Category Archives: Prehistory

What Do You Know?

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Beekeeping, History, Prehistory, Seasons, Technology

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It has been very cold here in the Great American Midwest, limiting the tasks I can take care of outdoors, but I had a few things I really meant to get done today. One of those jobs was to check on my beehive. Because it has been so cold I wanted to make sure the bees are doing well. I found them all dead, every last one of them. The combs are holding neither honey nor brood, but thousands of huddled dead bees.

I had told my wife that I would burn the pruned blackberry canes. We have a lot of blackberries, and she has been working to prune the dead wood out over the past few weeks. My job is to gather them all up and burn them, not an easy task because they are so wickedly thorny. Nor did I have an easy time getting the fire going.

A few years ago, when my seasonal research had taken me deep into the study of our primitive ancestors, I began to wonder something, a very basic question that I asked of many friends and colleagues. Some had no answer for me, some did, and I found most people’s answers either unsatisfactory or clearly the result of not truly understanding the question.

If you were to awake and find yourself among a band of primitive humans, perhaps 20,000 years ago, how could you help them advance their culture? I’d ask people this and they’d say well, we have modern medicine, or we know all about computers or electricity or transportation. Yeah, sure, we know all about those things. But what do you actually know how to do?

I mean, I understand that making metal drove a lot of the development of civilizations, so much so that we name different periods in human history the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. But I haven’t got a clue about how to find ore or turn it into metal. It goes without saying that I’m not going to be starting my primitive friends down the path of using electrical appliances any time soon. Examples like this abound. Even if someone is an accomplished engineer, the ability to get something meaningful done depends largely on having useful materials at hand. In the end, I think any modern human would be terribly dependent on those nature savvy experienced hunter-gatherers to stay alive, and the things we could show them would be limited indeed.

The blackberry canes wouldn’t light. I started with a pile of leaves and dried grass, put some newspaper under it and lit it with a match. It took several matches to get a fire started, which burned out before much of the pile of canes caught on fire. I started it again using more leaves and grass, even adding several logs from the wood pile to increase the heat. I was at this a long time, until I had used my last match. That’s okay, there were lots of embers, and limitless dried grass and leaves. As I worked furiously to ignite a flame, I thought how easily almost any member of a primitive tribe, given glowing embers and so much dry tinder, could have gotten a fire going. It would likely be a job for toddlers. I kept looking back towards the house, wondering if I should just march down there and get another book of matches.

When I finally got a good fire going the blackberry canes burned down in about fifteen minutes. But I still find it humiliating that even something as simple as starting a fire can give me such fits. When I came inside I found it had taken me an hour longer than I thought to do this simple job.

There are plenty of books and endless Websites detailing the steps to take in keeping a healthy beehive. I have read a lot of those, and I thought I was taking most of the steps they advise. Clearly I missed something, and my colony paid the price. It’s hard to say, in the depressing depths of winter, whether this crushes my spirit or inspires me to keep working. But for now, this is my goal: to be good enough at something–anything!–that I might be more than just a drain on resources to my tribe.

Keeping Track of Time

18 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Archeology, Birth of Jesus, Calendar, Dates, Dionysius Exiguus, Gregorian Calendar, History, Julian Calendar, Prehistory, Religion, Science, Seasons, Uncategorized

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I was at home one day with my teenaged daughter when she suddenly groaned out loud and tossed a weighty textbook across the room. The book was The Eternal Paradigm or Our Ceaseless Meandering or whatever it is they name AP World History books these days. She does not share my love of history, this child of mine; among many subjects at which she excels in school, it is just about her least favorite. I think a love of our past is something you have to mature into. I recall lots of kids, back when I was young, who loved math or science, literature or art, but I don’t remember anybody who just loved history.

What was giving my daughter fits this day was trying to remember dates, particularly dates before Christ, which, thanks to an almost purposely myopic dating system, run backwards. I couldn’t help but sympathize. How many poor students, scratching their heads over a lesson about ancient Egypt or Babylon, have worked to wrap their heads around how years BC–before Christ–run backwards, while years AD–Anno Domini–run forward. Sure, the birth of Christ was a watershed in the history of Western Civilization, but let’s face it, this numbering system was put in place by people who thought the rapture was imminent, and actually keeping track of the years until then was of minor importance. Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian Monk born in AD 470 (and whose Latin name means, seriously, something like ‘Little Dennis’) came up with the idea. Accuracy was out the window almost before he got started, since nobody believes any more that they knew the right year for the birth of Jesus back then. Nor did he think to add a year zero between 1 BC and AD 1, so counting the centuries has always been a trial, remembering that AD 2000 was the last year of the 20th century and such.  We now know that the rapture has been–at least–postponed by a few millennia, and we should have tossed  this system out with the theory of spontaneous generation and the earth-centric universe.

More recent scholars have chosen to use the abbreviations BCE, which means ‘before the common era,’ or ‘before the current era,’ and CE, for common or current era, though one can choose to say Christian Era if one is so inclined. Years BC and AD are identical with years BCE and CE. Some people think using BCE and CE smacks of contemporary political correctness, which they hate, since being sensitive to other people’s beliefs is distasteful to Americans. But the fact is, the abbreviations were first used as early as 1856 CE. What I find troublesome about them is that they only deal with the religious issue–they do nothing to make historical dates clearer. They don’t resolve the problem of running backwards then forwards, or of skipping a year zero, which still confuses people all the time. (Here’s a toast to everyone who mistakenly celebrated the end of the millennium in 1999!)

But my problem with historical dates is but the tip of the iceberg: there’s also the problem of scientific dating. In my research for The Varied God I have read a lot of science. Okay, so it has been archeology and anthropology mostly, some geology and geography. As Sheldon Cooper would say with a derisive snort, Not real sciences. But I have become comfortable enough with terms like palynology and osteology, and with techniques like midden floatation and radio-carbon dating that I can read a journal article straight through without running to a dictionary. But one of the most persistent problems for me, and I’m betting for many people who study these sorts of things, is the simple keeping track of time.

While historical years are dated one way, scientific years, measured by radio-carbon dating and dendrochronology and whatever else scientists get up to, have their own confusing nomenclatures. Popular these days is the abbreviation BP, which means ‘before present.’ Present, in this system, is 1950 AD (or CE), since that was the year radio-carbon dating was first used.

When dates get even older, some prefer to use the MYA abbreviation, or ‘million years ago’–as in ‘the Cambrian era ended 488 MYA.’ Sometimes they just use a simple MA, which means the same thing. There is even the use of BYA–and you can guess what that means.

The worst part of this problem comes when scientific dates, those hoary and inconceivably ancient times in prehistory, begin to tickle up against history, as in the times of what we call the Neolithic Revolution. The Neolithic, by many accounts, began around 11,500 BP, an ancient date, to be sure, but it is also perhaps easier to understand as 9488 BC (BCE). 11,500 BP sounds terribly remote, but 9488 BC, not so much. This is the beginning of human cultures and civilizations, just a few millennia short of the inception of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, which will be measured in years BC or BCE. Couldn’t we cut out the BPs here so we can wrap our heads more easily around the timeline?

Part of the problem is that the BC and AD dates are usually documented, while the scientific dates are mostly estimates–based on the best science we have, but estimates just the same. Often dates are expressed using the old ‘±’ sign, which means plus or minus a few years. This leads to some confusion, especially when we are talking about fairly recent human developments. They might say ‘samples of emmer wheat show signs of domestication as early as 10,500±.’ It almost becomes meaningless. As someone pointed out recently, we could say ‘McDonald’s restaurants first appear in 1960±,’ and it would look like they were all created at the same time. Do dates expressed this way have any meaning?

I would say that somebody needs to work out a good system that will cover all these things. It can’t be that hard. What is hard is getting everyone to use it. A 1975 law was meant to set the United States on the conversion path to the metric system: you can see how well that worked. The change to digital TV was like pulling teeth. So I don’t hold out much hope that keeping track of dates will get any easier any time soon.

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.