1: We never were cavemen!

Homo sapiens never chose to live in caves, they’re horrible places. Caves are only useful in extreme weather, hot or cold, and then only for a short time. But what of all the evidence of occupation over centuries, of all those middens? Well, surely the evidence is just as consistent with one, or two weeks of occupation per year?

It is an ongoing contention of this blog that the evidence we have of our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors is not in the least representative. Despite the colossal increase in finds in my lifetime, we are no further forward in our understanding than we ever were. That which is both preserved and accessible to us now, gives us a highly distorted view.

So, what of the rock art? That which is found in caves is exceptional, literally. Imagine that everyone in a hunter gatherer band was multi-skilled, every child leaving their hand print wherever it would stick. Every adult, a craftsperson of necessity, and in idle moments, using any rock face to hand, having a go at simply leaving their mark, their representation of life. Art may have once been everywhere, then eroded by time, by wind, rain, snow, ice. Unexpectedly stuck in a cave, for who knows how long, waiting for a change in the weather, short of food, short of purposeful activity, any wonder some were obsessed with the distraction of art.

I say ‘band’, by which I mean at most 150, usually no more than 100. I’m very keen on Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis, and will push it further than he intended – or perhaps just state the implications more bluntly! (Along with my own combination of old school sociology learnt in the early 1980s, later explorations of Neo-Darwinism, and the more recently emergent social neuroscience.)

It bothers me the way researchers interpret what I’ve come to regard as unrepresentative evidence. Jumping far too far ahead. We are still in the territory of speculation, of the generation of ideas. After all, we remain essentially the same people, quite capable of placing ourselves in what we know of their situation!

For our ancient ancestors time and distance were much the same thing. The future was ahead. Would they reach the horizon they could see, today? Behind them was where they had been, not just where they had slept the previous night, but where they’d left their ancestors a long way behind, who, though they may speak to them still, were always over their shoulders.

Only later did farmers build henges, when they’d lost the ability to tell the time and to navigate. Agriculture was not the key; it was permanent settlement! When you stay in one place, you must watch time, and endure the cycle of the seasons. Agriculture is a failure to adapt to natural environmental change; it is an attempt to transform the environment instead. Dominance over nature is the most dangerous of memes, a misconstruing of the role of homo sapiens as the top predators on the planet. Pursuing an end to scarcity is folly and warfare an invention of those with territory to defend.

There are no straight lines in nature and only what is a threat is ugly. Permanent settlement led to a change in psychological time which persists today. Just as for our hunter gatherer ancestors there was a time-distance equivalence; later peasant societies (subsistence agriculture) often displayed a cyclical view of time. The past repeated in a landscape that seemed to stay constant, all that could happen had happened before, all that could be known is known. But in the modern era time seems synonymous with the progressive. Everything is built upon the previous, and assumed to be an improvement. The possibility of some things being done better in the past is excluded. However, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution, whether biological or cultural!

You only start worshiping things you are dependent on and have reason from time to time to fear. We are a social species, our greatest desire is to belong. So in modern times when forced to be alone the narrative becomes ‘no one walks alone’ or a ‘ghost on the road’ story. For me, there may have been an ancient evolved spirituality, a once shared unconscious, growing out of our fundamental nature as a social species, living in small groups and being highly dependent on each other’s skills, moment to moment.

Over your shoulder, from the past, are the ancestors from whom wisdom can be acquired and therefore their presence changes how you behave. And there is no reason to feel learning from spirits shouldn’t manifest the same way we learn from the living; mirror neurons, imitation and memetics!

The move from a ground spirituality to a religion happens when, forced to stay in one place, the head goes up beyond the birds (who tell you what is happening on the ground) to worry about the weather and imagines it is in the gift of other-worldly forces. It is a common assertion that astronomy breaks with astrology sometime during the scientific revolution, one wonders how it ever got started. Perhaps astrological beliefs were added by permanently settled agriculturalists when they realised they were trapped, tied to the land.

The night sky might have been our original navigation aid. I’m attracted to the phenomenon of ‘double sleep’ in a natural sleep cycle, and the notion that it is natural to have a period of meditative wakefulness at night. If this were true for our ancient ancestors, then every child, perhaps unconsciously, could have absorbed a mental map of the sky, including not just annual celestial cycles but the added weekly/monthly layer of the change caused by the distance they had travelled.

A golden thread of modern religions we are told is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Closely aligned with putting others first and centre in your life. But these ideas remain aspirations because the whole species does not cooperate. But think smaller, the band or village, the extended family, the hunting party. We evolved to operate as teams in which cooperation and competition are two sides of the same coin; you see an opening, you take it; you don’t, then give the ball away.

Such speculations as the above began in my youth when wandering across Dartmoor as part of small groups. I started to ask myself whether this landscape was really a wilderness at all, barren in parts certainty, but evidence of human activity was everywhere and had clearly been occurring over very long timescales. Even the bogs we were trying to avoid were evidence that there had once been trees. Later, I learnt from authors such as W G Hoskins that it is truly a man-made landscape, and studying Geography and Geology in sixth-form told me it hadn’t been a genuine wilderness since before the last forest grew - back at the end of the most recent ice age when it had been arctic tundra. As the climate warmed again the arboreal forest returned and hunter-gatherers came back from the south, the trees weren’t under serious threat till thousands of years later when Bronze Age farmers developed an insatiable desire for wood, not least for the making of hotter fires to produce even harder metal that could cut down even more trees, even faster.

(photo by Maria Margato 2008)

For the real story of hunter-gatherers in Devon we should turn away from Dartmoor and look out to sea, to what has become the English channel but was once a massive river plain and estuary, when the Seine, Rhine and Thames were its tributaries. The story of the decline of hunter-gatherers and the rise of agriculture after the last ice age is also one of sea level rise. From the top of Dartmoor tors, all the way to the current coastline there was dense forest, occasionally visited for resources, but not the preferred landscape. At the height of the last ice age sea levels were between 120 and 130 metres lower. And despite the forbidding nature of undersea archaeology, the whole story is there to be uncovered in the future. Our gaps in knowledge relate much to what is supposed not to have been preserved, worked wood, hide and sinew – the sorts of things preserved in alluvial river deposits, later covered by the sea.

Much of our knowledge about the Palaeolithic period is highly contested, but much isn’t and therefore taken for granted in current debates. My contention is we are a lot less further forward than we like to think. The temptation to quantify, in order to justify and maintain someone’s status, distorts much which should remain at the more fundamental level of qualitative evidence and debate.