This is lecture 5; we’re going to be in prehistory here for a couple of lectures.
I call this one early man.
Let’s talk about African origins here for a moment.
Our ape-like ancestors ventured onto the savannahs of East Africa about four million years ago.
These early hominids quite often acted as scavengers in their search for food, along
with the hyenas, and the vultures, and other creatures.
These early hominids were also prey for big cats and other predators.
We should stress bipedalism, this is a key evolutionary development, where man begins
to stand upright and walk on two legs, as opposed to monkeys and gorillas who still
move about quite often on four limbs.
Bipedalism allows man to sort of rise above his environment a bit, and can see further,
can see both danger and opportunity.
Early man develops what we’d call stereovision.
This allows for depth perception.
This allows us to calculate just how far we should throw that rock or that spear to kill
dinner, which is just further along the grass there.
So stereovision, bipedalism – these are key evolutionary developments.
Early man substituted sticks and stones for teeth.
This, of course, puts a distance between the hunter and the prey.
Early man domesticated fire, from this we get heat – obviously – to protect us against
the cold, protection; a light; we can cook food, make it easier to digest, with fire.
Early man – if you’ll notice – unlike other primates, early man’s larynx is further
down in his throat here.
You can see here in the middle of the throat.
This allows for sort of an unencumbered voice box, which aids us in the development of language
– and of course, language allows for agreed upon meanings among human beings.
This is a key development.
Language allows for coordination of behavior, once we decide what to call things and what
they mean.
I should stress that human adaptability transcends ordinary environmental limits.
There are no places on Earth that we have not ventured to, and usually thrive in.
Human language and migration would eventually impact local ecosystems everywhere on this
planet.
A few words about human migration – in both Australia and in the Americas, the arrival
of humans – human hunters, especially – coincided with the widespread die off of large animals.
Horses and camels, for instance, disappeared from the Western Hemisphere when humans arrived.
Large mammals in the Western Hemisphere had not had the time to perceive the danger posed
by humans because we’d only recently arrived.
Technologies and languages spread with migrations, and large animals disappeared with human migrations.
Now I want to take a moment and talk about what I call opaque documents.
This is a metaphor.
Opaque meaning ‘murky’ or something you can’t see through.
We think of modern historians always working in the archives with actual paper documents
– here we’re talking about opaque documents, things from the deep past that we don’t
understand necessarily.
But, being a curious animal, we tend to speculate about their meaning.
For instance, somewhere around fifty thousand years ago, human beings began to bury the
dead.
Previously they had left the dead on the trail and simply kept moving.
Why?
Why did we begin to bury the dead?
We find preserved corpses with red ochre smeared over their skin.
Ochre is a red mineral similar to this Georgia red clay that you’re all used to.
Why is this red dye put on the bodies?
Is red symbolic of blood, which is symbolic of life?
We find corpses buried facing east quite often.
Is this because the sun rises in the east?
We find gravesites with tools, with fertility goddesses, with weapons, buried alongside
the corpses.
The question, of course, is why?
Are these implements to be used in an afterlife?
We begin to see a theme here, of life; death; and rebirth.
Experts in the spirit world differentiated themselves from ordinary people on the strength
of their ritual roles and their unusual capacity to summon the supernatural.
Again, the rise of religion, the rise of a priesthood.
Take a look at the Chinese terracotta army here.
This is quite remarkable.
Thousands of figures, individually carved – and the faces are all distinct; they’re
not cookie cutter.
You see horses and chariots, and this is a remarkable effort.
It took a great deal of coordination and authority to do something like this.
The key question, of course, is why?
Why would the Chinese emperor demand this sort of following into the afterlife, or at
least it hints that he believes that he will use this army in an afterlife.
Of course, we see the ziggurats.
You see these in ancient Sumer.
These pyramidal-like structures, these temples that are reaching to the heavens – we see
them in Central American.
You’ve all see the pyramids along the Nile in Egypt.
Cave paintings – these images are fantastic.
We find them deep in caves, find them high up on cave walls, high enough so that these
artists would have had to build scaffolding to reach that height.
There would have had to be plenty of light in there for them to see what they were doing.
The historian has to ask the question, why?
Why did these people do this?
Was it just a simple aesthetic nature expressing itself?
Were they paying homage to the animal in hope that he would return, so we could continue
to eat and feed our children?
Were these paintings of these animal herds – is it part of an initiation rite for young
men?
We don’t know¸ that’s why we call them opaque documents – it’s unclear.
But certainly, there is a theme here that emerges, of life; death; and rebirth.
Now with that in mind, I’m going to take a couple of moments and talk about origin
myths.
Origin myths are common all over the world, and there are some remarkable similarities
as you move from civilization to civilization – common themes across human societies to
account for our presence here on Earth, to explain our purpose, to answer the question
of evil, to account for the origin of things.
Common questions that origin myths try to answer – how did we get here?
How was the Earth created?
What happens when people die?
A common agent in origin myths – other than animals that can do things that we don’t,
that animals don’t do – are supernatural powers, gods, deities of some variety or the
other.
Origin myths attempt to translate the unknown into the known, the unfamiliar into something
more familiar.
Humans project their own qualities onto gods, endowing objects and the forces of nature
with human traits.
Humans tend to anthropomorphize gods, or to make deities manlike.
A good example – one most of you are probably familiar with – is the Hebrew god of the
Old Testament, Yahweh.
This is the god you guys just simply refer to as God.
This is a very personal god.
He walks in the garden.
He gets angry.
He’s wrathful, vengeful – even murderous at times, think of Noah’s flood.
He’s very jealous.
He’s a warrior god.
He appears to have a chosen people, whom he favors against everyone else.
He has contracts with his chosen people, the Israelites; they call them covenants, in the
Bible.
Yahweh is preoccupied with reproduction.
He has all these human qualities that we project on him.
So this is a very common theme, or motif, in these origin myths.
I’ll mention a few others – Mythical animals, associated with man – here the most obvious
example is the serpent.
We find the serpent in both the epic of Gilgamesh and of course, we have a talking serpent in
Genesis, in the Bible.
Another common theme is a mythical language, a common belief that a single, unifying language
existed in the deep past, but then something happened to scatter people into different
groups, different languages.
Here again, the most obvious example is from Genesis, with the tower of Babel.
You’ll remember that man was building this tower to the heavens, got too close to God,
and God scattered them and confused their tongue so that they couldn’t communicate.
We see the tower of Babel as a ziggurat, one of the Sumerian ziggurats, the priestly temples,
rising to the heavens.
Another common motif is a sort of mythical paradise somewhere back in deep, primitive
time, sort of a ‘golden age’ when life was easy and peaceful – no one died; food
was plentiful.
But then something goes wrong, and misfortune and grief come to man.
Again, the obvious example is from our own origin myths.
In Genesis, we have the fall of man – original sin – that destroys this earthly paradise.
Then, of course, we have mythical fire.
The first fire, presumably, began to be domesticated, as lightning struck the savannahs of east
Africa, I would suppose.
We have myths to account for this, of course – Prometheus, in the Greek mythology, brought
fire to humans, and then of course, was eternally punished for this transgression.
So these are some common themes, common motifs, that we find in origin myths.
Conclusions here – Myths are not lies, they are explanations.
So don’t discount myth.
You’d be surprised at the power of these myths, and how they still influence us today.
Myths are usually rendered metaphorically, not literally, and here we get into trouble
when we read texts that are written to be understood metaphorically, and we try to impose
a literal meaning on them.
We’ll talk about this more as we go forward.
Myths tend to glorify the past, and they justify the present.
And finally, myths explain cosmology, or our place in the universe.
So I’ll end there.
Thank you.