I can click on links, my computer is not at all telepathic.
My work is the history of invention, and while human by the bones can be tracked back 125,000 years, no artifacts appear until 50,000 years ago.
The background, since the time of our first evidence, it had been a stable wave of ice. All the usual north and higher up were iced.
Cosmic stuff happened, one rock left a mile wide crater in Arizona, another in India, and the odds were four out of five any rock would hit the ocean. The first result would be colder, as cubic miles of ash are sent into low orbit, but as they settle, ash and soot cover the ice, and being darker, absorb more heat, and the ice started melting.
Good evidence of sea level rise, where the best lands, low and close to the beach, the Continental Shelves, flooded.
This pushes life inland and uphill, where conditions were not as good.
Below where the Tigres and Euphrates Rivers join, through the valley now the Persian Gulf, was a sunken land with a river running through it, rich in trees, brush, grass, and food.
Humans did not live there, they lived on the dry plain above, in the brush along the river. Homo Erectus lived in the better lands, and were the most common hominid. The also ate humans, and each other.
Both had the same, a sharp rock, fire, and pointed stick. The erectus took the best lands and humans avoided them.
Humans hunted more open brush land, and here some 50,000 years age we first find, the throwing stick, flat on the bottom, domed on the top, with engraved lines, that rotated as thrown flat, side arm, and generated lift.
They not only discovered the aerodynamic principle of the wing, but also that engraved wavy lines along the top created turbulence and increased lift.
Almost all of the force of the throw was conserved in the spinning wing, it floated to the target on lift, and when the tip hit the target, all conserved force was focused on that spot.
To quote Mohammed Ali, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
Everyone used hand axes, for a few million years. They work. Our same flat stick people attached a handle, gained reach and leverage, and did not have to get close and personal to kill something.
The pointed stick is as old as the hand axe, a fire hardened tip was the New and Improved Model. It was used by holding with both hands, running, until impacting the thing you wanted to put a hole in.
This kind of worked for Neanderthals, who weighed more, could knock most things off their feet, then use the spear as a lever to keep them off their feet. It did not work as well for the smaller species, sapien and erectus. It did not work in combat between the two, as they would spear each other, making a tie, which is not good in a life and death fight.
Humans produce the first thrown spear, as it is not the size of a hole you put in something, it is the thought that counts. A spear in the guts is a spear in the guts, with erectus, it gave time to close in with the halfted axe and finish the work.
A throwing stick does not carry the message, in early Australia they were as much as four feet long, had a hundred yard range, and could take off a head.
The first burst of technology happened above the Persian Gulf about 50,000 years ago. Vastly outnumbered by cannibal erectus being driven up hill by the ocean, humans used throwing sticks, followed by thrown spears, then closed and engaged with halfted axes.
The soot covered ice kept melting, the sea kept rising, and erectus kept coming. Humans were pushed back, up river, defended by superior technology, defeated by numbers.
It is also warming, humans get pushed north, up river, through Turkey, Georgia, and into the mountains beyond. 10,000 years pass and erectus never caught on to that human stick magic.
Humans put faith in their technology, never change, even when pushed back a thousand miles, and having their population reduced. Faced with superior stick magic, the erectus died, but the survivors used their sex magic to produce a lot more erectus.
Driven up the snow and ice covered mountains the humans died out, except one family.
It was here that to cross the wall at the end of the earth, the second burst of technology happened. Faced with a solid wall three miles high to the lowest pass, a whole complex of interlocking inventions were needed to cross the mountains.
For the first time we find clothes, shoes, backpacks, charcoal for fires above the tree line, rope for mountain conditions, and their remains are found on the north side of the mountains. Technology continues with sleds, boats, nets, snow shoes, and they thrive in a better if colder climate, with no trace of erectus.
This happened 38,000 to 40,000 years ago. They were the first people to reach a Mesolithic Culture.
They also migrated into the highlands of Ethiopia and through southeast Asia to Australia. They are known by their tools, throwing stick, thrown spear, halfted axe, and for all having wavy hair.
Only the group that went north into the cold had a second wave of technology.
They also seem a branch of the originals, because they are the only ones with Neanderthal DNA. This goes way back, as the first Neanderthal father line was 125,000 years ago, and the second 80,000, and there is a third coming up at 36,000. The other branches have none.
So after that long aside, back to cave painting.
The area north of the mountains is called The Mammoth Steppe. for 125,000 years the Great Scandinavian Ice Sheet had reached down to London, and a line out to the south end of the Ural Mountains. The snow had fallen farther north, and the ice sheet had flowed south, till it was only three miles thick.
Thousands of miles long, three mile high south facing cliff, the only constant water as ice ages are cold droughts, it never rains or snows. A constant mist bathed the land, ice sublimed into a condensing vapor, all of the green land below was protected from UV Rays, every twig had beads of water, the cliff reflected almost all the light that fell on it down into the flowing, writhing, rainbow coated mist that bathed the plants, producing the most intense growing conditions ever on Earth.
Nothing like The Mammoth Steppe exists today.
Along this line, maybe a hundred miles wide, herds in the millions had migrated between Siberia in the summer, and the south of France in the winter, for over a hundred thousand uninterrupted years.
It is along this line we find cave paintings, Southern Urals, Czech Republic, southern France.
Same pigments, an engraved sketch of a mammoth on slate found in the Czech Republic is later found painted large and in full color in a cave in France. It is obvious the same hand did both.
I think it was from the Urals, a cave painting of a square tent, lit within and of several colors. I have it in a book, I have lots of books. It was some crude Russian Commie cave, during the Cold War. You had to be there to know what it was like. When Neanderthal was discovered, the British said it was just a German Hun.
Ideology and unchangeable national spheres of influence aside, all artifacts, cave paintings, graves, are found along the same line as The Mammoth Steppe.
Pigments are not everywhere. Ocher is produced by burning grey iron oxide, which turns it red, then crushing it to a fine powder. None of the pigments, base coats, fillers, binders, came from near the caves where painting are found.
In the Hall of Bulls, a single painting is as large as a billboard. it uses ten gallons for a base coat, then as much for finely powdered pigments, and as much again for their binders. It is twenty-five foot off the floor, so scaffolding had to be made just to reach it. Reaching it takes bringing all that through miles of cave, sometimes through underwater passages, then you need fire for light, cooking, and lots of food, as this job looks like it took a team all winter.
Nothing to it, just gather and prepare tons of pigments, binders, brushes, scaffolding, food, then transport it miles underground.
Winter paintings are the most impressive, but the other locations show the prep work, and art for arts sake cave decoration. Also their graves. they wore pants and a long shirt, decorated with dyed quills, making woven patterns, and wore hair nets with a sea shell at each intersection. The one painted tent shows they most likely painted their sleds, Reindeer harness, and while none of their textiles seems to have survived, impressions in clay later burned in the fire show seven weaves, including herringbone tweed.
Colin Renfrew, Richard Rudgley, and others find number markings and word symbols at their sites. At the time they would have been the sole speakers of Indo-European, the first large vocabulary language.
The art style of the caves is still found in European Art. The arts of Asia, Africa, have other qualities, and never match the sense of space. They produced a power of art that later ages rarely match.
Living in a tent dragged around in a sled for several thousand miles of being one with the other animals, sharing life, everything they did had to be good to survive. They were born, grew up, were educated on the move. Herds do not go to the same spot every year. When flowers bloom early, the herds see the signs, and turn back from summer pasture before winter catches them by surprise. Every year is different, every year the berries taste different, there are messages in it all for those who watch.
There is art of prey, and the Liger twins, but Mammoths have another place, Our Friends. Mammoths were the most intelligent and long lived, With Mammoths near you do not have to worry about Lions and Tigers, Ligers, as they have to worry about Mammoths. Follow the Mammoths, they will break a trail through the brush, leave piles of dung that will cover your scent, and provide fuel, scare big cats, and their singing is delightful.
No room here, but I write about life on The Mammoth Steppe.
As the climate changed new trails opened, new to the humans, but the herds had a much longer memory, a warm year, they may turn north to a pasture not seen in fifty years, but herd memory is not the life of one animal. When after thousands of years, in a warm world, going far north to pasture, they feel the rising wind, smell snow in the distance, they turn as one and hurry south, and barely reach the edge of the storm that covers all, where they could not walk, would have nothing to eat.
It took a greater intelligence to survive, a reliance on the intelligence of the herds, a knowledge of how to read the signs of the year, and put your self in the best place for you to be.
Everything that everyone knew went into building every sled and tent, article of clothing, so that it fit it's function through good and bad years.
They also shared the land with Neanderthal, who 80,000 years ago made bird bone flutes with the tone scales we still use. Neanderthal painted their dead with red ocher, kept prepared pigments stored in shells, and carved in a bone the year in phases of the moon. They knew what week what herd would come through, where it would be, and which animals they would kill for food. Time and Music seem theirs, and they may have taught us painting.
16 May 2015, 10:08 am
