When did humans think like people?
It's one of the greatest problems in the study of recent human evolution (in terms of the last 150,000 years or so.) There's enough evidence to draw some conclusions about the physical development of bipeds into hominids into homo sapiens, but it's much harder to judge when those creatures actually began to think like modern humans. A thought or an emotion simply doesn't leave physical evidence. Cave paintings and such are useful, because they show that humans were starting to think symbolically, but there are a whole bunch of other human behaviors that we'd love to know about. For example, when did humans start dancing? It sounds like a funny question, but it's not: every human community, no matter how isolated, practices some form of ritual dancing. Perhaps it was drill for war, or perhaps from mating rituals, but other primates do not demonstrate anything close to the universal human habit of dance. Well, this latest evidence doesn't necessarily indicate dance, but it is solid evidence for music, and there's another thing that helps us show earlier human thought processes. The reason I mention this is that there's just been an announcement of the discovery of fragments of a bone flute in Swabia (SW German) that have been dated to 35,000 years ago. That's the oldest evidence we yet have for human music.
A bone flute is certainly evidence of prehistoric music, but when it comes to more abstract things, researchers can let their imagination run wild.
The worst examples are of feminist academics who try to reconstruct ancient religions and social structures on the flimsiest and most ambiguous of evidence. They use something like the little carved “Venuses” of Old Europe, or the megalithic structures of Malta to reconstruct societies in which the “Goddess” was worshipped, and in which everyone lived under a peaceful matriarchy. Later on, according to them, nasty people like the Indo-Europeans or Semites came in, bringing their male gods and patriarchal structures, destroying the native paradises.
The godmother of all this, in spite of her otherwise excellent work, was the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas of UCLA.
Comment by Lentz of Goulburn — June 30, 2009 @ 5:04 am
Interestingly enough, I recently attended a talk by and for "women's studies" people. (Don't ask me what I was doing there!) A member of the audience specifically asked about Gimbutas' "goddess" worship and matriarchy ... and to my surprise the three panelists all expressed skepticism.
Comment by Filthy Stinking No.9 — July 1, 2009 @ 3:48 am