Richard W. Wise, Author

by Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31,000 BC

Copyright 2023

Far from just a burial site, Sunghir was a substantial village. By prehistorical standards, the area was "enormous." Active between 20-29,000 BP—later than Chauvet, earlier than Lascaux—two to three thousand people regularly visited the complex. How did it feed such a large population?

It was located along a mammoth migratory route (Lewis-Williams). A single kill supplied hundreds of pounds of meat sufficient to support a large population. (Don Hitchcock, Don's Maps). (Remains of 1613 specimens were identified at Dolni Vestonice (Wilczyński 2016) There is also evidence of specialized crafts and a division of labor.
 
Discoveries at Sunghir and Dolni Vestonice challenge the standard portrait of human prehistory as consisting of small wandering, leaderless, egalitarian bands of twenty-five to fifty individuals (Klima 2005). This model has now been shown to be true only a certain times and places. Find a renewable source of food, migratory routes, or fish-filled rivers, and people settled down. Were these groups leaderless? Were they egalitarian? And what about conflict? 
 
The brain's prefrontal cortex houses what are called executive functions, including reasoning, planning and communicating—a precondition for the creation of images. Thus, thanks in part to cave art, we know that the Homo Sapiens who peopled the late Paleolithic were just like us.
 
Some scholars have attempted to draw an artificial line between history, the period following the advent of writing, and what is termed prehistory. The latter has been portrayed as either a primitive Eden or hell on earth, depending upon whether one follows the writings of the 16th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—remember: nasty, brutal and short—or the speculations on Natural Man by the 18th-century French philosophe Jean Jacques Rousseau.
 
As I stated in Part I, much of the study of history has been devoted to elitist, authoritarian regimes simply because they had the power to centralize wealth and coerce their citizens into constructing monuments that have survived into modern times. They also controlled what entered the written record.  

Stay Tuned: Part III Governing in the Upper Paleolithic.  
 

by Richard W. Wise

Author: The Dawning: 31`,000 BC

Copyright 2021
 
As any good Marxist will tell you, history is a long, sad tale of the exploitation of the many by the few. Marx's thesis is difficult to dispute though his solution left a lot to be desired. We study elites and their wars. Why? Because what physically remains are the temples, pyramids, monuments and dwellings of the priests, aristocrats, military leaders and kings and what was written down was at their behest. Of the ordinary people, we know almost nothing. Their lives are not described. They were not buried in monumental graves and their mud, wood and thatch dwellings have mostly deteriorated, leaving little or no trace.
 
Excavations of a Paleolithic burial at Sunghir, 200 km. east of Moscow, between 1957-77 unearthed the elaborate burial of an elderly male covered in carved beads and red ochre (Sunghir 1). Aged about sixty, the skeleton is dated to the Aurignacian Period, between 24-34,000 BP. (Buzhilova 2004) The grave contains 2,936 mammoth ivory beads, pierced fox teeth and ivory armbands. Two others, one juvenile (Sunghir 2) and one adolescent (Sunghir 3), were buried close by—head-to-head— with 10,000 beads and similar grave goods. The two male children, buried head-to-head, show distinct physical deformities. The three individuals were not closely related (Sikora et al. 2017)
 
These birth defects would have made it difficult for them—to pull their weight—
to participate fully in the life of the tribe. Yet they were buried with great pomp and circumstance. Similar burials of deformed individuals have been found at Dolni Vestonice in Romania, dated to 28,000 BP. Again, two children were buried head-to-head. These burials—and there are many others—suggest care, empathy, and perhaps, more.
 
Experiments have shown that allowing one hour per bead would have required 3,000 hours to manufacture the beads found in the male's burial at Sunghir. That's a whole lot of surplus labor. Taking an analogy from the San people, the so-called Pygmies of South Africa, who feed themselves in a desert environment working a three-day week, we know that ancient hunter-gathers had a good deal of leisure time or, rather, sufficient time to create surplus value, also known as wealth. To whose benefit? It is difficult to wish away what these burials are telling us. The Sunghir burials have been referred to as "royal." Where there is wealth, there is also status and social stratification. 

Stay tuned.

by Richard W. Wise

copyright: 2022

Paleo artists did not limit themselves to drawing, painting and bas-relief; also produced three-dimensional sculpture. These include the famous "Venus" or Dolni figures. The oldest thus far, the Venus of Hohle Fels, dated to the Aurignacian Period (30-40,000 BP), was found in Germany.

These are sculptures of women. Many, though not all, are headless and naked with wide hips, bulging stomachs, legs and distinctly defined vulvas. This has led many experts to view them as votive or fertility objects or perhaps goddesses.

There are stylistic similarities, but they are not all the same. There are fat ones and skinny ones, compact and attenuated Venuses. Some are more, some less abstract. Some, particularly the French examples, are naked (naturally), but some, most notably those found in what is now Russia, are fully clothed. These Russian examples have been tagged: "Venuses in furs." The small statues range from Siberia to Northern Italy and are between 40,000-10,000 years old, attesting to an astonishing artistic continuity.
 
Like the work of Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Louise Bourgeois---artists strongly influenced by cave art---they demonstrate a very sophisticated ability to reduce form from complex to simple while retaining the essential and evocative. 

 
This artistic sensibility was not limited to Western Europe or to the female figure. A recent discovery of a 13,500-year-old bird figurine at Linjin in Henan Province demonstrates a similar ability to capture the essential. Though not a representation of the human form, the artist who created this Paleolithic bird reduced and captured what Constantin Brâncuși called: "not the outer form but the idea, the essence of things." For Brâncuși, the abstract is the more real because it captures that essence.

The female form is a recurring figure in Western art. The Venus figures represent a high-water mark in Prehistoric art.
 
Next: The Art of the Neanderthals