From Archeology to History, Part I

I rashly offered in an earlier post to write a timeline of the transition from archeology to history. By this I meant the vast period in human history between the first known permanent settlement for humans, generally dated to a site in what is now the Czech Republic 25 thousand years old (25 KYA) and -- as the later terminus, the moment humans began pressing cuneiforms on clay tablets in Sumeria, about 6 KYA, also known as 4,000 BC, or if you prefer, BCE.

As I say, that promise WAS rash. But I will cover the larger portion of the span right now, and save the ending of it to a later time. This time ends with the oldest known manifestation of organized warfare between humans. Around 8,000 BC. Ever since then, it has been one damned war after another. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Anyway, allow me to offer what I have. We start about 2K years after we left off with that first settlement.

23 KYA. This is the age of clearly human footprints in New Mexico, 3,000 miles in a straightline from the Bering Straits. It indicates the first migration of humans to the land must have been considerably earlier than that.

22 KYA. This was the time of the last glacial maximum. That is, if we think of glaciation in the northern hemisphere as a tidal phenomenon, this was the last high tide. Glaciers reached as far as New England in what is now the US, and into the center of what is now Europe. This is important. As Glaciers began to recede after this time, water levels rose with a lot of consequences for familiar geography. For example, the path those earliest Americans must have taken from Siberia was flooded AFTER this point, and anyone here was stuck here.

18 KYA, around this time, beautiful spotted horses were painted on the wall of a cave known as Pech Merle in France.

17 KYA. Something less realistic. Even, if we are to use the language of art criticism, surrealistic. Someone painted a bird-headed man in the Lasceaux cave. The bird-headed man, with a prominent penis perpendicular to his body, is little more than a stick figure: but he is standing in front of -- or perhaps falling down in fright at -- a much more realistically portrayed bison. See above.

14 KYA. This is the conventionally accepted beginning of the "Jomon" period in the prehistory of Japan. The above mentioned sea waters may not yet have entirely cut Japan off from the continent of Asia. The term "jomon" means "cord marked" and it refers to a style of pottery in which cords are tied around the clay as it hardens to determine its markings.

12 KYA -- evidence of a wooden building (and so likely permanent human habitations) have been found from around this time in South America. the long migration we mentioned above had by this time covered the whole range of the Americas.

11 KYA (which is also 9,000 BC, or BCE if you prefer) -- we have now reached the birth of pornography. For this is the age of the oldest known sculpture of a couple having sex. It was found in a cave in the Jordan desert, and was found there by a Bedouin at some point prior to AD 1933. The sculpture is known as the Ain Sakhri Lovers.

8,000 BC -- there is evidence of a massacre near Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Further, it may have been a quite organized slaughter: I.e. this could have been the site of a lopsided battle. If you are a Rousseauian and want to look back to a golden age before such nasty things, that golden age will have to be older than this site.

That is as far as I have gotten in this timeline. There is still some time to go, and I want to fill in the next 4,000 years with some care, getting us to Sumeria and civilization. That will hook up, chronologically, with this: https://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2019/10/civilization-and-history-in-40-snapshots.html

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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