The Really Dark Ages

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peter
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The Really Dark Ages

Post by peter »

It is some 150,000 years since modern man first emerged on the plains of Africa, and approximately 12,000 since our nearest relatives, the Neanderthals, were either lost or subsumed into our genome. But a short 4000 years passed before we were building the walls of Jericho and within another three thousand or so the age of recorded history had begun.

It is not therefore unreasonable to expect that some traces of who and what we were in that great unrecorded expanse will have survived in the oral traditions passed down into our earliest cultures and from there into the myths and historys of our oldest written sources. Clearly much can be learned from the archaeological study of ancient sites of human habitation and art/artifacts etc, but for a deeper understanding of how our forebears actually thought, how they actually saw their world, some degree of intuition, of imagination must be allowed, particularly in terms of peeling back the layers of possible meaning contained in the above mentioned sources. As a starting point on this journey it seems to me that a study of this formative period between the demise of the Neanderthals and the nascent emergence of ethnically/culturally distinct groupings of eight or so thousand years ago is of crucial importance. What were the factors that took this apparently homogenous group of Homo Sapiens and turned them into the Egyptians, Sumerians, Aryans, Scythians or whatever over the course of a few short thousand years. Why had it not happened before (or indeed had it - am I misreading the facts and that perhaps even as far as twelve thousand years ago, humans were already divided into ethnically and culturally diverse sub-sets). Oddly, it seems quite hard to actually order the appearance of such distinctive groupings in the historical record and I wonder if anyone has any particular knowledge of this stage of human history that they would care to impart.
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Post by Iolanthe »

Peter, there is an excellent book (I have it on my kindle fire) called Britain Begins by Barry Cunliffe (published by OUP in 2013) which covers the period 10,000 BC to 1100 AD. It is only about Britain, but it might give you some ideas. It's about people rather than archaeology. I found it fascinating, but the maps are not very clear on the kindle. I suspect the actual book may be a little expensive!
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Post by peter »

Barry Cunliffe is a name that rings a bell Io. I'll certainly check that book out. It's being limited to Britain is no problem - being from Cornwall I'm surrounded by megaliths and historical sites, the origins of which I'd like to know a little more about. Close to where I live, down a wooded path is a small circular labyrinth cum maze carving in a rock face. What is it: who put it there and why?
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Post by aliantha »

Count me as an American who is jealous of all of you guys who live down the lane from megaliths and castles and such. ;)

As to your original post, peter, I think the short answer is that various peoples started out as family groups and grew into tribes, nationalities, and so on. It would be cool to know more, though. Keep us posted on how your reading goes! :)
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Post by peter »

Ali, my early readings indicate that the subject is going to be really difficult. It seems to be almost impossible to ask where and at what time the various sub-divisions of humanity developed without it being construed as a racist question, and in my case nothing could be further from the case. We all are what we are, no better, no worse - and we all add up to this wonderful totality, humanity. But the shocking history of the twentieth century has made us almost afraid to ask questions about where and at what point the division between caucasian, negroid and mongoloid occurred. The whole area of ethnology has become so conflated with negative overtones it seems, that it is almost impossible to ask questions in this area without their being construed as perjorative in their intent. I'm saddened by this because I love people - all people and I just want no more about who we are and how we got here.
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....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

The ethnicities we have today arose from the same source that different dog breeds like Labrador or Schnauzer did--selective (in)breeding. As with dog breeds, there is no human ethnicity which is inherently better or worse than any other, except in the eye of the irrational beholder. Looking backwards in time beyond 75,000 to 85,000 years ago is mostly irrelevant though--credible research indicates that events forced us in to "genetic bottleneck" at about time, probably as a result of some supervolcano eruption or significant meteor strike, which led to a precipitous shortage in our food supply. A lot of neohumans died out during that time and some varieties of us were unable to recover from it, becoming diluted into the present-day gene pool.

Trying to reverse-engineer our collective heritage by examining and comparing/contrasting oral and written myths is a fascinating field of study which can become a lifetime career and I encourage people to engage in it. That being said, we will never discover hidden truths about our past that way--the original source material is forever lost and its fragments have been carved up, rearranged to fit desired narratives, and edited beyond all recognition. It is like playing the telegraph game--you say something to one person, who repeats it to the next person, and so on--but with millions of participants spread out over millennia. By the time the message gets back to you it isn't even remotely what you originally said.

I do have to admit I would like to go back and meet the first person who came up with the idea that they could capture herd animals and keep them in a relatively localized area, breeding them for both meat and hides, rather than having to chase the herds all over the surface of the planet. I wonder, also, that perhaps that person knew the other genius who decided that instead of wandering the wilderness looking for just the right plants to eat that they could bring back seeds of that plant and put them where they wanted them to be.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that there weren't civilization which rose and fell long before the ones we know from the Ancient World. Catal Huyuk is only one example of a settled, established city which predates the Old Kingdom of Egypt by at least 4,000 years. Sure, if such a civilization existed wouldn't we see evidence of it? Not necessarily--erosion could have wiped the slate clean, leaving nothing for us to find at this point...or....we haven't been able to look in the right places yet--just what *is* under all those kilometers of ice in Antarctica? I, for one, would love to know.
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Post by peter »

Absolutely agree Hashi that the process of 'reverse engineering' our history from myth and fable is fraught with danger......... but nevertheless there may be cases where our best guess can come pretty close to the truth, and hopefully can be corroborated by archeological evidence as it arises.

I went to see the Cretan labyrinth I spoke of above yesterday, and across the distance of 4000 years those images still spoke to me. I placed my hand flat on the carving as I know the carver will have done and I felt his pride in a job well done. To carve deep grooves in hard stone in concentric, tightly packed circles requires skill, care and tools appropriate to the task, so our person had these in abundance. He/she had a brain sophisticated enough to appreciate the beauty of symmetry and time/energy enough to dress the stone. When even a lay person such as myself gives these works some thought the information contained therein starts to flood out - I love this process of deduction and yes, at times the inference made will be wrong but this is going to go with the territory and as long as it is always born in mind no great harm will i think be done. In a game such as this conjecture isn't just our best friend - it's our only one! :lol:
(Edit: Thanks Hashi for drawing my attention to Catal Huyac. Just read the Wikipedia entry on the site and it is clearly an amazing place. The level of achievement evidenced there is astounding. It was a really good steer on your part, and one I can build on.)
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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Post by Cord Hurn »

Hashi Lebwohl wrote:I do have to admit I would like to go back and meet the first person who came up with the idea that they could capture herd animals and keep them in a relatively localized area, breeding them for both meat and hides, rather than having to chase the herds all over the surface of the planet. I wonder, also, that perhaps that person knew the other genius who decided that instead of wandering the wilderness looking for just the right plants to eat that they could bring back seeds of that plant and put them where they wanted them to be.
For sure, such individuals were the true pioneers of civilization.
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Post by peter »

I imagine the development of agriculture was more by accident than design. Hunter gatherers returning to the same location probably found grain yielding crops growing in places where they had stored or spilt their previous years seed gatherings. Slowly and over time there would have been a transition from one means of lifestyle to the other with a long period where both were practiced simultaneously by the same individuals. Similarly with herding and domestication, it would not have happened overnight, but rather by a gradual process of semi-containment and feeding along side free-range grazing and driving. Oddly and rather sadly I sometimes think, the change to fixed agriculture from the hunter gatherer lifestyle appears to have been an irreversible trap that, once a tipping point had been passed, there was no going back from. In it's early form farming appears to have been a much more labour intensive and onerous way of living than hunter gathering ever was, evidenced by the smaller stature, earlier death and greater levels of degenerative bone disease that appear in the fossil record of individuals living after the transition. Once having made the full transition however, the knowledge of how to secure means of living by any other method appears to have evaporated almost overnight thus entrapping the agricultural practitioners into a life of back-breaking toil from which it would be millennia before even a small proportion of humanity would escape.
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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Post by Ur Dead »

Cord Hurn wrote:
Hashi Lebwohl wrote:I do have to admit I would like to go back and meet the first person who came up with the idea that they could capture herd animals and keep them in a relatively localized area, breeding them for both meat and hides, rather than having to chase the herds all over the surface of the planet. I wonder, also, that perhaps that person knew the other genius who decided that instead of wandering the wilderness looking for just the right plants to eat that they could bring back seeds of that plant and put them where they wanted them to be.
For sure, such individuals were the true pioneers of civilization.
The rabbits were the hardest to tame..
Start out with two and in a short time your pen is overflowing..
Higher forms of math must have these types of beginning... :P
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Post by Cord Hurn »

Ur Dead wrote:
Cord Hurn wrote:
Hashi Lebwohl wrote:I do have to admit I would like to go back and meet the first person who came up with the idea that they could capture herd animals and keep them in a relatively localized area, breeding them for both meat and hides, rather than having to chase the herds all over the surface of the planet. I wonder, also, that perhaps that person knew the other genius who decided that instead of wandering the wilderness looking for just the right plants to eat that they could bring back seeds of that plant and put them where they wanted them to be.
For sure, such individuals were the true pioneers of civilization.
The rabbits were the hardest to tame..
Start out with two and in a short time your pen is overflowing..
Higher forms of math must have these types of beginning... :P
I like the way you think, Ur Dead! :) :thumbsup:

Maybe rabbits were first bred for clothing, but after people decided to eat them, then they invented a calendar to include months with no "R".
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Post by peter »

...... from which the consumption of oysters was an inevitable consequence. This is starting to make sense! :lol:
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: The Really Dark Ages

Post by Damelon »

peter wrote:
It is not therefore unreasonable to expect that some traces of who and what we were in that great unrecorded expanse will have survived in the oral traditions passed down into our earliest cultures and from there into the myths and historys of our oldest written sources. Clearly much can be learned from the archaeological study of ancient sites of human habitation and art/artifacts etc, but for a deeper understanding of how our forebears actually thought, how they actually saw their world, some degree of intuition, of imagination must be allowed, particularly in terms of peeling back the layers of possible meaning contained in the above mentioned sources. As a starting point on this journey it seems to me that a study of this formative period between the demise of the Neanderthals and the nascent emergence of ethnically/culturally distinct groupings of eight or so thousand years ago is of crucial importance.
Folklore about massive floods is found throughout the world and could date from this pre civilizational age. At the end of the last ice age there was the massive melting of the glaciers. About 100 miles south of me is evidence that about 14,000 years ago an ice dam broke, sending an amount of water equivalent to Lake Michigan today, about 1180 cubic miles, pouring down central Illinois and down the Mississippi all in the matter of a few days. Same with the Black Sea. Around the same time an earthquake opened up the Dardanelles, allowing the Mediterranean to fill up the Black Sea.
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Post by peter »

I'm guessing that any massive movement of water that effects the very landscape that people knew and were familiar with is going to find a place in the collective memory of humanity. Flood myths are most probably much more than myths in comparison with say tales of bull-headed men stalking underground labyrinths in ancient Greece (though who knows - quite possibly some factual basis behind even these stories).

If I had my time over again I'd love to have studied palaeoanthropology and in particular the wonderful subject of rock art.

It seems to me that this is a subject area that is particularly ripe for the development of skills by simply looking. I always remember that scene in the first Mr Bean movie where Bean (accidentally) finds himself mistaken for an celebrated art critic in New York (he is in fact a lowly room attendant in the National Gallery in London) and stuns all of the art literati when he answers the question as to what he actually does (put very seriously to him by the collected media) he says that he, well, just looks at the paintings. They all swoon at this seemingly deep revelation, when in fact he is simply telling the truth, and I have this feeling that rock art should be approached in the same way. All of the measuring and cataloguing in the world will not take us one iota closer to an understanding of why it was done, what it was for. For this we need to actually look at the paintings. Deep and long and hard. Live and breath them. Total and complete immersion. And then let your intuition out to play and see what results.

The approach of the Unfettered to the cave painters of yesterday. This would be akin to learning the formal rules of music and mastering them to the point where they can be abandoned with what comes out the other side being beautiful as opposed to a mess.
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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Post by Avatar »

Here you go Peter. :D Rock art in the Kamberg Reserve in KwaZulu Natal. Also pictured, our guide, whose name, I regret to say, I can no longer recall.

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Post by peter »

A quick check shows the Drakensberg rock art to be around 2,500 years old. While not the oldest by any means, its relatively closer proximity time wise, means that such works become closer to forming a 'bridge' to equivalent works being done in contemporary times by remote peoples of different cultures.

Risky thing to extrapolate backwards and say that because we do this for this reason, so it was for the same reason that our forebears did similar things.

But it seems to me that the purpose of such works were most likely to be magical in intent. Interesting, because magical in this sense should be seen as being not a spiritual thing - though this can inevitably get mixed in with it - but as more akin to a science; magic and science have similar 'worldviews' in so far as they rely upon the world working in predictable and fixed ways. There is no appeal to a higher authority to interpose on the working of the world on our behalf in either system. They both rely on the premise of 'If A, then B'. The systemic understanding upon which such magic is based may be in error - but the principle is the same.

In the case of rock art it is likely that the magic of 'sympathy' was being evoked (as opposed to contiguous magic). ie If I draw the appearance of the eland on the rock face, then they will likely appear on the ground, the one appearance making the other more likely by a process of 'sympathy'. (Cf contiguous magic where shavings of nails and hair etc could be treated in whatever fashion to bring about the same effect on the unknowing donor of the material.)

This is of course supposition on our part - perhaps they just liked the paintings (even your average neolithic man probably wanted to fill his time with a bit of r&r now and again ;) ), but it's a fairly reasonable conjecture.
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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Post by Damelon »

A quick check shows carvings of nature scenes and geometric figures in the Nevada desert that go back 10,500 to 14,800 years.

I don’t know about the motivations behind ancient art. It’s probably much the same as graffiti taggers today, desire to leave a mark. I was here. Keep out. Watch out. I’m bored.
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peter wrote:A quick check shows the Drakensberg rock art to be around 2,500 years old. While not the oldest by any means, its relatively closer proximity time wise, means that such works become closer to forming a 'bridge' to equivalent works being done in contemporary times by remote peoples of different cultures.
Interestingly, this particular region also has some of the youngest rock art known.

From what I recall, a failed rebellion against the colonisers led to some families hiding out in the area and creating rock art there as recently as 120 years ago.

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Post by peter »

In fairness my check was as I said - quick. There may be much older art on the site (or indeed the info I posted simply wrong - it has been known ;) ). But I believe that possibly some of the oldest art is found in S.A. - more in the form of decorative embellishment of jewellery iirc.
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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