Prehistoric chat rooms! How cool is that??

Went all blubbery on this one, DD. But then anything combining holy places and music does that to me. Thanks for make the end of the week a delight.

p.s. I guess that makes me only semi-ancient, and that's a plus as well.

well there you have it DD music and dancing are older than the Bible etc., no church required.

A link for you...

http://richlabonte.net/exonews/xtra4/some_native.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsiG6WiHHPQ

The amazing thing is that there are more nerds out there searching for clues than ever before.

engraved pigment chunks (geometric designs) 100kya in South Africa. Bows and arrows may be as old. Here's a link I love - David Meadows "Exporator" - mostly archaeology, but a regular section on Early Humans.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Explorator/

Now to the serious stuff. I'm convinced that the Venus of Wallendorf was porn. I don't buy into this fertility goddess nonsense. Look at how the anthropologists and archaeologists project all the time. Did cavemen like red ochre because it stood for blood, or because they liked the color? I was thrilled to read Claude Levi-Strauss' attack on Carl Jung and his notion that primitive man existed in a "twilight state of consciousness" where every object and event was infused with magico/religious significance. The first two chapters of Levi-Strauss' "The Savage Mind" contains a long litany of examples of solid concrete thinking of so called "primitives" - amazing stuff - like the sheer cognitive power required to build a flute.

And then there's Ringo Star's great flick, "Caveman"....

My thought, having had time to give it thought, is that music transcends even hunting.

Hunting must involve grunting, yes no?

But celebrating a feast, or calling upon the Gods for a feast, must move any soul to want to celebrate and sing.

Just sayin'.

Interesting post, DD. Convenient timing, for sure. Life = art = magic = life

Also, the time of the first human sacrifice (that jerk Gork and his flute- just wouldn't stop with the Yanni...)

And more thing DD ...

I did recommend your post, and by doing so I bumped my own How About Some K-Y With Your Health Insurance Coverage post off the top on the front page.

But you are worth it

~OGD~

a really interesting topic, DD. I had read about the discovery of the ancient flute but would have never been able to put it in the context you did.

I sometimes think we might have been better off if we stuck to music and art as the essential primary forms of communication and not narrowly typecast it as "art".

Great observations DD!

It is worth remembering, as you did, that the homo sapiens sapiens of 40,000 years ago were different but their brain capacity was the same. Now, look around at some of the amazingly backward and self destructive behavior today's homo sapiens sapiens are engaged in and you can see that while we are indeed different from those originals of our kind, we are not all that different either. The biggest distinction is that we have developed an extraordinary collective capacity for technology. We have not, however, advanced much morally. Nor have we been able to leave behind the overriding and dominating emotions of fear and selfishness. These things certainly have their place, but most humans are unable to manage how these dominate their thinking and behavior. We would not have such a massive and obscene worldwide obsession with militarism if it were otherwise and no group is worse in this regard than the collection of recently upright people as those of us here in the USA. Einstein was correct in the dawn of the nuclear era when he noted that humanity has not advanced in the realm of enlightenment in a fashion appropriate to match the technological development we have created. It is in this area we must work and pray for another "moment" such as that which propelled homo sapiens sapiens forward 40,000 years ago or so.

Well done DD! Thank you!

This is a great post. Thank you.

Of course, as I read this I can't help but drift to the darker side: that it is transformation that has given us the capacity over the years to commit the atrocities that we abhor. We see all the blood on the stage, there are the bodies. What do we make of them? Could it have been avoided? Is it avoidable in the future?

The reason why a post such as yours is perfect for a site such as this is that it makes us ponder just what is the nature of human nature. What is the nature of language, spirituality, etc.

Loving music - I found this fascinating and so well done - am, amazed at the history of man and his fondness of music from the earliest stages.
I am going to think of this blog each time I hear music of any time and wonder what our "ancestors" would think of some of our genres.

Highly rec'd, dear DD.

Sorry, but I'm not into the God-thingy stuff.

So about 40,000 years ago, something "miraculous" occurred - caveman marketing 101.

I'm troubled with a few inconsistencies in the historical records - or lack of.

First, from what I've read, cave paintings are quite accurate - one can really identify the animals of that time period portrayed on the walls and ceilings.

Second, the variety of pigments used as paint. So all of a sudden cavemen knew what ingredients and what proportions were necessary to get the colors they needed.

I just find it really odd that all of a sudden, pre-historic man and woman had the pigments and capable of drawing like images of the animals in their environment. Just look at any first graders artwork to catch my drift. Art is learned.

I suspect what we have uncovered so far is more in line with the final product of many years of painstaking efforts by many artisians to get the physical features in their correct proportions so anyone viewing it would easily recognize the animals depicted on the murals. Same goes with the pigments too. I sometimes wonder how the colors plays on the minds eye when view by simple torch light or oil lamp. The type of light used when they created the murals is critical if you want to see the real color the original artists were trying to show.

As for why there aren't any earlier drawing to show a progression, I suspect environmental entropy is at play here. As time moves on, the land slowly surrenders itself back to the forces of nature to be renewed. It could very well be nature has consumed the earlier auditions. Then again, perhaps they're still waiting to be found, just like the lost Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

David Horrobin had a wonderful book on this "cultural explosion" DD, which the Royal Society voted 2nd to Hawking's in Science writing one year. I knew Horrobin, he came out of Balliol and then taught at Oxford (as a doctor), before spending long years in East Africa (where he got into archaeo/anthro), then started up his own company (in Nova Scotia) selling evening primrose oil, because he was convinced we had lost something essential for our brains to function - the right fats. (Our brains are mostly fat.) He was a really funny and smart rebel, and named his company efamol - for essential fatty acid molecule he'd tell you officially, but really for "Fuck 'Em All", a name aimed at the scientific establishment.

His book was called The Madness of Adam and Eve, and basically, he argues strong links from fossils to anatomy to cultural output. He believes humans mutated and produced not only a larger brain (which other animals have) but more importantly, producing much more complex interconnections within the brain. His view is that the genetic changes producing this are now called - if you have too many, etc. - schizophrenia. If you have a bit less, then you're pretty "out there" - creative, shamanistic/artistic etc. It was these people, who had piled up the genetic changes, and then added a changed diet, which produced your big explosion. At that point, his argument is fairly simple, because we CAN'T FIND a physical or simple genetic change alone which produced that huge growth around 30-40,000 years ago.

So he looks at diet. Diet is key FOR THE BRAIN because you need certain fatty acids to help grow and grease the operation of those complex connections. And here he argues that because we see savannah inn East africa today, we assume it was like that back then - though it wasn't. there were tons of rivers and swamps and fishing places. (In fact, he argues that our body build and the way we produce/use water would have made the kinds of lifestyle and hunting we imagine physically impossible.) Rather, we hung out at fishing holes and rivers... and as we got good at that, we got access to more... fish. which basically, fed the mind... and the explosion followed, all along the East side of Africa, as their greater success, greater ability to communicate and motivate socially, enabled sometimes peaceful sometimes violent expansion.

The modern link is that industrialized food takes out these fats, and thus, many people with an above-average number of these underlying genetic changes end up somewhere on the schizo scale. He did a lot of work with trials in prisons, schools etc. to try and understand if we could change diets and thus help reduce the numbers suffering.

But to your point, he sees the explosion back then as having come about from a cumulative series of genetic changes affecting the brain... then super-fed a new, richer diet... which produces the cultural/intellectual creativity... which could mobilize new forms of social bonds, group mindsets, dance, art, religion, politics... which would have led to rapid growth and expansion geographically.

As they say, in many ways it's a "just so" story, but one with tons of really interesting archaeo/anthro facts under it, as well as medical/genetic./diet/psych - and since all we have otherwise are different sets of "just so" stories (where we're all spear-throwing cavemen on the savannah etc.), he's worth a read. Besides, there really aren't many GOOD explanations of that explosion, are there?

And mostly because his book is just damn good fun!

(fragment from an anthropology lecture delivered telepathically in the usual manner by Zall-click-click in the year 38340 AD)

A recent discovery of a 35,000 year old video storage media has given us an image of an ancient ritual that has my colleagues speculating wildly. The video shows a large assembly of early Homo-S-S gathered in a large hall. The seating is a semi-circular arrangement with a large dais at the center point. There are approximately 400 separate seated participants, the significance of the number being lost to the ages. In the video the seated Homo-S-S’s one at a time walk to the center dais and make a series of sounds that can only be described as song of some form. Interestingly the group on the right (as viewed from behind the arc of the semi-circle) seem to be a kind of chorus. I say chorus because this group intones the identical musical sounds over and over. The group to the left also stands at the dais and “sings” if that is what they are doing, but each seems to have a unique song fragment, perhaps of their own invention. Both sides are limited to about five minutes of song each. After this ritual is performed for several hours, there is a period of inactivity and murmuring and then it begins again.

As I say my colleagues are speculating about the meaning of this ritual. We may never know what was its purpose or its significance. The group on the right may have held a significance in their repetitive intonations. For the Left, the significance lay in their individualized performance more than the repetition of some familiar tonal string. All of this leads me to think that what we are observing is the evolutionary process of consciousness. The Right is content with repetition and stasis. The Left is the force of change, of possibility. It must have been in rituals like this, based on song, that our species expanded its understanding and its capacity for survival in the natural world. In our time we enshrine this principle in our science as: “It’s the singer, not the song.”

Magic flutes and a magical blog. Blog - that's an ugly word to use with this beautiful narrative of yours, dd. I wanted to be an archeologist when I was young, but it never happened. The caves have always fascinated me. In my next life, perhaps.

I hate to ruin the mood, but back to reality. What's with the He this He that? "He then discovered fire. He dug a hole, laid some rocks in it, and made fire. Hearth & Home eight hundred thousand years ago. Then he/she took off out of Africa and settled in Europe, Indonesia, China.... " You don't bring Eve into it until we're leaving Africa. Mitochonrial Eve dates back 170,000 years whereas patrilineal Adam reaches back only 60,000 years. Perhaps you're thinking of Genesis stories? ;)

You know, DD, this topic is so interesting that I just had to look at the critique of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution (UPR) theory. It's like eating the apple of Eden - I want to believe, but the challenging theories and evidence are also compelling.

There's a language development argument out there that is too complex for me, but suffice it to say our "Phase III" language, which requires a hideously complex network of synapses to use, is 130,000 years old, at least.

I think most of us agree that, at least historically, human achievement enhances when two formerly isolated people meet and exchange. In Eurasia, we find this happening 52kya with yet another Out of Africa migration. As it turns out, many of the features associated as evidence for the UPR are already quite old in Africa. The idea that the Middle Paleolithic period was a dull time in terms of human achievement is falling apart with recent archaeological discoveries and interpretations.

The UPR, then, would not be as significant as "human evolution," but it would retain high status as "Eurasian" prehistory.

I almost forgot my favorite "Far Side" joke:

Two cavemen standing there, one the journeyman the other the apprentice. The journeyman is holding a rock (he's working on the wheel) and complaining:

"I told you to bring me a Crescent Wrench! This is a hammer! Well, maybe it is a Crescent Wrench...."