Adelphiasophism
Richard Rudgley: Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age: Review
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Primitive?
Richard Rudgley’s book is a great source of humility. We think we are superior creatures, we modern humans, while our predecessors were little more than animals—they were ape men until civilizaton emerged suddenly about 5000 years ago, in the popular mind. Yet the men that did not have computers or even paper to write with were just the same as us for 50 thousand and perhaps a hundred thousand years before civilization began.
Can that be right? Rudgley says, No! For thousands of years BC, perhaps tens of thousands, human skills and societies changed only slowly but yet were advanced in many concepts. The slowness of change was perhaps because humanity was so thin on the ground that, even though the incidence of genius was no different from today’s, the population was so low that it did not manifest so often. Furthermore, as human tribes moved out to occupy the whole planet they spread themselves thinly and long-distant communication was inefficient, and new discoveries had to spread out from a center to the rest of the world.
What though of the thoughts that early humans carried with them as they spread out. There is an increasing body of evidence, though controversial, that these first modern humans worshipped a universal goddess. Of course, she was not known to be a universal goddess because no human knew much further than the distance they had or could travel, so the goddess was a local goddess to each band of people moing about the surface of the earth. But a wandering tribe travelling at only one mile a year would circumnavigate the earth in 25,000 years and would move faster in practice, so the goddess cult could easily have become world wide in the period of the Stone Age.
Rudgley points out that the constellation called the Pleides, by modern astronomers, was traditionally called the seven “sisters.” In tribes as far apart as Australia, Siberia and North America, this cluster of stars are referred to as “sisters.” Is this an astonishing coincidence, or are some of the stars called by names that go back to the Palaeolithic age? Australia was occupied by humans about 40,000 years ago.
People like Graham Hancock propagate bogus history based on the Atlantean theme of a super civilization, with ray guns, anti-gravity and spaceships, extinguished by upheaval and flood about 10,500 BC. Yet they are close to a more prosaic yet equally amazing truth. Humanity has lived a conceptually advanced but low-tech civilization for an even longer time.
Skills
The skills of hunter-gatherers were in many ways the skills of modern scientists and statisticians. A lot of observational data are gathered, hypotheses are formulated and tested in practice and conclusions are reached that are passed on as part of the collective wisdom. The human love of solving puzzles is another manifestation of the same thing. When you are next playing chess, doing the daily crossword or even a jigsaw puzzle think of the “primitive” features you are displaying!
We try today to solve serious problems like those of forecasting economic and social outcomes with high technology, like computers. Yet there are professors who swear that oracles are just as good. Nancy Reagan apparently ruled the greatest country in the world using astrology, and it is doubtful that anyone noticed the difference. The point about oracles—and we are not running down reason—is that use of them draws upon intuition rather than pure reason. Reason depends on all the evidence being clearly at hand and consciously taken appropriately into account. Interpreting an oracle is a way of using intuition, the mental way of taking all the available evidence into account and weighting appropriately, but subconsciously.
Why is this likely to be less reliable than consciously trying to solve a problem by reason, when all the relevant evidence might not be taken into account or even be consciously known? Evolution has given us an intuitive decision making computer in our heads, but now few people are brave enough to use it. We still have to gather all the available evidence, and part of that will involve conscious sifting and analysis, but in the end a decision has to be taken intuitively unless all the rational links are in place.
The transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers, after an initial growth in stature while numbers were still small, was always accompanied by a decline in stature, strength and health. Individuals suffered while the surplus production of food by monoculture allowed the population to increase and princes and priests to take more than their fair share. In ten out of 13 regions studied, life expectancy fell as a consequence of turning to agriculture. Diseases also multiplied, transmitted to humans often from domesticated animals and from dairy products.
The Stone Age Jomon culture of Sannai-Maruyama in Japan was a settled “town” covering 35 hectares and occupied from 5000 to 3500 BC. Certain cereals but not rice were cultivated yet the main means of provision had to be hunting still. Excavations on the site revealed artifacts from far away showing that trading went on extensively. The Jomon people could not write, use metal tools, support themselves solely through agriculture or boast an institutional state—but it was obviously civilized!
God and Goddess
Marija Gimbutas saw the farmers of Europe still united under the ancient Goddess from before 7000 until around 3500 BC. Ancient barrows, burial mounds, were made in the shape of a vagina and womb surely symbolising death as a return to the womb of the Goddess—the precursor to a rebirth from her womb. The entrances are often unmistakably representations of the female vulva. The first neolithic city, Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia had plain shrines to a Goddess at an early date.
In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered a surprising fact. The ancient language of the Indians, Sanskrit, was related to Latin and Greek. The Indo-Eupopeans were discovered in this peculiar way. From about 4,300 to 2,800 BC the Indo-Europeans in a series of invasions upset the previous stability of the Goddess phase of society—described by Gimbutas as “gyno-centred” meaning woman-centred while the social organisation of the invaders was “anthrocratic” or male dominated. The Indo-European invasions continued into historic times and the reduction of the Goddess and the replacement of gynocentric society by androcratic society took a long time. In Europe, Crete was gynocentric until about 1450 BC when the Minoan civilzation collapsed. The ancient temples of Malta carved out of the solid rock could only have been built over a long period of time—these people had no metal.
In the gynocentric world view, though the intuitive wisdom and reproductive ability of the woman placed her at the centre, the sexes were equals and society was essentially level and at peace. Death was a peaceful return to the womb of the Goddess earth, and so could hold few fears. The Indo-Europeans, from the Euroasian steppes, were wild tribes based on animal husbandry and horsemanship, and they introduced miltary might based on the horse, hierarchy and patriarchal society.
They worshipped a sky god whose deadly weapon was a thunderbolt, and the patriarchal gods, in the legends that reflected the suppression of the older society, divided up, ravished, banished and married the goddesses, according to the nature of the conquest. Where the conquest was impossible, the invaders settled among the natives and the goddess became the god’s wife or daughter, where it was complete, the goddess was banished or ravaged, and perhaps the in-between case of partial conquest was the enforced division of tribal federations into individual tribes whose goddesses had to take on different aspects of the Great Mother—divide and rule.
Writing
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, like many ancient and pre-historians had noticed the curious clay tokens found everywhere in the Ancient Near East from the earliest settled times. No one had apparently given then a second thought. Then she discovered an egg-shaped container inscribed on the exterior with a list of sheep and goats. Inside were different clay tokens of just the kind that were common everywhere and the numbers of each kind corrsponded to the list on the outside. The list, the container and the tokens constituted a primitive accounting system, and the earliest form of writing. They dated from 8000 BC. Civilization is traditionally associated with writing and assumed to begin with the use of hieroglyphics and cuneiform scripts in Egypt and Mesopotamia respectively. But people had been writing down accounts for 5000 years before. Will civilization be now extended back for another 5000 years?
Tokens like these are even found in societies known still to have been hunter-gatherers. The shape of a token corresponded to some commodity—sheep cattle, grain, wine, oil, labour. The tokens were essentially pictorial representations of the commodity and were independent of the spoken word for it—they were independent of language. Apparently, the tokens were used as a means of counting and then accounting for the items, and the later phase of collecting them into boxes and listing contents on the outside led to writing proper. At some stage the accountant realised that the tokens were redundant. All that need be kept was the list! The clay box or envelope evolved into a clay tablet for the lists (3500 BC).
The invasions of the Indo-Europeans, like the later invasions of the Huns and the Turks, also displaced the indigenous peoples, some of whom fled before the conquerors while others remained and became subject. The Old European Culture, as Gimbutas calls her conjectured Stone Age society, was therefore stage by stage replaced but also displaced to the margins. The rise of the Cretan civilization might be attributed to the escape of displaced people from southern Europe. Common to Crete and to the earlier Old European Culture are the bull and the snake, bees and butterflies, depicted as double-bladed axes, as important religious symbols.
The Vinca script also seems to have been taken with them, also apparently of cultic rather than commercial significance, like the origin of Sumerian script, the Sumerians being an unrelated people apparently speaking a Chinese type of language, perhaps earlier invaders. Accounting systems can hardly have given rise to such well structured languages as Sanskrit, Latin, German, Greek, Russian and so on. These are manifestly artificial languages. Natural ones would have been much less structured—like English but much worse. Sanskrit or its precursor must have been designed by priests for religious reasons, kept as a holy mystery for ages, then escaped into the general population.
Read It
Rudgley’s book traces the rudiments of writing to much older scratches on reindeer bones, and goes far beyond all this, but is not a light read. It is too chock full of information covering too wide a scope for that, but that makes it a fabulous book to browse, like a woman gathering berries and roots. Dip into it an you will find succulent, stimulating or soporific fruit to savour throughout—literally.
Thus he tells us, drawing on his own direct research, that the first cultivated plants might not have been foodstuffs as people normally assume, but psychoactive plants. The Aborigines of Australia had such a detailed knowledge of a nicotine bearing plant called “pituri” that could have cultivated it themselves had they chosen to. The Blackfoot tribe of native North Americans were also hunter-gatherers but they had already taken to cultivating the tobacco plant. The first plants cultivated in the Ancient Near East were probably belladonna, mandrake and henbane—all psychoactive.
Rudgley shows how these “primitive” people had a unified idea of art, science and religion. Only later, under civilization and the disparagement of the Goddess, did these elements separate. The task of Adelphiasophism is to unite them again as they once were in Nature’s wisdom.
