Scaling the Cliff of Prehistory

This essay is an idiosyncratic rough-and-ready attempt to give us a context in which to situate those high moments of metahistory that define who we are. I do not focus on the beliefs and achievements of Homo erectus, or on the more accessible heritages of our Cro-Magnon African, Asian, Australian, and American cousins. The sources I have used for this narrative are European and Semitic, culturally speaking. Despite their long, intimate, troubled, and always profusely intertwined relations, the Semite and the European arise from the same basic cultural matrix. Anyway, we who were born into patriarchal monotheism need to begin with our own story.

In the Vale of Kashmir

One of my more vivid memories traveling round-the-world a long time ago was of climbing the hills of Jammu in a rickety bus, overlooking incredible drops, a foot or at most a mere yard distant on the run, boulder-strewn ravines with gushing waters, grinding our way upward, finally entering a long tunnel at dusk. At nightfall we descended into the Valley of Kashmir, to its medieval lakeshore city, Srinigar, where I rented a room on a houseboat (all the little hotels or inns were floating back then).

In the morning I awoke to be confronted by one of the most glorious, most unanticipated sights of my life. For all around me, from the northwest to the north, northeast to the east, were stunning blazing-white mountains, rising majestic sheets of pure snow, towering thousands of feet off the ground. My blood stirred to its depths, I decided to strike out and fish, to connect to memories of unbroken roadless forest tracts in northern Maine and Quebec where I’d fished as a child for the spangled clear-water trout. Somehow (I forget how) I secured a fly rod and either took a taxi or a bus into the foothills, found a stream, a small shallow but very swift river and cast my line. I waded, surrounded by majesty, slipped, and was suddenly transported, tumbled uncontrollably among the rocks, unable to regain my footing, even to swim ashore, the river making a mockery of my efforts to halt my plummet. Out of control, I became ecstatic.

When we think about our past, the place we must set out from today should be like the vale of Kashmir. The landscape of our evolution was similarly majestic, until the long sweep of the Pleistocene ended (so we speculate) and the long interglacial of the Holocene began (so we presume). And, in a short time, agriculture on a grand scale, that is, urbanism, and the locust-like explosion of the human population. And war, slavery, and that most egregious of all misnomers, “civilization” ­ of the patriarchal variety ­ began.

The Gods, you may count on it, had presence.
(Paleolithic Venus, c. 23,000 BP, Les Eyzies, France.)

The Process of History

From “civilization” grew what the brilliant contemporary mystic, Eckhart Tolle, calls the “pain body.” Our daytime psychic shadow that clings tightly to us, woven into our egoic thinking-mind with which we have become falsely and, one may say, diabolically identified. We celebrate as our competition-driven accomplishments under the banner of the technological imperative, “the leading edge.” Today, quite simply, we are our technology. So we have been delivered into in our very strange thralldom of creating hell-on-earth.

How did it happen?

The story of civilization is, among other things, the story of the progressive elevation of the thinking function (Jung) and its subliminal colonization of the bicameral and four-fold brain (Jaynes; Gooch). Even if not exactly derived from separate physical correlates (the heart as the center of “intelligence” has yet to be mapped), it has been persuasively argued that we have devalued our innate capacities to know through feeling and imagery, “a dimension we are born with” (Gallegos). We have become a “right-handed” global culture through the process of history. This gross over-identification with that part of mental functioning that exists in what Tolle calls psychological time, that is time past and time future, has ruptured our basic biological contract with Gaia. And in so doing, removed us from the one, and only time that actually exists: now.

The present. Think of what it means to say of someone: he or she has “presence.” The gods, you may count on it, had presence (something Daniel Quinn has understood in his latest novel, The Holy).

Pleistocene Humanity.

The current general supposition is that the hominoid line began with the short-legged, long-armed African habilis, about 2.4 million years ago, maybe less (maybe more), who never left Africa. Habilis was duly followed by followed by our “true” progenitor, the more upright, larger, long-striding mobile erectus, some 1.8 to 2 million years ago, who recently was “known” to have left Africa via the Near East a million years ago (more or less), and well-established to have spread throughout Eurasia by 700-800,000 years ago. These are shifting sands, as we know. Thus this summer media reported on the ongoing excavations at the Georgian site at Dmanisi, a hilltop village overlooking the Old Silk Road where it traverses the Caucasus, which have resulted in yet another uproar among the paleontological scientific community. For a 1.75 million-year-old skull found there shows marked habilus and erectus traits. (I myself will never look at skulls so cursorily again after reading Stan Gooch’s Cities of Dreams and studying his comparison of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon craniums.)

The mix of bones found at Dmanisi creates a confusing impression of diverse types of humanity that appear to co-habit the same site more or less simultaneously hundreds of thousands of years before we humans were supposed to have left our African “Eden” thousands of miles to the south. Dminisi shows we left Africa at least 1.8 million years ago.

Confounding evidence keeps “popping up.”

Instead of mind-numbing speculations about what could and could not have happened, consider some facts: “Contrary to popular belief, the Ice Age has not ended....the fact is that humans have always lived in...a world of immense climatic swings” (Fagan). These conditions had their onset 35 million years ago, with intensification 3.2 million years ago as ice sheets formed on the planet’s high northern and southern land masses. “Then, about 2.5 million years ago [when indisputably toolmaking had commenced, at least of the lithic variety], glaciation intensified even more and the earth entered its present period of constantly fluctuating climate... climatic fluctuations were relatively insignificant until about 900,000 years ago. They further intensified about 730,000 years ago...” (Fagan; my italics). Is the correlation between the onset of these climate changes and technological and migratory arousal in our human ancestors co-incidental? Unlikely.

What concerns me here is our recent prehistory, going back perhaps no more than 100,000 years, certainly post- erectus, whose 1.5 million-year-old technology, the Acheulean “bi-face” stone toolkit, endured for longer than any other on Earth. Certainly erectus also possessed what we’d call a social culture ­ and one must suspect a mythos as well. But 100,000 years is a time more amenable to our imaginative knowing, the time of Neanderthal, and perhaps a bit later, Cro-Magnon. Neanderthal was adapted to extreme cold, and wandered all of Europe, culturally supreme, from the westernmost shores of France to the Urals, while Cro-Magnon, the mitochondrial geneticists tell us, originated in Africa and made his way north, first to the Levant, then to Europe, without doubt trodding routes as old as those taken by the game-tracking hominoids found at Dmanisi. Old paths.

Certainly erectus possessed what we’d call a social culture ­ and one must suspect a mythos as well. (Aborigines, New South Wales, engraving by William Blake, 1973.)

Cro-Magnon Arrives

Coming from the south, up the Nile valley and out of Africa, Cro-Magnon seems to have arrived in the Levant ahead of Neanderthal, maybe 100,000 years ago (give or take 20,000 years!). Depending on which anthropologist you listen to, Neanderthals arrived from their European fastness in the Levant (Palestine) either as early as 90,000 years ago or as late as 50,000. For their parts the Cro-Magnons took some 50,000 years to migrate north into the heartland of Neanderthal’s secret “empire” (Gooch), the cold climate zone of Europe. Thus these two presumed erectus offshoots, the secretive, powerful, hairy Neanderthals and their taller, smoother-skinned African cousins possessed of elegant speech, the Cro-Magnons, sojourned together in the Levant, and later in Europe, for somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 years. Was it in the Levant that the oldest psychic artifacts of what became Western civilization were forged?

The people of the Moon and the people of the Sun (Gooch; Kurtén) knew of each other for tens of thousands of years, or so the evidence of archeology suggests. And the evidence of mythology as well.

Curious place, Palestine, where Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal first met. I remember walking long ago at night in the moonlight, sauntering with crowds of low-voiced Levantines, somewhere in Israel, maybe outside Jerusalem, and feeling suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful and frankly incommunicable sense of the age of the human presence in that place. It seemed momentarily to be beyond reckoning, unfathomably, overwhelmingly old ­ aturated with a timeless human presence. A feeling I have never experienced again, anywhere.

Meltdown

The last of the Pleistocene’s five major cycles of glaciation, the entirety of which commenced 2.5 million years ago, began with the Würm in Europe about 120,000 years ago. (The cycles of the Ice Age were global events, but our narrative focus is on Europe.) The Würm proceeded in four hot-cold pulses (at least up to now; geologists and climatologists don’t agree on whether or not the Pleistocene Ice Age has really ended). Think, mythically, of “Ages.” Think about titanic waves of weather, in which ocean and sea levels oscillated almost 600 feet from their zeniths in the hottest periods, such as the one that preceded the onset of the Würm, to their nadirs in the coldest, when about 20,000 years ago the last phase of the Würm spasmodically ended, seesawing over the next 10,000 or so years.

Now think about us, our love of water. Our need for water. We arose from water. Our oldest memories, locked in the saltwater cells that make our flesh, are about seawater, where our very own cells began their really long terrestrial journey (never mind such temporal trivialities as 2.5 million years). We commune by water: blood, sperm-smegma, saliva, spit, snot, piss, and sweat; we live alongside water; and we move on water. If stones could float the poor paleontologists would know so much more than they think they do about our most ancient seafaring capacities. But of course perishable wood is what floats and what carried us, perhaps with more magnetically sensitive brains, on our fabulous star-guided sea voyages. As today, so yesterday. We live where the living is good, most of us ­ by the water! Oceanfront. Seaside; lake shores; along riverbanks.

The great bulk of our former grandeur as a trading, culture-making species prior to the last true global flood in ca. 12,500 BP, must now be buried under at least 300 to 400 feet of water worldwide, or otherwise washed away. No wonder Graham Hancock gone scuba-diving. Someday perhaps the entire archeological profession will follow him. Or will we have to wait until the next Ice lifts the curtain?

The dramatic scale and speed of the transformations of the landscape of our prehistory are almost inconceivable to us. Before the onset of the Würm, “Thick forest mantled a Europe only a short time before covered with treeless tundra” (Fagan) while the Sahara was “semi-forested grassland, abounding with streams and lakes and rivers, teeming with life” (DeMeo ­ a status that particular region did not acquire again for 90,000 years). Vast tracts of earth were covered by water and then, shockingly, stripped bare, exposed. France was joined to its future nemesis, England; Gibraltar was separated from Africa by a five-mile-wide oceanic river; great plains stretched miles off the eastern coast of Spain into a smaller sea; Corsica and Sardinia, one big island, almost touched the bloated boot of Italy on the north; Sicily, joined to Italy, stretched to the south a mere 30 or so miles from Libya; the Black Sea was a deep inland freshwater lake; the Red Sea, a long thin lake at the end of which the Arabian peninsula was joined to the horn of Africa; the Persian Gulf, an Edenic plain filled with game...back and forth from inundation to exposure.

The shifts in whole regional climates throughout the last Ice Age “from freezing cold to warm was abrupt in every cycle, perhaps lasting only centuries” (Ryan & Pitman; my italics). Sheets of ice one, two miles thick, cliffs of ice fronting the Thames (London Town: did Virginia Woolf know this ice age too when she wrote Orlando?), stretched across Hamburg-to-be and eastward to the Pacific, along the way touching down toward the northern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, while mountains such as the Jura were completely buried in Alpine glacial ice.

All these began to melt.

The Bosphorus Flume

Vulcanism, on a scale we have difficulty imagining, marked the entire epoch (Dickson), an unremembered echo behind our casual enchantment with the tantalizing paradox of “fire and ice.” When the last really great meltdown began 20,000 years ago, immense glaciers covered all the high mountains of Europe, Asia, North and South America. This was the titanic, the last and biggest “thaw” of the great Ice Age. And it went in spasms, advancing, retreating and advancing. A writhing Gaian fury beyond our reckoning. “Ages” ago.

In the end, the great inventive Upper Paleolithic cultures of Cro-Magnon (Homo sapiens sapiens ­ which inflated moniker I will not use again here), the Aurignacian, Gravettian, Sousterian, and Magdalenian, whose art has never been surpassed, vanished (but at not without some memorable traces).

What was it like, we wonder, we who are now reassured about the effects of “global warming” by George Bush: a little pain here, a little gain there?

I’ve encountered but one attempt to give some scientifically based but palpable, layperson’s account of the effects of a meltdown (a comparable, and more germane, sudden-freeze narrative has eluded me). It deals on the small scale of a post-Pleistocene regional flood that in 5,600 BCE transformed the freshwater Black Sea into the Mediterranean-fed saltwater sea it is today.

“.... as the rains and warmth returned...the ocean...stood poised to invade the Bosphorus valley and plunge to the Black Sea lake five hundred feet below....[at first a rivulet, then a gentle brook] the water, now several tens of feet deep, was a thundering flume twisting and churning with rubble as it clawed at the soft rock walls that now and then collapsed....The deeper it cut, the faster it flowed, and faster it flowed, the deeper it cut until it had gauged a flume at least 280 feet and up to 475 feet deep. Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile...

“The salt water roared through the strait at speeds greater than fifty miles an hour, crashing through unabated, radiating a thunderous din and vibration that could probably have been heard and felt around the entire rim of the Black Sea.

“The level of the lake began to rise six inches a day...moving upstream as much as a mile each day, without a pause hour after hour, day after day, drowning the less agile, forcing all else upriver or up onto the desertlike plateau through which the valley had been cut... For twelve months the tumultuous rush of water continued undiminished until the level of the lake had risen 180 feet...[And] during the next twelve months it would rise another hundred feet. It crested the old shelf edge and began its race toward the present shoreline, pushing all life before it...

“Everywhere the encroachment of the floodwaters was so rapid that whole regions that had been dry were covered by ten or more feet of water within days.

“The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days....Anyone who saw it must have carried away frightening images of the fury and power of the sinuous jet of salt water...[that] may have seemed like a huge, endless serpent writhing through the narrow defile, continuously roaring, sending up billows of mist like smoke from its fiery mouth, destroying all in its path....” (Ryan & Pitman).

Remember, this is a scientifically based description of a smallish Holocene flood, not on the scale of the great floods that punctuated and finally terminated the Pleistocene, about which we have not learned in the kind of meticulously documented detail assembled by those two marine-geological sleuths. What, for instance, about the mighty source of the Black Sea inundation, that great roaring serpent, the Mediterranean itself? Five million years ago the Atlantic burst into the Mediterranean basin through the “dam” at Gibraltar, where stood the “Pillars of Hercules,” and inundated with a roar and a quantity of water orders of magnitude greater than the modest episode described above, that is, the pent-up waters of the Atlantic raged through the gap at thousands of times the volumes of Niagara, dumping in a single generation thousands of feet of sea water and creating the Mediterranean as we know it today.

Remember, this is a scientifically based description of a smallish Holocene flood, not on the scale of the great floods that punctuated and finally terminated the Pleistocene... (Aztec Flood Serpent, from the Torano Codex, British Museum)

Was some simian ancestor of australopithicus around for that show?

The Ryan-Pitman description gives us some sense of the scale of events that, in terms of ancient human generations and their oral histories, routinely and unremittingly marked the lives of our ancestors.

Ice Ages

I’ve searched my library for exact dates for the comings and goings of the Ice. It seems curiously difficult to secure this data in an unambiguously presented form (without trekking into very specialized literature I don’t have). But it is clear that the onset of major Pleistocene cycles of cooling and warming are breathtakingly rapid. And drastic. Looking back to and from the time of archaic Homo, starting about 400,000 years ago, there have been five very big climate swings, and the ones that catch my attention commence in the heat climaxes of 330,000, 199,000, 123,000 years ago, and, it seems inescapable, looking at one chart by de Saint-Blanquet and Clarys, our present millennium. The 330,000 heat climax seems to correlate with that of 123,000 years ago, while that of 199,000 seems similar to our own still rising heat curve, which our technology is hastening. (A lot of state-sized little doggies are calving off the Antarctic mother cap as I write.)

Heat climaxes seem to invariably precipitate sudden, abrupt onsets of glaciation, or “ice ages.”

The cold climaxes occur 342,000, 270,000 (and after a momentary small heat blip, 261,000), 135,000, and of course, 20,000 years ago. Regarding the specifics of the spasmodic meltdown of the climax ice of 20,000 BP, the pattern seems to have been, following Hancock’s chronology: from 17,000 to 15,000 BP a global melting; from 15,000 to 13,000 BP icing up again; from 13,000 to 10,000 BP a final global melting ­ et voilà, the Holocene interglacial. It is likely that these spasms were the source of many worldwide flood myths.

To follow:

“How High the Moon: The Realm of Neanderthal’

“How Low the Moon: Saharasia”, “Patrism and the Fall of Woman and Child”.