It occurred to me after doing the previous entry that someone with a skeptical eye might object that I seem to be cherry-picking my examples in order to make a case for the prehistoric origins of mystical beliefs and practices.

In fact, from my point of view, it’s quite the opposite. Until recently, I shared the prevailing assumption that sophisticated intellectual and philosophical systems go back to not much earlier than 500 BC and that human knowledge before then was relatively unsystematic, intuitive, or “mythopoeic.”

It’s been only with the emergence of geek culture over the last couple of years that I’ve become convinced that geeks as a personality type have existed since the origins of modern humanity. (I doubt there were Neanderthal geeks — there’s certainly no sign of them in the archeological record — which may be why we’re still here, for all our flaws, and they’re not.)

And it’s in the nature of geeks to mess around with stuff, try to make sense of it, create intellectual systems of dizzying complexity to explain it, exchange wild metaphysical speculations with their fellow geeks, and generally geek out to the max at any opportunity.

See, for example, the Mayan calendar as an example of geekitude run amok. Or the I Ching. Or the pyramids. Geeks just can’t help themselves. Intellectual complexity mated to metaphysical subtlety is what they do. It’s the water in which they swim.

So, no, I’m not cherry-picking my examples. I’m just being struck by the fact that there are signs saying “Geeks at Work” in big flashing letters all over the archaeological record.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on deep prehistory can be found here.

A general overview of the areas of interest covered at this blog can be found here.

A chronological listing of all entries at this blog, with brief descriptions, can be found here.

It was announced earlier this week that a Paleolithic flute, carved some 35,000 years ago from the hollow bone of a vulture’s forearm, has been discovered in Germany.

The discovery is being heralded as demonstrating the “high-level of musical and technological sophistication” present at that time. It is also being suggested that such flutes might have contributed to their makers’ evolutionary fitness by enhancing social bonding.

All of that may be perfectly true — but it may also fall far short of explaining the real intentions of the flutes’ makers.

Flutes have ancient mystical connotations. It is not the physical body of the flute that produces the musical sound, but the nothingness within it. A flute is of no value as an instrument until it is hollowed out and becomes receptive to the breath and will of the musician.

Because of these qualities, flutes provide a ready analogy for the subtle relationship between body and soul, as well as for the mystical directive to empty oneself of ego in order to be filled from outside.

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Over the last few centuries, entrenched aristocracies have increasingly become a drag — inbred, arrogant, and generally useless. But there was a time when having aristocrats around was a good thing, because they were the major drivers of cultural innovation.

The reasons for this have to do with the interplay among leisure, disposable income, and the desire for novelty. Aristocrats tend to have way more than their share of the first two, which makes them extremely receptive to new games and toys, diversions and amusements, fads and fashions.

Up until the 18th century, most great art and music were produced either at the direction of or to curry favor with wealthy patrons. Even technological advances — like the steam engine or electricity — started out as gadgets to provide bored aristocrats with entertainment.

Ever since the French Revolution demonstrated that it was possible to do without them, aristocrats — and their corporate CEO successors — have become increasingly conservative and set in their ways. They worry that any sort of innovation will make their uselessness all the more apparent and fear that great art and music will stir up the lower orders and put notions in their heads. But once upon a time, things were very different.

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After writing a few days ago about how fairy tales may reflect the actual culture of roughly 4500 to 2500 BC, I got inspired to dig out my files on that period — and particularly on the times and places that don’t normally get into the history books.

When I was in school — and I doubt things have changed much since then — the beginnings of civilization were always pegged at around 3000 BC, with the emergence in Egypt and Sumeria of complex societies characterized by organized religion, monumental architecture, and writing.

The Harappan culture of the Indus Valley was also given an honorable mention in this story, though it was generally thought to have appeared several centuries later and to have been in some vaguely-defined way less innovative and influential than Egypt or Sumeria. But everyplace else was dismissed as crude and backwards — at most reflecting glimmers of influence from the three great river-valley civilizations — until some time after 2000 BC.

This picture of three major civilizations serving as lonely beacons of light in a sea of darkness was utter fantasy, of course. It grew out of late 19th and early 20th century prejudices, which regarded colonialism and monumental architecture as signs of evolutionary superiority, and was perpetuated into the second half of the 20th century by errors in carbon-14 dating.

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It always seem to be assumed that fairy tales are attached to no particular time and place — that they exist in an ideal land of make-believe that was invented for story purposes and never actually existed.

In fact, when I took a folklore course in college, the professor rather severely informed us that most fairy tales were written only a few hundred years ago, so they could not possibly retain any actual ancient elements.

I found that disappointing — but I also eventually found it unconvincing.

A story like “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” after all, seems to have very little to do with the late medieval / early modern world of chivalry and tournaments, of grand cathedrals and fanatical witch-hunters, of feudal loyalties and dynastic marriages, of royal bureaucracies and emerging nation-states, of printing presses and merchant bankers.

Instead, they appear to reflect an older and simpler organization of society — and they do so far too consistently to be the result of mere happenstance.

For example, there’s the multitude of independent petty kingdoms with which the fairy tale landscape seems to be littered, along with the extended stretches of savage wilderness which separate them. That’s not at all medieval — but it does seem to be the way things worked back when kingdoms were first invented.

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I’m as bemused as anybody by the frenzy over “Ida,” the 47 million year old proto-primate whose fossil remains have became an instant global obsession.

However, an entry at Not Exactly Rocket Science, which attempts to debunk the ongoing hysteria through extreme exaggeration, may paradoxically provide some useful hints as to what is actually going on.

“The creature has been named Darwinius masillae, but also goes by Ida, the Link, the Chosen One and She Who Will Save Us All,” writes Ed Yong. “The new fossil is remarkably complete and well-preserved, although the media glossed over these facts in favour of the creature’s ability to cure swine flu. … Businesses around the world are also hoping that demand for Ida merchandise will stimulate an ailing global economy out of recession.”

She Who Will Save Us All?

Of course. It becomes clear now.

It is obvious from various accounts that the wonder-working Ida is simultaneously perceived as (1) a little girl who died at the age of nine months, (2) the mother of all humankind, and (3) a being of unimaginable antiquity.

Clearly, then, she must be an incarnation of Robert Graves’ Triple Goddess — simultaneously maiden, mother, and crone.

If the point needed any further confirmation, “Ida” is also the name of a mountain in Crete where the god Zeus is said to have been born.

I still don’t altogether understand the extent of the frenzy — but it seems undeniable that we are witnessing a modern theogony in progress.

Related:

A listing of all my posts on higher knowledge can be found here.

A general overview of the areas of interest covered at this blog can be found here.

A chronological listing of all entries at this blog, with brief descriptions, can be found here.

According to a story at Wired this week, “Researchers who reverse-engineered an ancient superglue have found that Stone Age people were smarter than we thought. Making the glue, originally used on 70,000-year-old composite tools, clearly required high-level cognitive powers.”

That’s pretty neat in itself — even though this whole “smarter than we thought” business does tend to inspire kind of a “What You Mean ‘We,’ Kimosabe” reaction.

But the really interesting part is how this superglue was created. It seems that when the researchers tried to use acacia gum — of which they’d found traces on the ancient stone tools — to attach their replicas to wooden handles, it didn’t work. It wasn’t until they added in the iron-rich pigment of which they’d also found traces that everything held together.

“Making the glue required much more than simple mixing,” the Wired article continues. “It demanded careful and sustained attention. Keeping the fire at the right temperature required certain types of wood, with a certain degree of moisture content. If glues were mixed too close to the fire, they contained air bubbles. If too dry, they weren’t cohesive; if too wet, they were weak. The Sibudu Cave’s Stone Age inhabitants, wrote the researchers, were ‘competent chemists, alchemists and pyrotechnologists.’”

Yeah — alchemists. Their word, not mine. But it was very aptly chosen.

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The subject of conspiracy theory keeps nagging at me. The more I think about the kinds of situations that give rise to conspiracy theories, the less they seem like matters that we might hope to resolve by establishing clear-cut facts of history or politics. Instead, they present a kind of philosophical black hole.

A year ago, I suggested — at least half seriously — that conspiracy theories may challenge our assumption that there is a real reality out there which we can discover by applying the proper methods. I still suspect that might be true, but at the moment I’m more inclined to see the problem not as one of ontology — the nature of reality itself — but of epistemology — the sources of human knowledge.

We human beings are, on the whole, very good at starting with an inadequate set of clues and squeezing useful information out of them. The more complex and fragmentary the data we have to work with, however, the more likely we are to run up against the limitations of our methodology.

One of our most tried-and-true approaches is to patiently sift through whatever facts are available, looking for similarities and meaningful connections, until we arrive at some sort of conclusion. This method works best in the physical sciences, where the facts are solid and unambiguous and follow simple patterns of cause and effect.

It becomes less reliable when we try to apply it to living creatures, unless we have enough data to look for statistically meaningful patterns. And if our sample includes many rare or unique events — as is frequently the case with human history — the “noise” of individual goals and idiosyncrasies is likely to drown out the “signal” of any coherent pattern.

That is why our history books tend to be strongest on stirring accounts of kings and wars and revolutions and weak on plausible generalizations about how empires rise and fall or why civilizations appear in some places and not in others. With rare exceptions, we just don’t know enough to distinguish the unique from the universal.

This is the same problem that afflicts conspiracy theories. Because events like the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are unique in modern American history, there is nothing to which they can usefully be compared. No amount of fact-gathering will ever lead to definitive conclusions, and adding new and possibly irrelevant bits of data to the mix tends to blur the picture instead of clarifying it.

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People who specialize in digging up human fossils tell us that until about 15-20 thousand years ago, we all looked very much alike. Back then, everyone on the planet apparently resembled present-day Australian aborigines, with broad faces and strongly pronounced features.

But after that, we started changing rapidly — at least on the surface. So-called racial distinctions appeared, distinctions that are usually regarded negatively because they make us look different from one another and now present barriers to global harmony. What is far less often noted is that those changes also made us prettier. All of us. Though each group adapted according to its own unique standards of beauty, in every region our facial contours became smoother and more delicate, our hair more appealing in form or color, our bodies sleeker and sexier.

There’s an easy explanation for that — the old Darwinian standby of sexual selection. In a simple tribal society, success at producing and raising offspring is largely determined by basic physical and mental fitness. But once society becomes just a bit more complex and distinctions of wealth and power appear, the game changes radically. The most dynamic and charismatic men take on leadership roles, which typically gives them the opportunity to father children by multiple women. The most attractive and charming women appeal to the top-ranked men, and that offers their own children a better chance to survive, become leaders in turn, and have first choice of mates.

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All the great philosophies, in one way or another, offer the same simple message: The reality we inhabit is no more than a thin skin stretched over the substance of true reality.

This skin might be compared to the tenuous films of air and water that sustains life on the surface of our planet. Everywhere above our heads and everywhere beneath our feet lies a vast, unknown domain.

There are many ways of conceptualizing this larger domain, all of them useful to a degree and all of them ludicrously inadequate. We are creatures of the surface and never experience the depth of reality directly. Instead, we infer its existence and nature through the effects it has on our mundane world — and we devise metaphors, drawn from the things we do know, to express our inferences.

Recently, many of our older metaphors — such as “God” and “spirit” — have become decidedly creaky and started to show their age. They were made for a world in which the social relationships and state of scientific knowledge were very different from our own, and they no longer function effectively to attune us to the workings of a greater reality.

Rather than pointing towards higher dimensions of existence, as they once did, those words have become coopted by the mundane world of power and greed. They are used to justify self-promoting agendas and have a largely negative impact on our public discourse.

We need a fresh start — and a supply of new metaphors with the power to challenge these once dynamic but now degraded words and images.

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