Posts Tagged ‘Neolithic age’
“The Black Salon”, art of darkness and shadows in Prehistoric grottoes
Posted by: adonis49 on: November 22, 2012
“The Black Salon” in Prehistoric grottoes
As of the year 2000, archaeologists and other searchers have discovered about 350 grottoes in Europe, many of them emerged to large Black Salon, after crawling for at least 50 yards.
Prehistoric men are the current and latest mankind species called Homo Sapiens, who originating in the Near East (in current Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) 100,000 years ago.
Mind you that prehistoric Homo Sapiens barely accounted to 50,000 in total and didn’t increase substantially, until 10,000 years ago. In the (Neolithic period) mankind settled in urban centers to plant and harvest and the population started to increase in 10 to 20 folds on good harvest and climate conditions…
Mankind was on the brink of extinction on many occasions, and the fact that they split in smaller conglomeration increased the probability of Not vanishing from epidemics and natural calamities.
The Black Salons were reserved for the initiates, expert artists that modern painters, engravers, and sculptors have rediscovered the same methods, techniques, and array of possibilities, except the digital technologies.
Even 50,000 years ago, the new species left their artistic potentials and marks in caves and grottoes, sheltered from the ravage of time and climatic changes… Artists had worked on skins, woods, clay… Even today, tribes draw and paint on sands on their body…
All these work of arts have disappeared. The essential of the first culture is lost for ever. External work of arts were preponderant, but have disappeared.
What is left are fantastic frescoes, deep in the Black Salons, in the grottoes of Lascaux, Cosquer (underwater grotto, studded with frescoes of penguins, seals…), Niaux, Chauvet, Domme…
Marcelino Sanz of Sautuola was examining a grotto in Altamira and his kid daughter screamed “Padre, hay toros“. The frescoes were of bison, and Marcelino was the first to coin “prehistoric art”.
Only searchers started to look closely for images on ceiling, from different perspectives and angles, and contour representations of animals, where the artist made use of every rock shape matching what they were drawing and sculpting…
For example, in the grotto of Domme, a speleologue had the idea of beaming at the ceiling from a particular angle and discovered the sculpture of a mammoth, a meter large. Thousands had passed under that fantastic sculpture, but they missed this sculpture since they were looking for engraved works of art…
Homo Sapiens lived at the entrance of caves and outside, but the deep dark recesses of the grottoes were reserved for the initiates, where the spirits resided, and they erecting their scaffolding (holes of implantation are visible) and working amid the shadows of their torches…
Rare were the representation of human: The spirits were in the shadow of darkness, in the fissures inside the deep recesses of the caves…
They used all the gamut of paints, colors, and perspectives that current painters, sculptors, and artists use. Nothing new in techniques were discovered since prehistoric art: Just rediscovering the wheel… charcoal drawings, pigments, brushes… Prehistoric artists knew how to translate 3 dimensions works into 2 dimensions…
Oil painting is frequent, using animal and vegetable fat.
Stones of bi-oxide of iron were crushed and mixed with clay to obtain ochre color
Bi-oxide of manganese or charcoal were used for black color
The red color was extracted from oxide of iron stones…
Colors were applied by blowing through emptied bones, by fingers, brushes of horse hair… They used palettes of stone or wood…
Prehistoric artists applied binding materials and inert materials called “charge” to economize on pigments (30%) and obtain a more unified painting
Homo Sapiens had the same nervous system, same faculties for abstraction, of synthesis, and they were Not more primitive than we currently are…
A colored stroke, the body of a bison, a horse… engraved in stones… There are traces of “non-utilitarian” actions as far back as 300,000 years ago… They assembled stones, shellfish necklaces, little statues of men done in mammoth bones were found in the Jura…
Animal marks on the soil played a preponderant role in the genesis of art: The hunter/gatherer could recognize their preys from the imprints and sketching these imprints was a good start to communicate during the hunting season…
Frescoes and paintings are the most spectacular artifacts, since they take advantage of natural contours in order to model the supplementary reliefs.
The tribes and clans traveled hundred of miles to meet on particular events to celebrate, exchange gifts, shellfish necklaces, and seek partners…
There is an outstanding similarity in the ornamented Black Salons, grottoes distant thousand of miles away: Proof that prehistoric men had religious rituals, strictly regulated and learned from generation to generation, over 30,000 years span...
Note: The French book “The most beautiful story of mankind“, (Edition du Seuil, 1998) was contributed by 3 famous scientists and experts in various fields of specialties.
Andre Langaney is expert in genetic and population. He was one of the pioneers to apply modern methods of biology in order to comprehend the Past. He chased human genes from Senegal (Africa) to the cold island of Groenland (Greenland). He has responsibilities at the museum of Man in Paris and teaches at the Univ. of Geneva
Jean Clottes is world expert in ornate caves and the general conservator of France caves and grottoes such as Niaux, Cosquer, Chauvet...
Jean Guilaine is professor at the College de France and expert in Neolithic Age, as Homo Sapiens settled down to plant and harvest, 10,000 years ago,
Origin of languages? Has Mankind stopped migrating?
Apparently, the main factor that discriminates mankind (the latest Homo Sapiens) from the other mammalian species, particularly the chimps-kind, is the capacity to communicate in grammatical structure, starting with the verbal structure 50,000 years ago.
There exist in nature sophisticated communication systems among the animal species, and they are highly efficient, and making sense associated with signals…Among them all species, mankind was the only one making complete sentences. This evidence is an either we can communicate in grammatical structure or we cannot. “If you are unable to learn grammar, you stay a chimp…”
Grammatical structures do not means learning how the linguist want you to express yourself according to specific rules in a particular language, but the capacity of expressing yourself using words that the community use, in full sentences, and making sense to the community. There is structure in every dialect within the larger family group language.
Language requires a specialized part of the brain. It is turning out that this specialized part shares the capacity to adapt to extreme environmental conditions.
Most animals survive within particular environments, give or take mild changes in the climate and the vegetation…but mankind survived and settled in extreme regions and thrived…
The American scientist Luca Cavalli Sforza discovered high correlations between languages and the genes of the speakers. Developing a new dialect might take no more than two centuries, but genes diversity need a couple of thousand of years. Two genetically close populations have the same family group language, where the vocabulary are similar…
Although we are descendant of chimps, a couple million years ago, the chimp can learn (recognize) more than 900 words, but was unable to construct a sentence from the words they acquired…
It is currently admitted that mankind (the latest Homo Sapiens) had a single original language (about 50,000 years ago) and that the current 12 large family languages resulted from periodic mass migration to other regions. Every large wave of migration within or toward another of the 5 continents generated a new group of a basic language and were diversified by local dialect. This presuppose that the people settled the region for many thousands of years.
For example, linguists categorized 4 family group languages in Africa:
1. The Khoisan in the south of Africa
2. The Niger-Kordofan region in the west and central Africa
3. The Nilo-Saharan region that includes Arabic, ancient Egyptian, Berber, Hebrew…
4. The East of Africa group language starting from the Niger Delta (in current Nigeria) and expanding eastward
And how the linguists agreed on these classifications?
1. They use key words such as water, sky, I, you…and what are considered “fossil words”
2. A new-born baby has the potential to learn any language: He will acquire the language of his adoptive community, regardless of the sounds and the complex structure… (Chomsky)
3. There exist common grammatical structures in all languages and the brain of mankind is able to capture any structure at birth, and invent new structures…
And guess what:
1. Homo Sapiens, 100,000 years ago, was barely 30,000. And they were saved from extinction several times. The necessity to split into smaller groups saved them from sweeping epidemics and natural calamities…
2. Homo Sapiens migrated to China 65,000 ago, and reached Indonesia and Australia…He migrated to Europe 50,000 years ago, and to North Americas 20,000 years ago. Mind you that during the glacial periods, seas and oceans had receded and mankind and animals could travel walking among many continents …
3. The original Homo Sapiens settled the Near East (Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt) and from this region migrated and “colonized” the world and later, exported the urban civilization as they planted and harvested the lands 10,000 years ago (the Neolithic age)…
Go figure: from 30,000 to 7 billion of mankind within less than 12,000 years
The Sea People (Palestinians) and the 12 tribes
Posted by: adonis49 on: July 12, 2009
The Sea People and the 12 tribes (July 11, 2009)
Around the 13th century BC, “Sea People” of the northern Mediterranean Sea coasts vandalized coastal town and pirated ships in the eastern Mediterranean. Commerce and trade degenerated in that sea, which later on permitted the Phoenician City-States (Tyr, Sidon, Byblos…) commerce and trade to prosper.
Those “sea people”, the ancient precursors of the “Vikings”, spread havoc in Egypt before they were countered and forced to redeploy to Gaza and the southern coast of Palestine (named after the sea people).
It is plausible that the Palestinians returned Not as a block, but in waves to the Palestinian coasts. Many might have shipwrecked and many were lost in deserts (Sinai) before reaching the deserted region in south Palestine (the Negev/ al Nakab).
The fiction stories of Moses and the nomadic “tribes” that he led out of the wilderness might be a symbolic tale, or a mythical tale since there are no archeological facts or records in any civilization of the peregrination of these nomads. Even the stories of the Hebrew tribes raiding urban setting in Canaan (all the region north of current Gaza, all the way to coastal Turkey) are fiction stories: No artifacts or any archeological finding have uncovered anything, and possibly because they were nomads and didn’t leave any long-lasting residue or marks.
As these “Hebrew” tribes got acquainted with Canaan civilization they set aside “Yahweh” (God idol of war) and adopted “El”, the monolithic God of the Land.
Now and then, a few of these nomad tribes generated their own “prophets” to remind them of “Yahweh” in period of dire disaster to strengthen tribal identity and pick up arms, devastation, and desolation.
“Yahweh‘s” anger and thirst for revenge against civilized and settled people had no limits, and the mythical stories in the ancient testament tell how the Canaan settled people had to suffer from the periodic razias of the desert nomads for loots and easy profits, as was the custom for the nomads in the “Arabic Peninsula” who raided Damascus, until the nomads learned to taste the fruits of civilized life. I call these nomads on the borders of the urban agglomerations as the “Tribes of Transmission” of civilized customs and life-style
The process of absorbing nomads into settled life was long.
Frequently, new waves of nomads knocked on the doors of settled people in Canaan and Palestine. The new waves of nomads did not just emerge from the south but they also converged from the north (Turkey), the east (Persia), south-east (Arabic Peninsula), and the west (Greeks and sea people).
The Near East settled civilization, in City-States studded along the Euphrates, Tiger, Orontes Rivers and the coastal region, had to negotiate with warrior nations and infuse in these nations their monotheist religion and philosophy, which spread all around the Middle East.
Like in every religion, every town and city had to adopt a patron saint or demi-god to consecrate and identify its particular characteristics or line of business. Thus, Baal, Astarte, Adonis, Apollo, and all the derivative demi-gods, symbolizing the strength and bounty of nature, were mere representations of particular aspects of the all powerful and omniscient God El.
The Near East has been the melting pot of all kinds of immigrants fleeing from persecution, disasters, wars, harsh life, and soldiers deciding to remain in the land of “honey and milk“.
The trend has reversed: the Near Eastern citizens are immigrating to greener pastures for the same reason they settled down this region thousands of years ago.
The new nomads (apartheid Zionists) are brandishing sophisticated weapons and are abusing the same unyielding barbaric Gods but there are no profitable loots to generate.
The Near East region has been ransacked, impoverished, and depleted of educated and artistic generations.
Now the Near East is succumbing to brutal globalization.
Note: It has been demonstrated that the new human species of Homo Sapiens first settled in the Near-East 100,000 years ago, and from here they migrated to the 5 continents in wave, and the Neolithic Age (10,000 years ago) as mankind started planting and harvesting originated also in the Near-East.
Adonis Diaries 