cold-bloodz

How the Ice Age turned Bloodlines Cold



Once upon a time, human kind was wild. They hadn’t necessarily been ‘human’ very long. Their lineage had fairly recently diverged from other primates. Early hominids showed promise with simple tools. They began to evolve new biology to adapt and take advantage of their aptitude. In time, they started coming up with more sophisticated tools. They even learned how to use fire. It gave them another advantage but they were still at the mercy of the wilderness and nature until the agricultural revolution that marked the end of the Neolithic and the onset of the Bronze Age.
So were the other archaic humans and a more refined breed too. They all had some kind of stone tool technology in common. They might have shared some religious beliefs, I suppose. If they revered common totems, for instance. They must have been pretty different though. They were different enough to leave doubts about their potential genetic compatibility. After generations of living on a glacier ridden frontier, they adopted “extreme skeletal adaptations to the cold.” (Savvyer – The Last Human) Although, if the archaic races formed a minority of the population, the evidence might only be found in more contemporary racial distinctions.
At least one other significant factor would have determined the archaic populations’ survival. They would have to be industrious enough for the Upper Paleolithic Revolution first. The Neanderthals in particular might have been challenged by modern humans’ technological adaptability. What they lacked in adaptability, they’d have to make up for with brute industry. The fossil evidence has “helped inscribe the brutish picture of the Neanderthal.” (Sommer – Bones and Ochre) Clans were remote. Interactions with outsiders may have been natively foreign to them. They weren’t going to be business savvy from experience. Neanderthal tribes were usually left to forage for themselves.
Subsistence was an internal matter. Most traditional Neanderthal social functions were. Neanderthals seem to have mastered socialism on a tribal level. It took a military like approach to social rank but it was an effective way of organizing a platoon sized clan. Within a Neanderthal tribe, hierarchy was established based on historic needs and available resources. Throughout the Stone Age, hunting contributed to a tribe’s wealth and survival. Wild game “provided the key resource in the colonization and prolonged settlement of Europe.” (Gamble – The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe) Hunters were usually highly revered for their role in provisioning the clan and the risks they took. It would not have been uncommon for the tribe’s best hunter to become its chief. Leadership is bred through hunting strategy. There are other kinds of leadership too but few trades have ever demanded it like prehistoric hunting. A good hunter would have been trained to coordinate forces before he was ever made chief.
They may have revered tool makers and medicine men too. Neanderthals might have developed cult followings for the priests who invoked the clan’s totems. The ability to summon prehistoric supernatural forces was thematically the exclusive territory of witches and wizards. When someone was ill or the tribe needed favorable conditions on a hunt, the chief might appeal to the tribe’s priest to bless the endeavor. If the hunt was successful, the priest might even be credited with the kill. If it failed, the wizard might have to treat injuries instead. It must have been demanding. Even though tribal medicine men and hunters had pretty different job descriptions, they often shared same fortunes.
‘Bless this Hvnt’ and ‘Kiss the Chief’. For as sophisticated as they were in their brand of socialism, clan authority came down to its hunters and priests. And maybe its flint knappers. ‘Beware of Tool Man; he might be smarter than he looks’ could have been a realistic sentiment too. The flint knapper’s hearth or workspace might be the one lined with “large animal bones or piles of lithic flaking debris.” (Mellars – The Neanderthal Legacy) I admire the tool-maker’s artisanship in a primitive time. Like tribal priests, they must have been mentored to develop the skills the position required.
Any industrial trade of the Old Stone Age came with some authority and responsibilities within the tribe and its cave. It was a patriarchical establishment, largely. Labor was divided by gender, probably for the demands of the job. It benefitted everyone to different degrees. Women became skilled at foraging and crafts but possibly were forbidden to hunt where as men were bred for the demands of male-dominated industries. Within the same cave, the tribe came together from individual hearths. In the Ice Age, “proto-Neolithic inhabitants of the cave site built only simple domiciles of wood and brush within the shelter of the cave.” (Solecki – The Proto-Neolithic Cemetery in Shanidar Cave) Communal living like that might account for their socialistic tendencies.
I’m more of a Neanderthal historian but I think that was typical of Ice Age customs. Modern humans are typically credited with industry and customs that were more gender neutral. They may have been more brutish too before the Upper Paleolithic Revolution and resembled archaic breeds with robust features that were “strongly built, with short and dense bones and large joints.” (Trinkaus – The Neandertals) Other archaic populations were closer to the Neanderthals in their anatomies and customs. It’s not a genetic marker but ‘customary adaptation’ from the Upper Paleolithic technological revolution might still be present along racial lines. Customs tend to individualize us unlike industry with usually will bring races or breeds together.
The only way archaic bloodlines were preserved was if they were capable of the kind of customary adaptation that the Upper Paleolithic Revolution required. Industry is a machine. I think it was like a hunt or the Ice Age trading that would bring tribes together on a new scale. Archaic populations would have been drawn to it as it emerged from the sub-continent in the Middle East. It would have been a selective force too. It might have been selective about its candidates. Modern humans already had the advantage of experience with the revolution’s technology. What’s left of archaic populations would have to move out of their caves eventually. Agricultural demands required encampments that caves would impede.
It turned out that farming required a different kind of mobility than even nomadic foraging demanded. Turf dimensions changed too. Agro-industrial trade required network-scaled demographics and population bases. Governing beyond tribal hierarchy was also requisite to maintaining agricultural networking. It wasn’t necessarily the socialistic utopia Neanderthals were accustomed to but the rewards still might have interested ‘archaics’. Modern humans might have needed incentive to share their revolution with the outsiders though. Beyond their territories, the archaics might have been able to offer primitive treaties and labor if they could keep up with the revolution itself.
I think they’d have made a powerful ally. Turks, Greeks and Romans might have all incorporated their adventures in their mythology and militaries in the west and Near-East. Similar adventures would have occurred in the East. In the steppes between the Far-East and ‘Gaul’, ‘hybrids’ might have carried-on old nomadic traditions as they adopted new agricultural practices in deference to their collective ancestries. And by the time people were migrating to the New World at the end of the great Ice Age, new racial identities would have been forged.
Since then, demographics have continued to merge along the various networking lines of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Modern networking dimensions can be ‘provincial’. Larger markets act like an oasis to their industrial base. Instead of ‘hunting grounds’ and caves, resources are divided into regions’ industrial-productivity demands and the modern encampments that cater to them. I count three or more bona-fide archaic breeds (including ‘modern humans’). ‘Peking Man’ was as isolated in the Far-East as Neanderthals were on the other side of the steppes and modern humans were in Africa. At some point, all three breeds share an ancestry. According to Mary Leakey, common heritage among later humans is derived in the Miocene epoch from “an ape-like creature … not confined to East Africa.” (Leakey – Olduvai Gorge) Common ancestry might date back to the time of the three toed horse, a species whose fossils have “occurred only in Pliocene and Early Pliocene deposits.” (Lanpo – The Story of Peking Man) It might have been the last time the three breeds shared geography until the industrial expansion of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.
Other archaic populations could have been incorporated too but there seems to be substantial material culture from Gaul, Peking and sub-Saharan Africa. Each old Ice Age demographic/population makes a legitimate candidate, given they weren’t ‘obsolete’ to the technological revolution. More than any rivalry ever could, the revolution itself was the threat to an old way of life. Neanderthal brand socialism might have survived on some level but tribal dynamics had to change. Later technological revolutions would demand schools and local government.
The Upper Paleolithic Revolution required the first real popular government. It was a confederacy of its own, like the earlier ‘hunting ground networking’ of the Ice Age, but it was more sophisticated. Until the Bronze Age, when institutions of slavery promoted large-scale labor forces and the empires that ruled them, government was limited by confederation. ‘Turf wars’ might have continued under the new confederacy without any overriding authority. I guess it was popular government on a primitive socialist level. It wasn’t even quite as sophisticated as feudalism but it was similarly ‘social’.
Chiefdoms took on esteem. Conflict would have turned chiefs into warlords. In more peaceful times, tribes might have resembled an industrial camp and chiefs would have been more of a local governor. Revenues could have been communal without a system of distribution. Taxation and allotment wasn’t perfected until the end of the Bronze Age when the republic caught on, at the earliest. A socialist brand of government waited even farther into the future than the early military-state republics that may have first mastered the employment of federal taxation.
Wealth distribution and government services were probably of minor significance to the peoples of the Upper Paleolithic Revolution. Resources and maximization of them was more important as the industry and trade of the revolution were established. Racial preservation was a secondary concern of the revolution’s too. All the old breeds were assimilated by it. Extinction was the only alternative. I think selection and shifts in ‘race’ must have played a role. A way of life certainly died-out as humankind became “to some extent a self-domesticated species.” (Montagu – Man’s Most Dangerous Myth) It wasn’t competitive enough for progress. In some ways, it was a sacrifice though.
The Ice Age came to a violent conclusion in the Neolithic period. Geographies shifted and a new age of isolation began on both sides of the Pacific. Eventually, old Paleolithic cultures and civilizations would be reunited. They had moved out of the Stone Age by then but common customs still dated back as far. In the meantime, the fate of archaic races had become a mystery. I guess the Upper Paleolithic Revolution and its wake were probably more important than ancestry or race was to our destiny. It selected its candidates on adaptation and industry instead. Our technology effectively domesticated us as it delivered safety from wilder elements. We’ve traded the demands that came with life in the wild for modern luxuries. What’s left of the wilderness is still home to wildlife. Once upon a time there were wild cave men too.