by Adam Frank
Like a child being turned outward on a merry-go-round, we humans get a different view of the night sky in winter, spring, summer and autumn as the Earth wheels around the sun in its orbit. The constellations we can see each night change with the seasons. By the era of the Greeks at least the ancients had mapped out the positions of the fixed stars on the starry sphere. They were clever enough to imagine the noontime sun set against that background of stars even if those stars were blotted out by sunlight during the day. In this way they knew the sun was tracking a path against those stars in a line called the ecliptic. They saw that the sun, the moon and even the wandering planets stayed close to the ecliptic as they moved across the sky. The twelve distinct constellations the sun passed through in its motion along the ecliptic were called the zodiac. The movement of sun, moon and planets against the fixed pattern of stars, along the ecliptic, was a cosmic dance that anyone could see before artificial light stole the night from us.
– The Periodic Motion of the Planets –
The final celestial period imposed on us is one that few other than astronomers would notice today. Each of the five visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) makes a slow march along to the ecliptic and against the background of fixed stars. Night after night each planet moves slowly through the constellations, speeding up and slowing down at different times in the year and for different durations. Each planet also steadily brightens and then steadily dims as it completes its motion against the stars. Strangest of all, each planet executes a loop in the sky—called retrograde motion—halting its usual eastward march in a short pirouette that takes on the order of a few months to complete.
FALLING INTO TIME: THE PALAEOLITHIC COSMOS
The daily turn of night to day, the monthly cycle of lunar phases, the yearly journey of the sun through the zodiac and, finally, the strange wanderings of the planets—each of these celestial dance steps formed a raw physical encounter with time. It was seen on the sky and felt in the seasonal changes of warmth and cold. It is from this most basic experience that humans built their stories of the cosmos, its origin in time and its meaning for their lives.
The world we inhabit today makes a clean separation between time in our daily experience and the scientifically defined time of our cosmology. No one today connects her 12:15 appointment at the dentist to the fractions of a second in which Big Bang cosmology plays out. Daily time is lived through the digital time on mobile phones and our electronic calendars. Cosmological time is the domain of scientists, observatories and university graduate study. This separation, however, is an illusion.
The arc of cultural evolution has hidden the binding of human time and cosmic time from us, but in the Palaeolithic world the separation never existed. The cosmos of our Palaeolithic ancestors was of a whole, and that included time. The hunter-gatherer peoples of the Neolithic knew their place in the world, for they had yet to fully distinguish themselves from that world or its movement through time.
Our understanding of the Palaeolithic cosmos (and cosmology) relies on an understanding of myth. Myth, in this essential context, does not mean a false story (as in the urban myth of an old lady drying her poodle in a microwave oven). Myth, in the domains of cosmology, is far more essential and powerful. Every culture has its mythology, its potent narratives of origins and endings. To follow the roots of modern cosmological theorizing back in time to the imaginative territories of prehistory we must turn to the universe of myth, for within it we will find the first responses to the mystery linking time and being.
Myth came before all our forms of religion and before the practice of science.26 Its function was to recount “sacred” stories that set human beings into their proper context within the universe. In myth the experience of the world as sacred was codified into stories so old that they embrace the origins of both religion and science. As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade put it: “Through myth, the World can be apprehended as a perfectly articulated, intelligible, and significant Cosmos.”27 Thus it is through myth that the cosmos of prehistory becomes apparent.
Since our Palaeolithic ancestors left no written records of their cosmological myths, archaeologists must piece together their worldview from other materials. One important source is the repository of mythological narratives transcribed many millennia later, once writing was invented around 3000 BCE.28 These stories contain traces of the cosmological narratives of prehistory. The mythologies of existing hunter-gatherers, such as the Aboriginal people of Australia or the Inuit peoples of the Arctic, provide their own insights.29 From these sources a clear picture emerges of a cosmology that is dominated by ideas of a time without time, and the separation of elements once joined.
The world of the hunter-gatherer does not split cleanly between man and animal, culture and nature. Instead those paired worlds remain integrated. The Mbuti people of Zaire, for example, identify the forest they inhabit as a person. It is not “the environment” but another sentient being, a giving parent or trusted kin.30 The Inuit of Greenland take a similar position with respect to the animals they hunt. The polar bear is not simply a lower animal but is, instead, a member of the tribe. Once it has been successfully hunted and killed it must be treated with the same respect as any other deceased member of the society.31
Just as the separation of man and nature does not exist for modern hunter-gatherers, it likely did not exist in the Palaeolithic. As anthropologist Tim Ingold has written, “For modern hunter-gatherers there are not two worlds of persons (society) and things (nature) but just one—one environment—saturated with personal powers and embracing both human beings and the plants and animals on which they depend, and the landscape in which they live and move.”32
This seamless continuity between humans and their environment is also reflected in their conceptions of time and cosmos. The link, however, comes with a twist. Palaeolithic narratives of creation reflect the recognition that an immutable separation was imposed on humanity when we awakened in the Big Bang of consciousness. Thus hunter-gatherer myths will often speak of a lost paradise. In the “before” humans were immortal and lived in an ongoing balance with the world and the divine forces that shaped it. Human and animal could speak to each other and transformations from animal to human form were common.
The most important aspect of Palaeolithic cosmological myths was the Fall, which was the loss of a perfect, pre-existing harmony between humans and the nonhuman world. Somehow, the myths tell us, that harmony was shattered. As Karen Armstrong put it, “At the centre of the world there was a tree, a mountain or a pole linking Earth with heaven, which the people could easily climb to reach the realm of the gods. Then there was a catastrophe; the mountain collapsed, or the tree was cut down and it became more difficult to reach heaven.”33
In this myth, the pre-existing Eden was a timeless place. It was complete and existed without change. People in the golden age lived either exceedingly long lives or forever. Thus the Fall was also the fall into time. In many myths, when the harmony was shattered, time and death entered the world together. But in these myths the golden age was not truly gone. Instead it remained as an archetypal, timeless state that could be—and needed to be—recovered. The Aborigines of Australia, for example, conceive of returning to the primordial cosmos in the Dreamtime. As Armstrong wrote, “Dreamtime . . . is timeless and ‘everywhen’. It forms a stable backdrop to everyday life, which is dominated by death, flux, the endless succession of events, and the cycles of seasons.”34
The myth of the golden age and the Fall are all but universal in early human cultures.35 Like the Australian aboriginal emphasis on Dreamtime, the point of these cosmological myths was not to recount history; it was to recover original time. As Armstrong puts it, “Today we separate the religious from the secular. This would have been incomprehensible to the Palaeolithic hunters.” These myths had purpose. They “show people how they could return to this archetypal world, not only in moments of visionary rapture but in the regular duties o
f their daily lives.”36 Thus the time of origins existed not in the past, as we imagine it now in cosmology, but in this ever-present “everywhen”.37 For the hunter crouching low in the brush, waiting for the herd to pause, the time of creation and his experience now were never far apart. For the women filling baskets with wild grain, their actions and the primordial divine acts, which set the world in motion, were always closely paired.
The daily time of Palaeolithic people was set against a cosmos that was not “out there” but rather was close by. It was a cosmos without birth or final death or linear time. It was a universe alive with animate and divine powers that were always present, re-energizing the world each day with the return of the sun, each month with the return of the moon to fullness and each season with shifts in light and warmth.
But culture and its needs would change and the powers animating the universe would grow distant and more difficult to engage. Divine entities that were once proximate and personal slowly became remote and wilful. It is in this understanding that the sky was the first retreat of the divine. The development of more complex cultures led to myths of the sky as the first and distant domain of the divine. Armstrong notes that the sky god—a distant but powerful first cause—begins to appear in this era. She observes, “The sky towered above them [the Palaeolithic people], inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness.” The sky with its wheeling, repeating patterns was the first house of the father god, the original seat of divine power.38
The Palaeolithic cosmos was a direct reflection of our first awakened experience of the daily experience of time. As hunter-gatherers, people followed the herds and watched as the seasons ripened the best edible plants. In the Big Bang of consciousness they had begun to watch the cycles of the world around them and from it they lifted out the idea of time. In this way time was a creation of culture, just as culture was a creation of the embodied mind. The enigmatic entanglement between experienced physicality and the symbolic, cultured imagination created a time that existed in both daily life and myth. But as the world warmed, humanity changed, and our universe would change with it. A new kind of time and a new relation to the world would emerge with the next great human revolution. Our focus and our consciousness would be re-created as the Earth was put to the plough.
STAYING HOME: THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION
The world would not remain locked in ice forever.
Around twelve thousand years ago, the climate shifted, as it had countless times and countless millennia before. The planet warmed, the glaciers retreated and the Palaeolithic era ended.39 But unlike previous interglacial periods, something new was born with the return of climatic spring. Our species learned a fundamentally new way of being human.
As warm seasons lengthened and the ice disappeared, some bands of hunter-gatherers invented a new way of life. They stopped following the herds into warmer pastures. They settled down and began domesticating themselves—switching from hunting and foraging to the deliberate cultivation of grains. They built houses that would last from one year to the next.40 They grouped these houses together to create villages that would endure for generations. All these changes fed upon one another and were possible because people had learned to till the land and reap its harvests. Cosmos and time were each, separately and together, essential facets of this revolution. In this Neolithic era (new stone age), a flowering of human creativity began. It was a time of profound change that would not be matched again until the age of the machine.
The archaeologist Colin Renfrew identifies at least seven key features of the Neolithic revolution:41
1. The development of food production through domesticated plants such as wheat, lentils, barley and flax
2. The use of tools such as grindstones for processing these plants
3. The domestication of animals such as sheep, goats, cattle and pigs
4. The emergence of settled village life with permanent dwellings
5. The appearance of ritual practices involving shrines and human representations
6. The interment of the dead in cemeteries, sometimes featuring monumental tombs
7. The development of long-distance procurement systems for raw materials such as obsidian
Each of these cultural innovations required a fundamentally new way of organizing human activities, as well as a new way of imagining culture and its place in the cosmos. And, just as important, each one required a daily engagement with time unlike anything that had come before.
According to some researchers the Neolithic saw the completion of a transition that had its beginnings in the Palaeolithic. In the eyes of archaeologists such as Renfrew, the artistic revolutions of forty thousand, thirty thousand or twenty thousand years ago were local and uneven. The astonishing cave art found in Spain and France were not universal phenomena spanning the entire human population. In comparison, after the great global warming, our self-domestication and adoption of agriculture rapidly swept across every continent. It was a revolution that transformed almost everyone, almost everywhere. Thus, the Palaeolithic might be seen as a long series of skirmishes in a cognitive revolution that found completion in the Neolithic.
What made this final step possible? The answer, which continues to shape culture down to the modern era, is our physical embodiment. We live in the world through our bodies and their materiality.42 What altered the human mind was not simply the introduction of new ideas in our heads but new encounters with the world through what we built with our hands.
Many pivotal inventions were developed in the Neolithic era: planting and harvesting technologies, the construction and deployment of grinding wheels, the mastery of metallurgy. All of these changes represented fundamental shifts in the way people encountered the material world. It was, literally, the act of shaping the raw stuff of the world into these inventions that enabled new ways of thinking and new ways of organizing human activity. This process of material engagement completed the Big Bang of consciousness and is the root cause of all the innovations and revolutions that followed.
Brute facts are where material engagement begins; new ways of being human is where it ends. The early farmers of northern Europe circa 5500 BCE had surpassed the culture of their hunter-gatherer ancestors with new ways of handling material that superseded the natural world. Housing for hunter-gatherers, for example, had “required no more than promoting and combining the existing suppleness of hazel, the stringiness of willow and the sheets of birch bark that grew ready-made”.43 The timber-frame homes the new farmers built required nature “to be torn apart and the world built anew”.
Changes in material engagement redefine culture by altering what are called its institutional facts. Institutional facts define the human world into which we are each born. From punch-clock jobs to jury duty appointments, it’s the institutional facts that define how culture organizes itself and then imposes that system onto our individual lives. But cultural organization derives its power in the mental realm of symbols. Thus the changes material engagement wrought meant more than just a farmer figuring out a new way to fashion a sharpened axe. These shifts in material engagement implied shared understandings within a community that were at once social and cognitive—in that way they drove the creation of new institutional facts. For the farming villages, the materials that made this new life possible were reflected in the day-to-day organization of the community. A Neolithic farmer, looking back across her tilled fields and the chores that defined her day, was moving through an entirely new world.
With the advance of material engagement came new ways of experiencing time. By kneading clay with the hands, pushing iron ore around in a fire and stretching wool across a wooden frame, people engaged with the material world in fresh ways, and time was an integral part of this process. How long did it take for clay to be baked into pottery? How many differently timed steps were involved in forging an iron plough? Just as each invention made new forms of culture possible, cultural imagination
also developed alongside the technology. Because time always exists at the interface between the physical and the imagination, it would be closely tied to material engagement and the changes it drove in culture.
Nowhere is the effect of material engagement on institutional facts more apparent than in Neolithic megaliths such as Stonehenge. Megaliths are massive, highly structured stone works. These imposing stone monuments, as well as massive earthworks, are associated with prehistoric cultures across the globe. The construction of megaliths is one hallmark of the change from a hunter-gatherer culture to an agrarian culture. The eighty-metre-wide circular mound at Newgrange, about thirty-five miles north of Dublin, for example, appeared sometime after the advent of farming in Ireland. The earliest structures at Stonehenge were constructed later but were still part of England’s Neolithic agrarian past.
The construction of these monuments required the intense and coordinated effort of many individuals to transport materials across hundreds of miles. The megalith at Newgrange, for example, is fronted by a quartz façade composed of stones found on beaches near the coast of Dublin, many miles away.44 At the centre of the enormous mound is a vaulted central chamber only accessible through a narrow twenty-five-metre-long passageway. The stone supports for this chamber and passageway also had to be dragged across many, many miles. In a similar manner, the imposing central blocks of Stonehenge, each weighing forty-five metric tonnes, had to be transported as much as fifteen miles, possibly from quarries at Marlborough Downs.45 Thus, the decision to build these megaliths demonstrates entire communities willing to dedicate time and treasure in the effort to make symbols out of stone. And in that effort time and symbol were reborn.
The construction of Stonehenge likely required more than thirty million hours of labour. So much work that the effort must have spanned generations.46 With this new form of material engagement passing from father to son, mother to daughter, the construction of megaliths was itself an agent for imagining new forms of culture and time. As a direct result of building the megaliths, the monuments became the axis around which a new type of living community would be born.
