Stone Age Atlantis
Seems European civilisation began near the Isle of Wight.
Iron Age Ireland – The Invisible People
Around 1000bce Ireland was coming to the end of the Bronze Age and on a largely parallel path to England. The population was growing, people were moving to fortified hills, militarism was on the rise observable in both burials and new polities and their power-bases. However within a few centuries Ireland was to take a mysterious divergent course, a course that makes the Iron Age the most obscure period of Irish archaeology and lead to Barry Raftery dubbing the Iron Age Irish the ‘invisible people’.
The iron age began in Ireland about 700 BCE and sort of ended 600 BCE as it failed to take hold. For the next five centuries Bronze (despite abundant supplies of bog ore) continued to be the preferred metal for the next 5 centuries across the country apart from a few sites across the north. With the Iron age in full swing across Europe, populations booming, the population of Ireland suddenly started to diminish. Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe studying this anomaly noticed that tree rings showed large scale forest regeneration in the period suggesting a substantial decline agriculture. Rich burials also disappeared at this time. While the gold hoards are being buried with kings in Britain and across Europe, Irish burials become increasingly impoverished.
Reasons for the ‘unique’ decline of Ireland in this period remains a mystery. It has been suggested the appearance of hill forts and Raths in the period shows that widespread warfare could be the cause, but as exactly the same was occurring in Britain, that was prospering, so this is unlikely. Iron Age Ireland remains one of archaeology’s mysteries.
This graph from “Iron Age Ireland, Finding the Invisible People” by Katrina Becker, John O’Neal and Laura Flynn. In a recent survey of all all Iron Age sites illustrates the drop in population.
One solution may be that between 700bce and 500bce temperatures dropped a full two degrees, this was known as the Sub-Atlantic-Period.
Nigel Wright (“Separating Romans and Barbarians” MA thesis) says in Upper Teesdale circa 600 BC;
“large scale clearances increased erosion, leading to the spread of moorland across a wide area along with increasingly waterlogged and acidic soils. These depleted soils were incapable of sustaining forest regeneration.”
As the agricultural land dropped to a minimum, Raftery suggest the remaining Irish returned to a more nomadic lifestyle, but this weather change wouldn’t have effected Ireland in isolation but Britain as well. So why wasn’t Britain devastated?
What seems to have happened is as the climate changed it became wetter and farming more difficult the English moved their farms onto higher lands. This corresponds with the boom in Hill-forts surrounded by farms on the slopes. The British were driven to the hills but still flourished.
Thinking for a moment this contradicts everything I learnt in archaeology class, that the British moved to the hills because of overpopulation causing widespread warfare and the need for defence. As for the Irish, why didn’t they do the same. Simply, Ireland unlike Britain is a relatively flat country, there wasn’t the highlands to move too.
Journey of Mankind
This superb interactive map traces the journey of mankind and the populating of the Earth for 140,000 years based on Stephen Oppenheimer’s recent contraversial research and will tear up everything you learnt at school.
Aquatic Ape Theory
This is a summary of David Attrenborough’s recent BBC Radio 4 programs Scars of Evolution. I have supplemented it in places.
Introduction
Humans differ from other primates in many ways. We have no hair; unlike apes, we have body fat, we can walk upright, we have speech; strange for a land mammal, we can’t run but can swim. Most importantly, different from many non-marine mammals is that we have large brains.
Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is the theory that humans, early in their evolution, perhaps during the Homo Erectus phase, lived on the shores beside water, beachcombing for shellfish, swimming, diving the seabed and fishing. living beside water for 10,000s perhaps 100,000s of years is what caused us to evolve in a very different way to inland primates.
Taung Child
Prior to the 1920’s where humanity first evolved remained uncertain. The discoveries of Peking Man and Java Man made Asia the favourite and it was there most work was concentrated. However in 1924 Professor Raymond Dart uncovered a child’s skull that would become known as the Taung Child. The skull was much older than anything found before and switched the focus of human evolution from Peking and Java firmly to Africa.
The Taung Child was found on the South African Savannah and was eventually accepted to be the earliest link between apes and early hominids. The discovery of what was previously believed to be a forest dweller on the Savannah and showing early signs of bipedalism opened the way for the first great explanation of human evolution.
Dart launched a hypothesis of human evolution: Savannah Theory.
Savannah Theory argued the forests of South Africa began to shrink and the primate ancestors of man ventured out onto the hot, flat, African Savannah. There they were forced to stand bipedally to avoid predators and hunt, freeing their hands to develop into intricate tool manufacturing devices and growing a brain to plan even more complex hunting strategy and weapon designs.
By the 1960’s a theory thought up by Dart was accepted as orthodoxy became the theory taught in all schools worldwide, so strong was it that it became scientific heresy to oppose it.
What became known of as Savannah Hypothesis was written on and expanded by many authors, the most famous Desmond Morris in the Naked Ape. Where human ancestors struck out from the forest and threw themselves into competition with the ground birds. Pressure to increase their hunting capabilities caused them to become faster runners, walk upright so their hands became free to hold weapons and tools, their brains grew making brighter quicker decision makers. “A hunting Ape, a killer ape”.
In the wake of wwii and the midst of the Vietnam War a Killer Ape Theory found a ready audience, explaining man’s murderous instincts, war and attributing an urge to do violence a fundamental part of his evolutionary psyche. It was a very macho theory, the male apes went out hunting for red meat whilst the females stayed home doing little but tend for the young and being thrown the odd scrap off the table when the hunters had finished eating.
A simplistic but bloody account, throughout the 80’s and 90’s it became apparent Savannah theory was over simplified.
Work on the Taung area where the skull was found, showed hundreds of thousands of years ago it wasn’t as dry as it is now and probably wasn’t Savannah after all.
Also no other species in evolutionary history has voluntarily changed it’s environment, evolution doesn’t work like that, so how could man’s ancestors voluntarily venture onto the Savannah.
And finally the simple ill-suitedness which man is to life on a Savannah. If man had evolved on a Savannah we would be much more adapted than we are.
Over many years these and many more niggling little objections had built up. However in 1995 a bombshell struck the theory. Professor Philip Tobias a former student of Dart had spent decades in the chalk beds where Dart found the Taung Child trying to fill in the gaps in theory was beginning to have doubts about Dart’s theory along with many other leading Paleo-Anthropologists.
In 1995 Tobias declared at a large conference “The Savannah Hypothesis is no more” after it emerged in sites in south and east Africa that some early hominids dwelling in forest became bipedal without ever venturing onto a savannah. Effectively this eliminated Savannah as a cause of bipedalism effectively destroying the whole Savannah Theory of evolution.
Alternative Theories
As the Savannah hypothesis became discredited Palaeontologists began to look around for another theory to explain the early evolution of man without much luck. It was also remembered there was already one that had been around for more than 30 years that had been conveniently sidelined while Savannah Theory reigned unchallenged. The theory often named Aquatic Ape Theory.
In a late 60’s an award winning Welsh playwright and journalist Elaine Morgan read Desmond Morris’s Naked Ape. She noted the theory put all evolution in terms of what was advantageous for the male. And many things disadvantageous to the females, who were left simply sitting around all day doing nothing begging scraps of meat from the male. She regarded female role in the theory was both preposterous and no species could evolve on these terms of it being advantageous to a single sex and disadvantageous for the other.
Morgan also noted a single passage in Morris’ Naked Ape which stated an alternative theory that before the Ape had emerged on the Savannah it had spent sometime as an Aquatic Ape living beside water. This theory had been put forward by an Oxford Marine Biologist Sir Alistair Hardy in The New Scientist in 1960. He had originally thought of the theory in the 1930′s but had been warned against publishing because he would destroy his career through heresy.
Hardy had become interested in the peculiar layer of fat tightly bonded to the skin, that humans have but other primates don’t. Such layers of fat are only found in water mammals. So Hardy thought man might have been more aquatic in the past. In his article he went on to suggest a shore based environment might also explain man becoming bipedal too.
A branch of primates was forced from the forest by competition moved to the sea shore to search for food, shell fish and urchins in the shallow waters of the coast. Initially paddling in shallow waters gradually he evolved the ability to venture into deeper waters, standing on the bottom with his head out the water and the water supporting his weight he learnt to become bipedal in the water.
Elaine Morgan sought permission from Alistair Hardy to write a book on his theory and in 1972 she published, The Descent of Women, and what would become known as Aquatic Ape Theory.
Immediately the book cause a storm amongst the paleontological world. She was branded a crank and amongst her leading hecklers at lectures were Richard Dawkins and Douglas Adams.
In Aquatic Ape Hypothesis man was far from a killer ape and women’s role far from that of a passive breeder. Both males and females, instead, jointly harvested the sea, walking along the shoreline gathering shellfish. Society was not one of alpha males and hierachies of violence and domination but an effort of communal gathering.
However Aquatic Ape Theory was much more than this, it provided something Savannah Theory never could, a comprehensive explanation for all of the characteristics that distinguish us from the other apes. Bipedal, hairlessness, layer fat below the skin, big brain, language skills, large noses but weak sense of smell, ability to sweat, swimming diving, fat babies.
The Brain
The maxim of Savannah Theory that humans developed large brains because of hunting competition with other predators on the savannahs of Africa has no parallels. Every other species that ventured onto the Savannahs reduced its brain size.
Professor Michael Crawford of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition in London, in a study into to why there are different sizes of brains in different animals established that the brains of all Savannah animals had shrunk as they grew larger bodies. He also found that in order for a brain to grow it needs a supply of Omega 3, especially VHA and Iodine and the only place to find these nutrient through a marine food chain.
This is a testable theory, the theory argues marine nutrients in the human diet are essential to growth of the human brain, then a change of diet away from these nutrients would surely be detrimental to it.
According to the World Health Organisation report in 2004, Iodine deficiency among inland populations effects around 740 million people worldwide. EG: 60% of school children in Korea are Iodine deficient and 60% of children in Indonesia have thyroid gland goitre but in fishing villages not a single one.
Another important ingredient to brain growth is the body fat only found on man and marine mammals. A Chimp’s brain is almost as big as a human baby’s brain at birth. However a human baby has a 10 fold increase in fat in the last 10 weeks of pregnancy making 30% of the baby’s total weight brain and body fat. Baby Chimps and Gorillas have no body fat at all. The human brain trebles in size from birth to the age 10, Chimps brains don’t. Human body fat provides the fuel for the growth of the human brain.
Of all man’s ancestors, Home Erectus, experienced the largest singe brain growth. Most Homo Erectus finds have been found along coastal areas and Erectus is accepted by mainstream archaeology to be a shore dweller.
Breath Control
There are 3 kinds of breathing pattern in mammals, voluntary, involuntary and both.
Involuntary breathing is how humans breath most of the time, it requires no thought to do and is done unconsciously. Voluntary breathing is when thoughts takes over from the unconscious process. Voluntary breathing is used when we hold our breath, play a wind instrument or practice deep breathing exercises.
All primates and land mammals are involuntary breathers only. None have the capability to hold their breath.
Sea mammals such as dolphins and whales are conscious breathers which is why only half their brains can ever go to sleep at one time, otherwise they forget to breath and drown
A small third groups exist which can both consciously and unconsciously breath, these are amphibious mammals, such as seals and otters, who can hold their breath, dive underwater for food and return to the shore revert back to unconscious breathing. Humans are the only primates with this capacity.
Breath control then goes a stage further. During human speech conscious is needed, people in a conversation freely switch back and forth between conscious and unconscious breathing, many of the noises needing conscious breath control to make. This breath control then may be what allows us to develop speech while other primates, having the intelligence for communication have failed to do so.
Birth
Amongst native people’s living in coastal regions it was traditional for women to go into the sea to give birth. This only ceased when the missionaries thought it wrong and made them stop.
One of the main fears about babies being born under water is that they will drown, but they don’t, this is because of what’s called the diving reflex. The human diving reflex, that if water is on the face, the throat closes off, is strongest in new born babies. Babies are very at home in the water and amongst coastal people swimming is so natural it is common for children to learn to swim and dive under water before they can walk.
Professor Peter Wheeler, Dean of Science at Liverpool St John Moore’s University is the leading opponent of the Aquatic Ape theory. He believes giving birth in water cannot be an evolutionary adaptation because “Human babies lose heat very easy”. However in Russia it is quite common for women to give birth in the Black Sea at 19-20 degree temperatures.
One more thing about human birth little studied is, Vernix Caseosa, Latin for ‘cheesy varnish’ and the name of the white fatty/greasy coating on the skin of a human baby when it is born. One theory is that it protects the baby’s skin while it is submerged in amniotic fluid. If so surely all mammal babies would have it, but they don’t, not even any other primates, in fact the only other mammal that has it is seals. Harbour seals are born on land but enter the water 30 minutes or so after birth, have a coating of Vernix Caseosa, though somewhat thinner than human babies. Grey seals who enter several hours after birth are born with an even thinner coat and hooded seals that don’t enter the water for over a day have an almost undetectable coating.
The Beginning
Aquatic ape Hypothesis is far from proven, but at the moment enjoys the luxury of being the only theory of human evolution in existence at present. most of the scientific research being done in the area is on Aquatic Ape Hypothesis and its days as a crank theory in the distant past. A new generation of ethno-paleontologists exist and the killer ape a lot more cuddly than before.
Source
Cactus Hill vs Solutreans
The most significant find in American archaeology is Cactus Hill.
Until recently most Americans would have learnt at school the first people arrived in America by crossing the Baring Strait 13,000 years ago. With them they brought a unique new technology called Clovis and they became known as the Clovis people.
For a long time archaeologists had believed there were a people in America before the Clovis people, a number of finds and sites had been discovered over the years. In the 90′s the discovery of Cactus Hill finally provided the irrefutable evidence to prove this view.
Four main questions arise, who these earlier people were, where did they come from and when did they arrive? And were they the only earlier people or were there others?
In an earlier Blog I covered Solutrean Theory.
Solutrean theory has taken on board Cactus Hill and suggests the finds at Cactus Hill are the missing link between the Solutreans who disapeared 18,000 years ago and the Clovis culture which began around 13,000 years ago.
Personally looking at the Cactus Hill technology I find it far too primitive. While there is parallell flaking in Cactus Hill it is crude and nowhere near matches the Solutreans or Clovis Culture and doesn’t resemble a continuity period.
This superb documentary on Cactus Hill explains the significance of the site.
Cactus Hill Video
The Voyage of Pytheas
Pytheas was an ancient explorer from Marseilles in southern France who in 330bce wrote the oldest known record of life in northern Europe.
There was nothing unique about sailing this far north, there had been a regular tin trade route between Cornwall and Europe as far back as 1500bce and African Carthaginian ships were sailing the Baltic as Pytheas set out. Pytheas’s journey is remarkable not just for fact he recorded it but because he was a true explorer chronicling the people he met and places he visited, giving an inciteful account of pre-historic northern Europe and its people.
For over a century before Pytheas set out on his adventure the Carthaginians had closed the pillars of Hercules off to the Greeks to guard their monopoly on trading with northern Europe. Pytheus’s motive for travelling was undoubtedly on a search for the Carthaginians elusive source of tin.
It is unsure how Pytheas managed to get past this blockade. One theory is he used the Viking trick of dragging/carrying a boat overland between rivers to get past Gibraltar. Also there’s a story he travelled over land to Mauretania and either transported a boat with him or built one there. Another theory on how he travelled is he didn’t have a boat at all. Being from Marseille he could probably speak at least some Gallic and simply followed the established Tin Road. He would have sailed up river with Marseille wine traders exporting wine to the Aquitanii and made his way to the Dordoyne. From there to the west coast and then picked up a trade vessel to Brittany. From Brittany he would have travelled on one of the numerous boats making the trip to Cornwall………. So he may have been the world’s first backpacker.
When he arrived at the English Channel he reported slowly hugging the coast of France, stopping frequently for water and visiting the natives until after 5 days he reached the Kasiterides Islands (Britain). There he encountered an amazing site, a giant fish that squirted water from it’s back. He noted the climate change, and how people worked indoors not out unlike back home, lived in log clay houses. He journeyed to Scotland where he met a tribe called the Pretani (probably origin of the name Britain). The Pretani told him of wondrous sites and lands to the north where the sun never sets.
Travelling further north he encountered dense fogs and began to see ice floating in the water and before discovering a new uninhabited land, Thule (Iceland). Pytheas then set out from Iceland until within site of the mountains of Greenland, a powerful current barred his way and drove him back to the shores of Britain (possibly the Gulf Stream). Greenland being part of the North American continent technically means he beat Leif Ericson and reduces Columbus to a Bronze medal.
Pytheas returned to Greece to chronicle his discovery, but was miffed to discover no-one believed him. Greek science of the day held that the waters were frozen a lot further south than in reality, so there were no northern oceans to sail. Pytheas’s book was lost and his journey exists only in mentions by other writers who used and quoted it when writing their histories.
Pytheas’s journey to discover the legendary Tin Isles and Europe’s only major source of tin was successful and Diodorus in his history quotes Pytheas on British Tin mining.
“Those who dwell near Belerium, one of the headlands of Britain, are especially fond of strangers, and on account of their trade with the merchants they have a more civilized manner of living. They collect the tin after the earth has been skillfully forced to yield it. Although the land is stony, it has certain veins of earth from which they melt and purify the metal which has been extracted. After making this into bars they carry it to a certain island near Britain called Ictis. For although the place between is for the most part covered with water, yet in the middle there is dry ground, and over this they carry a great amount of tin in wagons. . . . Thence the merchants carry into Gaul the tin which they have bought from the inhabitants. And after a journey of thirty days on foot through Gaul, they convey their packs carried by horses to the mouths of the Rhone River.”
Stone-Age Columbus
Solutrean Theory created by the Smithsonian Institute is a radical idea that suggests a group of stone-age French may have been the first inhabitants of the Americas.
The idea is based upon the fact an advanced lithic manufacturing process known as Solutrean Industry existed uniquely in just one part of the world, South Western France 20,000 years ago. However the Solutreans culture was replaced by the Magdalenian culture which had inferior lithic technology, it’s a great mystery why the Magdalenians didn’t inherit Solutrean Industry. Solutrean technology suddenly disappeared without trace, only to reappear 5,000 years later in the hands of the Amerindians that cross the Baring Strait into America.
So the disappearance of Solutrean Industry in France and its reappearance in North America a few thousand years later is a great mystery. Was there a connection between the two cultures or were they the only two cultures in the world to develop this unique technology, independently?
The hypothesis the Smithsonian came up with is a small group of Solutreans, an ice age culture akin to the Eskimo, crossed the Atlantic in similar fashion to the Eskimos hopping between pack ice (which then stretched as far down as France) and landed in America. They would have paddled between the pack ice in small canoe like boats, could have camped on the ice for the night, eaten seal meat and fish and used seal oil to light fires to burn ice for fresh water. Between the ice sheets the sea would be a flat as the pack ice would stop the fetch.
After landing in the US they lived there in small numbers for a few thousand years until the Indians arrived and adopted Solutrean Industry then they were absorbed into the greater number of Indians.
Epic journeys by prehistoric peoples like this are not unknown; the Polynesians sailing into the Pacific Ocean crossing thousands of miles of oceans in canoes with no idea if land even existed, which apart from Easter Island and Hawaii pretty much didn’t. Also the Australian Aboriginal walking from Africa to Australia crossing many deserts and seas on the way.
A small amount of evidence has been found to support Solutrean Theory, including technology finds in Pennsylvania dating 4,000 years before the Amerindians crossed the Baring Strait, also a DNA study done on the Ichigua Indian tribe which shows European genes back in its prehistory linage.
What motivation did the Solutreans have to make the journey? Just as the tribes in the dark ages were driven into the Roman Empire by the Huns moving west, the Solutrean migration could have been caused by the Magdalanians aggressively taking their territory and driving them into the Atlantic.
Personally I doubt if Solutrean Theory is true. The finds at Cactus Hill that conclusively prove there were people in America before the Clovis people migrated from Beringia, 13,500 years ago, raise the question why did the Solutrean wait 5,000 years to teach their technology to Clovis people when there were people around when they arrived top pass the technology on to.
