Secret_History

Chapter 7: Ancient Enigmas 237
Some people suggest that the impetus for culture was the sudden development of
speech. But that idea doesn’t hold much water either. If we were to look at some
of the aboriginal societies of Australia and New Guinea, they are certainly
Neanderthal like in their stone tools. But they think and communicate in languages
that are as rich as ours, and they construct myths, stories and cosmologies with
these languages. They just don’t seem to be much interested in technology.
There is another very strange thing about this explosion of homo intellectualis
technologicus: it seems to have sort of “lost its steam” around 12,000 years ago.
We have already noted the pottery making of the Jomon. Even more startling is
the fact that twenty-six thousand years ago the residents of Dolni Vestonice were
firing ceramics in kilns. But you don’t read that in archaeology textbooks. In the
standard teachings, the emergence of ceramics is linked to the functional use of
pottery which supposedly did not appear until the agricultural revolution in the
Neolithic period some 12,000 years after the kilns at Dolni were last used.
Oh dear! Did we just stumble on something interesting? Didn’t we just note that
something happened to “cool” the steam of the cultural explosion of the Upper
Paleolithic and that it happened about 12,000 years ago? And we noted that the
Jomon culture “began” at about the same time. And here we note that the
agricultural revolution occurred at about the same time as that “loss of creative
vigor”. Could the two have some connection?
In Bulgaria, a thousand miles to the east of Dolni Vestonice, there is a cave
called Bacho Kiro. It is famous for containing the earliest known Aurignacian tool
assemblages. They are 43,000 years old.
This brings us to another curious thing about Neanderthal man: he never seemed
to go anywhere. He always made his tools out of what was locally available, and
he never seemed to travel at all. What was made where it was made, stayed there.
Nobody traded or shared among the Neanderthal groups. But it seems that right
from the beginning, Cro-Magnon man was traveling and sharing and exchanging
not only goods, but technology. If there was a better form of stone somewhere
else, the word seemed to get around, and everybody had some of it. Distinctive
flints from southern Poland are found at Dolni Vestonice, a hundred miles to the
south. Slovakian radiolarite of red, yellow and olive is found a hundred miles to
the east. Later in the Upper Paleolithic period, the famous “chocolate flint” of
southern Poland is found over a radius of two hundred and fifty miles. 151
Naturally, these rocks didn’t walk around on their own. Human legs carried them.
And that leads us to our next little problem with Cro-Magnon man: You see, his
legs were too long.
One of the sacred laws of evolutionary biology is called “Allen’s Rule”. This
rule posits that legs, arms, ears, and other body extremities should be shorter in
151 Shreeve, op. cit.