Blog

Languages

What Language Did Prehistoric Europeans Speak?

Brian

People sometimes wonder what language would have been spoken during the Bronze Age, or the Neolithic, or even the Ice Ages in Europe.  Linguists can provide some interesting ideas about this question.  To begin with, languages are usually grouped into “families” with more or less similar words, grammars, and sounds.  Beyond linguistic families, it is much more difficult to determine relationships.

In Europe, the dominant language family during historic times has been Indo-European which includes almost all the languages spoken there today including all the Slavic, Celtic, Romance, and Germanic languages.  Linguists are relatively certain that these are the same languages that were spoken in the Iron Age and Bronze Age, about in the same regions they are spoken today.  Most archaeologists think that the Indo-European languages were introduced into Europe together with bronze technology at the beginning of the Bronze Age (c. 2000 BCE–varying depending on location) by warrior bands that invaded Europe and originated from the Ukrainian region.  Other archaeologists think that Indo-European languages arrived much earlier as part of the Neolithic colonization of Europe (c. 7000 BCE) together with domesticated plants and animals and pottery.   What language was actually spoken in Neolithic times is problematic.  It is clear that Neolithic people came to Europe from the Near East, bringing with them plants and animals native to the Near East such as wheat, barley, sheep, and goats.  Presumably they also spoke languages that were members of linguistic families that are still represented in the Near East.

As for the later (Upper) part of the Paleolithic, before the Neolithic, it seems safe to say that the hunter/gatherers of that time spoke non-Indo-European languages.  There are several possible candidates for the types of languages spoken at the end of the Paleolithic (c. 35,000-12,000 BCE).  These consist of pockets of non-Indo-European languages that are still spoken in Europe including:

1/ Basque, spoken around the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France and northern Spain;

2/  Saami, spoken by reindeer herders in northern Scandinavia, together with Finnnish and Estonian;

3/ Etruscan formerly spoken in the Northwest of Italy, but now extinct;

4/  Hungarian, established when the Magyars from Siberia, speaking a Finno-Ugric language, took over the Hungarian basin c. 900 CE.

Etruscan can’t be evaluated very well because not enough was recorded about it before it became extinct with the Roman conquest.  Hungarian is too recent an introduction to be relevant to Ice Age languages.  That leaves Basque and Saami, both of which are found in what can be considered marginal refugia for populations displaced by incoming agriculturalists or Indo-Europeans.

Saami:  It has been suggested that the Saami may have been the original reindeer hunters in the southwestern heart of Upper Paleolithic Europe, when glaciers occupied most of Scandinavia and Scotland.  As the glaciers melted, the grasslands (which supported large herds of reindeer and other herbivores) moved farther north and were replaced in southwestern Europe by forests that did not support many herbivores.  In this scenario, the reindeer hunters of the Ice Age simply followed the reindeer herds as they gradually moved farther and farther north and became the Saami reindeer hunters of today in Finland and northern Sweden and Norway.  The Saami language is part of the very large language family called “Finno-Ugric” that extends all the way to Mongolia, so that the Saami may have actually originated in the Far East and displaced any original Upper Paleolithic reindeer hunters in northern Scandinavia sometime over the last 12,000 years.

Basque:  The Basque region is close to the southwestern European Upper Paleolithic heartland.  In the Basque scenario, when Neolithic groups arrived and took over fertile lands for their crops and animals, the original Upper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers took refuge in the Pyrenees Mountains which were far less suitable for agriculture.  While we can’t be certain that Basque was really a descendant from Upper Paleolithic languages (and that it wasn’t a language brought in by Neolithic groups–which seems unlikely given the light skin and eye color of Basques in contrast to the darker skin and eye color of groups from the Near East), Basque is probably the best candidate that we know of for being derived from Upper Paleolithic populations in Southwestern Europe.

In order to make the story in The Eyes of the Leopard as realistic as possible, I decided to use Basque names for many of the main characters.  Thus, for example, in Basque:

Bakar means ‘alone;’

Benat means ‘brave as a bear;’

Edur means ‘snow;’

Ekain means ‘summer;’

Izar means ‘star;’

Lorea means ‘flower;

Urtzi means ‘sky;’

and Osane means ‘remedy.’

I hope this will help add yet more realism to your reading of The Eyes of the Leopard.

 

Food, Uncategorized

Prehistoric Soup

Brian
A split longbone showing the marrow from the central cavity and the spongy-looking cancellous bone at the end of the longbone.

Soup may seem like a fairly uninteresting or pedestrian food to many people, but before there was pottery or domesticated animals, soup was a luxury food for many hunter/gatherers.  In order to understand its status as a prehistoric luxury food there are several key bits of information that need to be provided.

First, in temperate, subarctic, arctic, and even in places like the Australian Western Desert where temperatures can go below freezing some nights, staying warm is a major challenge and can be essential for survival.  Fires provide limited help in this regard because gathering enough wood to keep an entire family warm all night (and day) demands a lot of time and work as well as someone to watch and stoke the fire periodically.  What most people did most of the time is rely on body heat (together with heat retaining clothing) to provide most of the warmth needed, either from vigorous activities or by consuming a lot of calorie rich foods.

Second, the only types of foods that provide people with significant calories are starches (including sugars) and lipids–basically oils, greases, and fats.  Unfortunately, for most hunters and gatherers, meat or protein is not what is in short supply in the wild environments, it is starches and lipids.   Even the digestion of meat requires lipids to metabolize the proteins in meats.  Eating very lean meat without any fat leads to what is sometimes referred to as “rabbit starvation”–rabbit because wild rabbits were so lean.  A person could eat pounds of lipid-less meat every day and still starve.  Even today, people who want to lose a lot of their body fat go on protein rich-no fat diets so that the metabolizing of meat proteins will burn off the available body fat.

Unfortunately for hunter/gatherers, most wild animals usually have very low amounts of body fat, often 5% or less.  Compare this to domesticated animals like the meat bought in stores today where there is typically 25-30% or more fat content.  In fact, the first thing that hunters typically do after killing an animal is to cut open the intestinal cavity to see how much fat is in the animal.  If there is not enough fat, the animal is often left for other scavengers.  The essential need for lipids is why fats and oils are so highly prized in most hunting and gathering societies, and even in many traditional agricultural societies that rely to a significant degree on body heat to maintain adequate and comfortable body temperatures.  Think about the desire for fat-tailed sheep.  Natural selection has also given people having natural tastes for lipids better survival chances, so that these tastes have become part of our genetic propensities and lead to our overconsumption of “rich” or fried food whenever it is available.

A third bit of information to note is that animal fats and oils are primarily produced inside bones.  Most people today don’t often break up bones to see what is inside, so the spongy-looking “cancellous” bone at the ends of the long bones may be a novel thing for many, but that is where most of the fats are produced.  The fats are then concentrated as marrow in the central parts of the long bones; and marrow was one of the prized delicacies of hunter/gatherers–rich gobs of fat that are easy to get at.  There was also a lot of fat in the cancellous bone material, but the problem was how to get it out.  Some Neandertals seem to have smashed up the ends of the long bones into a paste that could be sucked on or eaten–and even today, some people like to chew on the cancellous ends of chicken long bones.  An even better strategy for extracting fats from cancellous bone was adopted by anatomically modern people in the Upper Paleolithic who broke up the cancellous bone into small bits and then boiled the bone to release the fats and make soup!  A similar technique was later used to extract oils from fish heads and hard-to-get-at nut meats by boiling them up into soups.

A fourth thing that we need to recognize is that boiling anything before there was pottery was not an easy affair.  It required leak-proof containers like pitch-sealed bark buckets, carved wood or stone bowls, or very tightly woven baskets.  It also required making long tongs for removing hot rocks from fires, procuring wood for fires and finding types of rocks that would not shatter in fires.  The fires had to be kept hot enough for long enough to heat up the rocks to glowing which could then be placed in the water-filled containers to make the water boil.  And voilà!  Soup!–a very rich soup.

Because this process required special containers and materials, it was time and effort-consuming, probably only used for special occasions or when in dire need.  Because of the efforts involved and the high value placed on lipids, soups were greatly relished.  This is why soups are key features in the story of The Eyes of the Leopard which is set in the Upper Paleolithic, 20,000 years ago.  If you have the opportunity to read this story, I would encourage you to take a look at the contexts where soups were consumed.  It is also interesting to see how soups continued to be important in later feasting cuisines like the relished soups for the ancestors celebrated in the Shang dynasty poems of China.

 

 

Burials

Burials in Prehistory and What They Tell About Societies of the Past

Brian

Burials provide fascinating insights into past cultures for archaeologists. While we might assume on the basis of our own experiences that everyone always buried their dead, this is not so! Burials varied remarkably over time, from culture to culture, and according to status. In fact, burial of any kind is a relatively recent phenomenon with only a handful of rare individuals being buried in Neanderthal times (32,000-150,000 years ago) and none before that time. For the entire Upper Paleolithic (32,000-10,000 years ago), there are only about 200 burials known. This is a paltry number considering the millions of people that lived in Eurasia over 20,000 years ago. Why were there so few burials and what determined who was buried?

Before venturing into this issue, it is important to point out that there are major differences of interpretations by archaeologists as to the nature of Upper Paleolithic society. Some maintain that all societies of the Upper Paleolithic were egalitarian, while others (myself included) argue that there were important social and economic inequalities at least in some resource-rich areas. Burials provide some of the most important evidence in these arguments.

The mere fact that few people were buried in the Upper Paleolithic indicates that only people or families with special status were buried. Perhaps they were powerful leaders or at least were being promoted by rich kinship groups as their powerful ancestors. But many of the burials were of children, which makes such explanations unlikely.

A more likely explanation is based on ethnographic observations such as those from the Northwest Coast of North America where slaves were not buried; their bodies were simply thrown on refuse heaps or into the ocean. It was the elites who were buried or given other special treatments by placing bodies in special boxes or caves.

In addition, in the Upper Paleolithic a number of people were buried with richly ornamented clothing. The most notable example was at Sungir in the Ukraine where an adult male and two adolescent children were buried with over 10,000 ivory beads altogether (apparently sewn onto clothing), plus ivory spears, ivory disks, and ivory bracelets. All of this represented well over 9,000 hours of labor to make. This demonstrates an extraordinary control over labor since the children certainly could not have produced these beads themselves, and the adult doubtfully could have either. There are few clearer examples of inequality in the Paleolithic record. But this is not the only example.

The burials from Sungir of an adult (above) and two children (below) covered with ivory beads. (from O. Bader. 1964. "Oldest burial." Illustrated London News 254:731.
The burials from Sungir of an adult (above) and two children (below) covered with ivory beads. (from O. Bader. 1964. “Oldest burial.” Illustrated London News 254:731.

At La Madeleine, a child was almost covered with over 1,000 Dentalium shells that had to have been brought from the coast, hundreds of kilometers away. Dentalium shells are tusk shaped, only 2-3 centimeters in length, and live several meters beneath the sea so that they were difficult to obtain and were therefore valuable. On the Northwest Coast, they were used as money, and their rate of exchange (at distances from the sea comparable to that of La Madeleine) was one and a half dried salmon per shell. So, the boy at La Madeleine was buried with an equivalent worth of about 1,500 dried salmon–a very substantial amount.

Other child burials with copious numbers of shells occurred at the Grotte des Enfants and Arene Candide. Such wealth buried with children is certainly an indication of inequalities in the Upper Paleolithic in my view. This is one of the reasons why I portrayed some Ice Age families as being rich and others poor, some powerful and others subservient, in my adventure story for young adults: The Eyes of the Leopard which takes place in France, 20,000 years ago.

Burials provide fascinating clues about the nature of past and present societies. It is really only with the Mesolithic and Neolithic (in the last 10,000 years) that burials become more common, and really only with more complex societies that burials became almost universal. You might ask yourself why. Was it due to an increase in intelligence? A change in beliefs or cultural traditions? Or changes in the social and economic importance of kinship groups or individuals, or other factors? These are questions that many archaeologists wrestle with.

Marriage

Prehistoric Marriage: What was it like?

Brian

Marriage in the standard North American style (a monogamous union based on love) is often taken as the normal and right way for a man and a woman to live together and have children. However, in the panoply of cultures throughout the world, this is a relatively unusual type of marriage. Anthropologists try to identify patterns of marriages and understand why different forms of marriage occur. These patterns are the basis for archaeologists’ interpretations of what marriage was like prehistorically. Anthropologists also try to understand why Industrial societies tend to have the kind of marriage system that we have, sometimes referred to as romantic marriage.

Probably the most common characteristics of marriages in Pre-industrial societies are that they are based on the economic and survival needs of parents. Therefore, they are arranged by the parents, and the more wealth or power a man has the more wives he can have.

Among generalized hunter/gatherers, the major imperative is survival, especially in times of starvation or conflict. One strategy for dealing with droughts, floods, or conflicts, was to leave the afflicted area for a place where conditions were better. But all the surrounding areas were usually occupied by other groups who generally regarded strangers as enemies. Having a son or daughter married into those communities gave families the connexions needed to be welcomed in times of need (or allies in times of conflict). It was the parents who therefore arranged marriages for their children at young ages. In more complex hunting and gathering societies, control over, and access to, productive food resources was the key to wealth–whether fishing sites, trap lines, drive lines, or prime patches of root foods. A corollary of arranging marriages for these purposes was that the more marriage partners that could be acquired, the more resources could be accessed (or the more places of refuge could be visited when needed). Thus, those men who could do so, sought to obtain additional wives–up to a maximum of about 10 wives in Australia as well as on the Northwest Coast of North America.

Access to more resources or wealth was frequently engineered by marrying children into families holding rights to those resources, again with the parents arranging to marry their children at young ages at for high prices! A form of this marriage logic continued through the ages, even into Industrial times (and perhaps today) in which elite parents sought to arrange marriages for their children that would be most beneficial economically and politically for the parents and their estates.

Thus, for the vast majority of human history and in the vast majority of human cultures, marriage was not generally based on love. It was based on survival and economic concerns of the parents. Even among the poorer groups, as Emile Petitot commented about the Dené in 19th century northwest Canada:
“They never consider beauty in getting married…She should be submissive, ready to work hard and laboriously, fecund, round-cheeked, and in good health; everything else is of little importance. A boy and a girl, however ugly they may be, will always find a mate if they are capable of working and of nourishing a family.”

In order to make my adventure story of a boy in the Ice Age as realistic as possible, I have incorporated these Pre-industrial aspects of marriage in the book, The Eyes of the Leopard. If you are interested in these and other details of societies 20,000 years ago, please check this book out!

Counting

The Prehistoric Origins of Counting

Brian

It may come as a surprise to people who have grown up with numbers that pervade all aspects of their lives to find out that most generalized hunter/gatherers did not count beyond the number of fingers on one or both hands. Very rarely, they had numbers up to 20, and this seemingly was the status quo for the first 2 million years of human existence. Was human intelligence so low during this time that people couldn’t conceive of more numbers? No. Many modern hunter/gatherers with normal intelligence had very simple number systems, less than 10.

The major explanation to account for simple versus elaborate number systems is need and cost. General hunter/gatherers simply did not have a need for developing elaborate number systems. Most communities consisted of 25-50 individuals where everyone knew each other by name and where possessions consisted of few items–basically what a person could easily carry over long distances. It has always been important, for people as well as animals, to distinguish between one, two, and three individual objects. One’s life may depend on whether it is 1 or 2 lions that are attacking, whereas beyond 3 or 4, all that is important is that there are a lot. These are termed “subitized” numbers. Being able to distinguish 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 or 4 objects seems to be genetically hard-wired in our brains and in the brains of many other animals. We are born with the ability to make these distinctions, and from very early on, babies make these distinctions. Some linguists even suggest that this represents a natural “‘logarithmic” view of the world.

the Taï plaquette from France, only 8 cm. long, with over 1,000 counting marks on it. It is from the end of the Ice Age, c. 10,000 years ago.
The Taï plaquette from France, only 8 cm. long, with over 1,000 counting marks on it. It is from the end of the Ice Age, c. 10,000 years ago.

All counting beyond the subitized numbers has to be learned, and this means spending time and effort teaching children (or adults) to count and remember numbers. Think back at the time, effort, rhymes, songs, and books that were used to teach you numbers in school and at home. These are the “costs” of maintaining elaborate number systems. If you seldom if ever need to use numbers greater than 10, why would you go to the effort of inventing and maintaining systems to do so? Even if there was a genius in the group who invented numbers up to 100 or more, there is little doubt that he could ever convince others to adopt his or her system or to pass it on to their children. Generalized hunter/gatherers simply had no need for such numbers, but complex hunter/gatherers certainly did.

In particular, keeping track of the amount of stored food needed for the winter (how many dried salmon or strips of jerked meat were needed per person for the winter?), and keeping track of the contributions that were made to their feasts and which had to be paid back (with interest), demanded some kind of counting and record keeping systems, typically reaching into the hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions. At major potlatches on the Northwest Coast, thousands of blankets were given away and needed to be repaid at future potlatches. In California, beads representing wealth were counted by strands of 10,000.

When do we see more elaborate number and counting systems begin to appear prehistorically? Precisely at the time that complex hunter/gatherers develop, that is with a number of Upper Paleolithic groups in Europe. The Taï Plaquette is probably the most dramatic artifact from this period with over 1,000 marks on a small scrap of bone that most prehistorians accept as some kind of record keeping, or tally. However, there are many other artifacts, often made on scrap pieces of bone, with notches or engraved lines that are viewed as some kind of record keeping. Alexander Marshack, Francesco d’Errico, and Lee Overmann have done the most research in this area.

In my portrayal for young readers of life in the Ice Ages (The Eyes of the Leopard), most readers probably will not recognize the importance of Sev’s description of bats in a cave as numbering in the hundreds or thousands. But this is an important detail emphasizing that the society at this time was a group of complex hunter/gatherers rather than a group of generalized hunter/gatherers.

Animals

Prehistoric Origins and Roles of Dogs

Brian

Dogs are very interesting for archaeologists. They were the first animal to be domesticated, and even predated the domestication of any plants. One of the biggest issues in archaeology is why people began domesticating animals and plants. Without domestication, we would still be living as hunters and gatherers. Civilizations as we know them would not have developed. It is usually assumed by most archaeologists that animals and plants were domesticated because people needed more food due to increasing populations or other factors.

However, there is a major disconnect between this idea and the domestication of dogs since virtually no one has suggested that dogs were domesticated for food. Virtually everyone agrees that dogs were domesticated for social purposes–as pets, or for other social purposes. If the desire to keep pets was the major factor, one wonders why it took over 2 million years to develop the desire for pets. What other factors might be involved? Why did dogs only start becoming domesticated in the last 10,000-30,000 years? What had changed in society?

First of all, it is important to recognized that keeping dogs is and was expensive. As Karen Lupo has shown for hunter/gatherers, dogs need to be fed at least for part if not all of their needs. On the Northwest Coast and in Alaska, dogs were typically fed about 1 kilogram of fish per day. This meant that a family maintaining just one dog had to produce an extra 365 kg. of fish (or meat) per year. This was a high cost for simply maintaining a pet that few poor families could afford. Only rich families that produced surpluses could therefore afford to keep dogs whether for work, defense, or simply pleasure and prestige.

Secondly, there is considerable ethnographic information that complex hunter/gatherers kept a wide range of animals as prestige displays, including eagles, hawks, crows, turkeys, marmots, racoons, coyotes, deer, moose, bison, and even bears, not to mention wolves which were later bred to make dogs. Part of the role of dogs may have also been to protect their owners from attacks or theft. But the prestige role of dogs has continued until the present for the rich, with special breeds costing very large amounts of money as well as their veterinary maintenance of good health. Even the Roman elites paid large sums of money to Celtic tribes for special breeds of dogs. I am suggesting that this role of dogs has not changed from the beginning. In fact, I have argued that all animals were originally domesticated for social purposes that typify complex hunter/gatherers. These purposes include the use of animals like sheep, pigs, and cattle raised and used for feasts (involving debts), marriages, lavish funerals, and political alliances. Domestic animals in tribal societies today are raised with surplus plant foods with the intention of using them as kinds of investments, much like people use surplus income to invest in the stock market (originally the market for “stock” i.e., cattle).

A skull of a domestic dog
A skull of a domestic dog.

Thirdly, early dogs first appear among complex hunter/gatherers like the Natufians of the Near East and the Upper Paleolithic groups of Eurasia. The earliest evidence of dogs comes from work by Meitje Germonpré on Eurasian dogs 32,000 years ago. The skulls of these dogs can be distinguished from wild wolves due to the shortening and broadening of the snout, a broader braincase, and overall smaller size of the skull. Complex hunter/gatherers provide the ideal context for domesticating dogs because for the first time in the evolution of humans and their cultures, there are regular surpluses of food, feasting involving debts, the accumulation of wealth, competition between individuals or groups for wealth and power, socioeconomic inequalities, and needs to display success or prestige. Dogs were certainly pets, but they were also so much more. They are mentioned specifically in my young reader story of life in the Ice Age (The Eyes of the Leopard) together with the keeping of ferrets as a key feature of the complex hunting and gathering societies that I think existed at that time.

Gambling, hunter-gatherers

Gambling in the Stone Age

Brian

Games seem to have been a part of hunting and gathering lives for a very long time. Most games among generalized (or simple) hunter/gatherers are non-competitive as might be expected in egalitarian societies where most things are shared and individual ambitions are derided if not proscribed. However, as shown in James Woodburn’s film, The Hadza, even among egalitarian groups in East Africa, gambling was adopted and tolerated as long as the stakes were relatively inconsequential–at most, a few arrows or other implements that could be easily replaced. As such games, and perhaps simple forms of gambling seem to have a fairly long history.

The situation changed, as you might guess from previous discussions, when complex hunter/gatherers appeared, beginning in Europe about 32,000-10,000 years ago. With them, individual property became established together with substantial individual or family wealth, and economically based competition (for instance, in feasts, marriages, and funerals). Given these conditions, gambling proliferated among complex hunter/gatherers and took on an entirely different allure.

People not only wagered large amounts of wealth, but gambling success became associated with individual spirit power–the power to guess or determine outcomes. Individual reputations and support bases were being determined by successes or failures in gambling. Along the Northwest Coast and in the Northwest Interior of North America, the standard gambling game was “lahal.” It was a bit like a shell game with one marked bone in a set of three, and the goal was to guess which hand of an opponent held the marked bone. Individuals’ supernatural helpers were called upon to assist in determining the correct guess. Stakes could involve literal life changes. People could go into deep debt from a losing streak, to the point where they sometimes lost all their wealth, their children, their wives, and even their own freedom–becoming indebted servants or slaves.

Because of its importance in most complex hunting/gathering societies, gambling is a central feature in the relationships between the boys portrayed in my adventure book about life in the Stone Age: The Eyes of the Leopard.

Evolution, Music

The Origins of Music

Brian

When did music begin and what role did it play in human evolution? Interesting questions since every culture in the world has some form of music, and thus it seems to be in our genes. It seems to have played a key role in our adaptations as a species. Our most fundamental adaptation is social. We are a social species. We use social relationships for protection, to help access resources, to get things when needed, and for support if we get sick or have other misfortunes. Being social is what has made people so successful in the natural world. Music is just one of many sub-adaptations that have helped forge strong social bonds. These adaptations include: kinship, language, rituals (including art representing spirit entities), group dancing and singing, group rhythms, smiling and laughing, gift-giving, and sharing. I was espousing these views as early as 1987 in an article and in my 1992 book: Archaeology: The Science of Once and Future Things, but they have been more recently become much more popular. In fact, our increased brain size is now accepted as the result of increased needs for social networking rather than technological needs. Steven Mithen even argued that singing preceded language and formed the basis for language.

Wooden whistles used by the Bella Coola First Nations for secret society performances.
Source: T. McIlwraith. 1948. The Bella Coola Indians. University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

So, we can infer that basic singing and rhythmic types of music have very deep roots in human evolution, perhaps emerging 100,000, or even a million or more, years ago. From my experiences in Australia, and as exemplified in films on the Bushmen of South Africa, basic music does not leave any trace in the archaeological record. The voices produce the tones; sticks, stones, stamping feet, or clapping hands produce the rhythms. These don’t leave recognizable archaeological traces.

Bone flutes used by historic complex hunter/gatherers for secret society performances in California.
Source: A. L. Kroeber. 1925. The Handbook of California Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology: Washington, D.C.

However, later in the Paleolithic, when more complex hunter/gatherer societies begin to appear around 32,000-10,000 years ago in Europe, more sophisticated instruments are found. These include whistles and flutes, beaters for hide covered drums, rattles, and bullroarers. Iaian Morley documented their occurrence in his book, The Prehistory of Music. One of his more interesting findings was that flutes and whistles were found overwhelmingly in cave contexts. These are the same caves where I have suggested that secret societies carried out their rituals and decorated the cave walls with their art. In fact, ethnographic secret societies used precisely these kinds of instruments (whistles and bullroarers) to portray the voices of spirits that they claimed to control (see my volume, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory). What I am proposing is that secret societies had the motivation and means to develop music beyond the simple basics of singing and rhythm. It is for this reason that whistles are part of secret society ritual performances in my adventure novel about the Upper Paleolithic, The Eyes of the Leopard.

Cave Art

Why Did People Make Cave Art in the Paleolithic?

Brian

The Ice Age cave art in Southwestern Europe is one of the great wonders of the world–true world heritage art incredible in its realism and artistic quality. It was first brought to the attention of archaeologists in 1879 when the young Maria Sautuola entered a cave now known as Altamira on her father’s property in northern Spain. No one had ever seen mammoths, rhinoceroses, bison, reindeer, or lions before. These only existed in Europe over 12,000 years earlier during the Ice Ages. At first, people could not believe that these paintings could be so old, but gradually more examples were found and they were accepted as genuine. And so began a long line of attempts to try to understand what motivated people to create this art so long ago (32,000 to 12,000 years ago) and what role it might have played in their societies. Continue reading “Why Did People Make Cave Art in the Paleolithic?” →

hunter/gatherers

All Hunter/Gatherers Are Not the Same!

Brian

Popular concepts of hunter/gatherers, especially prehistoric hunter/gatherers would have us believe that they all lived a meagre hand-to-mouth existence, clad in sketchy skins, living in caves, pulling women around by the hair, and grunting to communicate. That’s a caricature to be sure. Hunter/gatherers are defined as groups that got their food from nature. They did not farm or cultivate foods or raise animals for food. They certainly had hard times on occasion, but most “simple” hunter/gatherers only spent 2-5 hours a day getting and preparing food. They spent the rest of their time sleeping, lounging, socializing, gambling, and preparing rituals. They didn’t have many luxuries, but then, they didn’t have many needs either. Their language and social relations were just as complex as yours, if not more so. They did tend to move their camps around a lot due to the limited food that they could find in any one area. And because the moves were generally on foot, they had to carry everything that they needed with them: clothing, water, food, spears, digging sticks, personal things, stones for tools, babies, fire, and carrying bags. Continue reading “All Hunter/Gatherers Are Not the Same!” →