Tag: paleoarcheology

Posted on

How many times did humanity forget how to write?

Writing was invented independently on at least four different occasions according to historians – in Sumeria, ancient Egypt, China and Central America.

So it would not come as a surprise to discover that it had also been invented elsewhere beforehand and died out as a lost technology. After all, we still cannot replicate the techniques which made Samurai swords or Roman concrete. And other technologies like glass-blowing, central heating and seismography are attested to have been invented, lost and then rediscovered.

I think the Vinča symbols from ancient Serbia (which predate Sumerian cuneiform writing by millennia) are almost definitely an example of writing being invented then forgotten, for example.

This process may actually have occurred repeatedly before writing stuck, as it were, when the Mesopotamians discovered it five thousand years ago and shared the technology with their neighbours. What’s really interesting is when this process began.

Latest research suggests maybe up to 40,000 years ago. At least, there are artifacts covered in symbols dating to that period which have been discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, in the South of Germany.

Scientists are currently reluctant to describe this as even a proto- or rudimentary form of writing, but instead are calling it symbolic external information storage. Which to me seems like a cautious way to describe writing. They’ve also insisted that they’re not trying to decipher the symbols. But you can bet your ass they are attempting exactly that.

Human history often seems like a very recent and rushed occurrence, and it is when viewed through the scale of the history of the planet (billions of years) or even that of complex life on the planet (many hundreds of millions of years.)

But it’s actually quite long and the perception that for most of it, people who were cognitively and physically similar if not identical to us spent their time sniveling in caves or chasing deer and berries is probably a serious underestimation of their abilities to conceptualise and to communicate.

Homo Sapiens as a species (never mind the other sentient hominids which preceded us) is perhaps 300,000 years old. Increasingly we’re beginning to realise that most of ‘prehistory’ (as it was formerly dismissed) actually contained thinking people who thought stuff and achieved things.

Many of those things are now lost to us of course. And some of those things may have included technologies and behaviours now considered inherent to the human experience, like music, ritual and yes, writing.

The tiny numbers and thin densities of populations predicated against some of these technologies and behaviours being sustained sometimes. That’s inevitable. As mentioned above, a number of technologies and behaviours have been repeatedly invented, as it were.

I predict quite confidently that the coming years will bring further archeological discoveries which will start to reinforce the idea that human history didn’t suddenly begin when the Mesopotamians decided to start writing down their grain quotas, but in fact stretches much further back than we might previously have considered.

Posted on

Whose civilisation is it, really?

I carry Neanderthal DNA in my body. I am one of the modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, who are descended from hybrid cross-hominid fertilisation that likely occurred somewhen during the overlap of populations in paelolithic Europe.

Of course, that side of the family died out a long time ago, leaving my sapiens ancestors to colonise Europe and indeed everywhere else on the planet.

Neanderthal DNA Can Affect Skin Tone And Hair Color : Shots - Health News : NPR

I often wonder what we lost when we lost our hominid relatives – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like Homo Floriensis and so on. What might a world of multiple hominid species be like? How might we have accommodated our stronger, carnivorous and less gracile Neanderthal population? What might our tiny cousin with grapefruit-sized heads, the Floriensis hobbits, have contributed to our world?

Anyhow, the more I ponder the roads not taken, the less impressed I have become with our own boastful claims and achievements. Not simply because human achievement increasingly has come at the expense of all other species (initially the large mammals, then our fellow hominids, and now basically everything else). But also because even those achievements, it seems to me, may not really be ours to claim.

Air flight, modern medicine, computers? For sure. We made those. But let’s go back upstream to the origins of civilisation to see whose civilisation is it really?

Neanderthals used fire. Indeed, probably homo erectus, the ur-granddaddy of hominids used fire. Fire is a major issue. No other animal uses it. Most run terrified from it. But hominids tamed it, and found ways to use it for cooking and heat. If there’s one development which most explains why hairless apes like us and not, say, the gorillas or big cats rule this world, it is probably the taming of fire.

Neanderthals also buried their dead. This is a sobering thought really. In some senses so do elephants, and other species also demonstrate evidence of mourning, loss and grief. We may feel that grief is one of the things which makes us human, but it’s not an exclusively human sentiment. Even taking it to the point of ritual behaviour – burial – is not exclusive to us.

But what of the other foundational components of human culture and society? What about clothing, art, science, religion?

Well, Neanderthals made jewellery from seashells and animal teeth. Neanderthals created artwork on cave walls. Neanderthals invented musical instruments, specifically bone flutes. We can presume they knew how to beat on drums or rocks rhythmically too. After all, they also had hand axes, which would have been made and used with such rhythmical hitting. Neanderthals built stone shrines, and where there are shrines, it is highly likely that ritualistic behaviour took place.

Neanderthals used lissoirs, and hence invented hide preparation, and hence clothing. They invented glue and string and throwing spears which they used to hunt large game. These hunts required collective action and collaboration. Recent evidence suggests that Neanderthals may even have learnt to count and actually recorded their counting by notching scratches on bones.

So perhaps this isn’t OUR civilisation at all, when you think about it. Perhaps we are thieves living in someone else’s house, whom we murdered, looking at their achievements and claiming them as our own.