The Ice Ages

All fall I've been reading a book by Brian Fagan entitled, "Cro-Magnon -- How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans."  There's more than a bit of Eurocentrism in that title, as by 45,000 years ago modern humans had spread throughout Asia and possibly into the Americas.   But I don't intend to pick that battle today.

As I'm of Northern European descent according to my DNA, excepting about 3% that's Middle Eastern / Ashkanazi Jewish, I've long felt a sense of psychological roots when confronted with the cave art from prehistorical Europe.  It rings a bell for me somewhere inside.  I've also long wondered where exactly the West went wrong, because it was painfully obvious to me even in my childhood that Western culture was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt, its Christian facade notwithstanding.

So I decided to read about the time period in question, which would be from perhaps 45,000 BCE to about 12-13,000 years ago, the time when the Ice Age finally ended, or at least this interstadial began with a global warming that produced the Holocene, and transitioned European humanity from the paleolithic, through the mesolithic, and finally delivered us to the beginnings of a settled lifestyle in the neolithic.  We can trace our intermittent development through contemporary archeology back to about 8,000 to 10,000 years, but not really much further.  It's only natural to wonder, what came before?

We know that the Neanderthals preceded modern humans in Europe by perhaps 200,000 years.  The first half of the book really dealt with this species, about which I don't hold the same level of interest, partly because they really aren't the forbears of homo sapiens.  Although geneticists tell us that some Neanderthal DNA continues to exist in our populace, I still don't feel the pull to study their history and, in fact, there's very little to study.  Archeology is largely a field of supposition; its claims to knowledge of the past are mostly imagined because, really speaking, who knows what happened or how people lived?  We can only infer based upon our best guesses or  refer to polar cultures that subsist today.

What I gather with respect to the Neanderthals is that their culture changed very little over their 200,000 year occupation of Europe.  By that I mean that the tools they made changed very little, if at all.  They apparently passed on their knowledge but didn't progress measurably.  They must have been adaptable in order to have survived as long as they did, but it doesn't seem evident from their technological stasis.  

People wonder what led to the Neanderthals' demise and this book makes no particular claim on the subject.  However, the entrance of another, more inventive hominid species into their environment no doubt had an effect. There was also a major volcanic eruption in what is present-day Italy about 39,000 years ago that interrupted the development of the Cro-Magnons who had already entered the continent and perhaps hastened the Neanderthal's demise.  They seemed to relocate to sites along the Mediterranean and coastal Spain, and then gradually their population dwindled.  I'm guessing homo sapiens entered their territory and either out-competed them for resources and food, or were aggressive towards them (although there isn't really factual, archeological evidence of such conflict, given the history of people of European descent, it wouldn't surprise me).  It also occurs to me that the evidence of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon "coupling" was probably not always, if ever, consensual.  

Archeologists divide the Ice Age cultures amongst the modern humans who moved into Europe into three or four major groupings, based primarily upon the differences in how they made and shaped their tools.

The first culture is called Aurignacian and they dispersed over the entire continent, at least that portion that was livable.  This culture flourished for about 10,000 years, from about 39,000 to 29,000 years ago.  They were following game migrations or using specific locales which lent themselves to hunting and/or other resources.  Until the spectacular discovery of the splendid art in Chauvet cave in the south of France in December of 1994, it was believed that this culture had little to offer in the way of cave art.  If you've seen the incredible bestiary portrayed in the Chauvet cave, you know that presumption to be false.

A deepening of the Ice Age circa 30,000 bce had two results: the apparent disappearance of the Neanderthals from the fossil record, and the emergence of a new culture of modern humans in Europe.  This culture has been called the Gravettian.  Again, they lasted for about 10,000 years.  There was a brief culture, again identified by their own specific forms of weaponry, called the Soultrean, specifically in northern Spain and southwestern France.  And finally, the last major culture, from about 18,000 years ago until the end of the Ice Age, called the Magdelenians.  The famous cave paintings found at Lascaux are attributed to this culture.

I highlighted much of the text of this book and intend to go back and make notes on those sections.  But my primary take-away from the entire study is simply this:  we -- that is, the culture of northern Europeans -- were once indigenous.

Think of what that means: it means the culture of Europe was not unlike, and perhaps very similar to, the culture that developed in North America until these self-same Europeans came to disrupt it.  If you've looked into the Sami culture in northern Finland, or listened to their musical chants, you'd easily mistake them for a tribe from North America.

Why that interests me is for this reason: we in the West once had the same orientation to the earth, to nature, and to life that indigenous peoples in the Americas had.  Where, why, and when did we lose that?  Because one of the most prominent, and negative, features of our culture is our complete separation from the natural world and our lack of concern for it at all, beyond seeing it simply as a resource to be plundered.

When did we come to see the world from such a distance?  When did we lose our relatedness to other forms of life and to the natural world itself?  My guess is when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to a settled people who had begun domesticating animals and plant-forms for our own purposes.  Somewhere in that process, a few screws came loose -- we lost our spiritual center and became unmoored.  And we've been spiritually and emotionally adrift ever since.  That's what all this means to me.

I want to trace where we went wrong, so that I can trace the way back to that existential center.

And that's what my study has been about this fall.  I'm now looking into the transition from the paleolithic to the mesolithic, in terms of our spiritual beliefs, because something happened there.  We went awry in that transition.  Looking at the Venus figurines of, say, 30,000 years ago, which were ubiquitous across the European continent, it seems apparent that a goddess/Mother Earth form of worship towards life and the cosmos may have prevailed.

When and how did we transition from the divine Feminine mediating spiritual guidance for us, to male warrior sky gods imposing their judgements upon us?  

That's the basic spiritual question I have for the time of our cultural origins.

I have to admit that the subzero weather of this week has put me into a mindset of thinking about all these things.  I've wandered out into the cold just to experience it firsthand, and to remember the world from whence we came.

That's all for now.