Lake Baikal Skeleton and Ancient Americans

[uniface]

Absent the kind of data this study presents, speculations that hinge on could have are specious.

My grandmother could have assassinated President Kennedy.

Multiplying hypotheses in a vacuum of evidence is the way people with nothing on the ball get to pretend they're "contributors."

21st Century Soccer Mom Archaeology.

[Cognito]

Why does it have to Asia to America?
Why not the other way?
North and eastward after an ocean crossing.

Or even multiple back and forth?

It wasn't just one way, but most people assume the migration was only going east. Michael Hammer at the Univ. of Arizona has already demonstrated back-migrated human paleo-genetics from North America to Asia.

Animal species crossed Beringia from the Americas (where they originated) into Asia in ancient times such as camels, horses, mammoths, etc. Those who don't think ancient peoples also also traveled from the Americas to Asia ... simply lack imagination.

[Tiompan]

And we can at least know, from cave paintings, that Cro Magnon practiced hunting magic.

There was a lot to respond in your post Shawomet ,although I did cover some of it in some more general comments , here’s one to one specific sentence .
The “hunting magic “ hypothesis for Paleolithic art like totemism was an early suggestion from Frazer , Bégouen , Reinach etc , then later , more famously by Brieul in Europe and heizer and Baumhoff in the US , it has many problems e.g. the depictions are not always of local fauna that were actually hunted but simply the more powerful , the theory is all encompassing and ignores other possibilities , animals are not the majority interest in the Paleolithic paintings /engravings i.e. abstract motifs are far more common , rock art sites with animal depictions were often away from the hunting areas and directly associated with settlement , the theory demeans and reduces what may well have been a rich symbolic cosmology to basic subsistence .The hypothesis was dismissed by most researchers including those who were to suggest a shamanistic explanation . That's another another sentence and another story , meanwhile a relatively local (for you ) and interesting link that covers some of the same ground .
http://www.petroglyphs.us/article_coso_sheep_cult.htm

[Tiompan]

speculations that hinge on could have are specious.


Multiplying hypotheses in a vacuum of evidence is the way people with nothing on the ball get to pretend they're "contributors."

This is exactly what Eliade did when he got the detail on Siberian shamanism wrong , see http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/balzerm/ who commented Eliade “is remarkably inaccurate on details about Siberian shamanism.” , and more importantly extrapolated from cherry picked travellers tales into the urreligion of the entire Paleolithic world .

[shawomet]

Absent the kind of data this study presents, speculations that hinge on could have are specious.

My grandmother could have assassinated President Kennedy.

Multiplying hypotheses in a vacuum of evidence is the way people with nothing on the ball get to pretend they're "contributors."

21st Century Soccer Mom Archaeology.

Thanks, but I was hoping I had a little on the ball, maybe not I do believe your grandmother is innocent.

Tiompan, thanks for the education. My only point, if I was making any at all, is that the psychotropic plants all affect the same area of the brain, nearly all are dependent on DMT or tripping the DMT already present in our brains(AKA, the " spirit molecule"), the realm that opens up requires similar spiritual technologies to navigate, similar aides like chanting/drums are often used to enhance.
A broadly similar cosmology does emerge across the board in the sense of spirit guides, underworlds, etc. if you look at the shamanic practices of Australian aborigines, there doesn't seem any reason to believe that approach to interpreting reality does not extend deep into Paleolithic times in Australia, into both an epistemological and temporal "dreamtime". I believe the same would be true in Amazonia. I guess I was speaking of a generalized cosmology, and not the particulars. The general approach to developing a manner of interpreting the human place in a greater whole. Yes, it is speculation, but altering consciousness to access realms that integrate the physical realm into both higher and lower realms likely began pretty early. Or am I the only one who even suspects that? Isn't a fairly great age attributed to the anthropomorphs in Canyonlands National Park? I thought in the neighborhood of 8-9000 years? I don't subscribe to ancient astronauts to explain any bizarre anthropomorphic image on a rock. Transformed humans/other realm beings seen in altered states strikes me as more likely. So, in any event, I'm talking about the cosmologies that develop once humans accessed altered states and applied what was encountered/learned in incorporating everyday reality into that greater unseen cosmos. Just seems like humans have been ingesting stuff to "go out of their minds" for a long time. My apologies, though, if all this is irrelevant, or if I appear to be "pretending" here. I certainly do not have the knowledge some of you folks have, and I guess I let Eliade pull the wool over my eyes some 40 years ago.

[Cognito]

My grandmother could have assassinated President Kennedy.

I have it on good authority that Uniface's grandmother WAS ON THE GRASSY KNOLL when President Kennedy was assassinated!

Sources: National Enquirer article and X-Files random comment.

[Tiompan]

Shawomet , no problem , you don’t appear to be pretending at all . Fwiw , I don’t see why prehistoric peoples as early as the Paleolithic didn’t ingest psychoactive substances despite the lack of evidence and the caveat , still applicable today , availability , knowledge of preparation when necessary , and personal and cultural values may have been opposed to , or just not interested in ,ingestion . Similarly , although we have no way of knowing , some form of animism may have been the cosmology of choice in the period . Those cultures that may have ingested psychoactive substances and or had an animist belief system may well have had ritual specialists , medicine men , magicians , priests with distinctive abilities and duties , differing according to the culture and cosmology , they would not be like the shamen of post medieval Siberia Siberia who had their own distinctive abilities and duties defined by the period culture and cosmology . We can’t know about the beliefs in prehistory but we know from ethnography ,that Native Australian cosmology i.e. the Dreamtime , has no historical use of psychoactive substances or shamen .

It is often suggested that rock art motifs are somehow related to ASC ‘s or a result of the influence of psychoactive substances but these same motifs , spirals , chevrons , cross hatchings , arcs i.e. entoptic forms are found the world over in the drawings of children and the doodles of adults many of whom have never taken psychoactive substances or involved in any activity at the time of production that was related to ASC inducement . These motifs are our genetic inheritance and do not need drugs or any form of activity for their production . If the prehistoric rock engravers or painters had taken psychoactive substances and had been influenced by the experience we might expect a far more varied and interesting repertoire of motifs ,yet what we find , is the same motifs recurring time and time again . Contemporary artists who we know for sure as having had psychedelic experiences and even accepted being influenced by them do not necessarily produce art that is similar to rock art i.e. the psychedelic artists of the 60’s ,Victor Moscoso ,Stanley Mouse , Robert Crumb etc and there are plenty of other artists who are considered to have produced art that is psychedelic yet they have never indulged . How many times have you heard “(s) he must have been tripping when (s)he produced that " spoken about Bach , Richard Dadd , Mervyn Peake , Dante , Zappa ,when we know otherwise .
George

[shawomet]

Thanks, Tiompan, for the thoughtful reply. FWIW, I can see some ancient motifs just pressing my fingers against my eyes for awhile. I guess I'm looking for the earliest form of the answer to the question "what does this all mean?" I can't imagine what a Paleolithic mind feels like. I don't know what the world looks like through those eyes. Not the landscape. The mindscape.
I don't even know if what I know as consciousness was the exact same experience of consciousness to someone living then.
But I think these substances have been taken by so many shaman centered cultures, it seems they might have played a role in demonstrating there was "something" beyond the physical domain.

So I take it Eliade fell out of favor sometime after I enjoyed his stuff, the 70's I guess

This is a curve ball, it's not everyone's idea of worthwhile thinking, things like this tend to get polarizing reactions.
Apart from this, it can be said there was encouraging research published recently on the highly beneficial results of psilocybin sessions on human psychological health. As for ayahuasca, I admire the courage. I know people who have had sessions, and it is not easy. Anyway, The Daily Grail is a good "think outside the box" site and they posted this piece awhile back...

http://www.dailygrail.com/Guest-Article ... ychedelics

[uniface]

So I take it Eliade fell out of favor sometime after I enjoyed his stuff, the 70's I guess

With the armchair authorities.

[Tiompan]

So I take it Eliade fell out of favor sometime after I enjoyed his stuff, the 70's I guess

With the armchair authorities.

If anyone exemplies armchair authority it's Eliade .

No first hand experience ,relying on the cherry picked writings of early travellers with no anthropological or ethnographic experience , ignoring earlier and contemporary contradictory reports , extrapolating the cherry picked tales of herders from the late historical period living in circumlpolar regions to foragers many millenia earlier all over the globe .
Then , when researchers did get out of the armchair they discovered that his "findings " were " remarkably inaccurate on details about Siberian shamanism.” .Even Wendy Dollinger , Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago said his work had advanced the knowledge of his time "within a body of assumptions that we no longer accept", his students suggested that "Shamanism " was “sacred fiction” written for “poets, playwrights” and that's the proponents . Had he read Casteneda there would have been further sacred fiction to add to the brew sitting by the armchair .

[uniface]

That is the sort of thing you read any time there's been an underlying paradigm change. Because that's what its mostly concerned with -- not so much with substance as with the process by which data are sorted and conclusions reached. And whether (or not) these are, accordingly, "valid."

Archaeologists who were pontificating in their classrooms without getting their hands dirty or their knees sore did that to the people who were excavating pre-Clovis sites for 20 years.

[Tiompan]

That's exactly the point ,Eliade never got his hands dirty ,it was those who came after ,did the work and pointed out his failings , that was the paradigm shift .

[uniface]

As I see it, closer to the gist of this post by a friend on a completely unrelated topic board :

Unfortunately in my past profession senior management (particularly HR) just loved to find a new way of doing things. Almost always the new gospel will find fault with the previously revered management process - it seems to be the firmest bedrock for validating the new system.

Campbell, Eliade et al. were synthesists. They took the great mass of what had been written and made sense of it. That's as Old School as it gets. (The new regime always has harsh judgements of the old regime. And is rather full of itself, as a rule).

The people running the show now don't want lucid sense. Or the people who write books that people "outside the field" find interesting making it. For starters, because it gives normal people an opportunity to call the current dogmas into question and a basis for evaluating them. So everything has to be recently published in a peer-reviewed journal of record, guaranteeing the promulgation of the mandatory newthink perspective on whatever issues are involved.

FWIW, I find Eliade's outline of Shamanism rings pretty true overall. This on the assumption that the structure of the universe and of the human wiring system are pretty constant across time and space.

And yes, people like Castaneda are invaluable. But if you had a dollar for every academic who ever denounced him as a fraud and a charlatan, you'd be rich. I recall one massive book in particular that must have run to 400 pages about him that dissected out every observation he'd ever recorded and identified the "source" he'd "plagerised it from" in previous literature. The realisation that peoples' experiences demonstrate patterns that repeat seems to have escaped them. Or, more likely, it wasn't convenient for them to acknowledge.

IOW, I'm trying to point out that substance and process are two different considerations.

[Tiompan]

Eliades’s outline of shamanism , was based entirely on second and third hand cherry picked travellers tales and has been shown by those who have actually done the fieldwork to be so flawed as to be useless . We have moved on since it was written ,if you are really interested in shamanism then there is slew of works by skilled experienced fieldworkers . It is unlikely to “ring true “ to you but do you have any experience in the field that can refute it ?, as they have Eliade . This isn’t “new think” it has been around a long time and is empirically based , unlike the earlier “gospel “ which was entirely armchair , non empirical and selective .
There is more to the problem than just getting shamanism wrong ,the real problem is the legacy of 19th C views of Frazer , Morgan and Tylor , with their Darwinian inspired cultural evolutionary models of Magic to religion , savagery – barbarism –civilisation which inspired Eliade to view those herders in the late historical period as occupying a similar lowly evolutionary niche to the forgers of the Paleolithic whilst ignoring the abundant evidence that any magico –religious or religious systems does not stand still but evolve , we have seen this in the historical period with shamanism .The ultimate arrogance of course was the suggestion that by extrapolating from the tales he could describe the basis of all cosmologies in the Paleolithic , a fantasy greater than that of Castaneda .

[uniface]

Having said my piece, I retire from the field.