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Been reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind", this piece is mentioned as the earliest proof of the Cognitive Revolution that we know of. It displays how humans were able to envisions things that do not exist, crafting fiction from reality. How early man was able to share stories and how religions probably came to be.
Isn't that begging the question? For one, people can wear a lion headdress, making it something that does exist in real life. Secondly, it seems to be carved from a single tusk, which might have forced some choices when it comes to anatomy, rather than being "as conceived".
> ... so why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?
One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.
I think it doesn’t really need much explaining anyway. Just from their example, 2/3 of those tasks (keeping the fire going and protecting from predators) required just… being awake and reasonably alert. I mean you could spend the time sitting around the fire making arrows (or spears or whatever, not sure what they had in year 40k BC), but maybe they ran out of nice stones to sharpen.
Probably most of us would not want to trade places with a substance hunter/gatherer, but their lives had downtime, right? I would expect their lives to be punctuated by good downtime (got enough food to eat and a good supply of tools, time to relax) as well as bad downtime (wasn’t successful at hunting or gathering, ran out of resources to process).
You are deceived by the propaganda that was largely pushed to promote and rationalize industrial age interests and exploit industrial labor camp factory inmates. Even above people have said things like “no one would want to trade with a subsistence life”, which is based on the assumption that their life of being a wage and/or debt slave or slaver of the system is a superior state of being. Merely historical artifacts we have found and what we can plausibly piece together tell us that at least people’s lives had meaning and were authentic, which most people today in the West simply cannot say with any sincerity.
Are you better off because you can play video games and doom scroll while stuffing yourself with people shop chemicals and then take lizard toxin to control your diabetes and lose weight without doing anything while you have approaching zero authentic human connection, let alone culture not astroturfed by some corporate profit maximizing creative studio?
At least if you’re doing light farming and harvesting and’s spending all your day with your people practicing your cultural traditions passed down through the eons, you’re actually human, not whatever this is in the west today that is having its humanity destroyed by a parasite with every passing day.
The idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were running around 16 hours a day with no downtime is a fantasy to begin with. They had more leisure time than early farmers and many Americans[1]
Just as animals in the wild - especially other apex predators - spend a lot of time sleeping/lounging. A famous example - the lion.
That question does not require any greater explanation than "there was little else to be done, besides waiting for the storm to subside".
The human-animal hybrid immediately brought shamanism to my mind.
I had a project at the Smithsonian's conservation analytical laboratory in the later 90s and made friends with a girl working in the lab that was working on these:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251028779_Three_lat...
(The timing is right at least and the lead author is from the Smithsonian)
She probably shouldn't have but she let me hold them in my hands. You could see that they were made by stuffing a skull with grass then putting the clay over the skull - you could see the grass imprints on the inside. I think they were from 9000 BC, Syria region. Pretty much brand new compared to this lion.
The Eurasian Cave Lion was around there back then and was probably the direct model for the Lion-man sculpture. It was roughly 20% larger than modern African lions. Paleolithic cave paintings (e.g., Chauvet) show the male cave lions lacked the heavy neck manes of modern lions.
40k years from now, a hominid excavates a computer and materializes a login page in the ether. "We think they used this for ritual sacrifice or to brush their teeth or both."
You might enjoy the book "The Weans" by Robert Nathans, <https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2664067-the-weans>
It appears to be a primitive game where the user tries to guess which of 9 images contains “traffic lights” or “motorcycles” (whatever they are).
Between 35,000 and 41,000 years old. Germany.
TIL that Humans have been around for more than 40,000 years! I thought we started around 1000s of BC.
A 67,800-year-old hand stencil was discovered in a limestone cave on Muna Island in Sulawesi, Indonesia
The Madjedbebe rock shelter in the Australian Northern Territory show that people lived in Australia at least 65,000 years ago where stone tools, ground ochre for paint, and food remains were found.
The Neanderthals were still around, until a few tens of thousands of years ago. We lived in the same time and place as them, and occasionally had kids together.
More than 300,000 years.
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