Did Mozart play a magic flute
While Picasso danced and painted on the walls
Auroch dreams in firelight
Flickering stone becoming flesh
As Shakespeare chanted Hamlet
Dissolving in the dust of time
‘Til we’ve forgotten what forgetting is?
Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor until about 6,000,000 years ago. Stone Age peoples gradually evolved during the countless millennia of our early history when we were hunter-gatherers. Modern man is the product of 6,000,000 years of evolution. The last Ice Age ended 15,000-10,000 years ago. We have been farmers and then ‘civilized’ (whatever that means after the bloodshed of the 20th century) for only a small proportion of those 6,000,000 years.
Anatomically modern man emerged from the African savannah over one hundred thousand years ago and quickly spread himself over the globe and coexisted with the Neanderthals until the Neanderthals became extinct about 25,000 years ago.
Australia was colonized by the ancestors of the Aborigines over 50,000 years ago and, as there was no land-bridge, it must have been by boat. The Americas were colonized anywhere from 12,000-30,000 years ago. There was a landbridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska but many authorities believe that ancestral man may have reached the Americas much sooner than 12,000 years ago. Archaeological discoveries keep pushing all the dates back.
Many people think of Stone Age or Cave Men as being little more than unsophisticated brutes with rudimentary grunting skills. Stereotypically, the club, rather than flowers and a box of chocolates,was the method by which they expressed their feelings of love and romance. We don’t know much about the romantic lives of cavemen but we do know they rarely lived in caves and we are far more like them psychologically than we might care to admit. The emotions we feel now and our cognitive capacities are part of our evolutionary heritage. We are the evidence that they, like us, had rich and complicated emotional lives.
Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor until about 6,000,000 years ago. Stone Age peoples gradually evolved during the countless millennia of our early history when we were hunter-gatherers. Modern man is the product of 6,000,000 years of evolution. The last Ice Age ended 15,000-10,000 years ago. We have been farmers and then ‘civilized’ (whatever that means after the bloodshed of the 20th century) for only a small proportion of those 6,000,000 years.
Anatomically modern man emerged from the African savannah over one hundred thousand years ago and quickly spread himself over the globe and coexisted with the Neanderthals until the Neanderthals became extinct about 25,000 years ago.
Australia was colonized by the ancestors of the Aborigines over 50,000 years ago and, as there was no land-bridge, it must have been by boat. The Americas were colonized anywhere from 12,000-30,000 years ago. There was a landbridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska but many authorities believe that ancestral man may have reached the Americas much sooner than 12,000 years ago. Archaeological discoveries keep pushing all the dates back.
Many people think of Stone Age or Cave Men as being little more than unsophisticated brutes with rudimentary grunting skills. Stereotypically, the club, rather than flowers and a box of chocolates, was the method by which they expressed their feelings of love and romance. We don’t know much about the romantic lives of cavemen but we do know they rarely lived in caves and we are far more like them psychologically than we might care to admit. The emotions we feel now and our cognitive capacities are part of our evolutionary heritage. We are the evidence that they, like us, had rich and complicated emotional lives.
This much later carving is known as the Venus of Brassempouy. ‘Venus’ is the name given by archaelologists to the small carved statues of women found in many paeleolithic sites throughout Europe. Their exact significance is a matter of debate. However, this one is approximately 25,000 years old and the hairstyle (or hat as has recently been suggested) indicates an elaborate social network as well as evolved ideas of beauty or attractiveness. At the famous site of Dolni Vestonice in Czechoslovakia two human faces were found with apparent ‘droops’ on their left side. The site dates about 26,000 years ago and nearby was the body of a forty year old woman who apparently suffered from a bone disease that would have resulted in her face ‘drooping’ on the left. These faces might be among the first known attempts at some kind of ‘portraiture'(Daniel McNeil, The Face: A Natural History).
by Michael Sones
