Stones and Bones

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CAVE ART Blogged 2009 “Stones and Bones”

Anthropologists have confirmed that homo sapiens was thriving in communities in Africa 500,000 years ago. 30,000 years ago we were painting the walls and ceilings in underground caves. We lived without the physical culture we enjoy today, apparently enjoying each other and the natural wonders of this world...for hundreds of thousands of years. What changed?

Culture has clearly "advanced" -- the stones and bones show improvements and increased specialization coupled with organization. Tools become more efficient. The "fitness" is adjusted. Today we can physically see the changes we describe as neolithic revolutions which in turn led to "civilization" marching through its bronze, iron, and steel iterations.

Still, we look at the Cave Paintings and their absences -- no God, no King, no weapons, no hierarchies of men -- and the predominance of gravidity, of color and wonder. We really have to reconsider the direction we have come. In the recent blink of 10,000 years we seem to have wandered into an obsession with personality cults, superstition and weaponry. Have we wandered into a dead end? What is the real vector? What is going on now, and why is it so difficult to comprehend our actual History? Surely what we did for 100,000 years is significant compared to a few centuries of risings and fallings and futile prayers to pantheons of gods.

The point is, looking at Cave Art (which is only 30,000 years old but which was already "advanced" in the caves ((there is no evidence of slow beginnings which probably began "outside")), we had Art. We had the sciencia of the minerals and pigments. This is what makes the ABSENCES so startling. Cave Art depicts no gods, no weapons, no armies, no hierarchies. But we had Community and we had Art and yes, Science -- for hundreds of thousands of years.

The recent 10,000 year old obsession with superstition and vengeful slaughter of "others" is all very new and unnecessary. No, it was not as if evil did not happen, or Mankind did not suffer. The Ice Age extinguished the Cave culture. But there in our Past, it was still Eden compared with the mass suffering to which we have lately become accustomed at the hands of Kings and Priests.

Maria Sibylla Merian - renaissance woman 1647-1717

Just back from an exhibition of Maria Sibylla Merian's paintings and notebooks, presented at The Getty. Merian was born in Germany in 1647, and lived a quiet 70 years. She was one of the great women of science and art, who surpassed her peers, but was forgotten -- was and is actively obliterated -- by the publishing charade which pretends to be "history".
SCIENCE. Merian studied the natural world, completely changing our views of our own gardens as well as introducing specimens of tropical flora and fauna from Surinam to Europe. She was perhaps the first serious Entomologist, making meticulous observations illustrated with accurate images. She studied insects, in a period when many bugs were considered Satanic, and no one else was bothering.
ART. Merian's favorite subjects were the caterpillars. Her accurate images of their complete life cycle transformations are stunning for their scale, dimensionality, shadowing and color. These are portraits of kings and queens, who happen to be worms.
The Exhibition traces her life and art, and notes her contributions to science in the most understated manner possible. If any one of these paintings had been found in the notebooks of a man, historians would have credited the author with having anticipated the theory of evolution.
When I taught History of Science, I actually challenged students with what I thought was an observation of fact: Why are there so few great women of science and art? Now it seems so clear to me. What I was observing was their supression, not their absence.

Compare the Branch Davidians and the Yearning for Zion Ranch in ElDorado Texas

In early April 2008, prosecutors for the State of Texas announced a raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch. The State took "legal custody" of 401 children who had been raised in the 1,700 acre double-gated locked "19th century prairie" compound. By the second week a third person was arrested, Leroy Steed joining Levi Jeffs, and Warren Jeffs the founder, in jail.

It is interesting to recall the action taken by one of the finest Federal Attorneys General in the history of the United States, Janet Reno, in attempting to liberate a few dozen children in Waco, Texas, from a heavily-armed cult of Branch Davidians. The right-wing was screaming invectives at Ms Reno for each step taken in a slow transparent attempt to disarm the Davidian leaders. Now, after a wholesale raid and the taking of custody of 400 children from their community, not a peep of complaint from the right-wing.

The Federal Government, of course, is not involved. The Government has been deaf and witless in the face of the known and accumulating dangers with which civilization is faced. The Bush administration is not interested in the welfare of 400 children. Well, it is NOW time to scream. Who is taking care of these children? The children have been taken from the 19th century (weaving their own clothes), and from their homes.

It is not possible to forgive those who savaged the administration of Janet Reno, a prosecutor who at least addressed the dangers. Her critics are now hypocritically silent. They show no concern for an even worse and much much larger "cult" endangering the lives of even more children. Why is our Right Wing taken over by ideological hypocrites? Since extreme idiologues took over, we can no longer count on the wisdom of the Right Wing.

Finally, the news coming out seems to share the same tone and perspective which the FLDS Founders espouse: Males are important and females are reproductive drudges. Behind those "important" males are very significant females. We have not heard from any of them in any capacity. Apparently the State of Texas -- violating its tradition of having had five female governors and equal and independent citizens -- has been too much infected with the Bush legacy.

Conquest of the Inca - by women, and Atahualpa's enemies

We are told that the pig-sty maker Pizarro, wielding steel and harquebus' from horseback, conquered tens of thousands of warriors and seized the Inca Empire. In fact almost everything taught about this event is untrue and so implausible that it is monument to human gullibility that it has stretched over our "education" for almost 600 years. Perhaps the true story some day will be told, and it will be revealed from two sources:

(1) archeology - which will reveal how the warriors in the great armies of the Inca actually died (Hint: few were killed by steel weaponry, most by native stone clubs and spears), and

(2) the law suits in which Pizarro's children, who were born of the great and largely unknown "wife" taken by Pizarro at the outset of his "conquest". His wife was a princess of one of Atahualpa's enemies. Curiously, the legal records completely contradict the so-called historias of the priests who recorded Pizarro's conquest.