by Peter Watson
* Africa has far fewer archaeologists than North America available to carry out investigations, but even allowing for this, Haynes says, the kill-sites in Africa are ‘unexpectedly poor by comparison’.
* Mammoth survived until about 4000 BP on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, off the northern tip of Siberia.
* It was not totally absent, as some have suggested, at least according to David K. Keefer et al., who examined the site of Quebrada Tacahuay, in Peru, which dates to 12700–12500 BP, and which contains some of the oldest evidence of maritime-based economic activity in the New World. Sediments above and below the hearth, lithic tools and processed maritime fauna, were probably generated by El Niño events.19
* These ideas are supported, albeit indirectly, by the seminal work of Paul Wheatley (1921–1999), chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and chairman also of the Centre for South East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In his book, The Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971), Professor Wheatley was at pains to point out that, in antiquity, urbanisation was not what it is today. Across the seven civilisations that he studied – Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the north China plain, Mesoamerica, the central Andes and the Yoruba territories of south-west Nigeria – the first cities were invariably religious ceremonial centres before, and sometimes long before, they were anything else. They were established only after an array of geomantic considerations had been satisfied and were laid out as axes mundi, projecting symbols of cosmic order and focused sacredness ‘on to the plane of human experience, where they could provide a framework for social action.’21
Cities began, in effect, he maintained, as tribal shrines, with the priests in Sumeria being probably ‘the first persons to be released from the stultifying routine of direct subsistence labour’.22 Craftsmen were very few until 3500 BC, and writing and early calendrical systems were used to preserve elite cohesion but proved brittle as systems of government, easily susceptible to threats from outside – either by other groups or climate change.
* The African evidence, such as it is, modifies this ‘pure’ picture but doesn’t undermine it.
* This is the wording of the Revised Standard Version (1952). The King James Version (1611) of the same passage reads: ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’
* A study published in 2009 suggested that the gene for lactose tolerance in fact emerged in central Europe and the Balkans, among cattle herders living 7,500 years ago. Milk residue has also been found in pottery remains in Anatolia, dated to the seventh millennium. Parts of the secondary products revolution therefore must have begun earlier than Sherratt thought. We also know now that lactose tolerance evolved separately in Africa.14
* It is perhaps worth saying at this point that religious images, in all parts of the world, on all continents, are exceedingly complex, with multiple overlapping, interlinked and often contradictory meanings. This being so, there is always a danger that the analysis of religious images can be akin to numerology, where meaning is found in all manner of improbable patterns. The reader is cautioned that the patterns discussed here are only a few among many.
* The Funnel Beaker Culture is generally known by its shorthand form, trb, from the German in which it was first identified: Trichterbecherkultur.
* Mott T. Greene makes a convincing case for soma/haoma being ergot, Claviceps spp., a fungus parasitic on wild grasses, in which the psychoactive ingredients are alkaloids. He bases his argument on their distribution (mainly mountains, as it says in the Rig Veda), their method of preparation, as outlined also in the Rig Veda, and on the fact that, because they are parasitic on grasses, no one plant is identifiable as the source of soma – hence the historical ambiguity.29
* This is a very rough parallel, of course, and not without irony, since we now know that sedentism in the Old World preceded full-blown plant domestication.
* On the other hand, ‘Uru’ means a walled area.
* Studies of the ‘entoptic’ images found painted on the walls of some caves in South Africa included many ‘U’ shapes.26
* We should not overlook the fact that there was also a proliferation of secondary gods at Chavín, perhaps reflecting the greater heterogeneity of Chavín society, brought about by the many pilgrimages, facilitated by the newly available llama caravans.
* Chinese script dates from 1300 bc, possibly earlier.25
* This was a system of dots (=1) and bars (=5) and the zero (the sign for which was somewhat like the drawing of an eye). Peter S. Rudman, in his book, How Mathematics Happened: The First 5,000 Years (2007), includes the Mayan system as a form of abacus notation, meaning we can be reasonably confident the Mayans did abacus addition.27
* Rain was dramatic in the tropics. Uniquely, in that region the initial signs of thunder can be heard around the time leading up to the first overhead passage of the sun.43
* On the other hand, it might be just a figurine sculpture.
* The Spanish word for rubber, hule, is said to derive from this term.
* As it was of course in ancient Rome.
* The Greek ‘Antikythera’ mechanism, discovered on a wreck dating from AD 87, had an assembly of toothed gears, nineteen rotators of the main wheel coinciding precisely with 235 rotations on another, just as 19 seasonal years fit precisely with 235 lunar synodic months. This would seem to be a mathematical equal to the Mayans.51
* This somewhat overstates an interesting argument: for example, Christians continued to believe in the virginity of Mary, whose popularity peaked in the twelfth century; and there was no shortage of adherents who opposed other achievements of rationality, such as those who opposed Copernicus’s findings.
* John Larner says Bahrain to China was 70 days by sea and 274 overland from Tana, on the Sea of Azov, to Cathay.
* ‘Probably’ because we must never forget how much original indigenous written material was destroyed by Conquistadores, compromising our understanding.
* Patrick Tierney, in his book, The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice (1989), claimed that human sacrifice was still being carried out in remote parts of the Peruvian and Chilean Andes, and quoted evidence that seemed convincing in at least two cases. He also included in his book the following song after they had ‘quartered’ a boy-victim at Cerro Mesa, near the sea: ‘Take this boy now,/We are helping you,/We are paying you with this boy./We are all orphans./Why do you punish us, God?/We sacrifice this boy to you,/We give him to you as a gift,/So that the tidal waves are calmed,/So that there are no more disasters.’ Another informant told Tierney, a reporter for Discovery magazine, that ‘People here are accustomed to sacrificing someone when the weather gets bad’.47
