The old, deep stuff has always fascinated me — and the older and deeper, the better. The Walter de la Mare poem which I loved as a child and from which I took the motto for this blog goes on to say, “Very old are we men / Our dreams are tales / Told in dim Eden / By Eve’s nightingales.” It’s those tales of dim Eden that I’m always straining my ear to catch.

The first set of entries below was written in 2009 and represents an initial attempt to explore the earliest accomplishments of our species between about 200,000 and 80,000 years ago.

The second set, written in 2010, deals with recent indications that the date for our departure out-of-Africa should be pushed back to 125,000 years ago or earlier.

And the third, from 2010 and early 2011, starts to incorporate my theory of human history as a sequence of visions of the nature of existence and examines the four oldest visions in the sequence.

The Old, Old Days Back in Africa

• The First Alchemists Were Masters of — Glue
• Geeks at Work
• The Algorithms of String
• Female Magic
• The Invention of Society
• Yet Another Example of Ancient Tech
• Mind on the Edge of Chaos
• The Bottleneck and the Great Migration

 
How We Ventured Out into the Wide World

• The Great Migration Revisited
• A Matter of Depth
• Killer Apes — or Not?
• Conscious Control
• The Mysterious East
• The Denisovans

 
Of Spirit and Cosmic Order

• The Old Ones
• Spiritual Energy
• The Great Disillusionment
• Cosmic Order and Cosmic Anxiety
• Among the Spirits
• The First Global Civilization
• The Spectre of the Past