da Ice Age

‘VVhere have all da Cave-Men gone?’


Whenever civilizations meet they experience a revolution in technology. Even if they had crossed paths before. I think that is a throwback to our nomadic roots. It has been a while since bands of wild-nomads roamed the world’s plains. I guess you’d have a hard time even finding a bona-fide ‘wild-nomad’ anymore. Somewhere in our history we must have managed to domesticate ourselves. But it used to be a tradition. At least, according to legend. The nomadic life may have been doomed at the end of the Neolithic age when the new and old-worlds were separated.
Just like the game they hunted, nomadic-hunters were migratory. They were likely to return to the same camping grounds that had worked-out for them before but wouldn’t have left much behind waiting for them to return. Their camps had-to be mobile. Tools, huts and provisions all got packed-up for the journey between camps. A hunting party was needed. If tribes were gone for long enough they might bring a medicine-man to set any breaks or treat any hunting-wounds, or for a death rite if the hunter was mortally wounded. If they were staging their hunts from a camp, their whole clans might accompany them. A nomadic lifestyle would be different today. Permanent seasonal camps could be left secured and only essential items would have to make the trip. But the stone-age was unpredictable.
The heroics of stone-age survival inspired later legend. Before our nomadic tradition faded from custom it was common for some late/post stone-age tribes to welcome outsiders as guests. Like Greek and near-eastern legend, Irish legends from the bronze-age chronicle the exploits of strangers as if it were our older traditions’ way of surviving at the dawn of domestic-life. We didn’t follow big-game on the game-trails for our existence anymore but we suffered from wanderlust instead. Exploring the wildernesses ensured something else besides finding game too. In the Irish legend of ‘Cuculin’, a young Greek bride is instructed-to “never stop till you land in Erin”, where she finds her husband. (Curtin - 305) Marriage between distant tribes provided an exchange of genes and wealth. And the stories that returned with those exchanges fueled our imaginations and memories for ages.
Once upon a time, the nomadic people of the Neolithic age passed-on new customs from tribe to tribe. Language was primitive. We spoke enough to exchange ideas and innovations though. And since it wasn’t uncommon to run-into another nomadic tribe on the trail we didn’t view outsiders as strangers like we do today. Since then we have developed localized-dialects and jargon. These serve-to add-to our communal isolation. Language is unique that way. It can be most effective when it is localized. The trade-off is a loss of communication between peoples.
About the time nomadic culture and the cultural-exchange that accompanies it were fading from our popular customs, ‘modern-man’ (or at-least, then-modern African-exodus culture) was replacing Neanderthal customs on the plains of Eurasia. Whether it was by competition or assimilation, that culture had “in some very real sense … lived-on while Neanderthals had died-out.” (Trinkaus/Shipman – 380) Not that the Neanderthal bloodline was necessarily lost. Whether or not they were eliminated by other bloodlines remains a mystery. Archaic traits are subtle. And romantics like to hope that even though those traits may have gone undiscovered those bloodlines might have still been preserved.
Sometimes isolation is due to social factors, but history’s most tragic cases have been incidents of geographic isolation. At least twice in our history, mankind was cut-off from its neighbors by the ice-age. During the ice-ages the glaciers effectively kept outsiders out of Gaul and simultaneously lowered sea-levels to let tribes migrate beyond the Pacific. When the ice-age ended it was the tribes in the new world that had become effectively isolated and the same glacial retreat allowed outsiders into Europe once again. But the changes in customs (and traits) during the interim may have led-to significant conflict between the long-isolated clans. Stone-age rivals were “still motivated by traditions they had inherited from the hunting communities of the Upper Paleolithic.” (Wymer – 268)
Even with the earliest advance of African tribes into Europe there appears to have been some ‘turf-warfare’. All stone-age culture was primitive. Neanderthals and outsiders seem to have had at least that much in-common. They were also both nomadic, although the Neanderthals were hunters and their African rivals were nomadic-pastoralists. They were both aggressive too. The threat to any tribe resulted-in “a need to fortify the settlements” of the Neolithic Age. (Clark/Brandt - 89) Unfortunately, that need probably led to as much technological innovation as any exchange of culture between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal tribes ever did.
It was the Ice-Age (or its conclusion) that effectively halted our nomadic lifestyle on both sides of the Pacific and the exchange of culture that accompanied-it. The bigger game was suited for cold-weather and big-game hunters had to follow them as they migrated. Big-game wasn’t suited for the thaw. So obviously, neither was big-game hunting. Even though following big-game was no small effort, throughout the stone-ages nomadic tribes moved with the seasons. The steppes of Siberia are the native turf of nomadic life. It has historically been home to an “ill-defined confederation of nomadic tribes.” (Mair – 137) It was Neolithic hunters from Siberia that followed big-game to the other side of the Bering Sea and settled there after the glacial-melt flooded the land-bridge that spanned the North Pacific. When nomadic culture got separated by the oceans it was forced to evolve.
When agriculture replaced hunting and foraging we became bound to our fields. Agricultural camps built earthworks and defended the lands they farmed. No sooner had the stone-age ended than Gaul had become a feudal realm of farming villages. In addition to their earthwork-defended agricultural camps they also shared industry trends. A lot of history’s innovations occurred in the near-east but Europe’s farmers were responsible for developing ceramics for storage. Throughout the region farmers mined the earth for clay and fired-it in their homes’ kilns. They learned how-to build barrows and their defenses from the earth too.
It’s the utilitarian inventions that began to distinguish European culture from the near-east and beyond. And maybe a sense of community too. Farming camps weren’t large (at least not like a modern city). Even a large shire would really only consist of an extended family. In its own quaint way, a shire would have been peaceful. Shires were preoccupied with their own duties. Inside the gates of a shire, every day customs were limited to usual family dynamics. Living in a prehistoric shire kind-of meant you were cut-off from the outside world. Neighbors were a distant influence. It might be a day’s hike to the next shire. It would have been remote but must have bred strong communal bonds.
Nothing else fosters connection between a group’s members like being dependent upon each other. Even in farming. Agriculture in that age was a labor intensive enterprise. Tools were crude (but effective) and required considerable effort on the part of the user. Domestic livestock eased the burden some but the efforts of the members of an agricultural-camp were what ultimately determined its productivity. Relying on each other “ensured that every individual had a feeling of pride of belonging to the unit.” (Koryakova/Epimakhov – 212) It would almost be comparable-to a combat situation. It wouldn’t take long to forge a similar brand of comradery on a prehistoric farm. Like combat, survival was a matter of teamwork.
In our history, man-kind had always been relegated to the shelter that nature could provide. Once upon a time that had been the arboreal woodlands. Fire and tools forged from “locally available raw materials” allowed us to leave the savanna but not our fires. (Gamble – 286) But inside the gates of a shire we finally had our own turf. Predators only had an advantage outside our domain for a change. Even in the canopies and caves that provided shelter we never really held that advantage. We were still fairly defensive but our shires were the threat to predators that even caves couldn’t be. We could defend ourselves with tools and fire and not get cornered without a way out. Inside the gates of a shire, huts and long-houses provided even more shelter. They weren’t quite ‘siege-proof’ but shires were a formidable obstacle.
The nomadic tradition had been traded-in for a tamer way of life. It had its strong points, for sure. No longer were we at the mercy of nature to provide what we needed. We still had to answer to prevailing conditions but like the advent of tools, farming gave us a new survival-tool. Farming yielded year-round stores without having to follow the game-trails. Industry became sedentary. There was a new workplace. Fields became properties with the “shifting frontier between the forest and the man-made landscape.” (Jensen – 134) Instead of running-into other tribes on the game-trails we were preoccupied with agricultural cultivation. There were marketplaces where you could go to meet and trade with other tribes but the tradition of exchanging culture between strangers wasn’t the same.
Outside of Europe, the age of the military state was beginning. The farming camps of Europe had predators and barbarians to fend-off but not the large-scale political warfare that plagued the middle-east. The near and middle-east also had industrialized agriculture beyond the extent that Europe’s farming camps had. The combination led to a market for slave-labor. A slave in Europe (before Rome’s arrival) was more like a ‘page’, or personal servant. In the empires of the middle-east, slaves were the workforce. Neither capacity was an easy-life. But the life of a personal-servant is more ‘domestic’.
The slave-driven agricultural industry of the bronze-age middle-east was a state-sponsored (royal) institution. Histories diverge with their ethnic experiences in a crowded region. Turkey and Egypt block the middle-east in the west and the mountains of Bengal contain it from the east. Inside its borders the same old turf-wars continue to govern the middle-east’s policies. But no-one was above the slave-labor that started them. In the pursuit of ‘farming supremacy’ the dynasties of the middle-east created a legacy of conflict that has transcended “the agricultural life of Palestine and the challenging urban life of our own time.” (Patai - 86)
If anything has proven to be consistent over our history it is almost that conflict is directly liable for our technology. But it almost could-be a trend. We haven’t seen-it yet but aggressive-technologies could be replaced in the right global climate. The world would be ready-for one. In the meantime we follow more recent trends in historical diplomacy as competition continues-to play an important role in our advancement. Agriculture isn’t exactly ‘competitive’ by nature but it is driven enough to fuel future technological trends. That might arguably, make farming the most significant techno-industry of the common-age.
As an industry its disadvantage is found in its dependence upon the elements. Drought is still a prevailing condition. Climate always has regulated agriculture’s potential for productivity. Our other industrial practices can effect the climate and reduce the probability of drought but there is still a degree of chance in what the winds can deliver. Like big-game hunting, prehistoric farming was no minor-undertaking. The risk was almost as great. Often, drought would “be disastrous to pastoralists. Lack of water would reduce their flocks, and famine is usually the most potent agent behind mass-migrations.” (Mellaart - 94) It serves as a reminder of nature’s historic role in our survival. From our first fires through ice-ages and droughts we still have to answer to it.
The technological revolution to have followed us through most of our sometimes turbulent history might be the agricultural-revolution. Skeptics might argue that military-technology will too. But agricultural industry has proven to be irreplaceable and there are even some nomadic agricultural practices that are still effective. Seasonal crops could be farmed at different camps and livestock could be driven between them. It would be a return to older-ways. But it might also be a return to our real nature. Before we can realize the promise of any technological-revolution I think we might have-to find to our ‘wildernomad’ side again. It must be a recessive-trait by now. Generations have gone-by since nomads roamed the wildernesses. But it is the stone-age that today’s domesticated-nomad is still native-to. So, maybe we need to return to old stone-age ways in order to move forward. It ought-to come naturally to us all.