And it all went downhill from there...

[Ian David]

Offerings to a Stone Snake Provide the Earliest Evidence of Religion



News
December 01, 2006
Offerings to a Stone Snake Provide the Earliest Evidence of Religion
70,000-year-old African ritual practices linked to mythology of modern Botswanans
By JR Minkel

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior, or what could be called religion. The finding, which researchers have yet to formally publish, comes from a cave hidden in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods.

"It's very big news," says Sheila Coulson, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo in Norway and leader of the study. Prior to the discovery, researchers had identified signs of ritual practice going back at most 40,000 years from sites in Europe.


VIRTUAL SLITHERING: In flickering light the carved rock gives the appearance of an undulating snake.

Researchers believe that anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa perhaps 120,000 years ago. "The difficulty was always this incredible time lag between that occurrence and any more complex aspect of the culture other than just basic survival," Coulson says. Although some carved ornaments and wall markings from another African site are as old as the new find, they seem to have had no obvious ritual significance.

A chief of the local San people invited Coulson and her colleagues to study the cave in Tsodilo Hills. They were unprepared for what they found when they entered: a six-meter-long rock that bore a striking resemblance to a snake, including a mouthlike gash at the end. "My first words I remember saying are, 'My god what is that?'" Coulson says. "I'd never seen anything like it."

More:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=3FE89A86-E7F2-99DF-366D045A5BF3EAB1&sc=I100322

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Interesting article.

Left me wanting to know more, so I hope it turns up in my National Geographic somewhere down the road.

"You put it all together and clearly something very extraordinary is happening," says archaeologist and prehistoric religion specialist Neil Price, also at the University of Oslo, who was not part of the dig. "You have things occurring over a long period of time that do not have a functional explanation. There must be a whole complex of thinking behind these actions, and that in itself is exciting."

[yellowdogintexas]

2. This sort of pushes the timeline back a bit doesn't it?

My Old Testament prof in college described Genesis as Hebrew Mythology, then defined mythology as "the attempt of a primitive people to explain things they do not understand"


He was such a wonderful teacher.

And that is one beautiful picture, too.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. How did they determine it to be religion?

Modern anthropologists may associate snake imagery with ancient religions, but the finds at Tsodilo Hills don't really offer us much to go on -- at least, according to the details in the story.

The locals call the place "the hill of the Gods", and have been calling it that for a long time, but how far back does "long" stretch? Not 70,000 years, certainly! Different conquering peoples (Bantu, I think) swept through that area at least twice in the last 300 years. In 70,000 years, the "locals" could have changed a hundred times.

And what will future anthropologists make of people who live in St. Paul, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens?

Sadly, we have no good information of human culture before about 5000 BCE; in most places, even 500 CE is a stretch, e.g., Scotland and Russia. We moderns tend to have our own views of what "primitive" is. I think I'm on solid ground when I say that most of us, and most anthropologists, consider religion to be primitive. Atavistic.

But early people could have lacked religion altogether; mystical states could have been understood simply, as entertainment, or a form of intoxication. (I note that the area is in the range of several species of psychoactive plants, including some which contain the entheogen ibogaine.) There is some evidence that the cave was used for finishing arrow points, so it might have functioned similar to a hunting lodge or even a sports bar. And working on the theory, rough though it is, that history parallels human development (e.g., Ernst Haeckel's quote "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), children don't have much in the way of religion until they are taught it. In the childhood of the human race, religion might have been rudimentary, or non-existent.

If they were "just like us" only without the acculturation we've had a hundred thousand years to pick up, we should probably widen our view and test more daring hypotheses. The same area has also turned up "engravings" in rocks, presumed to be primitive art, and from the same general era.

Every time we find something new about our ancestors, it's always a surprise.

--p!

[moose65]

4. Very interesting

I find this sort of stuff fascinating. There is so much we don't know, so many possibilities out there and things like this just waiting to be found. It's exhilarating to me. So, I can't understand people who have the attitude that "Humans appeared 6000 years ago and that was it." Sheeesh. That kind of thinking is boring, illogical, and downright stupid. No wonder so many Repukes think that way. :-p