In the Göbekli Tepe series opener, I noted that several claims have been made about this 11,000 year old archaeological site:
It was built by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary or village agriculturalists.
It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
The massive stone pillars or megaliths were “temples” or “shrines.”
Göbekli [...]
Tags:Anna Belfer-Cohen·complex hunter-gatherers·Edward Banning·Gobekli Tepe·houses·Klaus Schmidt·Levant·megaliths·monoliths·Neolithicization·Neolithization·Nigel Goring-Morris·shrines·So Fair a House·temples
This past week, British newspapers carried sensational headlines about an archaeological find in Prague: “First Homosexual Caveman Found” (The Telegraph) and “Oldest Gay in the Village: 5,000 Year Old is ‘Outed’ By the Way He Was Buried” (Daily Mail). Although the assemblage in question has not been published in a journal, the archaeologists called a [...]
Tags:berdache·Bone Girl·Corded Ware·Cordware culture·Daily Mail·deliberate burials·gay caveman·gender·grave goods·homosexual caveman·Kristina Killgrove·Leore Grosman·Levant·middle range theory·Natufian·Neolithic farmer·Prague·sexual orientation·shaman graves·soul beliefs·Telegraph·third gender·transgender·transvestite·Two Spirits
In many books and articles addressing the origins of “religious” behavior, one will find the assertion that deliberate burials are indicative of soul beliefs and that because people began burying the dead approximately 100,000 years ago, this marks the beginning of what we today call religion. As I noted in this post, there are several [...]
Tags:afterlife·afterlife beliefs·burials·commonsense dualism·deliberate burials·fox·foxes·funerary·grave goods·guardian spirit·Jordan·Levant·Lisa Maher·mortuary·Native Americans·Natufian·pre-Natufian·Russia·social complexity·social organization·soul·spirit·Sunghir·Sungir·Upper Paleolithic·Uyun al-Hammam·vision·vision quest
Over at the Guardian, the archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones has written an enigmatic article asking “What Can We Learn from Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors.” While I think there is a great deal to be learned from our foraging ancestors, the existential and ontological lessons I have in mind are quite different from those Wickham-Jones proposes.
She begins by [...]
Tags:Caroline Wickham-Jones·farming·foraging·Levant·Malthus·Marshall Sahlins·megafauna extinction·Natufian·Neolithic Revolution·non-sustainability·Paleoterrific·sustainability·The Original Affluent Society·What Can We Learn from Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors·world population
This is really cool — an elderly woman buried in the Levant 12,000 years ago with a plethora of grave goods and indications of a feast for her send off. As reported by Live Science, this was a critical transitional period from foraging to agriculture:
Prehistoric leftovers of a feast 12,000 years ago at an apparent [...]
Tags:feast ritual·grave goods·Levant·mortuary practices·neolithic·ritual·shaman
Over at ABC News, Ki Mae Heussner reports on a Diane Sawyer interview of the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking with this contentious headline: “Stephen Hawking on Religion: Science Will Win.” This is an unfortunate banner. During the interview, Sawyer asked if religion and science could be reconciled. Hawking’s response was profoundly unhelpful:
“There is a fundamental [...]
Tags:animism·anthropomorphic·anthropomorphism·Babylon·Babylonian high god·city-states·Diane Sawyer·earthly kings·gods·Hebrews·hunter-gatherers·Judaism·Ki Mae Heussner·Levant·Mesopotamia·Neolithic·Neolithic Revolution·religion·Roy Rosenberg·science·spirits·spiritual kings·Stephen Hawking·supernatural thinking·Yahweh·Yahweh Becomes King
When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method. So far as I can tell, there are no hunter-gatherer or pre-Neolithic societies that had taboos against homosexuality. We can therefore trace the history of the [...]
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There have been many articles over the past week reporting that an unusually large group (150 members) of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda has been engaging in systematic territorial expansion by attacking and killing neighboring groups. The Nature article notes that this is “cooperative behavior” and then quotes from the New York Times story:
These [...]
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