The mammoth hunters' hide-covered dwellings squat on a low promontory overlooking the broad river valley. Thin plumes of smoke rise from the houses into the cold, still air this late spring day 25,000 years ago. A group of skin-clad men scrape meat off a large leg bone. Children play nearby, while an adolescent watches the valley below. Suddenly, he calls out softly. The men stop work and gaze intently into the distance. They see a small herd of woolly mammoth making their way to the river. The hunters grab their weapons and descend into the valley. The children halt their play and watch as the mammoth lumber on unsuspectingly. The senior cow stops, as if sniffing danger. Reassured, she moves on to the river, and the others follow. one young beast lags behind. The hunters concentrate their efforts on this one animal.
Excerpt form The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America by Brian M. Fagan. Fagan, a British anthropologist and archaeologist who taught in the US and Kenya, had an enviable grasp on his subject. Of course our understanding of the subject of early human migration has changed since the book's publication date in 1987. Notably, he addresses the subject of whether Neanderthals crossed over into the Americas. Since the starting point for humans crossing into the Western Hemisphere appears to have been Siberia, we'd now ask if Denisovans had done so. (That said, a number of Amerindian people have traces of both in their genome, not too surprising since the two species lived in overlapping turf in Eurasia.) But of course when the book was written, paleoanthropologists hadn't even discovered and identified Denisovan remains yet.
But the book has more going for it than Fagan's understanding of the science of the day. He's making a real and fruitful attempt to show how both the Old and New Worlds looked to our long-ago ancestors. It's a quest for understanding on a personal level as much as scientific knowledge.
1 comment:
I enjoyed the story at the opening of your post. Although there are many proposals about how and when the first people came to the Americas it's the dance of life that's the truly fascinating part. It seems like there were populations on Earth who were far wiser than us simply by the fact they were successful for so long simply living in harmony with nature. I'm not saying there weren't violent encounters beween people or between people and nature - nature being not just other creatures but all of those life threatening potentials we might imagine.
Did the ancestors of our race walk across the Bering Land Bridge or did they sail great canoes across the Pacific riding The North Pacific Gyre, known as Japan's Kuroshio Current? Does it really matter since anything, could be true when we consider this all happened over the course of thousands of years. I'm sure tribes hunted megafauna like mammoths but I'm equally sure they didn't wipe out all of them - possibly thousands of hunters versus millions of wild animals simply doesn't compute. The northern hemisphere sustained several large airbursts or meteor strikes between 12,800 and 9,600 years ago, proposals which are still argued but no longer completely controversial.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0319840
Rene Guenon wrote a book called The Crisis of the Modern World I read years ago and should read again. It's not long. In it he takes the contrary view to the modern conceit that we are the smartest creatures ever to inhabit the planet and therefore deserve to rule everything on it.
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