Human History - The Lost Years

Those who do not learn history are doomed to use this quote over and over again.

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peter
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Human History - The Lost Years

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[All 190 (odd) thousand years of them.]

Human history [as an activity of study] can really be said to date back to the development of writing what, about six or so thousand years ago, with perhaps a bit of further 'grey-time' going back into the previous oral traditions, as these were recorded by the first writings capable of expressing complex concepts in a recoverable form. The first known anatomically modern human fossils [that is H. sapiens as we would recognise as pretty much indistuinguishable from ourselves] appeared around the 200,000 years ago mark, and there is evidence [to some anthropologist's thinking at least] of some kind of 'cognitive shift' occuring in the way our brains functioned around the 70,000 year ago mark.

So we are left with a huge gulf of time, around 60,000 years at least or 190,000 years at most, where we can say that humans with all the capabilities for thought and communication that we ourselves posess, were extant upon the surface of the Earth. What clues then, do we have to open a window into this huge stretch of pre-history where literally anything, anything, could have been passing between humans, that because of it's non-physical nature, seems forever hidden from us. We have of course the tools that have come down to us buried deep [or not so] in the soils of our lands. We have the cave-paintings, the carved beads and marked stones and bones. We have beautifull carved figurines and of course the archaological remains of settlements and habitations long abandoned. We have the odd scraps of clothing and jewlery found preserved in graves where they had been delicately placed all those years ago - and of course on occasion we have their waste, cast aside into pits and gullys and waiting across the years for the excavation tools [not so different in many ways] of a different time to find them.

But what do these scant clues tell us. Precious little it would seem. Recently in the final program on a series on the human brain, during which the neurologist presenter speculated on what the future holds for our continued development, I was staggered by the scathing way that he referred to our forbears. "It always astounds me," he said indicating a distant cityscape with a flourish of his outstretched arm, "that in so short a period we could have come from a primative being grubbing around for scraps on the land, to this." He continued with a few furthur references to our 'primative' roots, and then continued to prophesize a huge advancement in the human condition by virtue of the imanent union of our 'wet-ware' with our technology.

As a deep lover of cave-art and myth I was both saddened and offended by his blinkered view of the capabilities of our distant ancestors, and got to wondering, just how deep and complex could human interaction and belief-structures become in the absence of any advanced 'tech' or recording system. Perhaps the story-cycles, the philosophy, the world-view and intensity of communication could be massively greater than we, in our tech blinkered world can imagine. Perhaps the peoples of our history had mental capabilities of which we could only dream - but just never crossed the line into areas where those capabilities would leave an observable trace in the physical realm of pre-historical investigation into which our study is perforce locked. Gosh, I do hope so - they are our 'Viles'.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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Re: Human History - The Lost Years

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peter wrote:So we are left with a huge gulf of time, around 60,000 years at least or 190,000 years at most, where we can say that humans with all the capabilities for thought and communication that we ourselves posess, were extant upon the surface of the Earth.
I don't believe that this is true. 200K years ago we may have had modern skeletons, but this doesn't mean we had modern consciousness.
Wikipedia wrote:Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys - a bicameral mind. The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality came to be the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind until as recently as 3000 years ago.
Jaynes work isn't considered to be entirely valid. But neuroscientists do indeed argue about when modern consciousness as we know it evolved, and many of them talk about a similar timeframe -- around 3,000 years ago.
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Post by peter »

Then every one of them should be obligated to sit at watch Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams . It is impossible not to see the delicacy of thought, the consumate skill of brining the images to life using the contours of the rock, the interplay of shadows and the techniques of modern impressionism, that created these beautiful works of art. Whatever kind of minds these people had, bicameral or otherwise, there was nothing primitive about them. Possibly different I conceded (though even here I have my doubts), but primitive I cannot accept.

I think the reason why things like writing and what we would see as the 'ascent' into civilisation took so long is the 'DNA Conundrum' writ large. Like jigsaw pieces, all the pieces that make up DNA, the purines, pyrimidines, sugars and phosphates were well established years, even decades before Watson and Crick came up with their beautiful solution.......... And yet from the other side of knowledge the problem of how they were assembled together seemed almost insoluble. It is only when the act is done we can slap our collective forehead and step back amazed at our slowness and exclaim "How did we miss that, how could it be otherwise!" - or in this case, how could we take 150,000 years to discover the wheel, or learn how to make a brick or record a thought.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

We are the Bloodguard
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