Part 1 🔗
Big History Lessons: An Overview
This work will draw on all three of these waves of discourse regarding human events. The second and third wave are critically important for showing how natural and social processes and interactions have conditioned the development of human history on a global scale, and how such processes form a sort of matrix within which humans must operate. Central to this has been an appreciation of the importance of science and scientific knowledge in the realm of historical development. This work shares this orientation, but argues that it does not go far enough in so far as science itself is part of human culture, and is subject to the same changes over time and place as all things human. Inevitably a dialectic emerges between natural science and social science. As human communities learn more about the world around them, they inevitably learn more about themselves: the knower and the known cannot be fully disentangled. Self is created by circumstance and vice versa. New understandings of the natural create new understandings of the human. The human sciences are not abolished but transformed. The knower and the known are locked in a cycle of question and answer. New answers to the question “Where am I?” (embedded in Nature) always provokes and modifies and refines the question “Who am I?” (a conscious subject) which in turn provokes new questions about Nature and then Mind in an endless cycle of reciprocal development. Natural Science and Social Science are conceptual Siamese Twins that cannot be entirely separated but also cannot be perfectly unified. The modification and persistence of human of human consciousness and its self creation might be called (in Plato’s sense) “the law of conservation of music”.
By treating culture as part of the human we can reintegrate the symbolic structures dealt with in the first wave with the purportedly more “material” elements in the second and third. Indeed, this project works on the assumption that as experiencing subjects humans cannot exist as fully human, much less “civilized,” historical beings without a cultural environment that produces shared meanings, purposes, and values that allow for large scale human sociability, cooperation, and flourishing. The apogee of every culture distinguishes the sacred from the profane. Consciousness is neither an illusion nor is it less real than nature. This is not to deny the importance of scientific knowledge and interpretation, but rather to historicize it. In fact, the central conceit of this book will be that world history is conditioned by changes in our civilized understanding of nature and its processes, and that this understanding is part and parcel of our larger cultural horizon.
The new influences on this Big History include pushing back the temporal frontier of what was previously regarded as “prehistory”. Rather than beginning with the conventional story of ancient river valley civilizations around 3,000BC, this work pushes back the origins of history by an order of magnitude, back to the earliest incontestable use of symbols in the Paleolithic. Examining the preconditions and implication of these belief systems from 40,000+ years ago, we will then examine the shift from sympathetic hunting magic in cave paintings to the first known funerary/ancestor cult that involved building in stone huge cultic monuments at the end of the last Ice Age, between10 and 9,000BC.
At what point does human consciousness unequivocally rupture the cyclic repetitions of hominid life? Control of fire is a transformative achievement that is hundreds of thousands of years old but there is little to go on. As we were taught in history graduate school, “No evidence, no history”. Human beings have buried their dead for at least 100,000 years and it is hard to see how this activity, unknown among other hominids, serves any practically useful function. Sorrow at a loss and/or preparation for an afterlife seem to be indicated by such practices. At the origin of human culture may lie the rueful acknowledgement of human finitude, the certainty of death. Before the invention of taxes, what else but death could be depended upon?
The first creative deployment of symbols would have left no traces. The earliest evidence for self consciously creative humans would have been evanescent. Body painting and marking, plus lively arts like singing, communal dance or early music would have left no data. The most suggestive ancient findings have come from the Blombos Cave site in South Africa, where evidence has been found of red ochre paint making that is seventy five to one hundred thousand years old. The petroglyphs at the Blombos site are extraordinarily ancient but hard to date exactly. Both dance and body painting must be of extraordinary antiquity but regrettably the first unequivocal signs of human mental life creating symbols are found in the physical remains of material culture. Forty thousand year old bone flutes are clearly products of a human culture, as are cave paintings or carvings and petroglyphs, like the Venus of Willendorf or the Lion Man or the Sulawesi cave drawings.
PIX
Art, religion and science start as one undifferentiated mass of what I might call “lore”. Art was closely connected to religious expression (as in grave goods) and the social cohesion fostered by religion was both the result of and a stimulus to, thought. Cult, creativity and contemplation take a long time to disentangle. Symbolism may have been suggested by natural “indexes”. An old tracker may point at hoofmarks in the earth and say the word for “deer”, youngsters growing up in such circumstances would pay careful attention, a very sustained and careful observation of such lessons and signs. This education would produce and expand useful neural networks for processing such impressions. Eventually tracks on the ground for a dozen or more species might be “legible” to the experienced hunter. It is not an impassible symbolic jump from tracks that represent deer to marks on stone that represent deer. The interpenetration of things and symbols is shown in the most “representative” objects that are both tools and symbols. The sword symbolizes war and the handshake symbolizes friendship. The smile is a natural representation or index of happiness. Affluent young people of the early twenty-first century, whose neural networks have been shaped by peering into cellphones and computer screens, have brains that are organized differently from those of their elders.
Symbols enabled the durable (as opposed to the evanescence of song or speech or dance) external representation of what appears in public (Nature, objects of sense perception like the sun or deer or people). This creates a unique new human capacity; the durable external representation of what does NOT appear in public, only in private (Mind or Subjectivity gets objectified in symbols rendering visible to the public intention, feeling, desire, imagination). Poetry is born which means lies are told. Metaphor emerges from its chrysalis. The accumulated views of nature and of our place in it do not disappear as new scientific revolutions supplant those before. Archaic worldviews continue on in the residual customs, languages and thoughts of every culture and every individual. Earlier conceptions of the world and consciousness are coded into folklore, tradition and “common sense”. We still say the sun “rises” and “sets”. In the West, educated people still sometimes throw rice at weddings or look up horoscopes. We still speak of “being exposed to the elements” but knowingly or not, this reference to weather is from Ancient Physics: earth, air, fire and water. Ships are “Christened” with a sacrificial bottle of champagne, because alcoholic libations were and sometimes still are thought to bring good luck. The Chinese still use fireworks at New Year, the caste system still exists in India. Exorcisms are still performed in various spots on the globe. Some skyscrapers skip the 13th floor. There are archaic holdovers in even the most technologically sophisticated cultures, and not without reason. The demands of the psyche prompt people, both ancient and modern, to organize into complex groups whose actions externalize and try to realize their collective internal longing for meaning, hope, order and the infinite. These demands continue into the present, invited or not, because the myriad difficulties and disappointments of human life require extraordinary consolation.
It is possible to thematize both conflict and cooperation in thinking about political history.[1] When he taught the Great Books core course at Columbia University, the great historian Richard Hofstadter provocatively used to begin his lecture on Marx by writing on the board, “All history is the history of class cooperation.” He was not necessarily advocating the latter over the former, he was pointing out it was at least as true as Marx’s claim to the contrary, and intellectually exciting in a very different way. It is well worth pondering the fact that without both social stratification and social cooperation, neither the Great Wall of China or Apollo 11 or the Italian Renaissance would never have gotten achieved. We must find a way to create cooperation between individuals and groups where there is common benefit and public interest. Cultures involve both cooperation and conflict, but the greatest human achievements such as the Great Wall of China required cooperation on an almost unimaginable scale, millions of people, for a period of many centuries. The immense sacrifices involved in constructing and maintaining the Great Wall were invested in the long term safety and security of China, and the Wall required sacrifice. Political order inevitably combines cooperation and conflict, freedom and coercion. History is the interference pattern formed as waves of heteronomy and autonomy, force and freedom, overlap.
Whatever was different about humans allowed them to adapt to every environmental niche on the planet, which meant that they, uniquely, propagated further and faster than any other species. New discoveries have emerged that may push the origin of cave painting (and symbolism) back beyond 60,000 BC, but it remains to be seen if these new early dates will survive scrutiny. Humans were certainly something different by the time ritual and art emerged, from the idea of symbolism (perhaps 100,000 years ago), but it is impossible to say where or when or how many times this happened. The earliest cave painting, petroglyphs and carvings required a very sophisticated kind of mental activity: symbolism, the very counterintuitive idea that something can be something else. The idea that marks in stone can be people or animals or the sun requires creativity, rationality and a disciplined imagination. Still more sophisticated is the idea entailed in the creation of painting and petroglyphs that four-dimensional animals can be re-presented as two-dimensional scrapings. Verbs were being transformed into nouns, acts into pictures, processes into things. A common grammar of thought and palette of symbols was carving up the world into shared categories for those who participated in the symbolic and ritual life of the group. There is no doubt that there was an emergence of a specifically human mental life, registered in the creative deployment of symbols, at least 40,000 years ago and probably much earlier, but it is impossible to say how much earlier or where this started.
The media in or through which symbols are constructed also tell a tale. Speech, song, dance, music are all evanescent, always in flux and existing only in the now. Drawing and carving achieve a symbolic and physical fixity, creating a center of space and time around it, like Wallace Steven’s Jar in Tennessee. Carving in bone, rock, antler, wood, all created static objects opposed to the impermanence of other media for symbolism. Carving tree trunks made possible carvings outside the human scale and as Mircea Eliade pointed out, these sacred shafts were understood as being the axis mundi. The oldest known example of a massive carving made of wood looming outside the human scale is the Russian Shigur idol, which is about 12,000 years old. Because this is an exceptionally well preserved specimen made of organic material, it is probably only one of multiple examples, and also probably not the earliest of these massive pillar carvings. The high point of sophistication in carving these larger than human wooden pillars will eventually be found in the northwestern Pacific coast of North America, totem poles. The distinction between the Old and New world erodes as the likelihood of premodern contacts emerges from new kinds of evidence. The tribe of nomadic Siberians that carved the Shigur idol and others like it may well have contributed to the mix of Old World peoples that crossed to the New World.
Every society thinks they are in the center of things, and the axis mundi inevitably runs through their space, an omphalos marked by symbolic pillars. This idea reaches its apogee in the move from carving in wood to massive carving in stone. The biodegradation of wood is easily observable, but the erosion of stone is generally too slow to be perceived. The change in media bespeaks a change in the aspiration for permanence in the people in the people that produced them. The Washington Monument, Nelson’s Column and other such stone totem poles are intended to be maximally permanent, yet they are still descendants of some predecessor of the Shigur idol. Moving from the monumental carving of organic wood to the much more labor intensive inorganic stone monuments costs an immense price in sustained heavy work. Since this price has been paid by so many societies for more than one hundred centuries, they must have believed that they were getting something for their heroic toils. Monumental stone architecture and stone sculpture are acts of Promethean defiance against time, change, entropy, death, as McCarthy’s Judge informed us.
There are apparently many other sites of Neolithic hunter gatherers creating art in the context of cultic practices. Recently in western India, several hundred larger than life petroglyphs have been discovered etched into rocky hilltops that have been provisionally dated at approximately ten thousand BC. They appear to have been made by hunter gatherers and the carvings appear to represent people and animals, including crocodiles, birds, elephant, fish, perhaps even hippos, rhinos and sharks. After the invention of agriculture and sedentary life in the Middle East about 8,000 BC, fertility cults were added to funerary cults in the first agricultural villages. These cultures both gave their denizens an understanding of their place within the larger universe, a doctrine of their fate beyond their mortal life spans, and a normative basis for association and cooperation in bands and communities of varying sizes. Sedentary life preceded the domestication of food. Sedentism was a response to psychic needs, with cultic practices providing intelligible boundaries to oneself and the world, and thus a moral center to subjectivity. The domestication of wheat follows after the “symbolic revolution” at Chatal Huyuk, which means, once again, that cult comes first.
The earliest known large human cooperative aggregations at the end of the last Ice Age was an ancestor cult in eastern Turkey which required thousands of workers to construct the first known monumental architecture in history. The ritual center at Gobekli Tepe was the site of seasonal feasting and cultic ceremonies which must have been objects of great anticipation and attention for those foragers that participated. It is one of a dozen man made hills within one hundred kilometers. The emergence of cooperation among multiple hunter-gatherer bands soon after the end of the last Ice Age (12,000 years ago) for cultic purposes was unprecedented behavior. This cooperation in building an immense ritual center lasted for a period of more than ten centuries at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. It seems to have been a funerary cult combined with a kind of ancestor worship. It also has something to do with masculinity. There are hundreds of stone animal sculptures, but in every case with species like pigs or foxes or wildcats where there is an evident sexual dimorphism, all are male. Perhaps these animals had some totemic significance or perhaps Gobekli Tepe served as a kind of “men’s house” for puberty rituals. There is also evidence of feasting. It may be that the acephalous T shaped idols were connected with a “Skull cult” as in found in other archaic sites like Jericho and Chatal Huyuk. This ritual complex predated by millennia agriculture, the domestication of animals, metallurgy, writing, the wheel and the other cultural achievements of the river valley civilizations that come much later. Religious rituals, the product of human consciousness, were the origin of large-scale human cooperation, not environment or economic necessity. Religion is the seedbed of civilization, out of which all the rest of culture grows.
The persistent patterns of attention, thinking and sensation characteristic of cultural life dialectically modified cultural practices, the “software” of human society. However, it is important to note that patterns of thought and practice also modified the physical “hardware” of the human brain. This is the reason why the mental habits and capacities of contemporary humans differ so markedly from those of the ancients. The tradition of epic poetry, for example, generally started out as an oral tradition in most cultures. It may seem incredible to us, living in a world marked by the instant retrieval of information, that generations of illiterate, itinerant bards should be able to recite from memory the 27,000 lines of poetry that make up the Homeric epics, or that an Islamic hafiz should be able to memorize the entire Koran, or that some Platonic dialogues are framed as being repeated verbatim by someone who heard them, perhaps second or third hand. In the Phaedrus, Socrates noted that writing removes a burden from memory, and that the ability to memorize atrophies with disuse. This is factually correct. Most people in the age of the Internet find it impossible to memorize lengthy groups of words the way the ancients could.
The burial of the dead and sympathetic magic related to success in hunting combined with the handprints which “sign” cave paintings signalize the emergence of a distinctly human culture, different from other hominids. New scientific work done on “mirror neurons” and “neural plasticity” has been applied to art history and cultural history, by Iain McGilchrist and John Onians and this can no doubt be extended further. Neuroarthistory, a new field that combines new knowledge of the structure and function of the human brain (derived from MRIs) with the history of art is the first completely twenty-first century historical venture.[2] The main practitioner is John Onians. Iain McGilchrist, a practicing neurologist, has extended some of these new findings about mirror neurons and neural plasticity and hemispheric differences to a discussion of the history of Western culture as a whole in an extraordinary book, The Master and His Emissary. The emergence of the most important, characteristically human cultural achievements, language, symbolism, myth, kinship and such changed the demands made upon the human brain, changing the neural structure of the brain itself, which in turn facilitated further changes in culture. Eventually, the cultural activities that gesture at transcendence, which were described by Hegel as the “Realm of Absolute Spirit”: Art, Religion and Philosophy, emerge, first as a mass on undifferentiated lore, later precipitating out as self-conscious, separate, standalone disciplines. The dialectic of brain and thought, hardware and software, inside and outside, subject and object are necessary to a current understanding of the human, its history and its prospects.
Art, religion and philosophy in archaic human life signal the emergence of self consciously creative human consciousness. Life size cave paintings were the original art within the original art galleries. Symbolic representation extended human consciousness beyond the boundaries of any individual brain. Consciousness was statically externalized.[3] Evidence for an unambiguously human history begins here. The earliest of these cave paintings which were “signed” by handprint of the artist show the emergence not only of self-consciousness and but also self-assertion. This nameless artist was responding to a question nobody previously heard being asked, “Who are you?” answering, “I am the creator of these animals, the god of two dimensions.” He or she was not merely representing objects of experience but implicitly (and with handprints, explicitly) representation of the artist, the experiencer as well. These handprints are actually self-portraits. This is the first evidence of a post-simian Descartes, an inhabitant of a new world, thinking about him or herself thinking. These paintings were dominated by animal forms and probably associated with some kind of sympathetic magic intended to facilitate the hunt.
PIX OF CAVE PAINTING
The self-consciously creative deployment of symbols with the intention of manipulating nature is the mark of the distinctively human. The primatologist van der Waal wrote, “I don’t usually argue this way, but no primate has the capacity for symbol creation that humans do.”[4] The emergence of self-consciously creative symbol making was something analogous to a quantum leap of humanity’s relation to nature like an electron into a new atomic shell. We have ontological continuity with chimps and bonobos, but there is also something unique in the emergence of a creative representation of nature that separates us from the other animals. We are qualitatively different. The handprint among the animals and female genitalia represented in cave art gestures at life and death. It signals the birth of the “self”. The handprint is a demand for recognition by the viewers. It is the birth of pride, the demanding self-awareness that Hobbes described as the essentially human emotion.
The earliest human cultures had not differentiated what would become in later culture separate domains of thought and practice. The ancients were storytellers and narrative connected cult to contemplation to creativity. These stories, precursors to the mythic traditions of the great sedentary civilizations, were the articulation of the self -dentification of the peoples that created them as well as the identity of those individuals that told and retold them. Thus Rome incorporated Greece by adapting their myths. Art is a cumulative human gesture that extends from the earliest glimmers of human experience toward an infinite horizon of possibilities. Pictures of animals and repeated patterns at Blombos cave in South Africa are of enormous but uncertain antiquity.
Ancient texts in religion and philosophy, which generally assume a premodern account of the cosmos, are often still valuable, nay indispensable, for their insights into the human predicament. Even texts assuming an outmoded physics have much to tell us about the fragility of human life, the moral obligations we have to ourselves and others, and how we best direct our all too finite choices. Archaic literature and poetry that was created under every earlier conception of nature still educate our imagination. Much of what ails us comes from poorly educated imagination, which is especially vulnerable to seduction of various kinds. Art, religion and philosophy respond to questions that science cannot ask, much less answer. Viewing Rembrandt’s self portraits chronologically arranged will tell the thoughtful observer more about Husserlian time than the most precise Einsteinian atomic clock. Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, the Good Samaritan, Sophocles’ Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Lear, Milton’s Satan, Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, all continue dwell amongst us, unexpectedly reappearing without being summoned to tell us something troubling and transformative, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. They are all too real.
Symbols are the externalization of consciousness, which frees mind from somatic mortality. Gilgamesh’s rueful acknowledgement of mortality is still with us, but Gilgamesh is not. Writing externalizes individual experience and internalizes collective practice. Formation of a collective mind happens in the extension of mind by symbols. Then mind becomes bigger than and external to the brain. Much of human history has been marked by the externalization of somatic activity. Cooking fires start the digestive process externally, prior to eating, allowing more complete absorption of nutrients. The domestication of large herbivores was a substitute for our lack of an enzyme called cellulace. Humans cannot break down cellulose, the main component of vegetation, but large herbivores have the enzyme, so humans had the animals break grass down for them, turning grass into mobile vessels of protein and fat. Symbols externalize portions of human cognition, turning subjective thought into objective signs. The standardization of these signs became writing. This process is the externalization of the individual mind, subjectivity rendered objective.
Human life is hourglass shaped. We are perched at the neck of an hourglass trying to select some events and reject other events as they slide from potentiality to actuality; but we do our job imperfectly, so the flux of historical events that flows like grains of sand into history are only partially under our individual and collective control. History is the interference pattern created by consciousness knowing and overpowering nature. Au natural, the default condition of feral human beings is hunger, poverty and fear. The Garden of Eden Myth of a long past golden age, the earthly heaven before eternal Heaven, is not a description but a wistful dream. It is not a nostalgic memory. Alas, once lost, there is no regaining innocence, none of us can live in Eden. Danger, work, worry, pain; these are the price we pay for life: nobody has it easy. Nobody rides for free and the ride is shorter than anybody expects. The human condition requires fortitude because nobody gets out alive. Every living thing is food for some other kind of living thing. Nature is trying to kill us and sooner or later it will succeed. The growth of our collective understanding of natural science has enabled us to push back against nature with some degree of success. More people live longer and healthier lives now than in earlier times, which allowed us to trade in some of our old problems for new ones we like better. This is called progress. However, as the human capacity to push back against nature increased, so did the human ability to push back against other people.
The story of Cain and Abel has been enacted in every place and time. DNA evidence shows how hideously routine genocide has been. What seems to some people unprecedented genocidal slaughter as in the Nazi Holocaust, the Ottoman extermination of the Armenians, the murderous history of Belgium in the Congo is in fact archaic, sadly is not. There are all too many precedents from every epoch and every place, like the elimination of the Neanderthal population that is implicit in our current DNA remnants. If you think our archaic ancestors were bush hippies, grooving sustainably with nature, sharing and caring and hunting and gathering in a blissful anarchy because they answered to no one and could exercise maximum liberty, you will only be able to get confirmation for this from those of your friends who are Denisovians. Our species, at the very least, assisted all competing hominids groups to globally die off. From there to the Iron Age collapse of the eastern Mediterranean civilizations just after 1200 BC, the Athenians’ annihilation of the Melians to the Iroquois’ destruction of the Huron to the Khmer Rouge liquidation of counterrevolutionaries, the extermination of large masses of people is not historically unusual. We are social, hierarchical animals, like our nearest biological cousins, chimpanzees. And like chimps, we pursue violence both within and between groups.[5] Evidence for cannibalism in humans is found in the fossil record at least three quarters of a million years ago.[6] In the archaic cave paintings of France and Spain, there are pictures of extinct species of game animals such as bison and mammoth, but in addition these paintings also contain human figures with spears buried in their bodies.[7]
The last 50,000 years of history that emerges from material culture and from bones, especially those which contain recoverable DNA is reason to worry. In this larger temporal vista, history reveals a troubling linguistic and genetic and technological game of musical chairs. Archaeology and paleontology reveal dozens of species that responded to the advent of a new predator, us, by dying off almost completely shortly after people arrived. It doesn’t matter if it was Maori in New Zealand or the Polynesians in Hawaii or Indians on the Great Plains of North America or European mariners dining on dodo in Mauritius, it is always the same. When people arrive in a new location, things that are easy to kill get killed. For most of human history, local human inhabitants outside the band were regarded as being a subset of the local fauna, threatening at worst, but possibly edible.[8] Other human beings were driven off or killed routinely and in some cases, they were cannibalized. Even peaceful interaction between human groups was potentially a source of lethal disease transfer. Eventually, as sedentary societies developed, especially fierce foraging bands got their first and perhaps only reason to keep captives alive, the newly invented slave trade.[9] In other words, in an age of genocidal war, the advent of slavery may have been a progressive change.
Everywhere on earth people manipulate nature to survive and reproduce. Ancient peoples were not some ancient bush hippies, ardent conservationists living in harmony with the “balance” of nature, grooving sustainably with the animals as Enkidu did that was imagined in the wishful thinking of today’s advocates of primitivism. The ancients did whatever it took to survive and these methods, like the burning of the landscape or stampeding herd animals off cliffs could be extraordinarily wasteful. From the forager’s point of view, it is always better to kill too many prey animals than too few. No human being has ever refused to feed his or her children out of regard for the environmental consequences. Even when not killing animals en masse, sustained hunting pressure on animals wiped out many species that had inadequate defense to human predation. The pattern was global. When humans first land in any new territory, such as the Old World river valleys or Hawaii or New Zealand or the Great Plains of North America, overhunting quickly extinguished many species of local game animals. North America was particularly transformed by human predation. Before human contact, the North American prairies had horses, glyptodonts (armadillos the size of ATVs), camels, several species of giant ground sloth, mammoths and other species, which went extinct shortly after humans made their appearance on the North American plains.
Not just animals, many of the human groups that made the journey to the Americas were also exterminated by mobile newcomers. We know that population Y was in the Americas at least 12kay. Around 7,000 years ago this readily identifiable South American group, described as “population Y”, suffered a sudden sharp population collapse. The few survivors left their homes on the coast of Peru and escaped by crossing the Andes into the remote headwaters of the Amazon, on the east slope lowlands. This tiny living remnant still carries the DNA markers of population Y. The genomes of three small, very remote tribes have DNA about 2% of which is unique in the precolumbian New World. The DNA markers from population Y are not derived from north east Siberians, but from the same genetic pool as aboriginal Australians and inhabitants of New Guinea. They were phenotypically different from the newcomers that killed and displaced them. The Japanese replacement (elimination) of the Ainu, the Roman annihilation of the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, the
Not surprisingly, the Bering Land Bridge allowed movement in both directions. Some horses and camels crossed from North America back into Asia and became the progenitors of today’s Old World populations even as the animals of the American prairie were being hunted to extinction. The original Clovis spear point, which was made by sophisticated Neolithic hunters, was found associated with the bones of an extinct species of mammoth. The large Mahaffey Cache of eighty-three Clovis type spear points from 11,000 BC, was found to contain the proteins of both extinct horses and camelids. Both now and in the past, people were willing to push their environment to it’s carrying capacity and beyond. Successful hunting and gathering means an increase in the population of foraging bands. It is very close to impossible for human groups to thrive indefinitely without upsetting the local ecology. Sooner or later, formerly abundant resources become scarce, successful reproduction causes human numbers to climb and resource stress causes violence, either within or between groups. As one anthropologist aptly noted, humans will fight before they will starve.[10] The European conquest of the New World was the ultimate resource war, conducted by the protracted territorial expansion of multiple competing Atlantic powers, which consumed several continents
The Hobbesian result is violence, which is far older than recorded history. The beginning of Kubrick’s 2001 was not far off. The 40,000-year-old Shanidar Cave in Iraq contained multiple Neanderthal skeletons that died of head trauma.[11] At Jebel Sahaba in northern Sudan on the east bank of the Nile, sixty-eight skeletons have recently been found that were thrown together after being massacred. The 7,000BC “Kennewick Man” skeleton found by the Columbia River in the US had a spear point in his pelvis, while Otzi, the mummified corpse dated 3300BC found in the Italian Alps, had a defensive wound to his hand and an arrowhead in his back.
The cheery pessimism of this Big History asks not how humans could be so cruel, but rather how human life ever departed from this miserable pattern. We are the only animals who have adapted to every ecosystem on the planet. Our civilizations make us different from any other social animal. Only humans invent symbolism and produce a hypercomplexity both in individuals and collectives that is not just different in degree but also in kind from aggregations of other species.[12] New ideas and new techniques from other disciplines have helped historians to push backward in the line between human history and prehistory. Natural history begins with the Big Bang. Human history begins with the Small Bang: the stone age invention of symbolism, which is subjectivity made objective, the “inside” rendered “outside”. Subjectivity, the notion of a single self that is continuously experiencing over time but also limited in time, is the Sonderstellung, the unique numinous valence of the human. In this respect, Descartes and Sartre were right: consciousness is simple; it is given and cannot be dismissed or ignored. Mind is here to stay.
One of the great attractions of sedentary agriculture was the dramatic increase in population that could be sustained in a single geographical area, and this population increase made it difficult or impossible for most foraging bands to raid successfully. For example, in Chatal Hoyuk in Turkey, one of the earliest known agricultural settlements, thousands of farming people clustered together, which made lethal attacks by nomadic bands, which usually numbered a few dozen and almost never reached a hundred, all but impossible. Much has been made of the drudgery and lack of dietary variety in early farming villages, but going to sleep with some assurance that one is going to wake up again is a valuable thing, easily underestimated by those who have never experienced such fear. Moreover, most people have strong emotional bonds to their families, and security for children is something many parents would willingly sacrifice for.
[1] Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 33
[2] John Onians, Neuroarthistory: from Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki: (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008). Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: (New Haven, Yale University Press 2009).
[3] Clark, Andy, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again: (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
[4] Van der Waal Aeon 2016
[5] Steven A LeBlanc, Constant Battles, the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, (New York, St Martin’s Press, 2003) 82.
[6] Steven A LeBlanc, Constant Battles, the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, (New York, St Martin’s Press, 2003) 95
[7] Steven A LeBlanc, Constant Battles, the Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, (New York, St Martin’s Press, 2003) 5. Evidence for sustained genocidal war more than 13,000 years before the present has been found in the Sudan. See https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/world-s-first-war-13-400-years-ago-was-not-isolated-event-1.9849856?fbclid=IwAR2rQ4gTnjpQ6EN-QNwxB6zjvcjcUvWqakEq82E0oH6iqa-ojSV1ndpmNOY
[8] American Association For The Advancement Of Science. “Widespread Cannibalism May Have Caused Prehistoric Prion Disease Epidemics, Science Study Suggests.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 11 April 2003. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/04/030411071024.htm>.
[9] Scott, Against the Grain
[10] LeBlanc, Constant Battles, 149 Cite Diamond Collapse
[11] LeBlanc, Constant Battles, 59
[12] Wittgenstein, “Why can’t a dog lie?” Because he lacks language?
[13] Childe, V. Gordon, Man Makes Himself, 4th Edition (Moonraker Press, 1981). Wittfogel, Karl, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, (New York, Vintage Books, 1981).
[14] Dunbar, Robin, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
[15] Schmidt, K., Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in south-eastern Anatolia, Berlin 2012.
[16] Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 89, 113.
[17] Ian Hodder, “History in the Remaking.”Dailybeast.com. The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC,18 Feb. 2010.
[18] Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods, 67.
[19] Oliver Dietrich, Jens Notroff, A sanctuary, or so fair a house? In defense of an archaeology of cult at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe. In: Nicola Laneri (eds.), Defining the Sacred: Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion in the Near East. Oxford: Oxbow (2015), 75-89.
[20] Schmidt, K. 1998. Beyond daily bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic ritual from Göbekli Tepe, Neo-Lithics 2/98: 1-5.
[21] R G Collingwood, The Idea of Nature,
[22] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution
[23] Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer,
Part 2 🔗
MUCH OMITTED
THEN
Religion is an autonomous human construction that ties together disparate and unequal social groups for cooperative action. The emergence of large scale human cooperation was in religion not economics, and sedentism preceded agriculture. The assumption that economic and environmental conditions, particularly agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals, created the necessity for sedentary human life and thus the emergence of villages and cities, dominated 19th and 20th century thinking about the origins of human civilizations. Historians and anthropologists in the Marxist tradition such as Childe and Wittfogel argued that the earliest “hydraulic civilizations” that developed in the Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates and the Indus river valleys needed to control the irrigation of crops, which entailed economic accumulation, a burgeoning population, social stratification, and all the intellectual apparatus for the social control of a subordinate population, an “ideological superstructure”, which was coded into religious myths.[13] This economic and environmental determinism was consistent with archaeological evidence as it existed then, and the story of the emergence of civilization had a satisfying materialist coherence. Unfortunately, recent archaeological investigations at Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk have shown this account to be seriously mistaken. The time has come for Marx to do a Hegelian headstand.
New techniques, like DNA analysis, cores drilled to extract ancient climate information, Lidar mapping of jungles, research into the neural architecture of the brain and important new archaeological digs have extended our historical horizons, offered new evidence and provoked new questions. Doubling the domain of history from 5,000 years to 10,000+ at Gobekli Tepe, then extending it back from there to the earliest human deployment of symbols (which may be 100,000 years old) requires reexamination of much we thought we knew. That far back there is little evidence to go on, but it is clear, on the basis of hard evidence in the form of cave paintings and artifacts like the Venus of Willendorf or the Lion Man that the use of symbols was demonstrably under way between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago at multiple sites. Instead of 5,000 years of history, we now have closer to 50,000 years and an increase in historical time by an order of magnitude means that our frame of reference has been transformed as well. We have new data and we must ask new questions. Some of our current self conceptions and wishful thinking about who we are how we became who we are now demonstrably unsustainable. The change in historical understanding created by this temporal and topical expansion of world history entails changes in our understanding of the locations and sequences of cultural development and the dialectic between human beings and the environment. Eventually a unique kind of change separated human self understanding from the understanding of nature. This rupture is a hapax logomenon, the emergence of a Sonderstellung, a separate status for human beings apart from nature which is completely unprecedented. This is what the late Klaus Schmidt, the first director of the archaeological dig at Gobekli Tepe, believed he had found.
LOTS OF PHOTOS AND DIAGRAMS OF GT including statues and masks.
The makers of Gobekli Tepe must have had a mutually intelligible language. They necessarily had the division of labor and by implication some kind of social ranking. Perhaps a shaman or several shamans who presided over the ceremonies organized the work of cutting monoliths and feeding the hundreds of people assembled for the rites. This labor could not have been coerced, because no mechanisms of coercion available to foraging nomads would have sufficed to keep hundreds of mobile, self-reliant hunter/gatherers in one place that didn’t want to be there. There must have been some sort of normative integration and a shared belief system for these disparate groups that made them willing to undertake such a precocious and strenuous cooperative effort. This was probably the peculiar province of the shamans as well. Such normative consensus and social cooperation could only have been realized by the propagation of myths that could symbolize and integrate this completely unprecedented degree of social cohesion. Moreover, more than a dozen other contemporary cultic sites with similar T-shaped headless statues, spread over a wide area have recently been found. This suggests an extended chiefdom, with a complex hierarchy over a long duree.
Cooperation between foraging bands may have been reinforced by ritual feasting and drinking. Vast numbers of wild game bones have been found on the site. Stone vats, apparently for the fermentation of alcoholic beverages have also been found on site. Intoxication and religious ecstasy may well share a common connection as can be seen in a rock concert or a rave. Such gatherings could have facilitated the trade in exotic resources, like obsidian, which was present at the site even though the nearest available source was hundreds of kilometers away. Some archaeologists have suggested that these feasts and ceremonies eventually became occasions for exogamy with the exchange of young people as marriage partners. The monolith carving and temple building at Gobekli Tepe went on for more than a millennium, centuries before the domestication of plants and animals, before the wheel, before pottery, before the calendar, before writing, before metallurgy, before all the other achievements of the river valley civilizations.[15]
The antiquity of Gobekli Tepe is extraordinary. It existed for millennia before the Black Sea, initially a vast freshwater lake, was inundated with saltwater about 5,600 BC as water levels of the Mediterranean Sea rose due to melting glaciers. Gobekli Tepe is millennia older than that. Gobekli Tepe’s beginnings are many centuries more distant temporally from the earliest Egyptian pyramids than the earliest pyramids are from us today. This place is old. Even stranger, Gobekli Tepe was not permanently inhabited. There is no evidence that it had houses, middens, privies or cooking hearths; there was no local source of water. Without a water source handy, this pre-pottery Neolithic culture would have had quite a task transporting enough water for hundreds of people from the nearest source, which was two kilometers away. There were many cracked bones, mostly of gazelles, deer and aurochs, but only of hunted animals, none were domesticated. The immense megaliths were anthropomorphic but headless. Other, later Neolithic sites in the Levant had “skull cults” in which the heads were taken from corpses as talismans of the ancestors and kept in special common structures, and recent discovery of skulls suggest that this was the case at Gobekli Tepe.[16]
The animals carved into the megaliths were generally not prey animals like those eaten on the site, so it is unlikely that the shamans were engaged in hunting magic. Instead the megaliths had representations of snakes, lions, scorpions, spiders, boars and particularly vultures; all threatening, dangerous animals associated with suffering and death. Different animals predominate in different enclosures. Enclosure A is dominated by snakes. Enclosure B by foxes (or perhaps wolves?) Enclosure C is dominated by boars. All have vultures. The emphasis on some animals rather than others connected by vultures may indicate totemism and clan kinship across hunter-gatherer bands united in a funeral/ancestor cult. Some have suggested that these structures were connected with traditions of “sky burial” like those found later in Zoroastrianism and in Tibet, where corpses are exposed for excarnation by vultures, which are understood as taking the deceased to the sky when they fly away.
Still more surprising is the reason why Gobekli Tepe is so well preserved. It was intentionally backfilled for reasons that cannot even be guessed at, at the cost of an enormous amount of human labor. The entire complex, which before current excavation was a fifty-foot high artificial hill, was intentionally buried more than ten thousand years ago about 8200 BC. It would have taken a vast number of people a very long time to bury these ritual spaces using only human muscle to carry enough stones, debris and dirt to create a fifty-foot high hill. There is much yet to be found, because only five percent of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated so far. Still more astonishing is the fact that there may be more than a dozen other artificial hills with buried ritual complexes like Gobekli Tepe in the vicinity. Work is only beginning on these. It is impossible to know what will be found next, but one thing is clear, history is much larger and longer than anyone suspected. “Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture,” Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology said. “Gobekli changes everything. It’s elaborate, it’s complex, and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time.”[17] Unlike the Donation of Constantine or the Shroud of Turin, Gobekli Tepe is not a hoax.
Klaus Schmidt saw in Gobekli Tepe “a completely new understanding of the process of sedentism and the beginning of agriculture.” As he encapsulated twenty years of work, “The temple precedes the city”. It not been explained why the giant clearly anthropomorphic statues/idols are all headless. Here is one conjecture: we know that there were archaic skull cults in the nearby Levant, which invoked deified ancestors. Assume Gobekli Tepe was an ancestor worship cult site related to the archaic skull cults in the Levant. Skulls have recently been found at Gobekli Tepe, which is consistent with this hypothesis. Then each year at Gobekli Tepe, in the autumn, multiple hunter gatherer groups bring the excarnated skull of the some deceased member(s). The reason the statues at Gobekli Tepe are headless may be the same reason that later statues of Roman emperors allowed for the switching of heads rather than entire statues when a new emperor came to power. When the ritual was over and Granddad has joined the ancestral divinities, Granddad’s skull can be removed for burial or burning or whatever and then another skull can be put on top of the headless figure, this year or next.
Perhaps the intimation of mortality produced an inchoate Freudian Ur-anxiety that was given an Aristotelian catharsis in the rituals of these ancestor cults.
This ritual recall of the dead would have been a visually arresting image, especially for those experiencing Gobekli Tepe for the first time. It would have been especially arresting if the ritual invocation of the ancestors were at night by firelight. A gigantic 15 or 20 foot human form, breathtakingly outside the human scale, topped off with the skull of Granddad and somehow is Granddad, perhaps being spoken for by a shaman, represents perhaps the apotheosis of our late Granddad now added to the roster of previous divinized ancestors whose spirits dwell among us. For over 1500 years at Gobekli Tepe, the idyllic life of the nomadic foragers had so much anarchic freedom, experiential stimulation, affluent leisure and Whole Foods diets, that many groups of them voluntarily put in millions of hours of labor constructing and then burying these immense stoneworks. Homo Religiosus precedes Homo Economicus and Homo Ludens also appears surprisingly early. The makers of Gobekli Tepe were not coerced, they must have valued and enjoyed the long observed tradition of work and feasting.
The old fashioned economic and ecological determinist accounts of the origins of civilization have been stood on their head. The 19th and 20th positivistic oversimplifications of the origins of civilization cannot be sustained. Instead of religion being the epiphenomenal result of result of agriculture, sedentary civilization, irrigation and the need for social control, it seems that the demand for cult and ritual is what first aggregated large numbers of hunter gatherers into a vast temple building program which lasted for centuries. Religion is the Urstoff of human history. The aggregation of people happened before the emergence of agriculture and before the domestication of animals in the first sedentary villages of the Levant. The archaeologist Jacques Cauvin has written of a “symbolic revolution” in Chatal Huyuk that preceded sedentary agricultural life in the form of a new “religious ideology” which cannot be attributed to some change in the “economic base”. He notes, “The chronological order of these changes, a symbolic transformation preceding the agricultural economy, is a proven, stratigraphic fact.” [18] Sedentary civilization and social complexity did not create religion; religion created sedentary civilization and social complexity. Cauvin identifies cultural artifacts representing a feminine nature goddess and a masculine principle in the form of a bull. It is only after the emergence of this new religious ideology rooted people to a particular place that agriculture began.
Durkheim was wrong. Religion does not eventually stabilize the practical needs of complex “societies” rather the origin of religion lies in the human psyche, and it precedes sedentary social complexity. There was no disruption in the life of small foraging groups in eastern Turkey thirteen thousand years ago that required them to seek stabilization through utterly unprecedented levels of intensive cooperation with other similarly stressed hunter/gatherer bands to create immense headless stone idols placed inside stone walls. They were not doing sympathetic hunting magic like the ancient cave painters. Whatever the Gobekli Tepe cult was, it was not the solution to any environmental, economic, or practical problem. These monoliths did not provide food or reproductive success. These perhaps acephalous, perhaps not, groups of foragers congealed together not as a result of Hobbesian conquest (the necessary means of coercion simply did not exist) but because of a shared psychic need for an orientation that was not limited to the accidents of the local terrain and individual life. Gobekli Tepe emerged at a point in history where there was not yet any complex “society” to have basic economic or social needs demanding a religious response from the ideological superstructure. Instead it appears that it was cult and ritual that constituted the first complex human society out of many independent hunting/gathering bands. A new form of necessity drove the participants: psychic impulses like anxiety, wonder, curiosity, awe, longing. They were trying to understand themselves and their world.[19] They wanted to know who they were and where they were in the cosmos. They manifested their psychic drives in new modes of social organization and monument building. Klaus Schmidt, the lead archaeologist for many years believed that Gobekli Tepe was the origin of the Sonderstellung, the idea that humans are separate from and superior to, nature. He may have been right[20]
The idea of a Sonderstellung, a separate status for humans apart from the rest of nature may begin at Gobekli Tepe. Klaus Schmidt, the Chief Investigator at Gobekli Tepe who oversaw 20+ years of excavation, believed that Gobekli Tepe earliest known manifestation of this separation. If he was correct, than this is the source of what Collingwood called the “Idea of Nature”.[21] At the point where the self-conscious development of our species extruded a Sonderstellung, our species had evolved the ability to speed up evolution by inventing history. By raising evolution from body to mind, hardware to software, environment to culture, history accelerates the evolution of our species by allowing patterns of collective behavior (culture) to try many possible practices, without necessarily or completely lethal results. Evolution operates at the collective level, not just the individual. If religion were not in some way adaptive, it would not be so ubiquitous.[22]
Human self-consciousness is not a postscript to civilization; it is the omphalos, the core of all the other practical activities that emerge later. Ideas matter far more than had previously been acknowledged by scientific naturalism. Hegel and Weber, not Marx, were correct about the origins of history and the autonomy of human consciousness. The scientific emergence of a new discipline, the current neurology of the brain using new technology like CAT scans to observe the stimulation of the brain antecedent to observed human behavior has been applied to history. A new approach, “neurohistory” sheds light on the influence these archaic religious rituals had on those that participated. Ideas and beliefs were enacted in such a way that neuronal and synaptic architecture, the actual hardware of the human brain, was modified. The new neurohistory, applied to art, has shown that experiences which are extended in time, repetitive and closely attended to by individuals, actually alter the neural structures of those engaged in such experiences. This is the actual physical mechanism that explains why practicing the piano increases skill. These ceremonies, with their attendant concentrated social labor and the unique liturgical connection to the deified ancestors, combined with the sharing of stories, feasting, drinking, perhaps gift giving and the exchange of marriageable young people between groups would have made a powerful impression on all the participants. Repeated annually every autumn, (as the archaeological evidence suggests) this set of cultic rituals, which continued to be practiced for well over a thousand years, certainly molded the neural plasticity of those brains that participated. Thus the “software” of human culture was modifying the “hardware” that made it possible: the physical structure composing the neural and synaptic grid of human brains. This “software” driven, rather than natural environment driven, modification, is the unique, most recent phase of Darwinian evolution undertaken by humans.
The emergence of sedentary life and agriculture in Anatolia and the Levant after Gobekli Tepe resulted in unprecedented population growth. Nevali Cori in Eastern Turkey on the Euphrates erected a cult complex on hillside with monolithic headless pillars built into walls like Gobekli Tepe in the 9th millennium BC. Catalhoyuk, a large later settlement in eastern Turkey, developed around 7500BC and eventually accumulated a population of perhaps 8,000, a number far too large to be sustained by hunting and gathering. At its apogee, this would have been about one percent of the entire planet’s human population. Catalhoyuk was a collection of cellular houses, each with two rooms, one of which always held a household shrine. Fustel de Coulanges’ interpretation of the ancient city as an agglomeration of families, each with its own ancestor cult, may extend far earlier than anyone suspected. A set of tenth and ninth millennia sites are clustered in Anatolia and the Levant, of which Catalhoyuk is the largest. Remarkably, in these Neolithic sites of the Levant, there seems to have been a “trade” in scarce goods, particularly in obsidian a volcanic glass that takes a keen edge, but was only available from Anatolia. An increase in population, sedentary life, and occasional trade would have enabled a greater division of labor, which would increase the skills of specialists and made possible the next movements in these advanced Neolithic cultures: agriculture, the domestication of animals and the invention of pottery.
The most important recent cumulative development in human self knowledge is the handshake between archaeology and history, allowing some human actions previously regarded a prehistoric, like monument building of 10,000BC and cave paintings of 40,000BC or even petroglyphs of 100,000BC to be brought within a world history, without going back to the beginnings of the universe (which is a wonderful story, but it has been done before). This extended time frame reveals that the ancient cluster of great river valley civilizations in the Old World, once believed to be the sources of civilization, inherited the cultural achievements of far earlier peoples. Samuel Noah Kramer was wrong; history doesnotbegin at Sumer.[23]Mesopotamia and the Nile and eventually the Indus civilizations amplified and extended cultural legacies, both conceptual and practical, that were invented millennia earlier. Religion, architecture, sculpture, agriculture, trade, the domestication of animals, social hierarchy and the invention of pottery all preceded the emergence of the great river valley civilizations around 3,000 BC. 🔗
The most important recent cumulative development in human self knowledge is the handshake between archaeology and history, allowing some human actions previously regarded a prehistoric, like monument building of 10,000BC and cave paintings of 40,000BC or even petroglyphs of 100,000BC to be brought within a world history, without going back to the beginnings of the universe (which is a wonderful story, but it has been done before). This extended time frame reveals that the ancient cluster of great river valley civilizations in the Old World, once believed to be the sources of civilization, inherited the cultural achievements of far earlier peoples. Samuel Noah Kramer was wrong; history doesnotbegin at Sumer.[23]Mesopotamia and the Nile and eventually the Indus civilizations amplified and extended cultural legacies, both conceptual and practical, that were invented millennia earlier. Religion, architecture, sculpture, agriculture, trade, the domestication of animals, social hierarchy and the invention of pottery all preceded the emergence of the great river valley civilizations around 3,000 BC.