Richard W. Wise, Author

By Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC
 
The brain's prefrontal cortex houses what are called executive functions, including reasoning, planning, and communicating—a precondition for the creation of images. Thus, thanks in part to cave art, we know that the Homo Sapiens who peopled the late Paleolithic had conceptual skills. In short, they were very much like us. 
 
Some scholars have attempted to draw an artificial line between history, the period following the advent of writing, and what is termed prehistory. The latter has been portrayed as either a primitive Eden or Hell on earth, depending upon whether one follows the basic assumptions of the 16th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—remember: nasty, brutal, and short—or the speculations on Natural Man by the 18th-century French philosophe Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 
As I stated in Part I, much of the study of history has been devoted to elitist, authoritarian regimes simply because they had the power to centralize wealth and coerce their citizens into constructing monuments that have survived into modern times. They also controlled what entered the written record.

I don't mean to imply that authoritarianism was the single governmental model of prehistory. In a new book, The Dawn of Everything (2021), anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow take a refreshing new look at political prehistory. They suggest that history was not the sole playground of kings, priests, and bloody conquerors which has been the traditional focus of both disciplines. 
 
Removing the blinders and carefully reevaluating what we have learned from archeology and anthropology suggests that various unusual forms of government evolved some more democratic than the conventional view of written history suggests.
 
In some cultures, there may have been discussions and meetings to determine the where and when of things, but then a band hunting a cave lion couldn't afford the time to debate. Thus, there were two forms, before and after. Once the hunt was over, the band reverted to a more democratic model. 
 
It seems perfectly logical to remove the red line and take what we know of human nature as expressed through written history and apply that to prehistory. What, after all, is the basis for the line? Rousseau believed it to be private property. Though he held private property to be a sacred right, he also wrote that it was one of those attributes of civilization that it was the basis for the corruption of the Noble Savage which eventually made a slave of him.
 
Let's start with leadership. Bring half a dozen boys or girls into a group, and a leader will soon arise. If it's a pickup basketball game, there are likely to be two, one on each team. Conflict? Two tribal parties stalking the same auroch herd encounter each other on the open taiga; conflict is likely. Conflict and war do seem to define us as a species.
 
What does all this have to do with cave art, and does cave art provide any clues to the question of the development of types of government in prehistoric times? Good question and one I will attempt to answer.

Stay tuned.

by Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC

Copyright 2023

Far from just a burial site, Sunghir was a substantial village. By prehistorical standards, the area was "enormous." Active between 20-29,000 BP—later than Chauvet, earlier than Lascaux—two to three thousand people regularly visited the complex. How did it feed such a large population?

It was located along a mammoth migratory route (Lewis-Williams). A single kill supplied hundreds of pounds of meat sufficient to support a large population. (Don Hitchcock, Don's Maps). (Remains of 1613 specimens were identified at Dolni Vestonice (Wilczyński 2016) There is also evidence of specialized crafts and a division of labor.
 
Discoveries at Sunghir and Dolni Vestonice challenge the standard portrait of human prehistory as consisting of small wandering, leaderless, egalitarian bands of twenty-five to fifty individuals (Klima 2005). This model has now been shown to be true only a certain times and places. Find a renewable source of food, migratory routes, or fish-filled rivers, and people settled down. Were these groups leaderless? Were they egalitarian? And what about conflict? 
 
The brain's prefrontal cortex houses what are called executive functions, including reasoning, planning and communicating—a precondition for the creation of images. Thus, thanks in part to cave art, we know that the Homo Sapiens who peopled the late Paleolithic were just like us.
 
Some scholars have attempted to draw an artificial line between history, the period following the advent of writing, and what is termed prehistory. The latter has been portrayed as either a primitive Eden or hell on earth, depending upon whether one follows the writings of the 16th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—remember: nasty, brutal and short—or the speculations on Natural Man by the 18th-century French philosophe Jean Jacques Rousseau.
 
As I stated in Part I, much of the study of history has been devoted to elitist, authoritarian regimes simply because they had the power to centralize wealth and coerce their citizens into constructing monuments that have survived into modern times. They also controlled what entered the written record.  

Stay Tuned: Part III Governing in the Upper Paleolithic.  
 

by Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31`,000 BC

Copyright 2021
 
As any good Marxist will tell you, history is a long, sad tale of the exploitation of the many by the few. Marx's thesis is difficult to dispute though his solution left a lot to be desired. We study elites and their wars. Why? Because what physically remains are the temples, pyramids, monuments and dwellings of the priests, aristocrats, military leaders and kings and what was written down was at their behest. Of the ordinary people, we know almost nothing. Their lives are not described. They were not buried in monumental graves and their mud, wood and thatch dwellings have mostly deteriorated, leaving little or no trace.
 
Excavations of a Paleolithic burial at Sunghir, 200 km. east of Moscow, between 1957-77 unearthed the elaborate burial of an elderly male covered in carved beads and red ochre (Sunghir 1). Aged about sixty, the skeleton is dated to the Aurignacian Period, between 24-34,000 BP. (Buzhilova 2004) The grave contains 2,936 mammoth ivory beads, pierced fox teeth and ivory armbands. Two others, one juvenile (Sunghir 2) and one adolescent (Sunghir 3), were buried close by—head-to-head— with 10,000 beads and similar grave goods. The two male children, buried head-to-head, show distinct physical deformities. The three individuals were not closely related (Sikora et al. 2017)
 
These birth defects would have made it difficult for them—to pull their weight—
to participate fully in the life of the tribe. Yet they were buried with great pomp and circumstance. Similar burials of deformed individuals have been found at Dolni Vestonice in Romania, dated to 28,000 BP. Again, two children were buried head-to-head. These burials—and there are many others—suggest care, empathy, and perhaps, more.
 
Experiments have shown that allowing one hour per bead would have required 3,000 hours to manufacture the beads found in the male's burial at Sunghir. That's a whole lot of surplus labor. Taking an analogy from the San people, the so-called Pygmies of South Africa, who feed themselves in a desert environment working a three-day week, we know that ancient hunter-gathers had a good deal of leisure time or, rather, sufficient time to create surplus value, also known as wealth. To whose benefit? It is difficult to wish away what these burials are telling us. The Sunghir burials have been referred to as "royal." Where there is wealth, there is also status and social stratification. 

Stay tuned.

Suppose the cave paintings resulted from a drug-induced, ecstatic experience; much prep work was required. Paints had to be mixed, surfaces prepared and scaffolds built. In the Axial Gallery at Lascaux, the remains of post holes can be seen.
 
At Lascaux, the spacing of the animals in the Hall of the Bulls frieze was carefully laid out, requiring precise measurement. The art is highly stylized. In the Nave, a series of seven Ibex labeled "Futuristic" after the dynamic early 20th-century art movement featured multiple images in time. Artists executed the ibex panel with a similar intent.  
 
In the first four images in the ibex series, only the neck, head and long horns are depicted; in the last three, only their horns and eyes. Is it meant as a herd or a single animal sweeping forward? There is a distinct sense of forward motion. Similar depictions may be seen in the rhinoceros panel at Chauvet dating back to the Aurignacian, 36,000 years.

Another series, in the same cave, the Frieze of the Stags, depicts the heads of five animals in motion, possibly swimming. The similar ears and glands have led some scholars to interpret them as a single individual in five successive poses into the ibex panel. However, the differing horn configurations suggest a herd was intended rather than a single individual. The artist clearly meant to articulate the difference.
 
These are artists trained in a tradition that would have required an apprenticeship. It speaks of organization and purpose. What purpose? We do not know.
 
We do know that these caves were used over a considerable period. Were they temples? Had these simple egalitarian groups an organized priesthood with painterly pretensions?

Stay tuned.

by Richard W. Wise
Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC

I find the altered states explanation problematic. If the painting are non-rational projections of our subconscious or the result of our brain's internal structure, why are they not more fantastical? The artists, at least in Europe, created realistic, naturalistic depictions. Lewis-Williams points to the fact that the images are not grounded, not part of a scene. The animals depicted appear to float—their hooves often missing or relaxed. This is particularly evident at Altamira but less so at Lascaux.
 
While it is true that these paintings do not obey the rules of 19th-century landscape painting, at Chauvet, we see a vignette—a pride of lions—ears swept back—clearly stalking and in a panel just in front of them a group of prey animals. In another series of panels, we see horses, aurochs, and ibex. Though there is no evident ground line, these animals are in motion, in natural poses, with their leg muscles tensed. Two rhinos face off!  These animals, which predate the depictions at Altamira by some twenty thousand years, are engaged. They do not float languorously across the ceiling. Complete pictorial hoove development did not appear before the Magdalenian Period, about 14,000 years BP.
 
These ancient painters sourced and prepared technically sophisticated coloring media. The list of natural minerals includes a wide variety of iron oxides, ochres, hematite, iron peroxide, black and grey magnetite and silicates, such as: limonite and iron hydroxide. The list goes on. Some of these minerals were sourced twenty-five miles or more from the cave. They then had to be processed, which included grinding, removal of impurities and precisely controlled heat treatment to purify the colors.
 
The painting of the precisely laid out, fifty-five-foot-long frieze in Lascaux's Hall of the Bulls also required scaffolding as did the paintings in the apse.    
 
If Mr. Bacon, et al, is correct and the images served a didactic purpose associated with the natural cycle of reproduction, they were rationally conceived, not the hallucinatory result of drug-induced visions. The neurological theory also purports to explain religion, the beginnings of social stratification and, ultimately, why, as Rousseau once said: "Man was born free but is everywhere in chains. Wow! More on this later. 
 
Stay Tuned

by Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC

Copyright: 2023
 
According to the latest theory, the <Y>, a symbol found on the walls of caves, is associated with sex, specifically birth. Dots correlate with mating. The <Y> was, thus, a verb. Nouns appear to be lacking. The animal image could be described as a pictographic noun with the symbol as a caption. The authors of the study do not go so far as to call this writing; they prefer the term proto-writing.
 
 The Cambridge study does show a remarkable correlation between the symbols, mating and birth. I found it interesting that the study included fish. In my novel, The Dawning, the Homo Sapien tribe lives in a permanent village. Its location along a river makes this possible. They are able to catch, smoke, and in late Fall, freeze and store fish to supply them through the long winter months.

The <Y> symbol is ubiquitous, with a long and distinguished history. Some scholars interpret it as symbolizing the vulva. (Bahn, 1999). It appears in a number of early writing systems, including Sumerian, Indus Valley, both Linear A and B, right up through the Greek, Roman and English alphabets (Rudgley, 2019).
 
The ability to understand and project abstract ideas, the cyclical nature of life, for example, does suggest that early Homo Sapiens—by the time they reached Europe—had developed mental facilities and the ability to communicate in a fully syntactical language.   
 
The Cambridge Study also threatens to throw cold water on the current archeological flavor of the decade. The neurological explanation for the cave paintings—that they are the result of the structure of the human brain. According to this theory, there are three stages of altered consciousness and the cave paintings depict hallucinations resulting from these altered states (Lewis-Williams, 2002).
 
Altered states are associated with early shamanic religions, which most experts view as the earliest attempts by humans to make sense of their world, they could be induced in a number of ways: ritual dancing, drumming, vision quests, and the ingestion of psychotropic plants such as magic mushrooms, yage, peyote, and other hallucinogenic substances.
 
The first stage may be experienced by simply pressing the closed eyes and focusing on the abstract shapes generated behind the eyes. Stage one explains the abstract symbols far outnumber the paintings on the walls of Paleolithic caves. In the second stage, the seeker begins to hallucinate. In the third, the acolyte loses their grip on reality, and the visions become a new reality and the non-rational basis for the paintings.

Mr. Bacon's explanation is, however, entirely rational. Stay Tuned.

 
By Richard W. Wise
Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC
 
Current headlines are screaming: The discovery of protowriting in European Paleolithic caves by a London-based furniture conservator, Ben Bacon, is the hottest thing in archeology.
 
Bacon, a long-term amateur archeologist working with three professionals, two from Durham University and one from University College, London, claims to have cracked the code around two specific sets of cave signs. The markings, found in caves throughout Europe, are a lunar calendar that likely tracked the reproduction cycles of the prey animals depicted in Ice Age cave paintings.
 
The system of dots together with the <Y> sign are among those earlier identified by Genevieve Von Petzinger as one of thirty-two ubiquitous signs found while crawling—along with her husband--through painted caves spread all over the European continent. My wife and I saw several of these signs at Font de Gaum, Lascaux and Chauvet during our June tour. Geometric symbols are associated with the phenomenal animal images at many others, including Lascaux, El Castillo, Niaux, Tito Bustillo, and Pech Merle.
 
That a system of dots can be deduced as calendar markings is not altogether revelatory. In his 1991 book, Archeologist Alexander Marchack made a case for markings of portable art—markings on bones—can be traced as far back as the Aurignacian Period (40-35,000 BP). This latest study acknowledges that such things are parts of Artificial or External Memory Systems (EMS) used by early Homo Sapiens.
 
To suggest that these dot sequences represented a numerical system and were meant to convey information about prey animals, such as mating, birthing, rutting and migration seasons, is something new.
 
The Calendar of Creation:
 
The authors of this latest study agree with Marchack that each dot represents not a single number but a single unit of calendrical time. But where should they begin? The authors suggest a meteorological calendar which begins with Late Spring, the beginning of the Season of Life when the ice on the rivers melts and the herd animals begin migrating to their breeding grounds. This information would be of great importance to the hunter/gatherers of the late Paleolithic, who depended on these animals for most of their diet.

Stay tuned!

by Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC

Recently, a carved deer bone (phalanx) of the giant species Megaloceros has been found at a Neanderthal excavation at Einhornhohle in the Harz Mountains. Dated stratigraphically and by Carbon 14 to 51,000 BP, the bone exhibits a cross-hatched slicing pattern or offset chevrons, a pattern roughly similar to the oldest "art" yet found, the celebrated engraved red ochre nodule unearthed at Blombos Cave, South Africa, and dated to 73,000 BP.
 
The deer bone appears to have no practical use. That, coupled with the rarity of this species, has led archeologists to conclude that it must have some symbolic meaning. Was this the result of a Neanderthal checking the edge of his newly knapped flint handaxe? Archeologists have the unsettling habit of labeling anything for which they can determine no use as a symbolic or votive object.
 
Whatever the cause, note that the archeological community has embraced the ochre nodule found at Blombos but not the Einhornhohle deer bone. John Shea, an archeologist from Stony Brook University, suggests the bone could have b as a sinker on a fishing line or a spool for thread, humm!

Heard the latest? Tiny daubs next to paintings of prey animals at Chauvet, Lascaux and elsewhere are identified as seasonal calendars. StayTuned!

Shanidar Cave, Iraqi, Kurdistan. Four levels of excavation. During the first excavation, Dr. Ralph Solecki discovered ten Neanderthal skeletons. One was of a mature male with a withered arm and other serious injuries. This skeleton inspired Jean Auel's character, The Mog-ur (Creb the shaman) in her 1980 novel, Clan of the Cave Bear.
 
Despite his injuries, the man survived well into his maturity A demonstration of Neanderthal empathy? Many think so. Another skeleton showed evidence of a projectile wound, providing the first documented evidence of conflict in prehistoric times.
 
The grave of one of the Shanidar skeletons, a 35-40-year-old male (Shanidar IV), was associated with pollen from six different flower species. Initial claims that this was evidence of a symbolic burial by the first flower children were extremely controversial. Additional remains (Shanidar 6 & 8) found at this dig were also associated with plant material but provided nothing definitive. Did Neanderthals decorate their graves? Was this an ancient cemetery? Neanderthals returned to this cave time after time. Precise dating has proved elusive. The remains appear to be at the outer limits of Radio Carbon dating. Leading to a stated range of 35,000-60,000 BP.
 
Another interesting find at this site. Upon examination, Shanidar 3, a middle-aged male, showed a deep scratch on his ninth rib, indicating a projectile wound. Was this a hunting accident or the result of a duel with another Neanderthal or perhaps a modern human? According to experimental archeologist Steven Churchill, the wound is most consistent with a lightweight, l, spear such as those used by our direct ancestors.  Is it the first evidence of conflict in the Upper Paleolithic? 

The Neanderthal residents were sophisticated foodies. Analysis of charred food remains indicates that they mixed wild peas, vetch, nuts and edible seed pods along with lentils. Wild mustard was used as a flavoring—the true Paleolithic diet.

Moesha's apartment building was located on Boston's Boylston Street, just on the fringe of Jamaica Plain but still within the borders of Flynt's Project.  It was large, a nineteenth-century brick townhouse that had been broken up into rental units.  The outside looked ok, but the inside was another story.  The door lock was broken and the big entrance door yawned open into a dark hallway—unlit and dank, reeking with the sharp odor of urine. 

The entrance hall had been wallpapered, but whole strips had sloughed off the walls—like a snake shedding its skin—leaving exposed plaster and visible lath. Slum housing was nothing new to Flynt. He had grown up in the projects and as the sole black man training as a block organizer in South Providence in the early seventies, he had seen a whole lot worse. Read On