The Lost Stone Age

The history before history

In my previous post, I talked about the debate over whether human ancestors were primarily egalitarian or hierarchical.

This discussion has often been framed through the lens of the Kalahari Bushmen. If they are an accurate representation of our distant past, the thinking goes, then we lived in small-scale communities where most of our relationships and interactions were face-to-face and there was little or no stored wealth for some people to accumulate, hoard, and control. There were families and friends, but no hereditary leaders or social classes.

If, however, they are an anomaly or a more recent cultural adaptation, then humans might have been forming large-scale, politically complex societies for thousands of years, perhaps deep into the Paleolithic.

This latter case is what Graeber and Wengrow clearly advocate for in The Dawn of Everything. Their logic, if I understand it, goes something like this: If humans have been forming large-scale complex societies all along, then that means there are no constraints on any potential forms civilization might take. Humans are self-conscious political animals and can form any kind of society they want to, either now or thousands of years ago.

If, on the other hand, we spent most of our existence in small-scale tribal societies, then once we started living at the level of something greater than a mobile foraging band, inequality is the inevitable result, and oppressive hierarchy becomes practically guaranteed—at least if the authors of "Big History" are correct. Because they find this conclusion so unpalatable, Graeber and Wengrow reject this version of history—and all the materialist theory that backs it up—in favor of a conception of society where social arrangements are fluid and open and determined only by "voluntary choice" and "bold experimentation".

A Different Approach

I believe there is different approach.

I tend to think that humans neither lived in small-scale communities where their entire social world consisted of only a few dozen individuals; nor did they live under hierarchical proto-states similar to those of much later Bronze Age empires complete with kings, priests, slaves, commoners, money, police, law courts, and so forth.

Instead, what the evidence seems to show is that there is no inherent contradiction between living in face-to-face communities and engaging in the kinds of large-scale cooperation that we typically associate with much larger sedentary agrarian civilizations.

Put another way, even if the primary social units people lived in were small, there is no reason to believe that they comprised the entirety of people's social universe in prehistory, nor did their small size lead to the kinds of limitations that we normally associate with existing band societies like the Kalahari Bushmen or Amazonian foragers who are hemmed in on all sides by larger societies and relegated to remote corners of the world. Instead, even in the absence of agriculture and hereditary leadership, hunter-gatherer societies could be quite expansive and socially complex. This itself is revelatory.

In other words, we did not spend the entirety of prehistory eking out a meager existence on the plains of Africa like the !Kung, nor were we living under Paleolithic princes and potentates like the denizens of the Pacific Northwest Coast or the Calusa (much less the agrarian Bronze Age).

Instead, we were something else entirely—something which we don't really have a good name for, or a good model of. We were a species that lived in bands and tribes that were often nomadic, yes. But at the same time we were capable of creating vast social networks that spanned entire continents, and we were able to engage in social cooperation on very large scales—even in the absence of domineering elites or coercive social structures—in a way that no other species is capable of doing.

My speculation is that this ability to form these kinds of broad and diverse social networks is what allowed our species to be the only surviving hominid, even in cases where other species should have had the clear advantage. In Ice Age Europe, for example, the Neanderthals had co-evolved with that environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Clearly there were better physically suited and equipped to deal with it. They should have survived, not us. But that's not what happened, and I think being embedded in complex, far-flung social networks is the key reason why.

That's what I'm going to argue in the next series of posts.

Lost Civilizations

A book that kept going through my head over and over while reading The Dawn of Everything was Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley. I’ve referred to this book before—it’s one of my favorite archaeology books.

The book's title indicates that "civilization" (or "civilisation" in the British spelling) isn't something that spontaneously sprang into existence with the first cities and states roughly five thousand years ago. Rather, many of the characteristics we traditionally associate with civilization have roots which extend much further back in time—in fact, all the way back into the Stone Age as the title implies. The cradle of civilization turns out to be everywhere. Rudgley gives us a number of pieces of evidence for this conclusion.

For example, the book presents evidence that calendrical systems were in use as far back as the Ice Age 10,000 years years ago or earlier drawing on the work of several archaeologists including Alex Marshack and his studies of artifacts such as the Taï plaque, which he described as "the most complex single artifact from the Upper Paleolithic." This is one of a number of artifacts with notches or markings in them which seem to indicate sophisticated observations and recordkeeping of astronomical phenomena going far back into the Stone Age. Some of these artifacts might have also been tally sticks used to keep track of debts and credits. The Ishango bone, dating from 20-25,000 years ago, is considered to be the oldest mathematical artifact in existence.

In a fascinating (and stomach-churing) chapter, he describes the evidence that prehistoric people practiced brain surgery based on the findings of trepanated skulls where the person apparently continued to live well after the wound was healed. He looks at places where trepanation is still practiced today to get an indication of what Paleolithic "medicine" might have been like, and whether their medical knowledge might have been significantly greater than we give credit for¹. Holes drilled in teeth even indicate the presence of Neolithic dentistry!

Rudgley’s arguments, made in the late nineties, have recently been bolstered by the discovery in Borneo by archaeologists of a successful limb amputation being performed 31,000 years ago:

The medical expertise of foraging communities such as hunter-gatherers has been thought to be rudimentary and unchanging. It’s been argued that shifts towards settled agricultural life within the past 10,000 years were what created new health problems and advances in medical culture; this includes surgery.

Published today in the journal Nature, we report a discovery shattering this longstanding trope of popular imagination – the skeleton of a young adult from Borneo whose lower left leg was amputated in childhood by a prehistoric surgeon 31,000 years ago.

This finding pre-dates the previous oldest known evidence for amputation surgery by a staggering 24,000 years. It suggests that human medical knowledge and surgical procedures were far more advanced in the distant past of our species than previously thought.

Multiple dating techniques (radiocarbon, uranium-series, and electron-spin-resonance) confirmed the burial had taken place 31,000 years ago, making it Southeast Asia’s oldest known grave. Skeletal analyses confirmed the lower left limb had been surgically amputated; the way the bone tissue had changed over time (known as “bone remodelling”) matched clinical cases of successful amputation that hadn’t become infected.

The healed bone confirms an injury that wasn’t fatal to the patient, implying the surgeon or surgeons likely understood the need to manage and treat it. They were able to prevent infection after the invasive surgery, allowing the person to survive into adulthood.

World’s earliest evidence of a successful surgical amputation found in 31,000-year-old grave in Borneo (The Conversation)

Rudgley describes the evidence of writing systems predating those of ancient Mesopotamia. For example, the same symbols like crosses and spirals turn up on items all across early Neolithic Europe leading some archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas to speculate that there was an "Old European" script in widespread use, and that this implied the presence of a true civilization. Artifacts like the Tartaria and Gradeshnitsa tablets indicate the possibility of pictographic or alphabetic writing thousands of years before cuneiform or hieroglyphics². Meanwhile in East Asia, the oldest Jiahu and Banpo symbols date back to 5000-6000 BC, predating the conventional origin of Chinese writing by thousands of years and even the earliest "official" writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Rudgley also describes the sophisticated clay token-based accounting methods used in ancient Mesopotamia which kept track of agricultural surpluses long before writing and cities and temples. The cuneiform writing system gradually developed out of these geometric tokens as abstract symbols representing the tokens were pressed into fired clay tablets in place of the actual tokens themselves³. He takes a look at enigmatic artifacts like the La Marche antler, which indicates that methods of complex information storage might have existed as far back as the Magdellanian period 17,000 years ago. The archeologist who analyzed the La Marche antler concluded that,

"the La Marche antler indicates that the problem of the origin of writing cannot be correctly addressed from an archaeological point of view without taking into consideration the evolution and variability of Paleolithic artificial memory systems. It is likely that the course of this evolution was more complex than we have previously imagined." (p. 82)

Rudgley argues that the deductive reasoning we traditionally associate with the scientific method derives from the same kind of deductive reasoning that hunters have used to track their prey for millennia. He points out the similarities between the deduction used in crime solving and that used by hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung (Bushmen) and the Hadzabe, quoting from the anthropologist Melvin Konner:

It would be surprising indeed if repeated activation of hypotheses, trying them out against new data, integrating them with previously known facts, and rejecting ones which do not stand up, were habits of mind peculiar to western scientists and detectives. !Kung behavior indicates that, on the contrary, the very way of life for which the human brain evolved required them...Man is the only hunting mammal with so rudimentary a sense of small, that he could only have come to successful hunting through intellectual evolution. (p. 112)

We tend to think of mining as the quintessential activity associated with civilization, but Rudgley shows that mining actually dates back well into the Stone Age with both the mining of ocher (or ochre) for pigmentation at least 40,000 years ago, as well as the systematic extraction of flint at Cissbury Ring in Sussex and Grime’s Graves in Norfolk beginning over 5000 years ago in the Neolithic period. Ocher clearly had some sort of symbolic rather than practical value, since it was deliberately heated to bring out the red color. Both flint and ocher were extensively traded over long distances already thousands of years ago. Standardized tools go all the way back to Auchelean hand axes of the Lower Paleolithic and lasted for a million years. Their similarity all over the world implies a degree of cultural cooperation and systemic knowledge which outlasted any single craftsman.

Remarkably, even today many people still haven't heard of these sites or artifacts. Have you? I hadn't before I read the book.

Rudgley discusses some of the same archaeological discoveries as Graeber and Wengrow, including the recently discovered (at the time) Jōmon site of Sannai-Maruyama in Japan and Çatalhöyük in present-day Turkey. Remarkably, one archaeological site he doesn't talk about is Göbekli Tepe, because the book was published in 1999 before the site's existence and age was widely known. Even now only around 5 percent of that site has been excavated, and nearby discoveries at Karahan Tepe have led some people to speculate that an entire "lost civilization" may lie buried beneath the hills of southern Turkey which predates the "conventional" origins of civilization by up to five or six thousand years.

The oldest megalithic ritual monument in the world (until the Turkish discoveries) was always thought to be Ġgantija, in Malta. That’s maybe 5,500 years old. So Karahan Tepe...is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible. After all, hunter gatherers—cavemen with flint arrowheads—without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.

Do they?

Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey? (The Spectator)

And potentially even more lost ancient civilizations lie just waiting to be discovered in other parts of the world such as India.

"Our first deduction from examining these petroglyphs is that they were created around 10,000BC," the director of the Maharashtra state archaeology department, Tejas Garge, told the BBC....Mr Garge says the images appear to have been created by a hunter-gatherer community which was not familiar with agriculture.

"We have not found any pictures of farming activities. But the images depict hunted animals and there's detailing of animal forms. So this man knew about animals and sea creatures. That indicates he was dependent on hunting for food."

Prehistoric art hints at lost Indian civilisation (BBC)

Similar (although more recent) lost civilizations are being uncovered in places like the deserts of Saudi Arabia, China, and the Amazon rainforest (click the links to find out about these).

Rudgley's core thesis echoes that of Graeber and Wengrow. He writes in his introduction (emphasis mine):

Despite the fact that prehistory makes up more than 95 percent of our time on this planet, history, the remaining 5 percent, makes up at least 95 per cent of most accounts of the human story. The prehistory of humankind is no mere prelude to history; history is rather a colorful and eventful afterword to the Stone Age. In this book I will show how rich and eventful were the contents of these early chapters of the life of our species; how great is the debt of historical societies to their prehistoric counterparts in all spheres of cultural life; and how civilized in many respects were those human cultures that have been reviled as savage... (p. 1)

I will show that the cultural elements that constitute civilization did exist in the Stone Age and that the civilisations of ancient Egypt and other ancient societies had their prehistoric precedents. The evidence for the existence of civilisation in the Stone Age is given in this book. I take as my starting point the origin of civilisation in ancient Egypt, and from there I go progressively back in time to explore the body of evidence that clearly shows that all the elements of civilisation—writing, scientific thought and practice, medical knowledge, technology and art—were present in the Stone Age. (pp. 11-12)

Rudgley argues that the conventional story of civilization which portrays it as a quantum leap from everything that had come before with no precedent is an unsatisfactory explanation. As he asks, "If mankind before the historical era was so primitive, how could civilisation have arisen from such poor cultural roots?" Furthermore, he points out out that, "Historians of the ancient civilizations have, on the whole, paid little interest to the prehistoric background of the cultures they study, and as a consequence many wild theories claiming to explain the origins of civilisation have arisen." Current popular authors like Graham Hancock are the most successful of these "cult historians."

A lot of these discoveries are dismissed and ignored simply because they're too early to fit the conventional timeline. For example, the examples of writing I listed above are often written off as"pre-writing" or "proto-writing". Cave paintings and Venus figurines are considered to be "primitive art" rather than proper art, as if the cave paintings are merely a precursor to "real" art which is exclusively produced by "civilized" peoples⁴.

This sort of bias is found throughout archaeology. Often the terms “Archaic” and “Mature” are arbitrarily assigned to cultures by archaeologists reflecting a bias towards a particular set of conditions (usually the presence of agriculture, codified laws, writing, formal leadership and organized religion), consigning the rest of history to a sort of prelude. For example, Egyptian history is typically divided into Predynastic, Dynastic, and Intermediate periods. Intermediate periods are those in which the central authority broke down and control reverted to local factions. From the term, one would think of these as brief interruptions in the "proper" order of things, and yet—as the Davids note—these so-called “Intermediate” periods “span about a third of Egypt’s ancient history, down to the accession of a series of foreign or vassal kings…and they saw some very significant political developments of their own”. (p. 380) This shows just how arbitrary and value-laden these terms are.

In several trenchant passages, the Davids ponder why so many of these new discoveries from prehistory are neglected and ignored. For example, they wonder why the cultures of North America who built monuments like Poverty Point and Watson's Brake (pictured above) are often relegated to obscurity, much like the Stone Age discoveries listed by Rudgley (emphasis mine):

One reason, no doubt...is that Poverty Point and it's predecessors have been placed in a phase of American prehistory known as 'Archaic'. The Archaic period covers an immense span of time, between the flooding of the Beringia land bridge (which one linked Asia to the Americas) around 8,000 BC, and the initial adoption and spread of maize-farming in certain parts of North America, down to around 1000 BC. One word, for seven millennia of indigenous history.

Archaeologists who first gave the period its name—which is really more of a chronological slap in the face—were basically declaring, 'this is the period before anything particularly important was happening.' So when undeniable evidence began to appear that all sort of important things were indeed happening, and not just in the Mississippi basin, it was almost something of an archaeological embarrassment...

On the matter of hunter-gatherer history, North America isn't the only part of the world where evolutionary expectations are heading for a titanic collision with the archaeological record. In Japan and neighbouring islands, another monolithic cultural designation—'Jōmon'—hold sway over more than 10,000 years of forager history, from around 14,000BC to 300 BC. Japanese archaeologists spend much of their time subdividing the Jōmon period in ways just as intricate as the more pioneering North American scholars now do with their 'Archaic'. Everyone else, whether museumgoers or readers of high-school textbooks, is still confronted with the stark singularity of the term 'Jōmon', which, covering the long ages before rice farming came to Japan, leaves us with an impression of drab conservatism, a time when nothing really happened. New archaeological discoveries are revealing just how wrong this is...

Back in North America, some researchers are beginning to talk, a little awkwardly, of the 'New Archaic', a hitherto unsuspected era of 'monuments without kings'. But the truth is that we still know precious little of the political systems lying behind a now almost globally attested phenomenon of forager monumentality, or indeed whether some of these monumental projects might have involved kings or other kinds of leaders. What we do know is that this changes forever the nature of the conversation about social evolution in the Americas, Japan, Europe, and no doubt most other places too.

Clearly, foragers didn't shuffle backstage at the close of the last Ice Age, waiting in the wings for some group of Neolithic farmers to reopen the theatre of history. Why, then, is this new knowledge so rarely integrated into our accounts of the human past? Why does almost everyone...still write as if such things were impossible before the coming of agriculture? (pp. 145-147)

The era consigned to “prehistory” is several orders of magnitude larger than the part we call history—which is largely the product of written records. Yet "Big History" authors consign it to a few paragraphs to get on with the "real" story. Whatever my objections to some of their conclusions, I think the Davids are correct in highlighting the ways in which the period before agriculture and domestication is a lot more important to the human story than it gets credit for in most accounts, and pointing out the inherent biases in defining certain cultures as "true" civilizations while everything else is relegated to merely prelude, postscript, or footnote⁵.

While the environmental conditions and technological limitations of the Ice Age meant that social structures were certainly less flexible than mere "choice" and "possibility" would permit, neither were they simply tiny isolated bands of 20-30 people roving across the landscape leaving no trace until the first seeds were planted. Perhaps we can look at some of the same evidence as the Davids and come up with a somewhat different picture, but one that nonetheless leaves hope for a better future intact.

1. Also: “A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half.” Surgery Is One Hell Of A Placebo (FiveThirty Eight)

2. Also known as the "Danube Script" or Vinča symbols.

3. This amazing discovery was worked out by art historian Denise Schmandt-Besserat, and deserves a post of its own. It also shows that early societies were capable of creating sophisticated accounting systems and that these systems predate writing and literature.

4. Picasso certainly didn’t think so, declaring that nothing of any importance had been discovered in art after visiting the caves at Lascaux.

5. As James C. Scott has pointed out, the majority of human beings before the discovery of the Americas—and for some time thereafter—didn't live under anything that we would recognize as a “state”. Surely that's an important detail? And one that the authors of “Big History” leave out in their "march of progress," Whig History narrative.