Ideas

by Peter Watson

  More controversial still is the work of the Danish linguist Holger Pederson and the Russians Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aron Dolgopolsky, who believe that all languages of Europe and Asia and even north Africa–the so-called Indo-European tongues, Semitic, Uralic, Altaic and even the Eskimo-Aleut languages across the Bering Strait in Canada–were descended from a remote ‘ancestor’, called Nostratic, from the Latin adjective nostras, meaning ‘of our country, native’.41 (And meaning that, of 6 billion people in the world today, 4 billion speak Nostratic languages.42) This act of ‘linguistic palaeontology’ takes us back, they say, some 12,000–15,000 years. It has an even more controversial relationship with an equally contentious entity, known as Dene-Sino-Caucasian, which includes languages as diverse as Basque, Chinese, Sumerian and Haida (spoken in British Columbia and Alaska). The relationship between Chinese and Na-Dene has been recognised since the 1920s but, besides being further proof of the links between New World peoples and those of eastern Asia, it raises an even more controversial possibility. This is that, perhaps, proto-Dene-Sino-Caucasian was spoken by the original inhabitants of Eurasia, and the people who moved into the Americas, but then the earliest farmers, who spoke proto-Nostratic, overcame them, and displaced them and their language.43 This theory is supported by the very latest evidence, which finds a particular mutation of mitochondrial DNA shared between India, Pakistan, central Asia and Europe.44

  This is highly speculative (at best), as–inevitably–are the claims of some linguists, Merritt Ruhlen chief among them, who claim to be able to distinguish a Proto-Global or Proto-World language. While Dolgopolsky has published etymologies of 115 proto-Nostratic words, Ruhlen and his colleagues have published 45 ‘global etymologies’ of words which, they believe, indicate a connection between all the world’s languages. Here are three of the etymologies–the reader may judge their credibility.45

  MANO, meaning man. This is found as follows: Ancient Egyptian, Min, the name of a phallic god; Somali, mun = male; Tama, an East Sudan language, ma = male; Tamil, mantar = people, men; Gondi, manja = man, person; Austric, whose people call themselves man or mun; Squamish (a native Canadian language), man = husband; Wanana (South American), meno = man; Kaliana, mino = man, person; Guahibo, amona = husband; Indo-European, including English, man.

  TIK, meaning finger or one. Gur (Africa), dike = 1; Dinka (African), tok = 1; Hausa (African), (daya)tak = only one; Korean, teki = 1; Japanese, te = hand; Turkish, tek = only; Greenland-Eskimo, tik = index finger; Aleut, tik = middle finger; Tlingit, tek = 1; Amerind (Karok, tik = finger, hand; Mangue, tike = 1; Katembri, tika = toe); Boven Mbian (New Guinea), tek = fingernail; Latin, dig(-itus) = finger, decem = 10.

  AQ’WA meaning water. Nyimang (Africa), kwe = water; Kwama (Africa), uuku = water; Janjero (Africa), ak(k)a = water; Japanese, aka = bilge water; Ainu, wakka = water; Amerind (Allentaic, aka = water; Culino, yaku = water and waka = river; Koraveka, ako = drink; Fulnio, waka = lake); Indo-European (Latin, aqua, Italian aqua = water).

  Dolgopolsky’s construction of the actual words in proto-Nostratic shows, he says, that the speakers of the language ‘were not familiar with agriculture, animal husbandry and pottery’ but his claims that they used ‘bows and arrows and fishing nets’ were attacked by fellow linguists.46 He was also able to reconstruct what foods were available (eggs, fish, honey), a variety of tools (flint knives, hooks, poles), leather footwear, parts of the body (spleen, the neck), kinship terms (father, mother, in-laws, members of the clan) and supernatural entities (casting of spells, magic).47 He found no word for a large body of water and so, partly for this reason, located the original homeland of Nostratic speakers inland in south-west Asia.48

  Attempts have also been made to reconstruct the way and order in which languages formed. An experiment published in 2003 reported that a chimpanzee in Atlanta had suddenly started ‘talking’, in that he had made up four ‘words’, or stable sounds, standing for ‘grapes’, ‘bananas’, ‘juice’ and ‘yes’. Among humans, according to Gyula Décsy, of Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana, the various features of language developed as follows:

  H and e, the first vocal sounds, and the sounds made by Neanderthals, say 100,000 years ago

  ‘Timbric sounds’ (nasal)–u, i, a, j, w = 25,000 years ago

  w, m, p, b = 15,000 years ago

  t/d, k/g = 12,000 years ago

  I/you, here/there, stay/go, good/bad = 10,000 years ago

  Third person = 9,000 years ago.49

  Some may feel that this speculation has been taken as far as it can go, the more so as other scholars have recently emphasised the levels of disagreement in this area. For example, Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who specialises in linguistics, argues that language began ‘two to four million years ago’, and Robin Dunbar attracted a great deal of interest in the mid-1990s with his theory that speech developed from grooming in chimpanzees. In effect, sounds allowed early humans to ‘groom’ more than one person at a time.50

  No less intriguing and controversial than the emergence of language is the emergence of consciousness. The two were presumably related but, according to Richard Alexander, a zoologist from the University of Michigan, the key factor here would have been the development of early humans’ social intelligence. We have seen that one consequence of bipedalism was an increase in the division of labour between males and females, leading to the nuclear family. This in itself, say some palaeontologists, might have been enough to stimulate an awareness of human differences, between men and women and between self and not-self, at the least a rudimentary form of consciousness. Then, as humans came to live in larger groups, co-operating with each other and competing against other groups, the appreciation of human differences would have been all-important in developing a sense of self, and the prediction of the future–what other groups might do in certain circumstances–would have highlighted the present and how it should be organised. The recognition of kin would also have been significant in evolving a sense of self, as would the development of techniques of deception in one’s own self-interest.51 Alexander believes that these two factors–self/not-self and present/future–were the basis not just of consciousness but of morality (the rules by which we live) and that the scenario-building (as he puts it) which was required helped to evolve such social/intellectual activities as humour, art, music, myth, religion, drama and literature.52 It would have also been the basis for primitive politics.53 This is another field where speculation is running ahead of the evidence.

  Merlin Donald, mentioned in the last chapter, has a different view. It will be recalled that, for him, the first two modes of thought were ‘episodic’ (in apes), and ‘mimetic’ (in H. erectus). His second transition, to the third mode, was to ‘mythic’ thought. To begin with, he says (and this is based on an analysis of present-day ‘stone age’ tribes), language was first used to create conceptual models of the universe, grand unifying syntheses, as individual and group self-consciousness emerged with language. Language may eventually have been used in many other ways, he says, but this was its first use and purpose.54

  For Donald, the final transition was to theoretic thinking or culture. This is shown in the inventions and artefacts that suggest the existence of apparently analytic thought skills that contain germinal elements ‘leading to later theoretic developments’.55 Examples he gives include fired ceramics at 25,000 BP, boomerangs at 15,000 BP, needles, tailored clothing, the bow and arrow, lunar records, rope, bricks at about 12,000 BP–and of course the domestication of plants and animals.56 The final phase in the demythologising of thought came with the development of natural philosophy, or science, in classical Greece.

  Many of the discoveries described above are piecemeal and fragmentary. Nevertheless, taken together they show the gradual development of rudimentary ideas, when and (in some cases) where they were first tried out. It is a picture full of gaps but in recent years some palaeontologists and archaeologists have begun to build a synthesis. Inevitably, this t
oo involves speculation.

  One aspect of this synthesis is to say that ‘civilisation’, which has traditionally been held to develop in western Asia around 5,000 years ago, can now be held to have begun much earlier. Many researchers have noticed that in the Upper Palaeolithic there are regional variations in stone tools–as if local ‘cultures’ were developing.57 Cave art, Venus figurines, the existence of grinding stones at 47,000 BP and textiles at 20,000+ BP, together with various forms of notation, in fact amount to civilisation, they say.

  One of the most important examples of early notation has recently been re-evaluated in a potentially significant way. This is the ‘La Marche antler’. Discovered in the cave of La Marche, in the Vienne department of western France, in 1938, this shows an engraving of two horses, with several rows of marks above them. The antler first came to prominence in 1972 when it was analysed by Alexander Marshack, who concluded that it was a record of lunar notation, accumulated over seven-and-a-half months.58 In the 1990s, it was reexamined by Francesco d’Errico, referred to earlier in connection with the Berekhat Ram figurine and the so-called Slovenian flute. D’Errico examined the notches on the La Marche antler under a powerful microscope. He concluded that the marks had all been made at the same time, not accumulated over months, and that they had nothing to do with a lunar cycle. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, the notches represented, or measured, but he noted that they were not dissimilar from the notches used in cuneiform writing. Since, as we shall see in Chapter 4, cuneiform began as a way to record commercial transactions (counting bales of hay, or pitchers of wine, for example), d’Errico suggests that perhaps the La Marche antler may be understood in a similar fashion, as proto-writing.59

  Paul Bahn goes further. He has suggested that there appears to be a link between the decorated caves of the Pyrenees and eastern Cantabria and the many thermal and mineral springs in the vicinity of these sites. Perhaps, he says, these centres played a role in the mythology of Palaeolithic times. The widespread occurrence of serpentine and zig-zag lines, almost invariably associated with water, is no accident and, he speculates, may be associated with a mother-goddess cult. The zig-zag is a common motif, often associated with fish, and a human-like figure at Les Eyzies in France, a site dating back 30,000 years, shows a zig-zag inscribed on the figure’s torso.60 A bone fragment discovered in 1970 at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria suggests this sign may go back to the time of the Neanderthals. The same applies to M-shaped and V-shaped carvings, which recall feminine symbols, such as the uterus and vulva. These symbols were repeated well into the Bronze Age on water vessels.

  Many specialists claim that carved or notched bones are tallies of hunters, others say that the signs can be divided into male (lines and dots) and female (ovals and triangles) and that Ice Age humans really were on the brink of an alphabet. This may be going too far but what does seem clear is that, in covering bones with carved images alongside a series of dots, in rows and columns, early humans were constructing what anthropologists call Artificial Memory Systems–and that, after all, is what writing is. Embryonic writing is perhaps the best description. The essential similarity of these signs is particularly intriguing, so much so that some archaeologists now believe that ‘a considerable number of the deliberate marks found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages, extending from the Mediterranean to China’.61 (See Figure 2.) In rebuttal, it might be said that there are only so many signs the human mind can invent. But even if this is true, the similarities would still amount to something, implying that there is perhaps a genetically determined limit to our imagination in this field. At present we just do not know, although in 2005 a study of 115 different alphabets found that most languages average three strokes a character. This is no coincidence, says Mark Changizi, the researcher concerned. ‘Three happens to be the biggest number our brains can recognise without having to count.’62

  Figure 2: Similar signs among early forms of writing and proto-writing

  [Source: Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 78]

  For archaeologists, the term ‘civilisation’ generally implies four characteristics–writing, cities with monumental architecture, organised religion and specialised occupations. We cannot say that Palaeolithic humans got there fully–cities, for example, lay some way in the future. But the study of language, and writing, in civilisation–advanced though it now is–may still have some way to go. Merlin Donald, for example, has highlighted certain important stages in language development, in particular rhetoric, logic (dialectic) and grammar.63 As he also points out, these comprised the medieval trivium in Christendom, which separated these basic skills, these rules of thinking, from the quadrivium–mathematics, astronomy, geometry and music, which were specific subjects.

  In so far as ideographic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical systems of writing vary in their rhetorical, logistical and grammatical possibilities, does this difference help account for the different trajectories of the disparate civilisations around the world? Does the physical form of writing affect thinking in a fundamental way? The trivium was based on the idea that dispute–argument–was a trainable skill. Was it this which, at base, would provide the crucial difference between the West and the rest, which is the subject of Parts Three, Four and Five of this book, and did it encourage the assault on religious authority, the all-important break with mythic thinking? It is something to keep in the back of one’s mind as we proceed.

  3

  The Birth of the Gods, the Evolution of

  House and Home

  To Chapter 3 Notes and References

  As we have seen, for Merlin Donald the great transformation in human history was the change from episodic thinking to mimetic, because it allowed the development of culture, ‘the great escape from the nervous system’. Before this book reaches its conclusion we shall have encountered many other candidates for the single most important idea in history: the soul, the experiment, the One True God, the heliocentric universe, evolution–each of them has passionate supporters. Some of these ideas are highly abstract concepts. For most archaeologists, however, humans’ ‘greatest idea’ is a far more down-to-earth practical notion. For them, the domestication of plants and animals–the invention of agriculture–was easily the greatest idea because it produced what was by far the most profound transformation in the way that humans have lived.

  The domestication of plants and animals took place some time between 14,000 and 6,500 years ago and it is one of the most heavily studied ideas in pre-history. Its origins at that time in history are intimately related to the climatological record of the earth. Until, roughly speaking, 12,000 years ago, the average temperature of the earth was both much colder and more variable than it is now. Temperature might vary by as much as 7° in less than a decade, compared with 3° in a century now.1 Around 12,000 years ago, however, the earth warmed up considerably, as the last ice age finally ended and, no less important, the climate stabilised. This warming and stabilisation marks the transition between the two major periods in earth’s history, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. This was in effect the ‘big trigger’ in history and made our world possible.2

  It is safe to say that while we are now fairly clear about where agriculture began, how it began, and with what plants and animals, there is no general agreement, even today, about why this momentous change occurred. The theories, as we shall see, fall into two types. On the one hand, there are the environmental/economic theories, of which there are several; and there are the religious theories, of which at the moment there is only one.

  The domestication of plants and animals (in that order) occurred independently in two areas of the world that we can be certain about, and perhaps in seven. These areas are: first, south-west Asia–the Middle East–in particular the ‘fertile crescent’ that stretches from the Jordan valley in Israel, up into Lebanon and Syria, taking in a c
orner of southeast Turkey, and round via the Zagros mountains into modern Iraq and Iran, the area known in antiquity as Mesopotamia. The second area of undoubted independent domestication lies in Mesoamerica, between what is now Panama and the northern reaches of Mexico. In addition, there are five other areas of the world where domestication also occurred but where we cannot be certain whether it was independent, or derived from earlier developments in the Middle East and Mesoamerica. These areas are the highlands of New Guinea; China, where the domestication of rice seems to have had its own history; a narrow band of sub-Saharan Africa running from what is now the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria across to the Sudan and Ethiopia; the Andes/Amazon region, where the unusual geography may have prompted domestication independently; and the eastern United States.3