Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I've always been interested in ancient history, but there are two little tidbits I wanted to mention today. The Aborigine culture dates back to about 50,000 BC — it is literally the oldest coherent culture on the planet. I had the pleasure of talking to newaddict for some time about it before the BBQ, and he told me horror stories akin to how both Canada and the US (and Japan and practically every other nation) have abused their indigenous cultures.

I realized something scary — Western culture is at best five thousand years old, but more realistically has no more than three thousand years of history. Aborigine culture is literally ten or more times as old as we are — absolutely ancient in comparison. Problem is, probably in part because they are nomadic cultures, they have a largely oral history (most indigenous people were only “given” written language within the last hundred years). The scary realization is that if we disrupt their culture through our “gifts” of reservations, alcohol, and small pox, if we destabilize only a couple generations, we literally wipe out fifty thousand years of history.

It would all be gone.

Scary.

Anyway, I'm also reading Before Civilization (“The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe”) by Colin Renfrew (not Wilson!) right now, which covers both the various sciences of dating, as well as covering the movement of peoples and technologies across Europe and the Near East. We see farming colonies and cities (well, more like large fortified villages) popping up in the Near East at about 6000 BC, and then moving up through Europe up until about 2500 BC when they reached Scotland and England.

Here's the kicker: Stonehenge and the other large stone structures in Europe date often to several thousand years prior to the arrival of homo sapiens from the southeast. Now, when Colin Renfrew wrote this book, it was widely accepted that tens of thousands of years ago homo sapiens sapiens moved into Europe and literally killed off Neanderthal man, who we believed had not moved past the paleolithic stage. (So he didn't really draw any conclusions as to who built these structures.)

Now though we know that in fact Neanderthal man was never actually wiped out, but in fact still lives primarily in Scotland and all over the world — we didn't kill them all, we interbred with them (judging by man's known history, I suspect through rape by warrior and similarly brutal methods), and those of Scottish descent as well as those who have red hair (which has been conclusively linked to Neanderthal genetics) are literally “a different breed of human” — Neanderthal man.

With that in mind, I think that the most likely explanation for the dating of these structures is that Neanderthal man achieved a far higher level of civilization than we ever imagined, and is responsible for their construction. Seriously, I get excited enough thinking about lost civilizations that constructed massive markers — I get even more excited when I realize that they were not built by humans in the sense of homo sapiens sapiens, and that the descendents of these builders still quietly walk among us!

Maybe I'm part Neanderthal too?

I think I'll put that on my next business cards: