Monthly Archives: January 2012

Science, Part II: Controversy

25 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Mythology, Prehistory, Religion, Seasons, Uncategorized

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(I am nearing completion of Part I of The Varied God–the part that deals with the science and history of early humans and how their development was influenced by life in a world ruled by seasons. My next few blog posts, I don’t know how many yet, will deal with some of the things I’ve learned in that research.)

In any research on the development of our planet or on humanity’s development as a species, there are a number of controversies, not the least of which are the religious objections. Even saying ‘humanity’s development as a species’ evokes evolution and Darwinism. This is not how many religious people choose to see things. To their thinking, the world and all within it was created by a deity, whole in seven days. I’ve never believed this, but my research over the past few years has given me some new insights.

Believers in a literal interpretation of the Bible want creationism to share equal time and space in the public sphere–especially in public schools. Evolution, they caution, is only a theory. They say this all the time: they print it on bumper stickers and T-shirts. But it’s wrong. Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is an observable natural phenomenon, like the rising of the sun or the turning of leaves in autumn. Species change and diversify over time. Every working naturalist has observed this. Charles Darwin’s famous theory is about natural selection–the device by which evolution happens. It is about how evolution happens, not if it happens. Among working scientists there is still much argument about the devices and timetables by which evolution has occurred. But if you’re paying attention, you’ll note that they, too, are arguing about how it happens, not if it happens. As an analog to this, think of the theory of gravity. Newton theorized that there was gravity after seeing an apple fall. But doubters (if there were any) wouldn’t deny the natural phenomenon–that an apple falls. They would deny his explanation, gravity.

What also bothers me about the Biblical explanation of things is how lacking the book is in cosmology. God creates the world in a few verses of Genesis, then we’re off into the history of the Jewish people. The seasons especially get very short shrift. This may be because the areas of the Levant and Mesopotamia where these stories were first told were not significantly defined by seasons. If the seasons are mentioned at all, it’s mostly to reassert God’s dominion over them, not to explain anything about them. At least Classical mythology, Native American mythology and many other world mythologies give us interesting and compelling explanations of the seasons. I don’t believe them either, but at least they involve some good storytelling. For someone who feels an intimate connection to the planet in knowing how things happen, there is great comfort and a wealth of fascination in new advances in understanding. Using an insufficient and unbelievable old legend as the major font of all knowledge will never work.

And finally I come to wonder about the people who first advanced various old creation myths. There is an attitude among many non-believers that the entire religious enterprise has always been about deceiving common people in order to exercise power over them–and of course that has been the motivation of priestly classes in various societies for thousands of years. Religion has been a useful justification for colonists, conquerors and empire builders throughout history, so I understand the deep mistrust of myth felt by non-believers. But I also believe that the earliest people who thought about how the world came to be were likely not interested in empire building; they were interested in how the world came to be. They did not have the scientific method or centuries of natural observation at their command, so they used the best tools they had–imagination and storytelling ability. Most stone age cultures are defined largely by their toolkits. When the tools improve or change, when they go from simple hand axes to delicately flaked spear points, archeologists and anthropologists name a new culture, and recognize the steady advance of humanity. Thinking about where we came from has changed: our intellectual toolkit has improved markedly. We need to recognize this and move on. If you were to hand a Neanderthal hunter a spear that was clearly superior to the one he had been using, he would probably toss his old one aside and take up the new one. So it is with stories of creation. If you were to go back and explain to people who first theorized about the creation of the world that we now have a better understanding of these things, they would likely be the first ones to slap their foreheads and admit that all that God-sitting-on-a-cloud stuff was just guesswork. And being good storytellers, they might weave the Big Bang into a tale worth reciting to a fascinated audience around a campfire at night.

Science, Part I: Ice Age Art

13 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Cave Paintings, Paleolithic Art, Prehistory, Seasons

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(I am nearing completion of Part I of The Varied God–the part that deals with the science and history of early humans and how their development was influenced by life in a world ruled by seasons. My next few blog posts, I don’t know how many yet, will deal with some of the things I’ve learned in that research.)

I saw Werner Herzog’s movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams a few weeks ago and I was more than a little disappointed. It wasn’t much of a movie, after all I’d heard about it. He doesn’t seem to have prepared well for it or to have expended much budget making it; he didn’t find good experts to speak with–or at any rate he didn’t conduct interviews that would elicit compelling insights or intriguing information. I will note that I watched it at home and didn’t see it in Glorious 3-D, which may have made a big difference in the spectacle of it; still, that doesn’t excuse the aforementioned flaws. And really, if the only thing to recommend a film is one visual trick, then somebody needs to go back to the drawing board. With that said, I have to admit that I learned some things. I didn’t know how Chauvet (the cave in the movie) was discovered, and I didn’t know that at about 32,000 years old, its art is far and away the oldest of the painted caves. The paintings in Altamira are about 18,000 years old; those in Lascaux closer to 17,300.

I looked forward to seeing the film because I have read much lately about cave paintings and other Paleolithic art. If you want to trace evidence of humanity’s growing fascination with the seasons, you need to start with the earliest art. We didn’t always see it this way. For decades after we started discovering painted caves and mobile art pieces of a similar age, the art was viewed within the context of a few major theories about its ‘uses.’ The main schools of thought were hunting magic and fertility magic. Both schools of thought had major problems with them, but it took a long time to come to grips with that fact because nobody did what you would think might be the first thing to do–carefully analyze the artworks.

In the 1970s a hugely talented amateur named Alexander Marshack, working on a hunch of his own, began a more careful analysis of Paleolithic Art, both mobile art pieces and cave painting. This work is detailed in his book The Roots of Civilization, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in early humans, especially the earliest intimations of culture.

The Montgaudier Baton

Marshack has his doubters and detractors, but it should be noted that his work is considered important enough that even without an advanced degree in any subject he was made an associate in archeology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

I’m using the example of this baton of deer antler from Montgaudier in France, dating to the Magdalenian Era (about 17,000 years ago), to show his process. When it was found, since it was covered with etchings of animals, it was assumed to be a piece of hunting magic: wave this around and you’ll catch more fish, or seals, or eels. But Marshack cleaned the piece and put it under a microscope. The fish was revealed to be a salmon; the seals, in pursuit of it, were demonstrating a springtime behavior that still occurs today. The eels were not eels at all, but young grass snakes, a species that hatches in spring. A number of small scratches, which had been taken to be either representations of weapons or of little consequence, turned out to be delicate renderings of buds and shoots of new plants. The entire baton, once seen as a crude piece of ‘hunting magic,’ turned out to be unified tableau heralding the coming of spring!

The baton laid open to show both sides

Marshack applied the same careful observation and analysis to much Paleolithic art. Everywhere he found a similar preoccupation with the seasons, and a determination to represent knowledge about them and appreciation of them. There was something in the art, he said, that went beyond belly hunger or primal drives. They are clearly artifacts of a growing aesthetic sensibility. That sensibility, if unified by anything, emphasizes an overwhelming sense of the cycles of the seasons.

From Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to Haydn’s Die Jahreszeiten, seasonal paintings from Bruegel to Wyeth, the poetry of Vergil, Thomson, Shakespeare or Millay, we know that all of the arts have indulged a love of the seasons, have interpreted them in a thousand ways. But how little we know of the people who were here tens of thousands of years ago, and felt exactly like we do about the first warm days of spring.

Crocuses in Winter

09 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Meteorology, Seasons, Weather, Winter

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On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve I was out in the yard taking down my Christmas lights. New Year’s Eve, mind you, and I noticed crocuses starting to poke their heads up in some of my flower beds. The TV weather personalities had been wearing out the term ‘unseasonably warm’ for several days, and I was out working in my shirtsleeves. Still I was surprised to see this harbinger of spring announcing itself in mid-winter. ‘Well, you’re not announcing anything,’ I thought, ‘except your own inability to tell time. I certainly hope you’ve got enough energy left come spring to do your job properly.’

I’ve actually experienced a few warm New Year’s Eves in the past several years, as well as some unbearably icy ones. Weather is so variable in the American Midwest, washed over as we are by everything from Alberta Clippers to Gulf low-pressure to the tail ends of El Niño winds. The weather and the seasons are not synonymous. As Anthony Smith put it in his book Seasons, it’s a complicated relationship because the seasons are both the astronomical phenomena that define them and the terrestrial consequences of them: the same word has to serve for both.

I recently read a commentary by a British journalist who said that the seasons vary so greatly that we only perceive them as having been seasonal in a kind of vague retrospect: that our standard year is actually the spring of 1984, the summer of 1980, autumn of 2000 and winter of 1997. The seasons give us whatever weather the prevailing climatic conditions indicate, and we recall them according to set perceptions. Thus you’re likely to hear someone complain about what a hard winter it’s been on the same day you hear that this has been the third warmest winter on record. And it doesn’t matter if it’s been warm enough for crocuses to bloom in January: for that person it was a hard winter. That person’s winter may have been hard for reasons other than the weather–family problems, excessive illness, money troubles–so winter in that context is a marker of time, not meteorological phenomena. Someone who falls in love in December is likely to recall a very nice winter, regardless of the weather.

‘I know we’re going to pay for it.’ That’s what everybody says when we get unusually warm weeks in winter, or cool weeks in summer. It’s a gift horse into whose mouth we can’t help but peer. Of course we’re going to have cold days soon (giving the TV weather personalities a chance to say ‘bitter cold’ repeatedly) and February ice storms. Of course those little crocuses are going to wilt and turn brown. I wonder if I’ll remember, this time next year, what nice days we had in late December and early January, or if those crocuses spent all that energy for nothing.