, prior to this time, there is little evidence of cultural change. But then, coinciding more or less with our exodus from Africa to colonise the world, there is a sudden flowering of tool-making, sophisticated weaponry, sculpture, cave painting, body ornaments, and long-distance trade
An alternative theory known as the Continuity Theory holds that “behavioural modernity” has resulted from a gradual accumulation of knowledge, skills, and culture occurring over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. Advocates of this view, such as geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, contend that evidence of modern behaviour can be found at a number of sites in Africa and the Levant from a much earlier time. A ritual burial with grave goods, for example, has been uncovered at Qafzeh in Israel and dated to 90,000 years ago. Continuity theorists believe that what appears to be a later technological revolution is probably the result of increased cultural exchange within a growing human population.
The truth may lie somewhere between the extremes of these two theories. From about 75,000 years ago there appears to have been a marked acceleration in the development of human language, cognition, and culture. The evidence for this consists primarily of artefacts found at Blombos Cave, 30 meters above the sea on the southern tip of South Africa. Here we find the earliest undisputed evidence of art in the form of bracelets, beads, rock art, and ochre used as body paint.
Beads made from the shells of tiny molluscs, dating from 76,000 years ago, were found in clusters. Pierced holes in the shells, together with smooth worn patches, suggest that the beads were strung together into necklaces or bracelets which may have rubbed against clothing. Blombos cave is also famous for its abstract engravings on red ochre from the same time. Together with the beadwork, it suggests that inhabitants of the cave had a complex sense of symbolism and a sufficiently developed language to describe the symbolic meaning that the beads and engravings represent. Here was the first tangible evidence of advanced, abstract thought.
Why should our ancestors have gone out of their way to collect high-quality red iron oxides? The red ochre has got to be culturally significant. At first it looks like any lump of pinkish rock. But look more closely and you see a cross-hatched pattern carefully etched onto its surface. It is regarded as the first evidence of Stone Age lipstick – as if, almost suddenly, people wanted to paint their bodies. Coincident with this is evidence that clothing also originated in Africa 75,000 years ago. It would of course have been useful when Homo sapiens left Africa and ventured into colder climes – but that migration did not take place until some 15,000 years later. It would seem that our taste for jewellery, fashion, art and cosmetics all emerged at about the same time. But why? Was it all about sexual attraction and signaling one’s genetic fitness with rare adornments? Or was it evidence of prestige and status? Even in this egalitarian society, some people would be more successful than others, and they may have wanted to signal their success with prized material items. This could, in other words, be the first evidence of social ranking marked by material possessions.
There were also significant advances in tool-making at this time. The harpoon had been invented 90,000 years ago. But now, just 70,000 – 65,000 years ago, using the earlier technology of heating silcrete to temperatures of 450-degrees Fahrenheit, small stone tools and points were invented, making possible the manufacture of lightweight bows and arrows and projectile spears.
Considering all these developments, along with the evidence of more permanent dwellings, hearths, and group living, and we begin to see the first signs of an organised society, communicating through language, symbolism, and rituals. Whether such developments occurred abruptly or more gradually, it seems clear that there was a significant advance in human cognition and culture from 75,000 years ago, leading to the African exodus of 60,000 years ago. The question is “Why?”
Climate was almost certainly a factor. With the onset of a new Ice Age some 80,000 years ago, our relatively settled life on the African savannah was forced to change. By 70,000 years ago it was getting downright nippy in the northern hemisphere. Great sheets of ice were bearing down on what would later be Seattle and New York. In Africa a 10-degree Celsius drop in the average world temperature, as well as the fallout from the eruption of a super-volcano in Sumatra, brought extensive drought to the interior, forcing early humans to coastal regions where they could survive on seafood. Genetic evidence, however, suggests that they nonetheless suffered a massive decline in population at this time – dwindling to as few as 2000 individuals. Homo sapiens was literally on the brink of extinction. The upside was that, in adapting to these new and difficult conditions, our species also became a whole lot smarter. The deep-freeze and drought may have been the catalyst for the Great Leap Forward, favouring intelligence and more complex social structures as life became more difficult.
It may also be that just a few small genetic mutations at this time gave us these amazing minds and the power of abstract conceptual thought. Whatever the trigger, none of these changes could have occurred without the development of language and the social networks that language makes possible. More specifically, the Great Leap Forward depended on our mastery of syntax – the ability to create multi-word sentences that are structured with a subject, verb, and object. How those parts of speech are arranged varies from one language to another. English and most other languages are characterised by a subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax. An SOV structure is used by a few languages; VSO and VOS are used by about 15% of languages; and OSV is the rarest of all. But whatever the structure, our ability to communicate complex meaning depends on our understanding and use of syntax. It’s what distinguishes human from ape communication.
Just why we should have crossed the syntax barrier at this point in our history remains unclear. It parallels the development of language in children and seems to require the maturation of certain brain structures. Children begin to speak by babbling. At about 12 months, they begin to use actual words. Over the next year there is a massive expansion of single-word vocabulary and the emergence of two-word sentences. Between two and three years of age, children begin to put together three-word sentences with syntax. This is the stage in individual development that corresponds with the Great Leap Forward in humanity’s development.
It was all necessary in order to make possible the next stage in our development when, some 60,000 years ago, we began to leave our African homeland and spread into Europe and Asia. During the next couple of thousand years we had walked around the coast of South Asia and reached Australia. A later wave of expansion took us into the Middle East and then on into Europe, Asia, and the Americas. A species that had almost been made extinct rallied to populate the entire world. And what set it all in motion happened first in Africa – this Great Leap Forward that marked our initiation as modern humans
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The World of Early Homo Sapiens
By “early homo sapiens” I mean the first modern humans who emerged in the African Rift Valley about 200,000 years ago. They maintained a relatively stable existence on the grasslands and in coastal regions of Africa until about 75,000 years ago when a rapidly accelerating Ice Age forced them to adapt in ways that anthropologists call the Great Leap Forward. Then, some 60,000 years ago, in the Great Migration, they left Africa to colonise the world.
Given the sparseness of the archaeological record, little can be said about their worldview. Indeed, given their still primitive level of cognitive development, they would have had no conceptual worldview as we think of it today. The best we can do, based on what evidence we have, is guess at what their experience of the world might have been.
Although his direct ancestry remains unclear, it seems likely that Homo sapiens, like his Neanderthal cousins in Europe, evolved from Homo heidelbergensis. Three fossil skulls found in Ethiopia and dated to 160,000 years ago are the oldest human remains yet discovered. His average brain size of 1485 cc is almost 50% larger than that of Homo erectus and slightly smaller than that of the Neanderthals. His appearance is distinguished from other Homo species by his nearly vertical forehead, very much smaller or non-existent eyebrow ridges, smaller teeth, a prominent chin, and a more gracile skeleton.
There are indications that, sometime after 160,000 years ago, four separate groups travelled south to the Cape of Good Hope, southwest to the Congo Basin, west to the Ivory Coast, and northeast to the coast of the Red Sea. Then, about 125,000 years ago, a group travelled across the Sahara and up the Nile to the Levant. Human remains found at sites in present-day Israel indicate that we were there from at least 110,000 years ago. From the end of the Illinoian Ice Age 130,000 years ago until the onset of the Intermediate Ice Age 80,000 years ago, the Levant was effectively an extension of northern Africa, with similar climatic conditions and animals. It would have been natural and relatively easy to follow the animals out of Africa. But then, soon after 80,000 years ago, modern humans abruptly disappeared from these sites. The encroaching Ice Age turned the Levant and North Africa into extreme desert and killed off the animals on which humans had relied for thousands of years. Those who had left Africa during warmer and wetter times either died off themselves or migrated back to Africa.
They were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands – necessarily small since the game present in any region was limited – comprised of a few family groups based on long-term monogamous relationships, with both parents caring for their children. Survival was less an individual thing than a group achievement. And because survival depended on cooperation and the equal distribution of food to everyone, the bands were egalitarian. There were no elite, no social stratification, and no formal leadership. Decision-making would have been consensual. Nor was there any formal division of labour. While women probably took greater responsibility for gathering and men for hunting, each member of the group would have been skilled at all tasks essential for survival. And for those too old or infirm to carry their weight, there is evidence that they were cared for by the group.
Surviving in the open grasslands would not have been easy. Maintaining a fire throughout the night helped keep the big cats at bay, but it required intelligence and cooperation for humans to hunt game that was much faster and stronger than they. As early as 165,000 years ago they had discovered a new way of fashioning tools by heating silcrete to a high temperature in a fire’s embers to create more consistent and sharper stone flakes. These in turn made possible the invention of stone-tipped spears and harpoons. But still the hunting of big game presented a challenge. It seems to have been accomplished by running the prey to exhaustion and then closing in for the kill at close quarters. Homo sapiens had emerged as a relatively hairless creature who perspired, so they could run for extended periods of time and still maintain their internal body temperature. Their large prey, while swifter over short distances, could not maintain that pace. Panting rather than perspiring, they needed to stop periodically to avoid overheating. Eventually the pursuing humans would run them to the ground.
Although primarily nomadic as they followed game from one region to another, they maintained central campsites (hearths and shelters) as home bases. Because their population was sparse – estimated at only one person per square mile – a given band would have hunted an area of perhaps 60 square miles from a single home base before moving on. Organised violence between bands was rare. The low population density, the abundance of food resources, the lack of any reason to hoard food beyond the group’s immediate needs, the survival value of cooperation, and the advantages of collaboration on hunting expeditions probably all contributed to the relative peacefulness of this period in our otherwise war-ravaged history.
Their diet consisted primarily of meat, fish, shellfish, leafy vegetables, fruit, nuts and insects. With a gradual drying up of the African interior that began 120,000 years ago, humans were attracted more and more to coastal environments where they could migrate easily along the coast and make their living from the sea. The cooking of shellfish is evident as early as 164,000 years ago at a site called Pinnacle Point in South Africa; large dumps of clam and oyster shells, dating from 125,000 years ago, have been found in Eritrea on the eastern Horn of Africa; and large 6-foot-long catfish were being caught with barbed fishing points 90,000 years ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Our now extinct ancestors began cooking their food at least 250,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier. Because cooked food, and especially cooked meat, delivers significantly more energy for less effort, it would have contributed to the growth and maintenance of our larger brains. It probably also contributed to our becoming more sociable as we brought food back to the central cooking area. We can imagine the band gathering at the end of the day, kindling a fire in the hearth both to cook their food and ward off animals, and then settling in around the fire to eat, laugh, sing, and enjoy their emerging ability to converse in spoken language, in a scene not unlike that which has been repeated countless times to the present day.
Archaeological evidence tells us more about the cosmology and religious practices of European Neanderthals than it does about that of contemporaneous Homo sapiens in Africa – but we may reasonably assume that they were similar. For both, it would be the animals – their nearest neighbours – that played a central role. Neanderthals’ veneration of the bear in mountainous sanctuaries is matched by evidence of animal worship in the Tsodilo Hills in the Kalahari desert. A giant rock resembling a python, and a secret chamber inside a cave there, is accompanied by broken spear points (dated to 70,000 BCE) that had been offered as a sacrifice. The python is still worshipped by present-day !Kung San hunter-gatherers who are descendants of the early humans who first devised the practice. Similarly, the discovery of “butchered” human bones at both European and African sites may point to a ritual post-mortem bone cleaning for presumably religious reasons. And one of the skulls found in Ethiopia has grooves cut into it in a manner suggesting that it was carried around after death – possibly as part of an ancestor worshipping ritual and indicating a belief in some kind of afterlife.
It is unlikely that they were concerned about their own death. While memory would have delivered some notion of the past, their orientation in time would have been predominantly the simple present. With little sense of time or causality, they would not easily have imagined their own death. Nor would they have been able to plan far ahead. They would have responded to their environment either immediately or after only a short delay.
Their language skills and cognitive development in general were probably like that of a 2 – 4-year-old child – what I call “the Innocent Nestling.” It corresponds to what Jean Piaget described as the “pre-conceptual pre-operations” stage, during which the child begins to use mental symbols to understand his world. By the end of this stage, vocabulary consists of about 200 words which the child can put together in 2 – 3-word phrases. He is beginning to understand the relationship between things, and has some notion of cause and effect. A gradually emerging sense of self finds expression in words such as “me” and “mine”. By the age of 4 the child has a clear sense of “I”, though it is still much more a body-ego than a mental-ego. All of this was probably true as well of early Homo sapiens.
The worldview at this stage, both for early humans and for the Innocent Nestling, can be described as animistic and magical. Animism is the belief that, like oneself, everything is conscious and animated by some life force. It makes for a dramatic universe filled with spirit-powers. Magical thinking arises from the tendency at this stage to confuse psychic and external reality – an inability to fully differentiate the mental image of an object from the object itself. In the world of magic one manipulates an external object by manipulating an image or symbol of that object – as in sticking pins into a Voodoo doll. So in primitive hunting rites, a man draws the animal in the sand before dawn, and when the first sun-ray touches the drawing, he drives a spear into the drawing. Later he slays the animal and performs a ritual dance at evening. But in his magical world, the symbolic act and the actual killing of the animal are so connected as to be inseparable. One cannot happen without the other.
Even today we have not totally outgrown such magical thinking. Many people continue to engage in symbolic acts either to bring good luck or to ward off misfortune. And when the right words are intoned by the right person in a properly celebrated ritual, the symbols of bread and wine are still believed by millions to become the actual body and blood of Christ.
Given the sparseness of the archaeological record, little can be said about their worldview. Indeed, given their still primitive level of cognitive development, they would have had no conceptual worldview as we think of it today. The best we can do, based on what evidence we have, is guess at what their experience of the world might have been.
Although his direct ancestry remains unclear, it seems likely that Homo sapiens, like his Neanderthal cousins in Europe, evolved from Homo heidelbergensis. Three fossil skulls found in Ethiopia and dated to 160,000 years ago are the oldest human remains yet discovered. His average brain size of 1485 cc is almost 50% larger than that of Homo erectus and slightly smaller than that of the Neanderthals. His appearance is distinguished from other Homo species by his nearly vertical forehead, very much smaller or non-existent eyebrow ridges, smaller teeth, a prominent chin, and a more gracile skeleton.
There are indications that, sometime after 160,000 years ago, four separate groups travelled south to the Cape of Good Hope, southwest to the Congo Basin, west to the Ivory Coast, and northeast to the coast of the Red Sea. Then, about 125,000 years ago, a group travelled across the Sahara and up the Nile to the Levant. Human remains found at sites in present-day Israel indicate that we were there from at least 110,000 years ago. From the end of the Illinoian Ice Age 130,000 years ago until the onset of the Intermediate Ice Age 80,000 years ago, the Levant was effectively an extension of northern Africa, with similar climatic conditions and animals. It would have been natural and relatively easy to follow the animals out of Africa. But then, soon after 80,000 years ago, modern humans abruptly disappeared from these sites. The encroaching Ice Age turned the Levant and North Africa into extreme desert and killed off the animals on which humans had relied for thousands of years. Those who had left Africa during warmer and wetter times either died off themselves or migrated back to Africa.
They were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands – necessarily small since the game present in any region was limited – comprised of a few family groups based on long-term monogamous relationships, with both parents caring for their children. Survival was less an individual thing than a group achievement. And because survival depended on cooperation and the equal distribution of food to everyone, the bands were egalitarian. There were no elite, no social stratification, and no formal leadership. Decision-making would have been consensual. Nor was there any formal division of labour. While women probably took greater responsibility for gathering and men for hunting, each member of the group would have been skilled at all tasks essential for survival. And for those too old or infirm to carry their weight, there is evidence that they were cared for by the group.
Surviving in the open grasslands would not have been easy. Maintaining a fire throughout the night helped keep the big cats at bay, but it required intelligence and cooperation for humans to hunt game that was much faster and stronger than they. As early as 165,000 years ago they had discovered a new way of fashioning tools by heating silcrete to a high temperature in a fire’s embers to create more consistent and sharper stone flakes. These in turn made possible the invention of stone-tipped spears and harpoons. But still the hunting of big game presented a challenge. It seems to have been accomplished by running the prey to exhaustion and then closing in for the kill at close quarters. Homo sapiens had emerged as a relatively hairless creature who perspired, so they could run for extended periods of time and still maintain their internal body temperature. Their large prey, while swifter over short distances, could not maintain that pace. Panting rather than perspiring, they needed to stop periodically to avoid overheating. Eventually the pursuing humans would run them to the ground.
Although primarily nomadic as they followed game from one region to another, they maintained central campsites (hearths and shelters) as home bases. Because their population was sparse – estimated at only one person per square mile – a given band would have hunted an area of perhaps 60 square miles from a single home base before moving on. Organised violence between bands was rare. The low population density, the abundance of food resources, the lack of any reason to hoard food beyond the group’s immediate needs, the survival value of cooperation, and the advantages of collaboration on hunting expeditions probably all contributed to the relative peacefulness of this period in our otherwise war-ravaged history.
Their diet consisted primarily of meat, fish, shellfish, leafy vegetables, fruit, nuts and insects. With a gradual drying up of the African interior that began 120,000 years ago, humans were attracted more and more to coastal environments where they could migrate easily along the coast and make their living from the sea. The cooking of shellfish is evident as early as 164,000 years ago at a site called Pinnacle Point in South Africa; large dumps of clam and oyster shells, dating from 125,000 years ago, have been found in Eritrea on the eastern Horn of Africa; and large 6-foot-long catfish were being caught with barbed fishing points 90,000 years ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Our now extinct ancestors began cooking their food at least 250,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier. Because cooked food, and especially cooked meat, delivers significantly more energy for less effort, it would have contributed to the growth and maintenance of our larger brains. It probably also contributed to our becoming more sociable as we brought food back to the central cooking area. We can imagine the band gathering at the end of the day, kindling a fire in the hearth both to cook their food and ward off animals, and then settling in around the fire to eat, laugh, sing, and enjoy their emerging ability to converse in spoken language, in a scene not unlike that which has been repeated countless times to the present day.
Archaeological evidence tells us more about the cosmology and religious practices of European Neanderthals than it does about that of contemporaneous Homo sapiens in Africa – but we may reasonably assume that they were similar. For both, it would be the animals – their nearest neighbours – that played a central role. Neanderthals’ veneration of the bear in mountainous sanctuaries is matched by evidence of animal worship in the Tsodilo Hills in the Kalahari desert. A giant rock resembling a python, and a secret chamber inside a cave there, is accompanied by broken spear points (dated to 70,000 BCE) that had been offered as a sacrifice. The python is still worshipped by present-day !Kung San hunter-gatherers who are descendants of the early humans who first devised the practice. Similarly, the discovery of “butchered” human bones at both European and African sites may point to a ritual post-mortem bone cleaning for presumably religious reasons. And one of the skulls found in Ethiopia has grooves cut into it in a manner suggesting that it was carried around after death – possibly as part of an ancestor worshipping ritual and indicating a belief in some kind of afterlife.
It is unlikely that they were concerned about their own death. While memory would have delivered some notion of the past, their orientation in time would have been predominantly the simple present. With little sense of time or causality, they would not easily have imagined their own death. Nor would they have been able to plan far ahead. They would have responded to their environment either immediately or after only a short delay.
Their language skills and cognitive development in general were probably like that of a 2 – 4-year-old child – what I call “the Innocent Nestling.” It corresponds to what Jean Piaget described as the “pre-conceptual pre-operations” stage, during which the child begins to use mental symbols to understand his world. By the end of this stage, vocabulary consists of about 200 words which the child can put together in 2 – 3-word phrases. He is beginning to understand the relationship between things, and has some notion of cause and effect. A gradually emerging sense of self finds expression in words such as “me” and “mine”. By the age of 4 the child has a clear sense of “I”, though it is still much more a body-ego than a mental-ego. All of this was probably true as well of early Homo sapiens.
The worldview at this stage, both for early humans and for the Innocent Nestling, can be described as animistic and magical. Animism is the belief that, like oneself, everything is conscious and animated by some life force. It makes for a dramatic universe filled with spirit-powers. Magical thinking arises from the tendency at this stage to confuse psychic and external reality – an inability to fully differentiate the mental image of an object from the object itself. In the world of magic one manipulates an external object by manipulating an image or symbol of that object – as in sticking pins into a Voodoo doll. So in primitive hunting rites, a man draws the animal in the sand before dawn, and when the first sun-ray touches the drawing, he drives a spear into the drawing. Later he slays the animal and performs a ritual dance at evening. But in his magical world, the symbolic act and the actual killing of the animal are so connected as to be inseparable. One cannot happen without the other.
Even today we have not totally outgrown such magical thinking. Many people continue to engage in symbolic acts either to bring good luck or to ward off misfortune. And when the right words are intoned by the right person in a properly celebrated ritual, the symbols of bread and wine are still believed by millions to become the actual body and blood of Christ.
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