Optimism is a many-splendored thing. As the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 continues to plague humankind, it can distract us from possible future dystopia: from possible infertility among infected men to the devastation we face from climate change.
The coronavirus even abets our distraction from our present predicaments: Quite a few of us have cooped ourselves up at home (considerately, or because we’d be arrested otherwise) and are binge-watching fiction rather than redoing the house, or at least reading the classics as we vowed. Or at least thought we might.
Optimism regarding our past has to do with our preconceptions about the benevolent nature of archaic and early humans, up to the point where we settled down and began to farm, and fight over territory. Some have suggested that hunter-gatherers were amiable folk who, if they got into a contretemps with a nearby group, would simply amble off elsewhere. That notion was dealt a blow by a study in 2014 of a race war 13,000 years ago. Now as Ariel David reported in Haaretz this week, it seems the hunter-gatherers who built the purportedly "world's oldest temple" at Gobeli Tepe 11,500 years ago were anything but small disconnected groups of nomads, and may have had a command of basic geometry to boot.
In another moment of shocking pragmatism, a scene was found in a rock shelter in India depicting not a noble hunt by courageous stick-people against some mega-mammal but a deer being butchered 30,000 years ago.
Yet another surprise lurked among hunter-gatherers in the Baltic region from 7,500 to 5,000 years ago: not only did they have cooking pots, they had local recipes, and some even ate dairy – which they may have stolen. You read it here first. | | | |
