Category Archives: Ancient Humans

The Smartest People Ever?

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

I read a fascinating book called Sapiens that was written by Yuval Harari an historian from Israel. It was one of those books where I learned something new on every page. Harari doesn’t just think outside the box he doesn’t recognized boxes. He is an original thinker like few others.

Harari pointed out that usually in most habitats Sapiens did not feed themselves by hunting. Usually they gathered.  They were hunter-gatherers. Harari described it this way:

“In most habitats, Sapien bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter,’ gathering was Sapiens main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood, and bamboo.”

This not the romantic or idealized picture I had of our ancestors.  I thought they were tough courageous hunters. They were that. But more than that, they were scroungers.    But sometimes the idealized version of events we hold dear has to give ground to other truths. And sometimes we learn our ancestors were amazing. They were just as amazing, but  in ways we have never thought of before. Harari added to his description of them this way:

“Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximize the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about he growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded thunderstorms or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, now to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and now to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Masters of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely.

In other words, the average forager had wider deeper, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited  to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.”

To support this startling conclusion Harari said, “There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain actually decreasedsince the age of foraging.”

I admit I never thought of our  ancestors quite that way. I think the use of the feminine “she” in this quote is not just a nod to avoiding masculine pronouns . This process of foraging, or gathering, was led by women.  Women  were vital in this process. Most of those important jobs were performed by women, while the men went hunting. It reminded me of what I learned in Africa.  The women did the hard work of fetching water I (among many other tasks). The men sat under trees discussing important matters! Women were incredibly smart in hunter-gatherer societies.

In other words ancient Sapiens were smart. Perhaps the smartest in human history as Harari suggests. They had to be in order to survive in a very dangerous world in which they were far from the largest, fastest, or keenest observers. They had to be smart—very smart. And this is what indigenous people were like when Europeans first contacted them! Makes you wonder why anyone would presume they were smarter. Only a deeply entrenched bias could do that.

 

The Original sin

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, New Attitude to Nature

 

Some of my Catholic friends might be surprised that a heathen like me believes in original sin. But it’s true. It is just that it is a little different form the original sin they are supposed to believe in.

When Europeans arrived in North America, (they did not discover it for it had been there a very long time) they came with that a lot of baggage. In particular they came with arrogance epitomized by that famous European attitude of superiority. They were better than everyone and more important than everything else. Everything was subordinate to them. I think this attitude was best exemplified by Cecil Rhodes that famous English colonialist from Africa. He said, “We happen to be the best people in the world. And the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.”These attitudes led to the genocide of indigenous people, barbarous enslavement of African-Americans, domination of women by men, the debasement of all religions except their own nasty versions of Christianity, and the subjugation of nature to the will and power of men.  This genocide Tzvetan Todorov in his book The Conquest of America called the “the greatest genocide in history.” Those attitudes were the original sin of the western hemisphere—the Americas.

The original inhabitants of North America had a very different attitude. Their attitude was more like this:

“Native America is alive. Its roots stretch back 13,000 years…to America’s original explorers. New people who create a new world. From North to  South America distant peoples share one common belief a deep connection to Earth, sky, water and all living things.”

The original explorers of the western hemisphere were not Europeans. They came here long before then. They came before the Egyptians built the pyramids. They came before Christ was born. They were different. They avoided the original sin. Fundamentally, they had a different attitude to nature and to people. They were the ancestors to the Indigenous people of today.

Teresa Ryan, in a recent PBS documentary series, Native America,  put it well, “We are part of this forest as much as the forest is part of us.” This is a fundamentally different attitude to nature and to all living things in it.

Beau Dick, n the same series,  added to that: “All of our ceremonies illustrate that one notion connectedness— not only with our fellow beings with animals and other creatures, but with all of creation.”

This attitude I have called Affinity. This is my word. I have applied it to this philosophy because I wanted a convenient handle. I considered the expression “being-in-the-world” invented by Martin Heidegger. But his philosophy is very difficult and  I am not sure I entirely understand it. He really uses it to apply just to humans, so it seems to me, but it does latch onto the very important basic notion that we are not separate and apart from nature. We are not alienated from it. We not apart from the world; we are a part of the world! We cannot hope to understand humans unless we take into consideration that they are part of the world. But, in my view, unlike Heidegger’s, this applies to all beings not just human beings.

From this fundamental principle, so different from the Europeans who later invaded their territory, a multitude of important consequences flow. As the PBS documentary Native America, said, “From this deep respect for nature, people create great nations.” That does not mean they were perfect. Not at all. But they were different in important respects. They had a lot they could contribute to the invaders, and they had a lot to learn from them. It is however very difficult, as the Europeans found after they invaded, to learn from the other whom you despise or at least do not respect. Feelings of supremacy are not a sound basis for learning. This does not mean they learned nothing from their hosts. It is just that they could have learned so much more had their feelings of superiority been blunted.

Many of the nations in the New World grappled with war and peace. They “develop governments from dictatorships to a democracy that will inspire the United States constitution.” Yet amazingly, here comes that powerful feeling of superiority again, that same constitution contained racist presumptions of superiority that helped to install the original sin as the basis of their society and has to this day prevented the United States from healing from that fundamental sin against at least 3 groups of people; Native Americans and African-Americans, and lets not forget, women. Of course, these white men also presumed to be superior to women.  That was also part of the fundamental sin of white male supremacy that still haunts the United States,  Canada, and frankly this entire western hemisphere. Not that the other hemisphere is much better. The other aspect of white male supremacy is supremacy over all animals, and even, all of nature. This last bias is still the least understood of these presumptions, but I believe eventually we will catch on that this too was a powerful illusion. It too has had a profound effect the west.

Sadly, the Europeans who arrived in the New World thought they were superior to the natives they found, to anyone who was not white, to women, and to all of nature. As a result they often failed to learn from their “inferiors.”

That deep sense of superiority drove the settlers in the New World and ultimately poisoned their relationship with indigenous peoples and African-American slaves.  The west is still suffering from that influence and non-Indigenous must recognized that ill influence or that relationship will never be whole.

 

Montezuma’s Castle

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Ancient Humans, Arizona, civilization, Indigenous Issues

Our son Stef and his friend Charli came to visit us in Arizona. One fo the things they wanted to see was Sedona. So we headed out one day. Along the way, thanks to Chris’ insight,  we stopped at the badly misnamed Montezuma National Monument.

The Monument illustrates wonderfully the life of the southern Sinagua Native Americans who lived here hundreds of years ago. The Monument is located in the Verde Valley. The northern Sinagua people as well as the Hohokam people’s culture heavily influenced the architecture and farming that was developed here.

Ancestors of today’s Puebloan people started building the “castle” in the wall about 700 years ago. No one knows why they built their huge connected homes onto the side of the cliff, but there are various theories that have been proposed. Defence was likely part of the reason. Once the step-ladders would have been withdrawn it would have been difficult, but not impossible for invaders to attack. From the cliff the residents enjoyed a commanding view of the creek, the fields, and surrounding countryside. It was also a place where the occasional flooding of the Beaver Creek would not have cause serious problems. Having homes on a south facing wall would have been very advantageous in winter.

What is now wrongly called the castle, probably housed about 35 people. Including families in nearby pueblos and rock shelters 150 to 200 people may have lived here. It is a five-story 20-room building that occupies a cliff recess 100 feet above the valley floor. Early European settlers marveled at it and wrongly assumed it was Aztec in origin. That is why they named it after Montezuma. Very close to it was a  larger 45-room condominium that has most disappeared. Only the remnants remain. For most of the time it was occupied people found a reliable source of water in the creek below.

The indigenous people who lived here belonged to a network of villages united by kinship, agriculture and cultural traditions that stretched for miles along the nearby Verde River into which Beaver Creek flows.

There were scattered villages in the region ranging in size from about 600 to 1,100 people. By 1200 CE (Common Era) communities extended all along the Verde River and its tributaries, such as Beaver Creek. Around 1300 C.E., they were all part of a complex settlement network that is now largely lost on account of modern residential developments. 40 large villages in eh area. The flood plains below were used to grow crops. They were also used for travelling. About 6,000 people in the valley were connected to much large populations of Native Americans to the north and south.

Originally, Indigenous People roamed the region for thousands of years, hunting and gathering food. The area’s characteristic farming and architecture emerged later influenced by near by Hohokam and the Northern Sinagua.

The first permanent settlement is believed to have been established by Hohokam people between 700 and 900  (CE). These farmers grew corn, beans, squash, and cotton using sophisticated techniques like canal irrigation to draw water from large distances. These people were civilized!  I want to emphasize that. This is a them I intend to return to in my blog. They also produced their characteristic red-on-buff pottery and built ballcourts. They had one-room pit houses perched on terraces that overlooked their fields in the bottom-lands.

The people lived mainly by farming but supplemented their staple crops by hunting and gathering.  Game included deer, antelope, rabbit, bear, muskrat and duck. Corn was a very important food. They also mined a local salt deposit a few miles away. There is evidence that they traded widely. Likely salt was highly sought by indigenous people throughout the west. They lived a good life, probably a lot better than the Europeans who came to visit (and plunder).

Sinagua craftsmen and artists created stone tools like axes, knives, and hammers. They created manos and mutates for grinding corn. Other crafts included bone awls, needles, woven garments of cotton, and ornaments of shells, turquoise, and local stone (argillite) for personal wear.

Southern Sinagua builders used local materials for their pueblos. The cobble walls Chris and I saw a nearby Tuzigoot a couple of years ago, are very large but poorly balanced. The limestone at Montezuma castle is fairly soft and splits unevenly. Yet Montezuma Castle, protected as it is from the elements, stood for more than 700 years. I don’t think my house will stand that long.  It is one of the best-preserved prehistoric sites in the American Southwest.

By the 1950s the “castle” was no longer stable and visitations had to be prohibited. Until  then tourists could crawl around the homes.  In 1964 the ceiling had to be repaired. Maintenance now is constantly required.

Indigenous groups occupied the cliff dwellings between approximately 1,100 and 1,400 A.D. the area also contain a larger pueblo and many small alcove homes in the cliff face along Beaver Creek.

The buildings they built above ground and often on the cliff face, were masonry dwellings that started appearing in about 1125. At first these were small structures, but later they built pueblos. By 1150 they started building large pueblos often on hilltops or in cliff alcoves. Montezuma Castle and nearby Tuzigoot village, which Chris and I visited a couple of years ago reached their maximum size and population in the 1300s.

Various theories have been offered as to why the site was abandoned in about 1,400 a couple of centuries before the Spanish arrived. The leading theory is prolonged drought caused by climate change. Over population may also have been a factor, as is happening again in the much of the southern US. People tend to flock to nice places! Look at us. Diseases and conflicts between groups may also have influenced the move.  Some have speculated that they left for religious reasons. People do strange things for religion. Many southern Sinagua people migrated to the north to pueblo villages. Some likely stayed in the Verde Valley and returned to hunter gathering.

Today we enjoyed a brief but fascinating journey into the land of Native Americans of the region. It was worth the trip. Next I will blog about Sedona.