Human History - The Lost Years
Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2016 12:09 pm
[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'.
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'.