Note preface :
English is not my native language, so if there are any mistakes in translation, please report them, they will be corrected. Thank you. :)
This text is an essay in the form of a letter to the author of “Les dix millénaires oubliés qui ont fait l’Histoire” (The ten forgotten millennia that made history), Mr Jean-Paul Demoule, French archaeologist and prehistorian, Professor emeritus of European protohistory at the University of Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he is also an honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France.
The first part is relatively incidental because it is specific to a particular archaeological site.
On the other hand, the second part, starting from “The Appearance of the Neolithic”, concerns what the title proposes.
Good reading. :)
Hello Mr. Demoule.
In search of origins, the title of your book, “The ten forgotten millennia that made history”, caught my mind and I came away from the bookstore with it.
I don’t want to bore you or waste your time, but to share with you some thoughts that were inspired to me by reading it.
Thus, as I was reading the pages, while I was finding answers to my own questions, I was thinking about yours, notably, on a limited scale, the function of the site of Göbekli Tepe, and on a more general scale, the appearance of the Neolithic.
Göbekli Tepe.
In addition to the fact that the utility of the structures found on the site is unknown, it is the one that there are other similar sites regularly spaced between them of about fifty kilometers, which appealed to me. Not having found detailed information on these other sites, what follows speculates that one finds there structures equivalent to Göbekli Tepe.
To illustrate the path of my thought, I propose a small situation: we are a culture of nomadic hunter-gatherers, and like all forms of life, but on our scale, our primary function is, consciously or unconsciously, to protect our future, to ensure our future, to allow the continuation of life.
What are we doing to make our way of life a little safer?
To this question, the modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens answers: you settle down and you invent agriculture and breeding.
Either.
But, on the one hand, we can argue to him that it constitutes a radical upheaval and not an evolution of our existing way of life, on the other hand, that the phenomenon which makes pass a nomadic culture hundreds of times millenarian, to a sedentary culture totally opposite in the spirit, in some thousands of years only, is a cultural tsunami.
This makes the answer of modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens in the framework of a “natural” evolution of things invalid. The answer thus remains in suspense.
One of the axes for the perpetuation of life is the resources necessary for this life. So by securing access to these resources. So how do we secure access to the resources we need, without questioning our nomadism?
One of the technical , quite feasible at that time, is a meshing of the territory by a set of uniformly distributed resource deposits. Deposits that can contain raw materials (stones and flints, wood, skins, dried plants, …), food resources (dried meat and fish, dried fruits, tubers and roots, …), and tools / already manufactured products (for hunting and crafting, clothing, medicinal products, …).
The implementation of such an infrastructure has many advantages for nomads:
- It provides access to vital resources, as needed, and in a uniform manner across the mesh territory.
- It avoids “territorial” conflicts over access to natural deposits of these resources.
- It allows to travel lighter, without significant reserves.
In the end, it facilitates the continuation of their lives at the cost of a concerted organization of the territory between different groups, but without the need for a fixed place to live.
But this implies two things that are difficult to accept for the mind of modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens, beyond the difficulty to prove it materially. On the one hand, that the primitive human being had a certain vision, far from survivalism, of his place in his environment, and in nature in general, that we no longer have. On the other hand, that he had a certain wisdom in his management of human relations…
I won’t go into these points further, as it is not the main topic of this letter, but the discussion remains open.
There is also a possibility that, in use, such a system will favor the emergence of periodic events in these places, common to the groups of the territory, for the consumption of foodstuffs at the end of their life and/or the replenishment of stocks, for example. Improving the genetic mix in the process.
In any case, the fact is that a human group evolving in such a mesh of deposits spaced out between them of fifty kilometers, would never find itself at more than twenty-five kilometers of a deposit. This represents between one and two days of walking in the middle of nowhere, depending on the topography, the vegetation and the weather.
I leave in suspense the presentation of these reflections on Göbekli Tepe, but, once again the discussion remains open. And with pleasure. :)
The appearance of the Neolithic.
We agree, it takes a cultural tsunami to overthrow such an ancestral way of life, in such a short time, on such a large geographical scale at the speed of communications of the time.
But it did happen.
There is only one thing that could have had such an important impact on the nomadic hunter-gatherers, and it also explains the invention of agriculture, animal husbandry, the appearance of chieftaincies and the end of the Venus. And this, without involving aliens or gods, with all due respect to them.
What triggered the Neolithic as we know it, is the acquisition of a knowledge, it is a “scientific” discovery.
Unfortunately for us, it is a discovery that we have forgotten having made. And we have forgotten it so well that, nowadays, we consider that it is a knowledge that we are born with, and that is engraved in our genes. By extension, we are convinced that animals also possess this knowledge, like us, in an innate way, and this, without any scientific basis, while the probability that we are the only ones, in the whole animal kingdom, to have it is close to one hundred percent.
The Neolithic began when the Human Being made the link between the act of copulation and the act of childbirth, in other words when Man discovered the power of his sperm, or in a more scientific way, when the Human Being discovered the male counterpart of sexual reproduction.
This has multiple consequences for our beliefs about animal behavior and the ethology that follows from it, for our beliefs in a male/female hierarchy and its origin, and for our modern social beliefs, such as the “natural” family structure, as well as for their foundation with the birth of the notions of Mother and Father, to mention only these subjects in this mail.
The box is a woman, and Pandora is a man.
The idea is not new, but we will try to support it by looking at what it means for the subjects mentioned above, starting with animal behavior.
General ethology.
Admitting that the Human Being has not always been conscious of the basic mechanisms of sexual reproduction and its stakes, and this, until a time when our modern science already names him Homo Sapiens, and considers him identical to the current human being, implies de facto that the animal is deprived of this consciousness, because Humanity is issued from Animality, it is even a “refinement”.
So what about animal behavior, if it is not linked to an awareness of continuity in time and space? Why do animals act the way they do if they are not aware of reproducing themselves by doing so, and that the very idea of reproduction is totally foreign to them and only makes sense to modern humans?
One of the intrinsic principles of life, whatever its scale, is to act in order to last in time and thus in space. Life acts in the present to have a future, it protects its future in the present. In a non-homogeneous environment such as our planet, this principle produces the evolution of species, as Charles Darwin theorized. Over time, and on a certain scale, this evolution of species has itself generated complex, distinct and complementary reproductive tools, allowing this perpetuation. In animals (and in some plants), these tools are found isolated in two different individuals, which leads to sexual differentiation within the same species. Nature not being driven by an aesthetic or artistic spirit but being entirely practical, this configuration must have had, and still have, a certain practical success to ensure the perpetuation, and, incidentally, the evolution, of the species that are subject to it, otherwise natural selection would have made it disappear.
But what does this particular configuration bring for the perpetuation of life, that the asexual configuration does not bring? We will say that it allows the multiplication of the genetic possibilities and thus a better capacity of adaptation. But that is a consequence of the survival of the individuals from day to day, therefore this sexual configuration must have an immediate effect on the survival of the individuals which are carriers of it, and that, throughout their life, so that the reproduction can occur.
If, at the same time, we admit that animals are not aware that they reproduce and that their behaviors allow their species to survive, then why do the lionesses stay with the lion, and why does the lion stay with the lionesses ? Why are there mating seasons and why are there courtship behaviour ?
This raises the question of the fundamental roles of the female and the male in nature.
Well, the basic function of the female is to survive, because she is the carrier of the matrix and she gives life. Females are survivors. And the basic function of the male is to make sure that the matrix survives. Males are protectors. And they are all the more good protectors because the females select them for this during the mating season and the courtship. And this selection of the male by the female is done up to the gamete level, according to a recent study by Professor Fitzpatrick and his team, from Stockholm University.
This is a practical mechanism of the natural selection: several females and one male will have more offspring than one female and several males, so the male is more expendable than the female. In species where numbers and uniformity are no longer sufficient to counteract predatory pressure, this leads females to evolve to avoid being sacrificed, and thus survive, and males to evolve to be sacrificed in their place, and thus protect them.
Male protection takes two main forms, depending roughly on the position of the species on the food chain:
- For the species in the lower part of this scale, the male is a decoy. He draws the predator’s attention to himself and distracts it from the female. So he is bigger, more colorful, noisier, he has a stronger smell, he may also have more taste than the female, and all this with one goal, to take as much space as possible in the predator’s sensory universe and thus favor the female’s escape. The females of this category do not choose the most beautiful males, the most musical or the best dancers, this would be attributing exclusively human considerations to them, but they choose them because they occupy more space in their sensory universe. And in practice, this will also be the case in the predator’s. They choose them because they make the best prey. Thus, natural selection makes that the most discreet females, associated with the most extravagant males, have more chances to bring a new generation to term. The fact that, statistically, the female is more likely to be covered by the male who protects her is a consequence of this behavior.
- When the size of the species, subjected to a strong predatory pressure, increases, driven by that of the males, and reaches the stage where it becomes, in itself, a practical tool of defense, the male becomes an opponent. He is selected for his ability to physically oppose threats. The more voluminous he is, not only physically, with the muscular strength and the accessories (antlers, tusks, horns) that come with it, but also in the sound and smell universe, the more he will be a good protector. This explains the cries and clashes, during the mating season, between the males of this category, which are a way of showing that the males are capable of protecting a certain number of females, to them, to other candidate males, and to the rest of the group, without there being a desire for genetic hegemony by restricting access to females to other “competing” males. (How can a fallow deer be aware of passing on its DNA, or anything else, to “its” offspring, when this is part of high school education for humans ?)
If we consider these principles and the observations that we can make, we can deduce that the more a species undergoes, or has undergone in a relatively close genetic past, predatory pressure from other species in its ecosystem, the more it will tend to develop a marked sexual dysmorphism and/or to form communities of individuals to respond to this pressure. And the longer this situation persists, the more the average size of the individuals of these species will tend to increase, driven by the increase in the size of the males, from generation to generation. This phenomenon can explain in part the gigantism reached by the dinosaurs and, before Homo Sapiens came to reshuffle the cards, the giant mammals that are now extinct.
From this we can then deduce that the adaptation of a species to its environment includes physiological and social responses to the predatory pressure it faces from other animal species in that environment. Lionesses and lions live in groups because they share their ecosystem with other carnivores, some of which live in packs, such as hyenas, and it is also the predatory pressure that they are subjected to from these carnivores that is the cause of the sexual dysmorphism of the species, which is more accentuated than in other big cats.
But going further, we can consider that vegetation, climate and the geological environment also constitute, but on longer time scales, sources of predatory pressure. Vegetation, through the predation of space, and thus through its density, influences the size of animal species (see the case of African and Asian elephants). The temperature of a climate can, in the same way, be considered as a thermal predation and, beyond that, energetic. Finally, the predatory pressure of the geological environment includes the modulation of sunlight: variable according to the slopes and the time of day in a mountainous environment, omnipresent in the plains, unknown in the deep sea and underground systems.
One of the consequences for Charles Darwin’s theory is that the hypothesis of the separation of natural selection into two sub-selections, namely, survival selection and sexual selection, is no longer founded. Natural selection is survival selection. And sexual differentiation in general, and sexual dysmorphism in particular, are consequences of this survival selection, giving each sex a fundamental, but different, function for the survival of the species, beyond the individual, and in a context of interspecies and, more generally, environmental predatory pressure. Sexual reproduction is a consequence of natural selection, beyond having become a vector of it.
But beyond the animal world, the human experience shows us that the more a species is predatory of its environment, the more this environment becomes predatory for this species. We do not destroy our environment, we make it, day after day, more and more capable of killing us. The principle is not new in our collective knowledge, the law of Karma, which in summary is defined as follows: “We reap what we sow” or “We receive what we give”, is a good example.
Finally, these same natural principles also explain certain sociological phenomena of our civilizations, such as the Homosexual and Transgender phenomena, whose intensity is a function of the predatory pressure that a society/nation makes itself undergo internally through its political, cultural, religious, philosophical and moral struggles, and those that other societies/nations make it undergo externally. These phenomena are more intense in societies/nations that are stable in time, on a historical scale, from a political, cultural, religious, philosophical and moral point of view, and that are rather at the top of the food scale of societies/nations in the world. And it is in these same societies/nations that the pre- and post-natal mortality rates are the lowest and that one can practically, but unfortunately not all, give birth on demand. In fact, in these societies/nations, the dominant predatory pressure shifts from the biological and animal domain to the social and human domain. And the utility of the sexual tooling in individuals and in the choice of a life partner, within this new paradigm is much weaker. It is even suffered, at present, as a handicap by a good half of us, despite recent attempts to restore the balance. Thus, in our system of civilization, the decorrelation of the characters “survivor” and “protector” from the sexual tooling of individuals is accelerating with the development of democracy and the geopolitical status quo.
The “Venus” in particular and representation in the Paleolithic in general.
In a culture not yet initiated to the reverse side of the things and still all forged by the practical spirit of the natural selection, what can well bring the representation, human on the one hand, with in particular the “Venus”, and animal on the other hand, with in particular the parietal frescos?
Concerning the utility of the animal parietal representations, we can consider that it is that, practical, of the representation itself, namely, to present in a place and a time where it is not present, an information acquired in another place and another time. In this case, the animal parietal representations bring the information of the fauna which frolics out of sight of the camp / place of life, inside this same camp / place of life, without it representing a danger for the group. The audience of this representation and therefore of the information transmitted must also be considered. The elders and adults, those who can or have been able to leave the camp/place, have (or have had) access to this information outside without having a practical need for it inside. This means that the audience of the parietal representations are the individuals of the group who have never yet left the camp / living place, that is to say, in great majority, the children, for whom, moreover, is it necessary to underline it in view of their size, the environment of the caves is less constraining than for the adults.
Thus, if we focus on the practical aspect of these works, we can consider them as one of the first forms of teaching aids of Humanity. Still from a practical point of view, in the transmission of information and therefore of knowledge, it is easier to draw a curve than to describe it with words, all the more so if this curve represents a horse for a child who has never seen one in a picture book… The fact that the great majority of the animals represented are large animals, reinforces this theory a little more. Indeed, if the large animals are hunted, they must be cut up where they fell, on the one hand to keep the inevitable scavengers away from the camp, on the other hand to facilitate the transport of the recovered resources. As a result, the children cannot experience the entirety of these animals when the hunters return, unlike small game, rodents and birds in particular, which are hardly ever represented on the walls of the caves but can be shown to the children in their natural forms, on return from hunting, and/or experienced from inside the camp/place of living — particularly the birds. As an extension of this hypothesis, the parietal hand marks could be seen as a support for counting and/or learning to do so (cf. the digital formulas of the Gargas cave).
Every parent in the world is at some point faced with the question “How do we make babies? ». If children ask this question, why do adults consider it to be innate knowledge? If it were, children should be born with it and never ask the question. And if this knowledge becomes innate at sexual maturity, that is to say at the maturity of the hormonal system, (and if the idea of an innate knowledge that would not be constantly innate is not disqualifying…) does this mean that it is these same hormones that whisper it in our ears?
That our hormonal system has an influence on the conscious desire of the sexual act is a scientifically attested fact, but the conscience of the link that it has with the reproduction has nothing hormonal, it is a knowledge acquired by the education. And it is therefore that there was a discovery at a moment of our History.
Before that, the notion of family must not have existed, as well as the notions of “Mother” and “Father”, and beyond that the modern notions of “Woman” and “Man”. Childbirth was to be perceived as a natural element equivalent to the weather, the seasons and the phases of the moon, but without any detectable cycle: women do not become pregnant at the same time, and they do so without any regularity in relation to each other, or to observable natural cycles. And without any apparent logical link with the sexual act: the consequences only appear progressively several months later, with other sexual acts in between, and the multiplication of orgasms does not multiply the number of children in the womb.
This leads us to think that the key to reading the Paleolithic is neither the woman, nor the man, but the child. And that, rather than considering the human groups of this time as hierarchical by the “adults”, a parental notion, would it not be better to consider them as bands of children without parents? Young children, not so young children, and even older ones, transmitting their experiences to each other and whose only goal is to live and continue to live in the most practical and pleasant way possible, in a universe that is immutable on their scale and to which they have been integrated for tens of thousands of years, far from the survivalist cliché of the man terrorized by his “wild” environment ? (for the record, only two thousand years separate the sandal of Jesus of Nazareth from the boot of Neil Armstrong and that already seems like an eternity)
This would suggest the cultural contrast between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic and the potential clash on their meeting line.
If we place ourselves in this framework, the most logical hypothesis, concerning the “Venuses”, is that they are talismans sculpted by pregnant women during their pregnancy, a period of forced sedentariness in the camp/place of life, and offered to non-motherly women to bring about childbirth on those who desire it. The irrationality of the method is to be paralleled with the irrationality of childbirth itself in Paleolithic cultures. The size and shape of the movable versions of these works, and the presence of suspension holes in some of them, suggest that they were worn by individuals, around the neck or in a small pocket, which is characteristic of personal talismans. Moreover, the discovery of reproduction and the Neolithic era that it brings in its wake, sweep away the usefulness of such talismans. Childbirth is (almost) no longer irrational and their use disappears.
Subsequently, why aren’t the “Venuses” appeals to a divine entity, necessarily superior? By analogy, in 10,000 years, will archaeologists be right to attribute a cult to a golden cat that raises its paw, to the Asian merchant caste of our time? Does the irrationality of a method of action on its environment make it an act of faith? Especially since rationality is subjective, dependent on our knowledge and understanding of our reality. It is therefore a spatio-temporal variable of our history which must be limited in order to be usable. Do Asian traders really worship a golden cat that raises its paw, or are they just talismans to attract good fortune? So that the sequence of present and future events, controlled and uncontrolled, will be favorable?
Are the “Venuses” cult objects or paleolithic Maneki Neko / Zhao Cai Mao?
The natural selection that validates the most practical solutions in a context of predatory pressure, should logically give birth to an intelligence based on practice, on how things are done rather than why things are done. How to be the most efficient to live, rather than why to be the most efficient to live. How to prevent the fish from falling off the harpoon? How to limit the risks of hunting? How to be warm when it is cold? How to “fix” yourself in case of an accident?
The how gives rise to practices that endure, through teaching, and evolve over time according to their effectiveness in improving physical and primary existence, like genetic mutations, but on a shorter time scale. The why, on the other hand, only gives birth to other whys, and thus does not have the practical and physically perpetuating fruitfulness of the how, while questioning the “unchanging” character, on the scale of animal life, of the rules of the world; which, animalistically speaking, is a nonsense.
The mastery of fire, which is the last major cultural revolution before the Neolithic, answers the question “how the fire?” The question “why the fire?” will only be asked hundreds of thousands of years later, after the advent of the Neolithic, and will lead to the discovery of the principle of combustion by oxygen by Antoine Lavoisier in 1775.
Now, another analogy: if tomorrow, someone discovers that with a certain simple method, all women can fly by themselves, and this for thousands of generations, what will explode in our minds?
Why didn’t we realize this before? Why women? Why not men? Why ?
And with this Why, all the doors of metaphysics open, because intrinsically it implies something that has eluded the senses, and in the case of reproduction, for hundreds of thousands of years and countless generations. Since the discovery of reproduction, and by this permanent and reciprocal game of questioning between these two questionings about the world, the understanding of our physical environment as well as our metaphysical one has considerably accelerated, but for an exclusively physical culture, which finds itself pushed unceremoniously, by evolution, into metaphysics and which has not yet forged the first tools to evolve in it, it is the beginning of hidden causes and invisible entities, of divination and of the scientific spirit, without defined borders.
Following this reasoning, we can logically think that the discovery of reproduction has provoked in Homo Sapiens a change of mental structure and an evolution of its cognitive system, a non-genetic evolution that persists through education and that we all experience during childhood, a non-physiological branch of the human species. The point in time when Homo Sapiens became Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
To conclude on the “Venus”, if spirituality and the supernatural appeared only with the discovery of reproduction, the works of Humanity which are previous to it, can, more than hardly, be considered through the modern prism of these notions.
From the organic group to the chiefdom and beyond.
A culture without “Father”, without “Mother”, without “parental” authority and the notion of hierarchy that it imposes from birth, therefore without any other natural authority than that of the experience acquired and transmitted.
A culture where no single, obligatory figure of the inferior genitrix is imposed on either children or women, where no single, obligatory figure of the hero and mentor is imposed on either children or men.
A culture where children are free to choose as role models any human being around them and where these same role models are free to assume it, and they become mentors to listen to, or not, and they become heroes to imitate.
A culture that evolves through the eyes of children and the response they receive, where authority is given to those who transmit practical skills directly or by example, authority as a source of knowledge.
[What about authority through physical strength? If physical strength had been the basis of authority for Paleolithic humans, they would not have confronted animals larger and stronger than themselves. Their adaptability, on the other hand, allowed them to do so successfully, and on a human scale, it is transmitted more with skills than through genetics].
A culture where the manifestations of ownership do not go beyond what is used, worn, or ingested, and where utility makes value.
A culture with fission-fusion and polyandric dynamics, like our closest cousins, but having evolved with the tools and the mastery of fire, over greater distances, where only its social role remains to conscious and practical sexuality, stripped of the idea of reproduction, sharing joys and forgetting sorrows in the common pleasure.
A culture in which explodes the discovery of reproduction and its biased interpretation that redefines its universe.
A culture that links copulation, sperm — the visible manifestation of male gametes — and female childbirth, and that cannot suspect female gametes, strictly internal and invisible.
A culture where the dominant thought will make of the man the one who, after having deposited his seed, a part of himself, in the woman’s womb, will receive the flesh of his flesh and the blood of his blood during the childbirth, in the way we bake bread or clay in an oven. Reasoning reinforced, in spirit and in practice, by the superior physical stature that natural selection has given to the “protective” man.
A culture where only men have offspring and women have none, obliterating their role in the new social order that is taking shape, along with their biological role. Where men take women as tools and children as burdens, and where they become the sole responsible for many other individuals, having to provide for them, while the cohesion offered by the pooling of resources by all and for all is inexorably eroded in parallel.
A culture in which human organic groups are subdivided into autonomous family entities that end up specializing in certain tasks and resources, because of the lack of time and manpower to do everything, and in which families exchange the fruit of their respective specialties, giving another cohesion to the group.
A culture which, with the discovery of reproduction and the new ways of life that it entails, sees its birth rate triple, as you yourself indicate, which increases in the same proportions the burden of the “Father”, with a constant infant mortality rate, and the sedentary nature of the “Mother” by the multiplication of pregnancies, (“He said to the woman: ‘I will multiply the suffering of your pregnancies’” Genesis .3.16) which become annual.
A culture which will be exported, at the same time as its demographic surplus, by the ways of less climatic constraint, that is to say in priority towards temperate Europe and temperate Asia, since the fertile crescent.
A culture where polyandry disappears with the emergence of patriarchy, where the dynamics of fission-fusion are centered on the family and require new social rules within the initial organic group, and where nomadism disappears with the specialization of these same families, the sedentarity of the resource deposits and that, increased by the increase in the number of pregnancies, of women.
A culture where men live for their descendants and children by their ancestry, where knowledge and experience of the world, truncated by specialization and the new social boundaries, are transmitted, in the first place, within the family, “by blood”, without necessarily leaving it to be validated by the general consensus, where each family becomes a source of predatory pressure for the others, and where fathers end up monopolizing resources for the good of their descendants, to the detriment of those of “the others”.
A culture in which knowledge grows as it is fragmented, in which those who have more fragments are consulted more than those who have less and become de facto sages, judges, heroes, teachers, chiefs, patriarchs, substitute fathers, hierarchizing the new social environment of organic groups in the image of the emerging family organization, around a single, fatherly and providential figure.
A culture where the sedentary resource deposits, reserved by the members of the new communities of families, behind the front of colonization and therefore in demographic expansion, define the first borders, which it is always appropriate to “defend” for the good of our children and the honor of our ancestors, reserving the resources to these same communities and making the phenomenon of predatory pressure between them appear.
A culture where collective cults are a means, conscious or unconscious, to recover the previous and disappeared community of spirit, independently of the new schizophrenic social organization that tends to make families and individuals antagonistic and interdependent at the same time.
A culture that will know art and torture, justice and slavery, the pen and the crossbow, mercy and genocide, and which of single species becomes sum of single species, destined to clash until the end of time.
A culture where the varnish of “civilization” and the end of virgin and infinite spaces will bring back men from competing conquerors to conquering competitors, offering an etiquette to the jockeying for position that intensifies with the increase of the demographic density.
A culture where it will be necessary to wait for the year 1876 so that the western science, become the alpha and the omega of the knowledge, proves definitively that the woman and the man are equal in front of the sexual reproduction of the species, with the setting in evidence of the fusion of the nuclei of the female and male gametes in one, independently by Oskar Herwig and Hermann Fol. Discovery which brings a weighty credit to the young movements of emancipation of the woman, babbling in the Western educated circles.
When breeding causes agriculture.
Humanity, which adopts patriarchy and settles down as a consequence, encounters two major problems for its survival, one accentuating the other.
The first is the impossibility of following the seasonal migration of the herds of large herbivores that make up a large part of its meat diet.
The second is the obligation to live a “bad” climatic and environmental season, reinforced by the absence of the herds, leaving as food resources only small game, possibly fish, and the fruit of the gathering, which evolves with the new seasonal opportunities.
The solution retained by humanity is to prevent the animals from leaving by enclosing them. At first by small groups, to wait for the return of the wild herds, then, the front of colonization moving away and the demographic density increasing, in a more intensive way, until complete disappearance of the wild herds.
But this solution has a downside. Keeping animals alive for consumption during the “bad” season requires feeding them during that “bad” season. It is not for nothing that the herds migrate.
Once again, Humanity will find the solution by transplanting and then cultivating the large forage plants, mostly grasses, that wild herbivores feed on, and from which it may already be recovering the grains during occasional pickup, the dry plant preserved to feed animals held captive at the end of the “good” season, and the grains preserved to supplement human food in the “bad” season.
In a rationality to be put in relation with the knowledge of this time, the big grains will be replanted in priority, to have big plants and the others will be consumed. A practice which, as modern genetics teaches us, has the effect of increasing the size of the grains carried by the plants from one selection to the next, and which will lead this source of food, initially secondary, to supplant gathering, completing the sedentarization of the populations, and giving rhythm to the lives of women and men through agricultural work and the anticipation of the “bad” season.
(“He said to the man, […] ‘The ground is cursed for your sake. You shall eat from it with difficulty all the days of your life. It shall bring forth to you briers and thistles, and you shall eat grass of the field. You shall eat bread by the sweat of your face, until you return to the earth […]” Genesis 3.17/.18/.19)
Reflections, digressions and conjectures.
History begins with the invention of writing. Does it really?
Why doesn’t it begin at the beginning of the story told by the first scriptures, History being, in the end, only the story of the adventures of humanity for future generations, a global Odyssey?
Because the Earth was not formed from the remains of the giant Ymir, and certainly not in six days, because the universe is not a golden egg, because these are myths and legends, but above all, because it cannot be scientifically proven.
But if we, modern humans, chronicle our recent history, specifying, improving, correcting, by our rationality and our science, the one that has been transmitted to us, it is logical to think that other humans, less modern, have also attached themselves to it before us, otherwise we would not have a past.
But since when? Only since the invention of writing?
If we consider historical events and the lessons attributed to them by the rationality of their time, we can see that the events that come to us from the past are those whose importance of the lesson, in the eyes of our successive predecessors, has not wavered, even when the memory of the rationality that gave rise to them disappears from the collective memory, even more slowly than their material remains, pushing them towards myth and legend.
So why did the generations of chroniclers who preceded us, and their respective rationalities, take the trouble to transmit useless and unfounded lessons? And in particular on the origin of the Human Woman/Man, and moreover in writing, statufying the Commander in multiple cultures?
We have long lived on a flat Earth, before it became spherical, and despite the (or perhaps because of the…) major paradigm shift that this implies for Humanity, the memory that we once found a flat Earth rational, and that we lived with it, tends to fade from our collective memory, and from our History, leaving only the myth and legend of Human Beings terrified of falling off the edge of the world.
Myths and legends are born from the collective oblivion of the rationality on which they are based, so any event tends to become a myth. The Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, for example. That a human mass could brave certain death, in difficult conditions, to invade a land it did not covet, for an idea that belonged to no one, has already become mythical in our era of drones, “surgical” strikes, commando operations and national interests, while the last witnesses and holders of this rationality are gradually disappearing.
So if myths are born out of history and oblivion, why not that of the first “Man”? And if we grant him a historicity, then who was he?
Archaeologists have taken to studying the last modern hunter-gatherer tribes to imagine how our Paleolithic ancestors might have behaved. So on this same principle, who is the modern “Man”? Who is he with his “natural” and all-powerful patriarchy, when it is not of divine right? Who is he with his sedentary and laborious system, dedicated to his descendants in honor of his ancestry? Who is he to, again and again, foresee the “bad” season? Who are Adam and his kind if not the first “Sons” of a first all-powerful “Father” and a first obliterated “Mother”? Who are Eve and her kind if they are not the tools (and some, in bone…) of the destiny of the first sons, by descent? Are they not among the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens who appeared after the accident of the discovery of reproduction?
Especially since the exclusivity of the sperm and the male in childbirth is prevalent in the vast majority of religious cultures from our oldest scriptures, whatever their origins.
In Isaiah 45:10, “ Woe to him who says to a father, ‘ What have you become the father of ? ’” or to a woman, “ To what have you given birth? ”. The woman, who does not have the status of “Mother”, gives birth to what the “Father” begets. She does not beget it with him, she only brings into the world the child of the “Father”. And if two different expressions have been used, it is because the distinction must have had some meaning and importance for the author.
In the Qur’an, Sura 53, verses 45 and 46, “ And it is He who created the two elements of the couple, male and female, from a drop of semen when it is ejaculated ”. Here there is no trace of female participation in the creation of the human being, not to mention an ovum.
In the Hindu Vedic Hymns, it is the semen of Prajapati, Lord of creatures, who, meeting the earth, created the first men.
And the state of mind that stems from this exclusivity also explains some of the so-called “curious” behavior by modern humanity. The fact that Sarah proposes Hagar to bear Abraham’s children is quite rational if women are only incubators. What does it matter which one carries the daughters and sons of the man?
This implies that women are considered to have no offspring of their own. This implies an exclusively male ancestry and descent. Women who have no offspring are “dead branches”. This is transpiring in the meticulous, and almost obsessive, care of religious texts to describe and retranscribe exclusively male lineages that originate from a unique “Man” from a unique “Father”, notably in the Old Testament.
Adam and Eve are not unique. They and their counterparts in ancient writings existed on the expansion front of the Neolithic, just after the meeting between those who “knew” and those who did not yet know. They are the first children of a new era, the one we are living in.
Does History start when there is one to set in stone or when there is one to be told?
An emotional charge difficult to imagine, provoked by the discovery of “how babies are made”, followed by a cleavage between Men, anchored in reality by their ancestry and shaping it for their descendants, denying that it could ever have been otherwise, and women, “impulsive” and ephemeral, without consequence since they have no offspring, but necessary for the anchoring of Men in reality. A denial, an impulse and a unity in spite of everything.
Does this mean that humanity as a whole has a place on the psychoanalytic couch?
All the more so as she has put in place other defense mechanisms that this discipline attributes to a mind reacting to trauma.
The “withdrawal into oneself” which makes her see her environment as something from which she is separated and which dominates her, against which she must fight and from which she must free herself by “dominating” it in turn. The “omnipotent control” and its pyramidal social structure, from the family to empires, unions and other confederations. The “idealization” of “Man” to the point of giving him a deic and irrational form. The “dissociation” and its cultural multitude. The “isolation” and its massacres. “Intellectualization” and “rationalization” with scientific and numeric thinking. “Compartmentalization” and its nations. The “retroactive cancellation” and its “human rights” (the literal translation of the french expression is “Man rights”…). The “turning against oneself” and its conflicts. The “displacement” and the archaeologization of the origins. The “reactionary formation” and its pacifist movements. The “inversion” and its productivism. The “passage to the act” and the sexualization of the world. The “sublimation” and its triumphant individualism.
If the product of our individual interactions leads our whole to generate post-traumatic defense symptoms in the manner of an individual mind, does this product of our interactions constitute a “Mind”? A “Mind” sick of its trauma, but adapting as best it can to continue to endure, repressing the origin of these ills in time, mythification and amnesia?
A “Humanity” of which religions would be the catharsis, divided like it, clashing like it, guiding it towards a good, idealized reminiscence of the previous cognitive and social organization, defining the evil, each one carrying the torch of its truth, illuminating a path paved with its dogmas, without realizing that their failure is in their root, a truncated universality.
Exegetes and eschatologists will note that the first time a “Father” asserted rights and duties over a child, we discovered preemption and invented property. The first time he did it by force, we discovered anger and invented war. The first time he did it by exchange, we discovered trade and invented profit. And the first time he left them behind, we discovered death and invented heredity. And in the same way, readers of Isaac Luria will be able to see in the discovery of reproduction the Shevirat haKelim, when the knowledge received, misinterpreted, leads to the negation of the feminine by the masculine, disintegrating the original unity and splitting and dispersing knowledge, leaving the world/universe split in two.
This leads us to believe that if there is to be healing/“peace of God”, it will begin between women and men, and will occur when we see ourselves, not as sexes, but as Human Beings.
The main disadvantage of this theory, apart from the fact that it scratches a few statues, is that it implies that all the discovered or invented rules that govern our reality, whether they are sexual, individual, family, social, cultural, religious, philosophical, economic or scientific, result from an intellectual accident.
Thank you for your time, your reading and your book.
And I look forward to reading you.
