Archaeologica.org

All -

Given that this site is the oldest discovered so far, the 164k question is "How did this techne become globally distributed within the next 100k years, including offshore sites which presumably could only be reached by seagoing watercraft"?

http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_sum ... _id=110395

http://www.helium.com/tm/691741/amidst- ... s-seagulls

http://clas.asu.edu/newsevents/newsrele ... 172007.htm


hoka hey


john

introduction of shellfish into the early human diet might be the result of climate changes that caused the availability of earthbound foods to decrease,

Or....maybe that was when someone invented the boat...enabling man to gather the bounty of the sea?

Just tossing out the occasional random thought which flashes through my head.

Minimalist wrote:

introduction of shellfish into the early human diet might be the result of climate changes that caused the availability of earthbound foods to decrease,

Or....maybe that was when someone invented the boat...enabling man to gather the bounty of the sea?

Just tossing out the occasional random thought which flashes through my head.

Minimalist -

All I know from a lifetime of fishing is that "The bigger fish, and the most fish, lie just beyond the reach of your cast".

And just how did that impulse get hardwired into me?


john

And just how did that impulse get hardwired into me?

Evolution?

Minimalist wrote:

And just how did that impulse get hardwired into me?

Evolution?

Oh boy, Minimalist

You have just stepped right into the 1,000,000,064k question.

The following might be interpreted as a rant. It is not. The lines of cleavage and conjunction between cognition and evolution are, in my opinion, driving the entire set of present hominid arguments.

Define, or a least speculate about the web of relationships between the development of cognition and what we call evolution. And Creationism is absolutely banned from the scope of this argument, because it depends on the spurious assumption that there is an individual "omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent" identity, rather than the manifestly obvious collective identity, i.e., the fall of Wm. Blake's sparrow.

Side note to Ishtar: To what degree do the peoples we call animals, fish, birds etc., including rocks and trees and water, possess intra-specific ability to communicate?

(St. Francis of Assisi, to me, is possibly a remnant Paleolithic shaman).

In the last couple of weeks, here, the Killdeer have been calling out in the fields at night, House Finches and Song Sparrows have begun their mating songs, the Canadian Geese are getting restless, the Alder and Willow buds are disturbing the leafless winter branches with a purple haze, and so on, and so forth. In a few weeks the Skunk Cabbage and Cattails will become "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower".

These events are my mother tongue. As instantaneously recognized and understood as English is to me, and with far earlier roots.

In my opinion, the last few thousand years has been a concerted exercise by the politicians and the priests to beat the mother tongue out of all of us - like the 19th and 20th century mass transportation of American Indian children into schools which "taught" them to be White - with the ultimate goal of "reducing our cognitive ability to a maneagable level".

I do not think you need to guess my view on that one.

Anyway - one final intuitively obvious leap - the Yin/Yan, or Ying/Yang relationship is, to me, amazingly similar to the relationship between cognition and evolution. Only we are too stupid to realize that its not about heirarchy, but in fact, harmony. The perceptions of the Tao te Ching, though written down, are far older than written history.


john

As much as I lean to the idea of the early discovery of the advantages of the boat, I do think leaping from one cave at the southern tip of Africa all the way to Australia is a pretty big jump.

Is there dated evidence along the way?

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

Is there dated evidence along the way?

Here is one attempt to date the journey of man along the coastal route. It doesn't deal with the boat issue however and I have several disagreements with it. But, it's a start.

John, your comment about the schools ultimate goal of "reducing our cognitive ability to a manageable level” was not limited to Indians.

My Grandmother was a school teacher in northern Illinois. When she was in teachers collage part of her curriculum was to be careful not to teach the kids to think too much.

They were to be taught their “3R’s” because then they would be a more valuable working class. But if they began to think at to high a level, they may upset the apple cart.

An 8th grade education was perfectly good level for most employers.

It was the “rich” kids, whose parents were bankers, lawyers, doctors, etc that went on to high school and then collage. The only exception was smart girls who were willing to go into teaching. It was acceptable for them to continue their schooling.

This was in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. She got married and quit teaching around 1908. All her kids went as far as free schooling would allow.

You have just stepped right into the 1,000,000,064k question.

I consider that my prime function around here.

Minimalist wrote:

You have just stepped right into the 1,000,000,064k question.

I consider that my prime function around here.

Minimalist -

But you must provide an answer, also.


john

Answers are much harder. I do agree that creationism is out of the running though.

I'm still not convinced that HNS and HSS are different species which were incapable of interbreeding anymore than whites, blacks and orientals are different species incable of interbreeding...which obviously they are not. So some basic answers are still needed and I hope I live long enough to have those answers found.

In the interim, I'm a solid supporter of the early boats premise. Groups which learned to go to sea would have found a rich harvest of food there. Such must be considered a very useful adaptation...but it would be evolution via the mind not the genes.

I don't know...probably too late for me to be making any sense. I'll probably look at this tomorrow and delete it.

These events are my mother tongue. As instantaneously recognized and understood as English is to me, and with far earlier roots.

In my opinion, the last few thousand years has been a concerted exercise by the politicians and the priests to beat the mother tongue out of all of us

... we are too stupid to realize that its not about heirarchy, but in fact, harmony. The perceptions of the Tao te Ching, though written down, are far older than written history....

In humans we call the mother tongue intuition, in other animals we call it instinct. Although a very ancient legacy necessary for survival, our mother tongue has been trivialized since it cannot be taxed or controlled by modern-day governments or religion.

We have been brainwashed to believe that we are smart and the ancients were dumb since they didn't have the modern-day conveniences that we do. However, drop any of us into a 40,000 year old environment and see how long we would survive before becoming lunch. Sounds like a great reality show.

ntroduction of shellfish into the early human diet might be the result of climate changes that caused the availability of earthbound foods to decrease,

So just when did man become sufficient in numbers to run out of land food?
And what about those who didn't live any where near the sea?
Could it not be that they found it much easier to chase down a Limpet than a Deer?
In adition, the 'Club' insists that the early migrations, to places like Oz, was along the shore line, with regular forays in land for a snack?

john wrote:
Side note to Ishtar: To what degree do the peoples we call animals, fish, birds etc., including rocks and trees and water, possess intra-specific ability to communicate?

To the shaman, everything is energy and all matter is dancing energy - it's just that some dances are a hell of lot slower than others. For instance, the energy in a rock is dancing a lot slower than the energy in a plant.

Everything is moving. Nothing is still. It is called the Cosmic Dance.

The energy is made up of spirit matter - which is where the idea of nature gods come from. The Indians call them devas. So for instance, you have a deva for every specific function, or dance, in nature, and it is those devas that communicate with each other and also higher up. Everything is inter-connected in the form of a Web.

This is not a theory. This is what shamans experience when they journey into the realms of causality, or go into Dreamtime, or whatever you want to call it. I don't particularly like the term Dreamtime because, although it is poetic, it has connotations of unreality. On the other hand, I also don't like what we're taught to call it these days, in core shamanism, which is Ordinary Reality (this one) and Non Ordinary Reality (that one).

Hope this helps.

I'd like to add an addendum to my previous post on shamanism, as I want to be clear about what I mean when I say: "Shamans say such and such" or "Shamans see such and such..."

I do also see and experience these things myself, but if I say 'I', that might give the impresson that it's just me - and who's to say that I may not just be a bit of a nutter who goes wandering off with the fairies. So I say "shamans say..." which they do anyway. It's all recorded in a book that provides the nearest thing we have to any kind of scientific or empiric evidence for shamans and shamanic technques and that is Mircae Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

Eliade is dead now, but he was professor of Professor of History of Religions at Harvard and has a chair there named after him. His book on shamanism was first published in France in 1951, and basically it's a compilation of scholarly reports from anthropologists who studied shamans and shamanic cultures from all the over world - from Siberia to South America, and India and Tibet to Australia. Finland and the Eskimos. This was the first time anyone had brought all this information together in one place and published it.

These anthropologists wrote their reports on shamanic practises using the usual objective way of remaining outside the action as a neutral observer. So for a long time, few really understood what actually happened when the shaman went into trance; we had only had their reports of what they say happened, and some of them were very forthcoming on this to these anthropologists.

So the by-word was 'non-involvement' and to study these shamans in the same way we may study rats in cage in a lab ... until another anthropologist, Michael Harner, who was working with a tribe in South America, decided to change all that. He realised that in order to really understand shamanism, he needed to learn to go into trance himself and have a practical inside and subjective experience of where the shaman actually goes.

Harner's first shamanic journey was such a revelation to him that it transformed his life. Over time, he went from being an anthropologist to being a shaman and also founding the American Foundation for Shamanic Studies: http://www.shamanism.org/. He is almost single handedly responsible for the sudden surge in interest in shamanism among us previously non-shamanic folk, and the training of thousands of shamans.

The British branch of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies is called the Sacred Trust, and it is with them that I'm undergong my training. I'm just about to start the second year of their two-year Shamanic Practitioner training course. Here's the link to the Sacred Trust: http://www.sacredtrust.org/

I should add that before I started the course, I already had a very thorough understanding of what shamanism was about from my years of study in India and also back here in the UK. I just didn't have the practical experience.

So I hope that's demystified what can seem to be a very mystifying subject!