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Earliest "Writing" On 60,000-Year-Old Eggshells
New Scientist reports on research published in PNAS (abstract here) about what may be the earliest writing yet discovered, on eggshells dated to 60,000 years ago. "Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa. They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5,000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team. [Another researcher is quoted:] 'Judging from what we know about the evolution of art all over the world, there may have been many [written language] traditions that were born, lasted for some time, and then vanished. This may be one of them, most probably not the first and certainly not the last.'"
I wish in articles like these they presented more of the source images, and in higher resolution. The small sample they provide is beautiful, but to the layman appears as a kind of meandering, simple decoration. Of course the claims are limited: communication via graphic art is distinct from communication via modern written languages.
It's interesting to imagine the first lonely human writers at the dawn of written language - how many wrote things only they themselves could understand, before coincidence formed the first community of proto-literate people? How much of this early writing was just the smooth flow of art - abstract or representational - into more concrete meanings relevant to the every day lives even of the illterate?
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Actually, all research points that they had a lot more spare time, meats of various kinds is a very energy dense food item, grain production requires a whole lot of work for piss porr nutritional values in comparision.
By an ancient Einstein, I mean someone who develops as significant piece of technology in a single generation. Like fossils in evolutions, this could be so fast that it was not saved in the archeologic record. Two Examples:
Egyptian pyramids went for stacked sand-walled mastabas to full-blown monsters in less than a century. This was attributed to creativity of Imhotep. (also credited with inventing columns in architecture).
The idea of purely phonetic alphabet seen to arise instantly in the archeological record in Ugarit 3400 years ago. It was adapted to Phonecia, Greece, Isreal, Rome etc. Most previous writing systems had combination of pure ideographs and phonetic syllables- ideographs borrowed because they sound like other works (like people do in charades).
Doubt that. Hunting take much time and energy and is an all year round activity - you can't store it unless you have salt - while grain harvesting take ~3 weeks and can be stored indefinitely as long as you keep it dry.
You doubt? Don't. Research shows that the transition to neolithic agriculture was accompanied by appearance of nutritional deficiencies, skeletal deformations (quern mill took its toll), severe dental problems and most likely by an increase of work having to be carried out daily from the average of three work hours to twelve work hours (per day).
Ezekiel 23:20
I think I have to clarify something here - I am certainly not adhering to any "noble savage" theory here. I completely agree that from our point of view the quality of life and societal structure of hunter-gatherer societies are nothing desirable at all and with your assessment of the relative merits of our society compared to it. What I was arguing was that from the perspective of an early farmer, life has not really improved in the course of the neolithic revolution. I am not saying that there was a golden age we should strive to get back. I am saying that for the early neolithic farmer it might have looked that way, thus giving rise to the golden age myth present in so many cultures.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Plus plus. The research I've read (disclaimer: grad school drop-out in Anthro) is that farming/agriculture permits higher density living -- more peeps per sq kilometer. It requires more time investment per person to get the same calories, but you can do it on much less land. It also permits more specialization (I make the ploughs, you raise the oxen, he plows the fields) in society due to logistic simplifications (we live close enough to each other to make the exchanges frequently), as well as the inherent monetization created by storable crops (he pays you and me with the barley he grows).
Your point on nutrition in mono-crop societies is a good one too -- if you live on mostly barley, you might be getting the calories but not the nutrients that a family wandering from place to place eating varied roots, nuts, berries and wild game is getting.