Article - Laura Knight-Jadczyk
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Article - Laura Knight-Jadczyk
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Chapter 26 About 35,000 years ago, at the same time that homo sapiens sapiens was supposed to have appeared on the stage of history, simultaneous with the mysterious disappearance of Neandertal man, there appeared an explosion of representational art. It is as if the birth of culture occurred from the primal continuum of the Paleolithic mind. Prominent among these first and most artistic creations are diverse representations of the creatrix goddess of fertility, complemented by sculpures and wall paintings of animals and the hunt of a more shamanic content. The consistency and the careful beauty of these figurines is consistent with the worship of the female as generator of the continued line of living existence. The explanation for this event is that while primitive men were wandering hunters who had to remain silent in the shamanic meditation of the hunt, the women were collecting and recognising a wide variety of plants, talking more and socializing, forming the foundation skills that underpinned the birth of civilization. The myths of diverse tribal cultures hint at a previous era when women were the founding influence in this way. The "venuses" of Dolni Vestonice, Willendorff, Lespugue, and Laussel date from inter-Gravitean Solutrean 20,000-18,000 B.C. Over and over again we read in scientific studies that Cro-Magnon man was just an "anatomically modern human." The experts will say: "The Cro-Magnons lived in Europe between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. They are virtually identical to modern man, being tall and muscular and slightly more robust than most modern humans." Notice how they slip in that "slightly more robust" bit. The fact is, the Cro-Magnon man was, compared to the other "anatomically modern humans" around him, practically a superman. They were skilled hunters, toolmakers and artists famous for the cave art at places such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. They had a high cranium, a broad and upright face, and cranial capacity "about the same as modern humans" (can we say larger?), but less than that of Neanderthals. The males were as tall as 6 feet. They appeared in Europe in the upper Pleistocene, about 40,000 years ago and "their geographic origin is still unknown." Their skeletal remains show a "few small differences from modern humans." Cro magnon’s tools are described as the Aurignacian technology; characterised by bone and antler tools, such as spear tips (the first) and harpoons. They also used animal traps, and bow and arrow. They invented hafts and handles for their knives, securing their blades with bitumen, a kind of tar, as long ago as 40 thousand years ago. Other improvements included the invention of the atlatl, a large bone or piece of wood with a hooked grove used for adding distance and speed to spears. They also invented more sophisticated spear points, such as those that detach after striking and cause greater damage to prey.[Eric Whitaker, Steve Stewart; Article Reviews; Late Ice Age Hunting Technology (Heidi Knecht) Scientific American, July 1994] The Cro-Magnon type man was also the "originator" of such abstract concepts as "time." They marked time by lunar phases, recording them with marks on a piece of bone, antler or stone. Some of these “calendars” contained a record of as many as 24 lunations. [Marshack, Alexander, 1991; The Roots Of Civilization - Moyer Bell Limited, Mt Kisco, New York.] Cro Magnon people lived in tents and other man-made shelters in groups of several families. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers, had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials. This indicates a culture of partnership, not domination of one sex or class over another. They included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and burial. Symbolic representation by personal adornment in burial becomes more common. [Erin Schirtzinger, December 6, 1994; The Evidence for Pleistocene Burials, Neandertals versus Modern Humans] They were the first confirmed to have domesticated animals, starting by about 15 thousand years ago (though ancient sapiens may have domesticated the dog as much as 200 thousand years ago). They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women. Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated. Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorised as hunting, fertility or other types of sypathetic magic. Re-evaluations have put these great works of art in a more prominent place in art history. They show evidence of motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of “impressionist”like style, perspective, and innovative use of the natural relief in the caves. Also possible, considering the new concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro magnon, are abstract representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer. [Reeser, Ken, 1994; "Earliest Art: Representative Art In The Upper Paleolithic Era" (after: Marshack, 1991; Grand, 1967; Ucko, Peter J., and Rosenfeld, Andre, 1967; Brown, G. Baldwin, 1932; Breuil, Abbe H., date unknown) (unpublished)] Aside from pregnant women and other goddess worship iconography, [Stone, Merlin © 1976 When God Was A Woman - Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, New York, London] representations of people, “anthropomorphs,” are very few, and never show the accuracy or detail of the other animals. Humans are represented in simple outlines without features, sometimes with “masks”, often without regard to proportion, distorted and isolated. At Grottes des Enfants, France are found four burials with red ocher, and associated with Aurignacian tools. At Lascaux, France, are the famous caves of upper Paleolithic cave art, dated to 17 thousand years ago, and even older, in some cases, by many thousands of years! The modern human types that appeared in the Levant were, however, somewhat different from Cro-Magnon. They were the sub-saharan type, less "robust" individuals than the Cro-Magnon "superman" of Europe. The truth of the matter is simply that the modern humans of the Levant were "different" from the Cro-Magnon types that "appeared" in Europe. Try as they will, scientists have been unable to prove that Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa or the Levant and then moved to Europe. What seems to have happened in Europe was that after millennia of almost no progress at all, even in areas where modern man has been found, suddenly human culture seems to take off like an explosion. Not only does culture explode, new ways of doing things, new styles and innovations that were utterly unknown in the period immediately preceding them, suddely appear, only to disappear again like an outdated fad. From Spain to the Urals, sites list the developments of sewing needles, barbed projectiles, fishhooks, ropes, meat drying racks, temperature controlled hearths, complex dwellings - all in conjunction with the presence of Cro-magnon man. The most amazing part of all of it is the art. Art suddenly springs onto the landscape, fully formed, with no period of gradual ddevelopment; no signs of Egyptian awkwardness or Mesopotamian childish attempts preceding it. A piece of ivory carved 32,000 years ago is as realistic as anything turned out by the most accomplished carver of the present day. The only explanation for this tremendous change is that a new kind of human appeared on the earth stage. But, is it really that simple? When we consider the difficulties of such an event, in terms of "evolution," we find that it is not simple at all. First of all, we still have the problem of a 60,000 year time lag between the appearance of the sub-saharan modern-type man. The most effective and popular way that science deals with this crisis is to ignore it, to deny it, or to seek to twist the facts to fit the theory. Many archaeologists continue to account for the cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human being from Africa. They propose a "second biological event" to explain this, never mind that it left no tracks in any skeletal shape. Nowadays, the idea is to suggest that the other "modern men" of sub-saharan Africa were not really fully modern. They were "near-modern." Thus, Africa is preserved as the origin of all mankind, and the only thing necessary was a breakthrough in the African lineage; a "neurological event" that allowed this "new man" to develop all these new cultural behaviors overnight, so to say. What this amounts to is saying that the explosion of culture in the Upper Paleolithic times did not happen earlier because other modern men didn't have the brains to make it happen. Unfortunately, the support for this idea amounts only to circular logic. What's more, it seems that if it were a "neurological event," it would start in a small place and spread outward. But what seems to have happened is that it sort of exploded in a lot of places at once: from Spain to the Ural mountains in Russia! And in fact, the Middle East is the LAST place where art appears. The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans, and they are dated to around 43,000 years ago. Three thousand years later, the Aurignacian craze is all over Europe.
And we ought to note that the Neandertals did not have art. What's more, there was essentially no change in their stone tools for 100,000 years!
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