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Creationism/Evolution Title: The Caveman’s Home Was Not a Cave It was the 18th-century scientist Carolus Linnaeus that laid the foundations for modern biological taxonomy. It was also Linnaeus who argued for the existence of Homo troglodytes, a primitive people said to inhabit the caves of an Indonesian archipelago. Although troglodyte1 has since been proven to be an invalid taxon, archaeological doctrine continued to describe our ancestors as cavemen. The idea fits with a particular narrative of human evolution, one that describes a steady march from the primitive to the complex: Humans descended from the trees, stumbled about the land, made homes in caves, and finally found glory in high-rises. In this narrative, progress includes living inside confined physical spaces. This thinking was especially prevalent in Western Europe, where caves yielded so much in the way of art and artifacts that archaeologists became convinced that a cave was also a home, in the modern sense of the word. By the 1980s, archaeologists understood that this picture was incomplete: The cave was far from being the primary residence. But archaeologists continued focusing on excavating caves, both because it was habitual and the techniques involved were well understood. Then along came the American anthropological archaeologist, Margaret Conkey. Today a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, she had asked a simple question: What did cave people do all day? What if she looked at the archaeological record from the perspective of a mobile culture, like the Inuit? She decided to look outside of caves. For the past 20 years, Conkey and her team have been conducting open-air field research in the Ariège region, in the Central Pyrénées foothills of France. Her project, titled Between the Caves, concentrated on the Paleolithic era, also known as the Stone Age, before humans became sedentary. Challenging the status quo, she found that the Paleolithic people were much more than cavemen. The California-based Conkey spoke to Nautilus from Seattle, where she was, coincidently, helping her daughter re-organize her home. Why did you launch the Between the Caves project? Were cave sites too crowded with other archaeologists? I dont blame anyone for focusing on caves. Caves are constrained spatially, preservation is excellent because theyre usually limestone and very alkaline, which helps preserve bone and other materials that dont often preserve in the open air. But caves are an unrepresentative sample of where people were and what they did. People were clearly inside cavespainting, drawing, and doing other kinds of artistic and cultural activities. But they werent hunting in a cave, they werent collecting raw materials in a cave, they werent collecting firewood or other things. So where were they the rest of the time, and what were they doing? What tells an archaeologist that Paleolithic people spent less time in caves than we imagined in the past? How did you look for evidence on the landscape and what did you find? Caves are an unrepresentative sample of where people were and what they did. Then we discovered what we think is an open-air habitation site in Peyre Blanque, also in the Ariège region, on a ridge thats never been plowed. We found artifacts eroding out of a muddy horseback-riding trail in the woods. The horses had stirred up the mud, and exposed some stone tools; now the site has yielded hundreds of them. We started excavating and found stone slabs, which we believe is a habitation structure in the open-air, probably from the Upper Paleolithic, about 17,000 years ago. We also found yellow, black, and red pigments, meaning ochrepowdered hydrated iron oxidethat early humans used for art and body art. We also found pieces of flint that came from sometimes 200 or more kilometers away. In some fields there were no flint sources anywhere nearby, so finding pieces of flint that are flakes, or otherwise worked, suggested that people carried flint from somewhere, used it for tools, and left it. That means that people were on the move; they were making long treks, or passing these materials to each other as they met somewhere on the landscape. The number of artifacts we found suggests a long-time use of the landscapepeople were coming to this area probably 80,000 years ago and even into the Neolithic. We found many Paleolithic sites, but we cant determine exactly what period because we just dont have any datable, organic materials. Were using a typological classification system that the French perfectedwe look at how the people made their tools. Neanderthals, for example, have a very distinctive technique of removing a flake from a core, called the Levallois technique.2 We found more Neanderthal tools than anybody ever imagined were in this area! How would you define home? Interestingly, not all these locations are next to a source of flint, so people intentionally chose to use, and re-use, a location with clear evidence of previous generations, previous peoples, and maybe even previous kinds of peoples. People would recognize the stone tools of other groups, similarly to how wed recognize this funny thing from the 1800s. We see some tools that were possibly made earlier and then reworked much later with different techniques. I think people of the landscape had social memories of the uses of the landscape, and they understood that people before them used those places too. These Places of Many Generations actually could be places of memory and memory-making. So people of the landscape created memories and, in doing so, created a home. Would an archaeologist from a mobile culture have a different view of what home is compared to an archaeologist from a sedentary culture? Poster Comment:
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#1. To: Willie Green (#0)
Sat around and sang stupid songs:
#2. To: misterwhite (#1)
(Edited)
That song always cracked me up! And actually its "Put the Lime in the Coke You Nut"
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