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Stone Age Mass Graves Reveal Green Sahara
iminplaya sends along a New Scientist article that begins: "One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger [is] called Gobero... It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush... 'The first people who used the Gobero cemetery were Kiffian, hunter-gatherers who grew up to two meters tall,' says Elena Garcea of the University of Cassino in Italy and one of the scientists on the team. The large stature of the Kiffian suggests that food was plentiful during their time in Gobero, 10,000 to 8,000 years ago... All traces of the Kiffian vanish abruptly around 8,000 years ago, when the Sahara became very dry for a thousand years. When the rains returned, a different population, the Tenerians, who were of a shorter and more gracile build, based themselves at this site... 'The most amazing find so far is a grave with a female and two children hugging each other. They were carefully arranged in this position. This strongly indicated they had spiritual beliefs and cared for their dead,' says Garcea." The research article is at PLoS One.
Isn't the history of civilization generally based around water for animals, agriculture, transport, industry?
Maybe time to start treating our seas with respect. I was on a beach in Togo last week and every day the ocean washes up plastic bags.
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I thought it was fairly common knowledge that the Sahara used to be a very lush and fertile plain between 10-15k years ago. Or at least that's what I was taught 15 years ago. Still, nice to find anthropological and archeological evidence of the people that lived there.
This guy's the limit!
Why does this imply spiritual beliefs? Maybe they just felt comfortable with the idea of being buried in the arms of someone they cared about.
You're looking at leader/follower relationship with a peculiar modernistic cultural/anthro/sociological viewpoint.
What about the goose or the duck at the head of a flock? Or an ant that finds food and lays down pheremones on its way back to the colony and heads back out to gather more? Sometimes leadership/follower relationships don't require any social or political identity angst. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of efficiency, luck, or natural optimization (i.e. birds expend less energy when they fly in a flock formation, and one of the birds has to take the lead to get the aerodynamics going correctly)
I dunno. You're applying this political identity angst to a topic which often doesn't need it. Occams razor and all that.
I'm perfectly well aware that geese and ducks take turns leading the flock. They do it to maintain efficiency. And if a duck or geese doesn't keep with the flock, they're going to have a much rougher time. They won't be able to travel as far, will have more difficulty getting food, and may even die.
The point is, leadership is sometimes about somebody simply getting in front to deal with the headwind, and everybody else had better get into line or else they won't get the benefits of flock formation (i.e. can travel further, get to the next watering hole, etc). And this process of somebody getting in front to deal with a headwind doesn't require some political identity angst to explain it. Does that duck in front like dealing with the headwind? Possibly not. Does the head duck expect perfect obedience? Does it need to? Or do the benefits of group behavior justify themselves? I suppose you could apply the political identity argument to the ducks, although it seems to me like you don't need to. Systems are often created or adopted for efficiency purposes, and the added efficiency that a system provides is often justification enough for following the system.
And humans rotate leadership just like ducks do. At least in democracies. We just do it at a less frequent interval. Human affairs have headwinds that we have to deal with also... oil prices, global warming, economy. These are simply the headwinds that our leaders have to deal with.
I do agree that leaders are victimized by the system as much as the followers.
They say that a system applied to an ineffective process will simply magnify the ineffectiveness. Perhaps what we have in our government is simply an efficiency system being applied to ineffective solutions.