The Paleolithic - Heaven or Hell?

Beside, without literacy it's pretty difficult to develop a popular, universal notion of hell or heaven. Preliterate cultures tend to have vaguer views of the afterlife and divinity as a whole.

In short, the Paleolithic couldn't have been heaven or hell because those concepts did not exist yet in any clear form.
 
I'm certainly of the opinion that the transition was more Gather Hunt -> Gather Hunt Parttime-Agriculture -> GH or Fulltime Agriculture or Nomadic Herding.
And since ftA populations soon far outstripped the others they became dominant unless the others had significant military advantages.
This. There's genetic evidence in several major food crops that they underwent a long (possibly millennia) period of selection prior to domestication and full-on cultivation, which implies that people were consciously tending or choosing which food plants they wanted spread around for a very long period.
 
According to research on the early Indo-Europeans, pretty much the same thing happened on the Steppe. Agriculture showed up, people settled in the river valleys (the precise order of these two is unclear), and then later horses+wagons allowed people to start living on the whole Steppe (only wintering in specific spots) without much agriculture so they stopped building houses and started living as nomads with herds.
Worsening climate had a lot to do with this, though.
 
Worsening climate had a lot to do with this, though.
Mighty nice of the climate to wait around for the locals to get domesticated horses and wagons before getting worse, but additional push factors would hardly be amiss to get people into a scary new way of life.
 
Mighty nice of the climate to wait around for the locals to get domesticated horses and wagons before getting worse, but additional push factors would hardly be amiss to get people into a scary new way of life.
That was not a scary new way of life. Cattle herding and horse-domestication were practiced on the steppes already before 4000 BCE. Steppe dwellers mostly skipped over the agricultural phase; while 6th millennium!BCE cultures like Dnieper-Donets were fisher-gatherers, a millennium later herding was a Norm (although fishing remained important). Dnieper-Donets people were sedentary in the valleys not because they were agriculturalists but because they lived around such rich fishing grounds and strategically important places at the dnieper rapids that they could afford to do so even as fisher-gatherers.

Anthony posits long-distance cattle thefts occurred ritually from around 4000 BCE onwards. Wagons were certainly new, but no utter revolution.
 
That was not a scary new way of life. Cattle herding and horse-domestication were practiced on the steppes already before 4000 BCE. Steppe dwellers mostly skipped over the agricultural phase; while 6th millennium!BCE cultures like Dnieper-Donets were fisher-gatherers, a millennium later herding was a Norm (although fishing remained important). Dnieper-Donets people were sedentary in the valleys not because they were agriculturalists but because they lived around such rich fishing grounds and strategically important places at the dnieper rapids that they could afford to do so even as fisher-gatherers.

Anthony posits long-distance cattle thefts occurred ritually from around 4000 BCE onwards. Wagons were certainly new, but no utter revolution.
Wagons mean the difference between having a house along while out herding, and not having that. It means you can travel for months across the steppes. So it means that if anything means staying put in the riverlands is unattractive, you can just go off and never go back to a house.

Meanwhile, without wagons, its simple tents and riding for everyone, including babes, the elderly, and heavily pregnant women.
 
Wagons mean the difference between having a house along while out herding, and not having that. It means you can travel for months across the steppes. So it means that if anything means staying put in the riverlands is unattractive, you can just go off and never go back to a house.

Meanwhile, without wagons, its simple tents and riding for everyone, including babes, the elderly, and heavily pregnant women.
True. Although herding with horses increasingly included seasonal migration already, and I'm not sure they left the above-mentioned groups behind...
 
Its not just farming and herding that HGs did, even without founder crops or suitable animals HGs did what they could to alter the environment to stabilise their food supply. Over near my brothers' places the locals built 'improved wetland' by making stone weirs in Condah swamp, a large swamp made by a nearby volcano. This regulated the water and gave ample opportunity to set up eel and fish traps, which they then preserved by smoking them in hollowed out trees, allowing about 8000 people to live on this swamp for about 9 months of the year.

The moral of the story is that when given a chance people will do whatever it takes to stabilise and prolong their food supply.

11101399_1593540410894418_1727893070096686327_o-1024x523.jpg
 
Top