Archive for the ‘Deep Prehistory’ Category


A few weeks back, I commented in passing on the devastating attack recently directed by hivemind group Anonymous against internet security firm HBGary.

Despite that stinging humiliation, HBGary planned to go ahead with a presentation it was scheduled to deliver at a major security conference — until the presentation team arrived to find a sign in their booth reading, “Anon . . . In it 4 The Lulz.”

At that point, the team packed up and left, complaining, “They decided to follow us to a public place where we were to do business and make a public mockery of our company.”

Mission accomplished, at least as far as Anonymous was concerned. But I’ve been wondering ever since about that mocking sign and the strangely cryptic word “Lulz.”

For those who are just coming in on the story, Lulz is a noun derived from the exclamation LOL — as in lolcat — which is, in turn, an internet acronym for Laughing Out Loud. If you look it up in online dictionaries, you’ll find doing something “for the lulz” defined at doing it for laughs, often at someone else’s expense.

But although saying “I did it for the lulz” can certainly be used to justify bad behavior, its application to the HBGary situation suggests something deeper.

Read the rest of this entry »

After I’d finished my previous entry arguing for the existence of a global civilization 50,000 years ago, I recalled that I’d attempted to write something similar a few years back. So I pulled out my old notes and partial draft and found them offering many of the same conclusions, though in rougher form and without the benefit of the latest discoveries.

My primary focus in that earlier version, however, was on a point that I haven’t previously touched on here.

I believe there is a crucial message about the past that we’ve been trying to get across to ourselves for over a century. Ever since we started digging up ruins and translating old inscriptions in the 1830’s and 40’s, we’ve been haunted by a sense of something enormous and ancient and unexplained lying just underneath our feet.

Conventional accounts of prehistory seem designed to ward off that disquieting perception, but it stubbornly hangs on. The irreducible fact is that the last 5000 years of recorded history are like a small house built over an ancient and cavernous basement, whose true extent and contents we do not yet fully comprehend.

The realization that our own past is largely unknown crept up on the Victorians gradually, but by the end of the 19th century it had become undeniable. In 1890, for example, the young H.G. Wells wrote an essay titled “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” which emphasized the limits of scientific knowledge using a metaphor that appears to be drawn specifically from the study of prehistory:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been developing a bunch of unorthodox theories here, and at times I can start to wonder if I’m just letting my imagination run away with me, so it’s nice to get occasional confirmation that I’m on the right track. Case in point: an article the other day summarizing a paper by archaeologist John Shea, who argues that there is no significant biological difference between the earliest modern humans of 200,000 years ago and their more recent descendants, including ourselves.

“For decades anthropologists contrasted these earlier ‘archaic’ African and Asian humans with their ‘behaviorally-modern’ Upper Paleolithic counterparts,” the article notes, “explaining the differences between them in terms of a single ‘Human Revolution’ that fundamentally changed human biology and behavior. … Shea argues that comparing the behavior of our most ancient ancestors to Upper Paleolithic Europeans holistically and ranking them in terms of their ‘behavioral modernity’ is a waste of time. There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability.”

As anyone who’s been following this blog may have noticed, I’ve arrived at much the same conclusion over the last year, as it’s become apparent to me that my chronology for the sequence of visions requires the earliest visions to go back to the dawn of modern humanity.

But even though it’s nice to see someone else rejecting the old Eurocentric delusion that the important part of human history began only when modern humans arrived in Europe, I’d still take exception to Shea’s reductionist notion that all we’re seeing over the last 200,000 years is “behavioral variability” involving “the varying costs and benefits of different toolmaking strategies.”

The human knowledge base has expanded enormously over that period, art and technology have grown increasingly complex, and the pace of change has constantly accelerated. A theory like Shea’s which describes history as essentially flat has to be omitting something vital.

Read the rest of this entry »

A study that came out this week adds tantalizing new details to the story of how modern humans reached eastern Asia, and I’ve found it particularly intriguing in light of the non-orthodox scenario of human expansion that I’ve been developing in recent entries.

It appears that the sequencing of DNA extracted from a finger-bone found in a cave in Siberia has demonstrated the existence of a previously unknown species of archaic humans. Researchers have dubbed them the Denisovans, after the cave where the bone was discovered, and describe them as the Far Eastern cousins of the Neanderthals, with whom they shared a common ancestor 400,000 years ago.

This study has a number of fascinating implications. For one thing, it overturns the old Eurocentric assumption that eastern Asia was inhabited solely by the relatively primitive and small-brained Homo erectus until the arrival of modern humans.

But the really extraordinary conclusion it reaches is that the first modern humans to arrive in Southeast Asia must have interbred with Denisovans in the same way that modern humans in the Middle East interbred with Neanderthals. The researchers determined that about 5% of the DNA of present-day Melanesians — who inhabit New Guinea and the smaller islands nearby — is of Denisovan origin.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the last two entries of this series, I’ve offered some speculations on the development of the spirit and cosmic order visions during the last ice age. But there is an additional element that needs to be taken into account, and that is the influence of the mysterious entities I have previously described as “shadow visions.”

Like the ordinary visions, the shadow visions appear to come in three forms — scientific, social, and inner experience — and each one is regularly associated with ordinary visions of the same type. But they are clearly distinct from the ordinary visions, with their own premises and their own timetable of development.

In addition, where the ordinary visions are relatively simple and rational — with just a touch of mysticism — the shadow visions are far deeper and more primal. They lack the clear-cut intellectual, philosophical, and moral structures of the ordinary visions but are given instead to propagating a riotous profusion of imaginary beings and realms.

The shadow visions are clearly associated with the dark side of our nature. They can be wild and irrational and may display such negative traits as obsession — particularly sexual obsession — and paranoia. But they also provoke the highest flights of the imagination and are frequently the source of liberating new forms of thought and action.

Read the rest of this entry »

If the last ice age did coincide with the earliest and most traumatic “romantic break” — when faith in the transformative-and-kinship partnership was shattered and the dance of the visions truly began — then the period between 70,000 and 10,000 years ago must have witnessed the active development of not only the spirit vision but also a number of other alternatives.

In particular, the successor to the transformative vision — cosmic order — would have been undergoing a burst of intense speculation.

We are all familiar with the cosmic order vision from its final stages, when a conviction that society should reflect the mathematical elegance of the heavens gave rise to the great civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria, India and China, Central America and Peru.

But the earliest intimations of that vision, which must go back almost to the dawn of modern humanity, involved no such grand ambitions. At the very start, there were only a few lonely science geeks who had begun tracking the movements of the sun and moon and were awe-struck by their regularity.

Certain aspects of those observations appear to have been incorporated into the older visions even before cosmic order itself was fully defined. In the transformative vision, the Moon was seen as female because its monthly phases so closely matched the cycle of women’s menstruation. And when the transformative-and-kinship partnership was established, the pairing of Sun and Moon became a central expression of the fundamental male-female duality.

The spirit vision would have been even more closely attuned to the first suggestions of cosmic order. Shamans are often described in archaic societies as traveling to the Moon in trance or as drawing their spiritual energy from the skies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since I started working with the visions, I’ve been wondering how such an elaborate, recurring cycle could have gotten started.

A year ago, I compared the dance of the visions to a Rube Goldberg machine, because it has something of that quality of disparate elements zooming around and banging into one another in ways that trigger new flurries of activity. But unlike Rube Goldberg’s ingenious devices, the cycle of visions is circular and self-sustaining. New visions emerge to take on the roles formerly held by older ones, and the same sequence of events keeps repeating over and over.

In recent entries, I’ve suggested that the three original visions — the transformative, kinship, and spirit visions — might have arisen out of attempts by the first modern humans to reflect upon and systematize their own scientific, social, and inner experiences.

And I’ve speculated that after perhaps a hundred thousand years of gradual development, a desire for even greater systematization might have brought the transformative and kinship visions into a secure intellectual partnership, which was also able to encompass at least part of the spirit vision.

That urge towards systematization may be key. If we assume that the evolutionary leap which produced us modern humans resulted in a raging desire to make sense of the world, it would go a long way towards explaining the creation of the first three visions and the first dominant partnership. It would also indicate why new visions should have continued to appear as new information and new experiences rendered the old ones inadequate.

If that was all there was to it, though, the new visions ought to click into place as smoothly as software upgrades — slide the old one out, slide the new one in, no fuss, no bother. But that isn’t what happens at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tens of thousands of years have passed since the first cultural visions were deployed, and most components of those early visions have long since been superseded, discarded, and all but forgotten. If it were not for the few archaic peoples who still maintain their ancient kinship systems, for example, we would have no notion of the elaborate social constructs which once governed every detail of our ancestors’ lives.

But certain aspects of those visions have proved far more durable. The practical knowledge of how to chip a stone axe or seek the approval of a potential mother-in-law may have faded, but the philosophical structures established in those long-ago times are still with us.

I suggested some while back that every partnership between two dominant visions gives rise to a philosophical system that integrates elements of both in an intellectually compelling synthesis. This kind of tight integration is particularly apparent in partnerships between a scientific and a social vision, which draw upon the ordered structures that humans build into their societies as a model to explain the natural world.

In the mid-20th century, for example, the emphasis that had always been placed by the democracy vision on “government of laws and not of men” was projected outward onto the cosmos, and the universe came to be seen as ruled by simple scientific laws that were even-handed and allowed of no exceptions.

The equivalent philosophical synthesis of 80,000 years ago appears to have been based on interpreting the natural word as the manifestation of a system of simple dualities, all ultimately arising out of the dichotomy between male and female: hot-cold, dry-wet, day-night, sun-moon, fire-water, and so forth.

Read the rest of this entry »

As anybody who’s been following this blog will be aware, I’ve been gradually laying out a theory of human history as driven by a succession of differing visions of the nature and meaning of existence.

Each of these visions appears to arise out of a fusion of practical knowledge derived from one area of human experience with intimations of higher oneness underlying the flux and seeming randomness of everyday life. And every vision has its time of burgeoning, then enjoys a period of cultural dominance, and eventually becomes unable to respond to changing circumstances and is discarded.

The three most ancient visions that emerged before modern humans left Africa all drew upon millions of years of practical experience — enhanced by a new capacity for keeping track of fine details — but they were also inspired by a determination to penetrate the underlying structure and meaning of that experience.

In the scientifically-based transformative vision, a growing expertise in modifying stone and plant materials through the alchemical use of fire and water became the basis of a general theory of existence as an unending series of transformations. This philosophical understanding was then extended to encompass the great mysteries of birth and death, growth and decay.

In the socially-based kinship vision, the ability to keep track of not only immediate family members but also more distant cousins was elaborated into a complex set of social rules and relationships that eventually came to govern every aspect of life.

And in the inner experience-based spirit vision, the shamanistic use of trance and dream as a source of knowledge and healing was interpreted as reflecting a spiritual power that pervades all of existence.

Read the rest of this entry »

The expansion of modern humans into Europe and central Asia began only about 50,000 years ago, when the last ice age hit a warm patch and people from the Middle East started spreading out in all directions. That makes it relatively simple to reconstruct. But the arrival of modern humans in East Asia goes back considerably further and is a lot harder to figure out.

Some aspects of that story are reasonably clear. It seems well-established, for example, that by 80,000 years ago there were people living in India who were making tools similar to those made by early modern humans in Africa, and both genetics and linguistics suggest that around 70,000 years ago they began moving further east.

The most recent ice age was under way by then, and sea levels had dropped far enough that southeast Asia and the islands of Indonesia were united in a single land mass known to archaeologists as Sunda. Australia and New Guinea were also connected, and it is believed that the present-day Aborigines and Papuans arrived in their present locations, perhaps 60,000 years ago, by traveling down the west coast of Sunda and then doing some fairly modest island-hopping

Both of those peoples have marked physical similarities to early human remains from east Africa and Israel, and a recent study of the DNA of traditional tribes in India found that “several of the Indians studied had two regions of their mitochondrial DNA that were identical to those found in modern day Australian Aboriginal people.”

Read the rest of this entry »