Lurqer...
I was also multi-tasking during Sunday Morning...drinking coffee and reading this interesting article.
Sunday, February 23, 2003 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Understanding the U.S.-Iraq conflict | War on terrorism
Scientists find prehistoric ax that may bear earliest sign of
human spirituality
By Robert Lee Hotz
Los Angeles Times
NEW YORK — To the primitive hands that deftly shaped it
from rose-colored quartz 350,000 years ago, the glittering
stone ax may have been as dazzling as any ceremonial
saber.
It was found in the depths of a Spanish cavern among the
skeletal remains of 27 primitive men, women and children
— pristine, solitary, and placed like a lasting tribute to the
deceased whose bones embraced it.
For archaeologists who unearthed this prehistoric blade, the unusual burial site is a compelling but
controversial glimpse of arguably the earliest evidence of humanity's dawning spiritual life.
The ax may be a token of the first known funeral.
If so, the find is 250,000 years older than any other evidence that such early human species
honored their dead, said experts led by Eudald Carbonell at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona,
Spain, and the Museum of Natural History in Madrid.
The researchers believe the ax — perhaps the earliest offering to the dead — testifies to what skulls
and bones alone cannot: the origins of spirituality and ritual. In their view, this mute rock embodies
compassion, grief and a desire to commemorate the dead among creatures until now considered
incapable of modern human behavior.
"This would mean that human cognitive complexity emerged on the planet much earlier than
previously thought," Carbonell said.
Exploring the origins of the mind is a perilous research endeavor under any circumstances. It can be
all but impossible to distinguish hard evidence of something as fleeting as thought, especially from
the distance of so many thousands of years.
But, if the research team's claim is borne out, the ax marks a crucial milestone in the archaeology of
the mind.
"This is the first instance in Europe where we have some evidence of burial rites and burial ritual and
symbolism," said paleoanthropologist Marie-Antoinette de Lumley at the Museum of Natural History
in Paris. "The hand ax is perhaps tied into this and perhaps shows some sort of symbolic behavior."
The researchers found the almond-shaped ax in 1998 mixed with nearly 4,000 fossilized bones
belonging to a species called Homo heidelbergensis. The find and their analysis are to be detailed
in the French scientific journal L'Anthropologie this year. The ax itself has been put on display for
the first time at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Scholars worldwide are
puzzling over its meaning.
The bodies were located far from any camp site or animal den, at the bottom of a narrow
50-foot-deep shaft that scientists have named Sima de los Huesos — the Pit of the Bones. The pit
can be reached only by crawling one-third of a mile through a subterranean passage.
Carbonell and his colleagues are convinced that the inaccessibility of the pit, which contains the
largest assemblage of such hominid fossils in the world, is additional evidence the site was a
deliberate burial place.
Whatever its ultimate meaning, the find is unique in the annals of human evolution, said
anthropologist Richard Klein at Stanford University.
Powers of the mind were long considered the exclusive province of Homo sapiens — the species to
which all modern humanity belongs.
By this theory, the modern mind was born in a cultural Big Bang — a creative explosion about
40,000 years ago that left elaborate cave paintings, expert carvings, musical instruments and finely
crafted tools throughout Eurasia and Africa.
More recently, however, researchers have argued that Neanderthals, who lived from 200,000 years
ago to 30,000 years ago, also shared the human capacity for art, music and spirituality.
Most scholars agree that Neanderthals had developed some kind of symbolism related to death as
early as 100,000 years ago. Throughout the Middle East and Europe, they buried their dead in
oval-shaped graves with what may be votive offerings, such as goat horns and, in one possible
instance, bouquets of wildflowers.
The discovery of the ax and bones in the Sima de los Huesos pushes that debate back even
earlier, to the species who were the forebears of Neanderthals.
The ax belongs to an era when early Europeans — the Homo heidelbergensis — were settling the
rolling limestone hills of Atapuerca in northern Spain, not far from the modern city of Burgos.
Most scholars thought that these hominids were relatively primitive scavengers with a knack for
making stone tools, not so much smarter than chimpanzees who can fish for termites with twigs or
New Caledonian crows, which scientists recently discovered can bend wire to suit their purpose.
Although their brains were about as large as those of modern humans, these hominids were only
beginning to master fire. They were cannibals, evidence from Atapuerca suggests. They left no
evidence of art, language, religion or, until now, complex cognitive behavior.
"We don't have anything that screams out that these people had a more elaborate, sophisticated
intelligence," said Lesley Aiello, an anthropologist at University College London. The ax, however,
"seems to be shouting that something is going on," Aiello said. |
