(Had to split this into two for length)
For a long time, it was assumed that only with the creation of cities did humans aggregate together in large numbers. This was the so-called "urban revolution" described by the noted archaeologist V. Gordon Childe in the early twentieth century, and it was supposed to have taken place thousands of years after the so-called "invention" of agriculture (which, as we'll see, was not an invention at all). It was only when cities were established, the thinking went, that we were able to do things like construct permanent habitation, build temples, pursue full-time craft specialization, and develop things like art, music, science, and literature.
This view is almost certainly wrong. Humans have been gathering together in large numbers for thousands of years. Coming together in large numbers on a permanent basis was indeed new, but humans had been already been engaging in patterns of aggregation and dispersal typcial of fission-fusion species since time immemorial. When cities proper did emerge during the late Neolithic, they were simply a cementing of tendencies that were not at all alien to our species.
In a widely-shared article, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow point out that these sorts of gatherings were probably a regular feature of human social life as far back the Paleolithic:
Most...Paleolithic sites...are associated with evidence for annual or biennial periods of aggregation, linked to the migrations of game herds – whether woolly mammoth, steppe bison, reindeer or (in the case of Göbekli Tepe) gazelle – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests.
At less favourable times of year, at least some of our Ice Age ancestors no doubt really did live and forage in tiny bands. But there is overwhelming evidence to show that at others they congregated en masse within the kind of ‘micro-cities’ found at Dolní Věstonice, in the Moravian basin south of Brno, feasting on a super-abundance of wild resources, engaging in complex rituals, ambitious artistic enterprises, and trading minerals, marine shells, and animal pelts over striking distances.
Western European equivalents of these seasonal aggregation sites would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their famous paintings and carvings, which similarly formed part of an annual round of congregation and dispersal.
How to change the course of human history (Eurozine)
The main point of their essay is to emphasize the flexibility of these social arrangements. Rather than a simple linear evolution from egalitarian bands to sedentary authoritarian tribes, to chiefdoms, to states, it appears that these societies were able to move back and forth between different social arrangements depending on the circumstances.
They cite as their primary example the anthropologist Marcel Mauss's description of the Inuit tribes of the circumpolar Arctic as having "...two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion." Mauss published his observations in a book entitled Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology. Graeber and Wengrow conclude from this and other data that humans in many different regions of the world have always been "self consciously experimenting with different social possibilities."
In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder. Property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, another social structure entirely took over as Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone. Within them, the virtues of equality, altruism, and collective life prevailed; wealth was shared; husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Seals.
Another example were the indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast, for whom winter – not summer – was the time when society crystallised into its most unequal form, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastlines of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch. Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations, still ranked, but with an entirely different and less formal structure. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.
Perhaps most striking, in terms of political reversals, were the seasonal practices of 19th-century tribal confederacies on the American Great Plains – sometime, or one-time farmers who had adopted a nomadic hunting life. In the late summer, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip, or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet as the anthropologist Robert Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis, giving way to more ‘anarchic’ forms of organisation once the hunting season – and the collective rituals that followed – were complete.
How to change the course of human history (Eurozone)
They argue that this sort of "dual morphology" was probably characteristic of many hunter-gatherer societies all over the world going back for thousands of years into the very remote past.
Quite independently, archaeological evidence suggests that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving in broadly similar ways: shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements, permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year, on the proviso that they could not last; on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. Within the same population, one could live sometimes in what looks, from a distance, like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes a society with many of the features we now identify with states.
All the evidence indicates that humans were going back-and-forth between more nomadic and more sedentary ways of life for perhaps many thousands of years. At the same time, their social arrangements were likely just as fluid, ranging from the very open-ended band societies based around fission-fusion, to more hierarchical ones complete with leaders and headmen. Evidence indicates that even many band societies were not fully mobile, but would routinely settle in one place for significant amounts of time ranging from just a few days to months at a time, usually when a certain natural resource was in season, only to revert to living in small, mobile bands once those resources were exhausted. It might be migrating herds, it might be spawning fish, or it might be plant resources like trees stocked with nuts or bushes filled with berries. Such fission- fusion behavior has been documented in cultures all over the world. Here’s Mark Moffett:
Each year some otherwise roving Andaman Islander societies rebuilt residences they kept near the ocean, and bands would rendezvous to fish for a couple of months. The pole-and-palm-from structures reached well over ten meters in diameter and several meters in height...Inside, each family had a sleeping platform and a fire. The communal domiciles were maintained for so many generations that each was associated with piles of refuse in some places thousands of years old and more than 150 meters in circumference and 10 meters high.
For another example, every autumn in North America, bands of certain tribes gathered to frighten herds of bison over cliffs. No chimpanzee community enjoys each other's company this way, as one grand assembly; the apes parcel out their social engagements in smaller doses.
In some fundamentals, life during a band get-together was little changed from normal, with each band often keeping its status as a "neighborhood" by camping a bit apart. Yet the throngs were the reunions of the day, enlivened by gossiping, gifts, songs and dances, and, much as occurs when elephants aggregate, with males on the prowl for conquests.
While the most common instances of socializing between bands were visits by lone travelers or families to those they knew personally, these assemblages were greased by the people's shared identity. Surely this must have given gatherings a significance in buttressing group practices and behavior, if just by circumstance. I've seen no evidence decisions were made that affected the collective. Still, the activities must have conveyed a sense of common purpose. (124)
Indeed, humans must have lived in such multi-level fission-fusion societies, neither completely settled, nor fully nomadic, passing between more egalitarian and more hierarchical social structures, for countless millennia before recorded history began. Writing off all human prehistory as simply small, isolated, nomadic hunter-gathers bands roaming the landscape and living exclusively off of wild foods prior to the 'invention" of agriculture really has caused us to completely get a lot of prehistory completely wrong.
There is evidence for this even in historical times. Colin Tudge notes that the Khoikhoi in southwest Africa will adopt goatherding in times of scarcity, only to abandon it and return to hunting and gathering once resources become more abundant. Mark Moffett describes the recent history of the =Au//ei people living in what is now Botswana (the symbols represent click sounds):
The records concerning these Bushmen from the early decades of the nineteenth century recounted the =Au//ei as seasonally occupying villages surrounded by defensive palisades. To obtain sufficient food while so entrenched, the people innovated methods for culling game by driving herds into pits that were a maze of yawning chasms. The =Au//ei of that time were warriors prone to blood vengeance who burned wagons, stole cattle, and collected tribute from other bushmen.
That a society adapted to leaders and village life didn't mean the change was permanent. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, =Au//ei reverted to roving, leaderless bands. By 1921, headmen had reemerged with the reduced role of orchestrating armed clashes, this time without the people settling down. The leaders gained influence during periods of encroachment by armed tribes such as the cattle-rearing Oorlam. When the incentives to fight diminished, the leaders fell out of favor and the people reverted back to an egalitarian band life. One might assume it would be their original way of life, except there is no telling how far back in time the requirement for self-defense might have arisen. The dynamic =Au//ei culture suggests that changes in social organization come and go, leaving hardly a trace.
Famously, nomadic American Indians had leaders, too: senior individuals whose roles continue to the present day. It is impossible to say how often those hunter-gatherer tribes, with their portable tepees and wigwams, were led by chiefs prior to the arrival of the Europeans, who brought with them horses and guns. What's clear is that when dangers were ongoing, nomadic societies embraced greater social complexity. Among the Plains Indians, warrior associations—the West Points of the day—put select men through rigorous training to prepare for combat.
At the other end of the gamut from the =Aau//ei, who spent most of their time as nomads, hunter-gatherers widely thought of as fully settled were just as malleable. Even the Pacific Northwest Indians, the gold standard for settled peoples who forage from nature, didn't always stay put. Villages either moved or disbanded as suited them. Some longhouses were seasonal residences, with families traveling by freight canoe to homes elsewhere. There's evidence of temporary camps, too, suggesting people would go out to hunt game, perhaps like sportsmen pitching tents today. Probably few hunter-gatherers lived at the absolute extremes, as perennial homebodies or incessant wanderers. (130-131)
These sorts of gatherings were, in fact, crucial to the evolution of civilization. Human societies were just as malleable as water—as water exists in different states such as solid, liquid and vapor; human societies have also existed in multiple states, with freezing, melting, evaporation and condensation taking place repeatedly over time. Thus agriculture was not so much a "break" with how humans lived previously, but a “freezing” of certain tendencies that had always been there under the surface.
Many descriptions of human prehistory assume that food domestication made way for the power and role differentials of civilizations to come into play. True, agriculture tipped the balance. However, just as chameleons change color as conditions demand, humans reconfigured their social lives—transitioning from equality and sharing to deference to authority and hoarding, and from roaming to settling down roots—as suited the situation.
This can be hard to believe because we have come to think of hunter-gatherers much as they would have thought of us: as an alien life form. Yet human cognition nonetheless remains adjustable across all the social options that had once been available to hunter-gatherers. (123-124)
Putting down roots, along with the concomitant development of the social features often connected with settlements such as leadership and inequality, has been portrayed as a watershed step for humanity. It's true the full potential of the settled life has been achieved since the development of agriculture. I see no reason, however, why these customs couldn't have sprung up, as the situation merited, with all the versatility shown by the =Au//ei, from the dawn of humanity. (136)
All of this leads Graeber and Wengrow ask:
Rather than idling in some primordial innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again. If so, then the real question is not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’
This raises the question of just how far back humans lived in larger settlements, and for how long. Moffett concurs with Graeber and Wengrow that living together in large settlements was not something that sprang up with agriculture, but must date back to the far distant past:
Before some point in our distant past, fission-fusion must have been the sole life choice for our ancestors. I say that because chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans have in common fission-fusion into small groups. The simplest explanation for this shared trait is that the ancestor from whom all three species sprung had this mode of life, too.
With spreading out the only game in town, the nightly encampments of early proto-humans must have served as incubators of the social dexterity we would need to take up residence at one place. But that split between us and the two other apes occurred 6 million years ago or so—long before our ancestors were anything one could call human. How far back in the human evolutionary lineage did settlement appear? (136)
If we take a look at the archaeological record, we can clearly signs that human settlements date back tens of thousands of years to the very remote past. Let's take a look at some of the best-known evidence for them in roughly chronological order.
A. The prehistoric sites and decorated caves of the Vézère Valley
This region of France is home to many of the earliest examples of Upper Paleolithic art, including the famous Lascaux cave paintings. Dozens of sites have been discovered in the area since the late nineteenth century, providing a huge number of artifacts including tools, hunting weapons, and carvings in stone and bone, earning it the nickname "the capital of prehistory." The Cro-Magnon rock shelter in the region lent its name to the earliest anatomically modern human inhabitants of Europe. Most of the sites date to between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago, but the region was also inhabited by Neanderthals as far back as 450,000 years ago.
It appears that the sites of the caves and rock shelters were deliberately chosen to take advantage of the migratory paths of large herds of reindeer and caribou. The reindeer drives would have taken place in the autumn, after the animals had gorged on rich plant food during warm months. As the herds attempted to ford streams where the caves and shelters were located, the hunters would strike, killing large numbers of animals at a time—enough to possibly sustain them throughout the winter if they were smoked inside the caves or stored on ice during the winter: "Late Ice Age Cro-Magnon bands had been able to exploit fall reindeer migrations where thousands of animals passed through narrow river valleys and crossed streams on their way to find summer pastures. They harvested hundreds of animals every year." [2] In addition, the rivers and streams would have also provided rich salmon runs to exploit. All of these animals are depicted on the walls of the caves.
The caves themselves have long been assumed to be places dedicated to esoteric rituals enacted by the Paleolithic hunters who inhabited the region. Paintings are not placed at random or at easily accessible locations in the caves, but rather at specific places where the acoustics are superior, suggesting the ritual use of chanting and music. The flickering lights of tallow lamps would have created the illusion of movement in the animals painted on the walls. It has been argued that the human and animal symbols on the cave walls—inducing the well-known Shaft Scene at Lascaux—"represent star constellations in the night sky, and were used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes," although this is not universally accepted. [2]
Whatever their ultimate use, it is clear that the caves and rock shelters meant something to the people who inhabited the region. Most likely these sites were not inhabited year-round, but were places where the people who lived in this area of Paleolithic Europe congregated during the autumn to prey on the migrating herds of reindeer, while during the summer they would disperse across the landscape seeking out more widely distributed sources of forage. During the gatherings, some sort of ritual would probably be enacted inside the caves whose ultimate nature we can only speculate. It's fair, then, to call these the earliest known "temples." Cave art of even older vintage has been found in Sulawesi in Indonesia dating to over 40,000 years ago, implying that such caves were used for places of congregation and refuge by modern humans across the world since exiting from Africa 60-70,000 years ago. [3]
Not only were they storage spaces for precious artwork, they were also gathering places for humans, possibly up to 100 at a time in some of the larger chambers. To paleoanthropologists, especially those leaning toward magico-religious explanations, such spaces inevitably suggest rituals, making the decorated cave a kind of cathedral within which humans communed with a higher power.
Visual art may have been only one part of the uplifting spectacle; recently, much attention has been paid to the acoustic properties of decorated caves and how they may have generated awe-inspiring reverberant sounds. People sang, chanted or drummed, stared at the lifelike animals around them, and perhaps got high: the cave as an ideal venue for a rave. Or maybe they took, say, psychedelic mushrooms they found growing wild, and then painted the animals, a possibility suggested by a few modern reports from San people in southern Africa, who dance themselves into a trance state before getting down to work.
‘Humans were not centre stage’: how ancient cave art puts us in our place (The Guardian)
B. Kostenki 11
At this remote site in Siberia, researchers have found the remains of a large circular structure composed of mammoth bones dating to approximately 25,000 years ago during the Ice Age. The 30 by 30 foot (12.5 meter) structure at Kostenki 11 utilized the bones of at least 60 mammoths to construct it. Over 70 of these mammoth bone circles have been discovered in Siberia dating from around 20-22,000 years ago.
It was originally thought that such circular structures were houses built to shelter their inhabitants from the harsh climate. However, researchers now believe this is unlikely, as such structures would have proven difficult to enclose making them unsuitable as shelters. Simple shelters comprised of posts and hides—or even snow blocks—would have provided an easier more effective solution as demonstrated by more recent Arctic peoples. In addition, the composition of the circles left little room inside of them for habitation. As one archaeologist speculates concerning the location of Kostenki 11, "One possibility is that the mammoths and humans could have come to the area on masse because it had a natural spring that would have provided unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter—rare in this period of extreme cold." [4]
Constructing such enormous structures would have required a massive investment of time, resources, and labor. Such an enoromous investment may indicate that Kostenki 11 was a kind of sacred ground or "temple" for the mammoth hunters of the Ice Age steppe to congregate and perform rituals 22,000 years ago. [5]
C. Dolní Vĕstonice and Pavlov sites
Dolní Vĕstonice is a site in the Moravian region of what is the modern-day Czech Republic at the base of the Děvín Mountain and was inhabited around 26,000 years ago. This site is the location of a number of spectacular burials, including one of a forty-year-old woman often depicted as a "shaman" adorned with red ochre and covered with mammoth shoulderblades. Many of the burials contain elaborate grave goods. Large numbers of stone tools have been recovered at the site, along with bones of prey animals including mammoth, fox, and reindeer.
There are a number of permanent huts constructed at the site which the excavators believe were used for mammoth hunting. The archaeologists estimate that up to 20 to 25 people could occupy a hut, and postulated five or six huts being occupied at one time on the site, for a total of 100-200 occupants. The length of stay at the site has not been determined.
In the center of the arrangement of stone huts was a large communal hearth. Like the caves of the Dordogne, the location of the site seems to have determined by the migration route of large prey species. The site is situated at a natural corridor known as the Moravian Gate, connecting the North European Plain to the Danube Basin, which was a sort of superhighway for migrating beasts, especially mammoth herds.
Dolní Vĕstonice is the location of a large number of archaeological firsts. The oldest ceramic sculptures have been found here—15,000 years before the next evidence of ceramic pottery turns up among the Jōmon people of Japan. The Pavlov site contained the oldest evidence of woven fibers based on impressions in fired clay (subsequent discoveries of flax in Georgia are older [6]). It also appears that the people at Dolní Vĕstonice hunted prey with nets and may have also constructed weirs and traps. A carving believed to be the oldest example of human portraiture comes from this site (earlier cave paintings and Venus figurines were always stylized representations of anonymous humans).
Intriguingly, there is evidence that inhabitants of the site kept track of time. The Wolf Bone is one of a number of prehistoric bones from the Paleolithic era with hatch marks made on them in a deliberate pattern. Some scholars have claimed that the hatch marks were calendrical—made to keep track of the phases of the moon or the movements of the stars. Such artifacts may have been how stone-age "shamans" kept track of when rendezvous would take place at these locations. Others argue that they might be "tally sticks" used to keep a record of debts and credit facilitating the exchange of goods. In either case, they show a sophistication not normally attributed to Stone-Age peoples.
D. Göbeckli Tepe
There are only a handful of sites that can legitimately be claimed to have "rewritten history," and Göbeckli Tepe ("potbelly hill" in Turkish) is one of them. The site sits near the border between modern-day Turkey and Syria.
The site consists of a large number of circular and semi-circular stone temples that appear to have been deliberately buried by the people who built them for unknown reasons. Due to the burial of the stones, the temples can be reliably dated to at least 11,000 years ago, with construction on some parts of the site dating as far back as 14,000 or 15,000 years ago, indicating that they were definitely built prior to metal tools and the domestication of plants and animals in the region. The stones themselves are enormous T-shaped carved limestone pillars which stand over nine feet tall and weigh several tons apiece, ringed by dry-stacked stone walls. Portions of the site appear to have been reused and relocated over time.
The earliest known enduring piece of architecture, and a monumental one at that, is Göbekli Tepe, on a ridge in the southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. Construction began there at least 11,000 years ago, before any plants or livestock had been domesticated. Proclaimed by one archaeologist as "a cathedral on a hill," Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known religious site. Arranged in circles on a slope are T-shaped limestone monoliths, three meters tall and up to seven tons in mass, engraved with stylized animals spiders, lions, birds, snakes, and other mostly dangerous species, all made improbably with simple flint tools.
The antelope that frequent the area must have drawn hunter-gatherers to this corner of the countryside from midsummer to autumn. Archaeological explorations have uncovered evidence that Göbekli Tepe was a center for feasts featuring the earliest known bread and beer made from grain reaped from wild grasses.
To create such a formidable structure, the site's builders must have lived nearby for all or part of the year. Though similarly ancient dwellings have yet to be found nearby, other researchers working a few hundred kilometers to the south have unearthed substantial homes and elaborate headdresses for hunter-gatherers going back 14,500 years, well before Göbekli Tepe. (143-144)
There is no evidence that people lived at the site on a continuous basis, indicating that once again this was most likely a ritual center where foraging people in the area would congregate to engage in feasting and perform ceremonies. There is evidence that some people in the nearby region lived in permanent stone huts which predate the temple's construction:
...there isn't any evidence suggesting people actually lived at Göbekli Tepe. There were no burials and no apparent homes. So, to better understand who the site's visitors were, scientists were forced to look to the nearby countryside. When they did, they found signs that for centuries before Göbekli Tepe appeared, Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the region seemed to be building small, permanent settlements where they lived communally, sharing their foraged resources. If that’s confirmed, then such sharing might have helped spawn the creation of society. [7]
E. The Shigir idol
Not a place but an artifact dating from around the same time as Göbeckli Tepe—11,500 years ago—the Shigir Idol is a tall wooden sculpture made from larch found in Siberia that originally stood just over three meters (nine feet) tall. The wooden sculpture was preserved by a peat bog, which is why it survived for so long unlike most wooden artifacts from such a long time ago which have long since decayed.
The enormous size of the sculpture indicates that it couldn't have been mobile; in other words, some degree of sedentism is implied. This indicates that the idol must have been associated with some sort of communal ceremonial ground where only the "idol" was preserved. In this, it is somewhat reminiscent of the large totem poles caved by natives of the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, where sedentary hunter-gatherers who subsisted mostly on maritime resources lived year-round in permanent settlements constructed of wooden planks. If this was the case, then it's likely that none of the wooden buildings in this region of Siberia—if they had existed—would have been preserved.
F. Nabta Playa
Nabta Playa was discovered by archaeologist Fred Wendorf in the remote Egyptian desert about 700 miles away from the Great Pyramids at Giza. The site was constructed around 7,000 years ago—or 5,000 BC—meaning that it was nearly as remote in time from the Egypt of the pharaohs as they are from our own time.
Nabta Playa was the site of a number of menhirs (upright standing stones), stelae (carved stones), and tumuli (earth and stone mounds raised over a grave). The megaliths were arranged in an approximately north-south direction. The most spectacular discovery at the site was a cromlech, or calendrical stone circle, that has often been described as "the world's oldest astronomical observatory" (the possible astronomical alignment of Göbeckli Tepe is highly debated). The stone circle at Nabta Playa was aligned to the stars Arcturus, Sirius and Alpha Centauri as they would have been positioned in or around 4800 BC.
The site appears to have been a meeting place for the nomadic cattle herders of the western Egyptian desert. Sometime before ten thousand years ago, a shift in the North African monsoon meant that the Sahara went through one of it's many periodic "wet" phases, with grasslands replacing parched desert (c.f. the famous "Swimmer's Cave" featured in The English Patient). Scholars debate whether cattle were independently domesticated from native animals called aurochs in Northern Africa, or whether they were brought in from elsewhere.
In either case, the highly variable and seasonal climate of the grasslands made herding cattle and goats a much more attractive and reliable option for subsistence than growing crops full-time anywhere outside of the Nile Valley. When the monsoons came, seasonal lakes called playa would fill up with water in the summer months providing short-term oases for grazing. This gave these nomadic cattle herders a place to gather together in one place during the rainy season. At Nabta Playa they sunk wells to store water and built stone shelters that they would have occupied for part of the year.
The sandstone tumuli contained the remains of cattle, leading researchers to believe that the site may have been the epicenter of a "cattle cult". Erection of stone megaliths combined with the presence of what appears to be sacrificial activity indicates that Nabta Playa was probably a regional ceremonial center for the herders of the western desert. Discover Magazine describes the purpose of the site (emphasis mine):
Cattle were a central part of Nabta Playa’s culture...The people of Nabta Playa would travel across the often-featureless Sahara from seasonal lake to seasonal lake, bringing their livestock along to graze and drink. “Their experience was rather similar to Polynesian navigators who had to sail from one place to another,” [professor emeritus J. McKim] Malville says he suspects. “They used the stars to travel across the desert to locate small watering holes like Nabta Playa, which had water about four months of the year, probably, starting with the summer monsoon.”
There was no north star at the time, so the people navigated using bright stars and the circular motion of the heavens. This kind of celestial navigation would have made Nabta Playa's stone circle a powerful symbol to the ancient nomadic people. The stones feet would have been covered by seasonal water, and would have been visible from the western lakeshore. “You would watch the reflection of the stars off the dark waters of the lake, and you could see the stones partly submerged in the water, lining up with the reflection of the stars on the horizon,” he says.
Practically speaking, the megaliths would have also helped the people of Nabta Playa time the rainy season, which only became more important as the society developed over thousands of years. The summer solstice would have coincided with the arrival of the annual monsoons. So tracking the sun’s location could have tipped them off to the coming wet season.
The first strong evidence for people at Nabta Playa appears around the year 9000 BC. At the time, the Sahara was a wetter, more pleasant place to live. Eventually, there was enough water that people could even dig wells and build homes around them. One site excavated at Nabta Playa revealed rows of huts with hearths, storage pits, and wells that were spread out over several thousand square feet. The team of archaeologists called it a “well-organized village.”
The Sahara appears to go through approximately 20,000 year cycles of wet and dry periods based on a shifting of the monsoon—which is caused by the tilt of the earth's axis—and after 5000 BC the monsoon shifted yet again. Due to this change, the inhabitants of Nabta Playa increasingly stored food resources and took to growing cereal crops to supplement their diet, including the earliest sorghum and millet in the region.
...between 5000 B.C. and 3000 B.C., thousands of years after the stone circle was built at Nabta Playa, the region dried out again. Some researchers think this environmental stress could have forced the people of Nabta Playa to develop a complex society, which most scholars thought depended on the development of agriculture...
However, this complex culture seems to have fallen somewhere in between nomadic and agrarian. In addition to the oldest astronomical site, Nabta Playa is also home to the oldest known remains of sorghum, a crop first domesticated in Africa that’s now one of the world’s most important foods, especially in the tropics. Hundreds of sorghum seeds were found at Nabta Playa, and they appear to be more closely related to domestic sorghum than wild varieties. Millet, another crop critical to the global agricultural history, was also domesticated in the region. And excavations at Nabta Playa also turned up storage pits for grass seeds, tubers, legumes and fruits.
The nomadic people likely ate wild foods, but also planted some semi-domesticated crops along lakeshores at the beginning of each wet season. They then moved on after the harvest...
Nabta Playa: The World's First Astronomical Site Was Built in Africa and Is Older Than Stonehenge (Discover)
Interestingly, some Egyptologists—including Wendorf himself—see links between the site and elements of later Dynastic Egypt, especially its cosmology and funerary rites. The Nabta Basin stelae face the circumpolar region of the heavens which represented a region of everlasting life where the souls of the righteous dead would migrate after death. Egyptian cultic symbology was rife with references to cattle, including refences to the pharoah as a "great bull" and the sky goddess Hathor was depicted as a cow.
Within 500 years after Nabta was abandoned, the step pyramid of Djoser was constructed—the earliest colossal stone building in Egypt—indicating a possible continuity with the megalith builders of Nabta Playa.
G. Stonehenge
Unlike the other sites listed above, Stonehenge was built after the Neolithic Revolution which introduced cereal farming and animal husbandry to Britain. Stonehenge was the site of lavish midwinter feasts, and to this end the site was astronomically aligned with the winter solstice. Cattle—and especially swine—seem to have been the most common items on the menu. Examination of animal bones and teeth reveals that animals were brought on the hoof to the site in southern England from many far distant corners of the British Isles as far afield as Scotland more than 500 miles away, and perhaps even transported by boat. Such distances were incredible in a time before horses—or even wheeled carts—were available. It is thought that Stonehenge was the site of such annual feasts for many thousands of years. [8]
Even though the people of Britain had taken up farming and domesticated animals by the time Stonehenge as we know it was built, Graeber and Wengrow argue that Salisbury plain and related locations nearby had been sites for regular communal feasts and gatherings long before the Neolithic Revolution. In this view, Stonehenge—dated to around 5,000 BC—was only the latest in a long series of monuments which had been repeatedly constructed and deconstructed over time. Like the people who built Göbekli Tepe, their monuments appear to have been only semi-permanent, much like their social arrangements. And like the cattle herders of Nabta Playa, the people of stone-age Britain lived a hybrid lifestyle that combined elements of both farming and foraging:
Stonehenge, it turns out, was only the latest in a very long sequence of ritual structures, erected in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles, at significant times of year. Careful excavation has shown that many of these structures —now plausibly interpreted as monuments to the progenitors of powerful Neolithic dynasties—were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.
Still more strikingly, this practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it, abandoning cereal farming and reverting—around 3300 BC—to the collection of hazelnuts as a staple food source.
Keeping their herds of cattle, on which they feasted seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, the builders of Stonehenge seem likely to have been neither foragers nor farmers, but something in between. And if anything like a royal court did hold sway in the festive season, when they gathered in great numbers, then it could only have dissolved away for most of the year, when the same people scattered back out across the island...
H. Florida's Gulf Coast
There were many such places for hunter-gatherers in the New World as well. Robert's Island and Crystal River near modern-day Tampa were the sites of regular communal feasts which took place for nearly 1,000 years. Natives in the region converged on the these islands to partake of deer, alligator, sharks, and many other wild foods, eventually changing over to mostly oysters as the climate worsened after 650 A.D.
Religious ceremonies at Crystal River included ritual burials and marriage alliances, Duke said, solidifying social ties between different groups of people. But the community was not immune to the environmental and social crises that swept the region, and the site was abandoned around A.D. 650. A smaller ceremonial site was soon established less than a mile downstream on Roberts Island, likely by a remnant of the Crystal River population...
The Roberts Island ceremonial site, which was vacated around A.D. 1050, was one of the last outposts in what was once a flourishing network of religious sites across the Eastern U.S. These sites were characterized by burial grounds with distinctly decorated ceramics known as Swift Creek and Weeden Island pottery. What differentiated Roberts Island and Crystal River from other sites was that their continuous occupation by a small group of residents who prepared for the influx of hundreds of visitors—not unlike Florida's tourist towns today. [9]
I. Poverty Point, Louisiana
Built by one of the many Pre-Columbian "mound builder" cultures of North America, the Poverty Point site has been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status due to the fact that, "[T]he earthen works at Poverty Point, La., have been described as one of the world's greatest feats of construction by an archaic civilization of hunters and gatherers."
Built on the western edge of the complex, Mound A covers about 538,000 square feet [roughly 50,000 square meters] at its base and rises 72 feet above the river. Its construction required an estimated 238,500 cubic meters—about eight million bushel baskets—of soil to be brought in from various locations near the site. [Anthropoligist T. R.] Kidder figures it would take a modern, 10-wheel dump truck about 31,217 loads to move that much dirt today.
Part of a much larger complex of earthen works at Poverty Point, Mound A is believed to be the final and crowning addition to the sprawling 700-acre site, which includes five smaller mounds and a series of six concentric C-shaped embankments that rise in parallel formation surrounding a small flat plaza along the river. At the time of construction, Poverty Point was the largest earthworks in North America.
Remarkably, a cross-section through the mound shows no signs of the blending of earthen layers as would be expected to occur due to either rainfall or erosion. This led archaeologists to conclude that the entire mound must have been built between periods of rainfall, generously estimating that it could have taken no more than 90 days to accomplish! Constructing such a massive project would have taken a considerable amount of manpower in a civilization that still relied hunting and gathering.
"The Poverty Point mounds were built by people who had no access to domesticated draft animals, no wheelbarrows, no sophisticated tools for moving earth," Kidder explains. "It's likely that these mounds were built using a simple 'bucket brigade' system, with thousands of people passing soil along from one to another using some form of crude container, such as a woven basket, a hide sack or a wooden platter."
Kidder analyzes the varied colors and layers of the soils of Mound A, which are a result of the building process. Indians carried basket-loads of dirt weighing roughly 55 pounds and piled them up carefully to form the mound.
To complete such a task within 90 days, the study estimates it would require the full attention of some 3,000 laborers. Assuming that each worker may have been accompanied by at least two other family members, say a wife and a child, the community gathered for the build must have included as many as 9,000 people, the study suggests.
"Given that a band of 25-30 people is considered quite large for most hunter-gatherer communities, it's truly amazing that this ancient society could bring together a group of nearly 10,000 people, find some way to feed them and get this mound built in a matter of months," Kidder says. [10]
These large ceremonial sites put paid to the notion that hunter-gatherer societies in the far distant past were comprised solely of tiny, isolated bands, with no larger social connections between them. In fact, human societies have probably been much larger and more complex than we ever imagined, going far back into to the Stone Age. But the protean nature of multilevel fission-fusion societies has often obscured this point, causing us to get a lot of prehistory very, very wrong.
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All page citations in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett.
[1] Brian Fagan, The Long Summer; p. 68
[2] See https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2018/12/08/ancients-constellation-leo-horse/
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/european-paleolithic-art-complex-astronomy-06658.html
[3] Sulawesi art: Animal painting found in cave is 44,000 years old (BBC News)
[4] Mysterious bone circles made from the remains of mammoths reveal clues about Ice Age (Science Daily)
[5] This is one of the largest Ice Age structures made of mammoth bones (ScienceNews)
[6] These Vintage Threads Are 30,000 Years Old (NPR)
[7] Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Astronomical Observatory? (Discover Magazine)
[8] Stonehenge builders feasted on animals brought from Scotland, study shows (The Guardian)
[9] During tough times, ancient 'tourists' sought solace in Florida oyster feasts (Phys.org)
[10] Archaic Native Americans built massive Louisiana mound in less than 90 days (Science Daily)