Israel – Excavations at Kibbutz Kfar HaHoresh, about 2 miles form the center of Nazareth, have unearthed evidence of a burial complex as well as strangely decorated human skulls indicting that a major cult center existed in the area 8000 years before Christ. Although the remains of 65 people have been unearthed, it is expected that hundreds more remain to be found that may have been interred in complex rituals. A partly disarticulated headless man was found on top of a pile of 250 aurochs bones and 4 children were buried with fox mandibles. Some were interred with what appeared to be heirloom flints while 50 others were arranged in the shape of some type of animal. Also discovered were 3 human schools that had been deliberately defleshed after death and overlaid with lime plaster that was then modeled to form facial features. One of the skulls was painted with a red pigment quarried from central Turkey and another with red ocher.
27,000 bp is a long time to 8,000 bc. Could the same tradition have been maintained for that long or is this simply a chance re-discovery?
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Great big wodge of guess work here but red might equate to fire or blood (both of which could be seen as links to the sacred through their respective mysterious (at the time) properties - heat/life etc.). The Mexican obsession with jade (and possibly turquoise in the American South West - Stan? Forester?) stems from a similar idea. Fires may not be blue or green but stare at the sun for any length of time and that's pretty much the afterimage colour that stays in your field of vision. A jade fragment was left in the mouth of corpses, ostensibly as a useful object of afterlife bribery, but perhaps the ritual evolved from whatever instinct led disparate peoples to use red ochre upon their dead.
Great minds think alike, or even just human minds think alike.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
I don't know about putting jade in the mouths of corpses, but it seems that bright shiny things always have seemed valuable or magical to people. Gold, diamonds, other precious or semiprecious stones,
bird feathers, earth colors (ochres, etc.)
I would think that each group gave its own symbolic meaning to these
materials...such as gold being associated with the sun (a deity), and silver with the moon. Turquoise like the sky.
I would also suggest that humans have almost always adorned their bodies with these materials in the form of jewelry, piercings, tatoos, scarification, body painting--- and the earth (ochre and others) colors, blood, soot, and bright berry juices were about the only pigments available in prehistoric times.
Sometimes various groups behave in ways that seem self- destructive due to religious beliefs. One example is that the Apaches would not eat fish because they were associated with the underworld. Likewise cows in India. What I'm getting at is that humans engage in symbolic thinking
and are not always merely practical.
The Neanderthal molars are definitely different than human ones, equipped with a thick crest rarely seen in people. But, "The total crown formation times in both deciduous and permanent molars were nearly identical with those reported for large samples of modern humans," the study found. And while humans finish growing the roots of their teeth around age nine, the Neanderthal infant tooth finished its root's growth around 8.7 years. The adult tooth also shows growth rates similar to modern humans. All this points to "similar timing of tooth initiation relative to birth in Neanderthals and modern humans," the authors conclude.
From yesterdays Archaeologica news.
For some of the newer members who may not know, I tend to lean to the Multi-regional theory rather than the more popular Out of Africa theory, but probably neither one is correct in the strictest sense. I also tend to have a streak of Diffusionist in me, but the the stuff Charlie has been posting has even got my jaw dropped to the floor.
Don't ask me to quote a source Beag cos I can't remember! But somewhere I read/heard that man, in one form or another, was in Australia before he was in Europe. Made a wrong turn do you think, or perhaps home was nearer Australia than London?
You'd never convince the mainstreamers of that though. While I disagree with several points in the migration model of the Bradshaw Foundation, it is the accepted one right now. It has been posted several times in the forum, and the nearest one is in Rock Art posted by both Stan and Barracuda.
One of the first ventures out of Africa was into the Levant area. The mainstreamers have that branch of HS dying out about 95,000yrs. ago.
Right there is where I disagree the most.
I've never heard Charlie say they were Neanderthals.
An unidentified group of Texas Homos, perhaps...but never Neanderthals!
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
I think Charlie has evidence of humans in Texas at that time. Sometimes though when we talk about the relationship between Clovis points and Solutrean points we are thinking that Solutreans may have HNS genes, but there is no proof of that yet.
Solutrean = one locale of Cro-Magnon.
Mousterian = Neandertal
I think Charlie needs to weigh in here, I don't want to misquote him.
BUT - anything as old as 250,000 yrs. is not Homo Sapien.
