Totally unrelated to unicycling, but perhaps related to some of the pointless arguments we sometimes get into when life’s too short…
I am reading a fairly heavy book about prehistoric life in Britain. I was part way through the section on the Palaeolithic (that’s the “old stone age”) period.
The chapter I was reading compared two sites, only a couple of hundred miles apart, one near to the sea, the other not. The author commented that the evidence showed that the people at the site near the sea did not have a diet that included fish; those who lived at the site further from the sea did eat fish.
Then the punchline: “At first it is surprising that the lifestyles at these two sites only 200 miles aparts hould be so different, until you remember the settlements were separated by 480,000 years.”
And, unless you are just pointing out a misprint (I wasn’t sure): are the dates correct? Does Britian really have sites half a million years old that are in such a good state of preservation that experts can determine diet?
Only 200 miles, but that was before the invention of the unicycle.
...Boxgrove was occupied before the great chill of the Anglian glaciation, whose ice retreated around 423,000 years ago...
...One of the best known examples of Cro Magnon man in Britain is the so called Red "Lady" [actually a male skeleton, originally misidentified as female] of Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula....
...fish and seafood formed a major part of the Red "Lady"'s diet...
... the contrast with Boxgrove, which was closer to the sea, but where there is no evidence of fish eating, is remarkable; but then, so too is the huge time span (roughly [B]480,000 [/B][480 thousand] years that separates these two Palaeolithic sites.
...It's easy to forget that the Palaeolithic takes up about 98% of British prehistory.
Yes, 480 thousand years, although, on re-checking, I was a little wrong on the 200 miles bit. That’s my modern perception of distance: it’s a few hours’ drive, that’s all.
But the astounding thing is two settlements 480 thousand years apart. That’s 240 times as long as the time between the life of Jesus or Caesar and today. And we laugh at old photos of the Victorians, 120 years ago!
Archaeologists could identify the diet both from traces of food-bones in the ground, and from an analysis of the chemistry of the bones of the people whose skeletons were found. Food-bones accumulated over centuries. Change was slow in the stone age, and many sites were used by hunter gatherers and herdsmen over centuries, allowing large piles of waste to build up.
A comparison here with the Australian aboriginals whose way of life was largely unchanged for thousands of years before the Europeans invaded. They have sacred sites (rather than buildings) of an antiquity that make the Stonehenge pr the pyramids seem like a flashy new development.
Archaeologically, it would have been the BP wheel. Palaeoarchaeologists refer to “Before Present” because it is not a culturally loaded term, and because when you’re talking about units of ten thousand years, a year or two either way doesn’t matter.
Palaeoarchaeologists also get discount on vowels because they use so many.
According to the Smithsonian’s Human Origins program there is molecular evidence to suggest that homo sapiens date back 200,000 years. Apparently the fossil record goes back only as far a 130,000 years.
Because I don’t want to appear elitist, I’ll just say I’m satisfied that my wife has no facial hair and our grooming habits don’t include picking nits off our heads.
eargh after reading this im actually confused, humans must have been around for more than 65,000 years old for mikefules imformation to be certian, so if there is contradiction the information cannot be reliable
im still confused over how there is less seafood near the sea, but i presume this is down to plate tectonics and the geographical changes to the contenents over millions of years, and rising sea levels. meaning that the other sight could have been closer to the sea while the one closest to it now was further away.
Notice the reference in the excerpts to Cro Magnon men: that is before Home Sapiens. The Palaeolithic was a time of men who were not the same species as us. There were various species of man including the famous “Neanderthal” men (who were probably killed off by our own species) as well as Cro magnon, Homo Habilis and the amusingly-named Homo Erectus.
And hominids are now believed to go back a total of around 2,000,000 years or more - depending on how you define your terms. The fossil record is sketchy, and a lot has to be inferred from a jaw bone found here, a tooth found there, and so on. There are few complete skeletons available for study.
As for the eating fish thing: the simple answer is that they appear not to have caught and eaten fish. Men live on the land; fish live in the water. So, without fishing rods, poles, nets, gourds, traps or boats, men wouldn’t eat fish.
It’s not me that’s believable; it’s the professional archaeologist and prehistorian who wrote the book from which I quoted, and the other archaeologists and prehistorians whose published papers he cites. And of course the many other academic books on the subject.
It’s fascinating, and certainly gives a sense of perspective.
Here’s another thing that gives a sense of perspective: I once met a lady who was 102 years old, and was 6 at the time of the first powered flight (Wright Brothers, 1903.) She was born when powered flight was an impossible dream, and died when weekend shopping trips from Europe to the USA were readily available.
No mention was made of whether the fish were salt or freshwater fish.
Hang on a moment: salmon of course would confuse that, so perhaps I should have said “whether the fish were caught in salt or in fresh water”?
Certainly salmon migrating up the rivers would have been one of the easier fish for primitive man to catch. And they could have done it without a Greenwell’s Glory.
Just think, if Liam and Noel Gallagher were primitive men (perish the thought) they could have released an album called “What’s the Story, Greenwell’s Glory.”
Here’s another amazing thing the archeologists uncovered recently:
The USA bombed Baghdad 5 years ago, not 200 miles away, but in the very same place where Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden only 6,ooo years ago!
Talk about sense of perspective.
Archeological findings suggest Adam and Eve ate no fish.
Archeologists did find an ancient trash pit with lots of apple cores in it, though. Thus, they have put forth the hypothesis that Adam and Eve were repeat offenders, and that they were actually expelled from the Garden only after a number of probation violations.
