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Old Europe (Vinca) language and culture in early layers of Serbian and Irish culture
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I said already that hand fire drill, a stick that can make fire, was probably the first magic wand. What did this magic wand look like?
If you’re a beginner with hand drill in the UK – or more widely the northern temperate environment such as found in Europe and parts of North America – then a good drill material to start with is a member of the Sambucus sp. commonly known as elder.
Elders put up straight shoots which can be used to make a very good hand drill. The best shoots are often secondary growths which are striving to head upwards out of the bush to reach the light. Even though they have a pith in the middle, they have quite thick sidewalls. You always should select a live shoot. If the bark of the shoot is green it is too young. Wait until the bark is grey before harvesting for a potential hand drill. The diameter of the harvested shoot should be about 15 mm at the base.
You can see how nobly the bark is. If you tried to use a twig with bark for a hand fire drill, you will rip your palms to shreds.
To prepare the drill, first the bark should be scraped off. This can be done with the back of your knife and is quite straightforward. Even the straightest looking shoots will have kinks and slight bends in them. These need to be straightened out. What you’re aiming for is a drill that is dowel-straight.
What you want to end up with is something like this:
With tips looking like this:
http://frontierbushcraft.com/2013/06/21/getting-to-grips-with-hand-drill/
Looks familiar?ELDER
Also known as Ellhorn, Elderberry, Lady Elder. Sacred to the White Lady and Midsummer Solstice. The Druids used it to both bless and curse. Standing under an elder tree at Midsummer, like standing in a Fairy Ring of mushrooms, will help you see the "little people." Elder wands can be used to drive out evil spirits or thought forms. Music on panpipes or flutes of elder have the same power as the wand. Remember the words of the Rede. Elder is the Lady's Tree, burn it not or cursed ye be!
http://wicca.com/celtic/celtic/sactrees.htm
So fire drill is a white straight stick about 1,5 cm (half an inch) in diameter and about 60 and 90 cm (25-35 inches) in length. Fire was powerful force which was probably deified very early in human history. The person who was able to make, summon fire using one of these fire sticks, was probably regarded as blessed, anointed, special, selected by god. I believe that during paleolithic, any person who was able to to make fire, was very quickly elevated to a position of power and authority. The source of this power and therefore the symbol of this power was the white fire stick.The White Rod, White Wand, Rod of Inauguration, or Wand of Sovereignty, in the Irish language variously called the slat na ríghe (rod of kingship) and slat tighearnais (rod of lordship), was the primary symbol of a Gaelic king or lord's legitimate authority and the principal prop used in his inauguration ceremony.[1] First documented in the 12th century Life of Máedóc of Ferns, but assumed to have been used long before then,[2] it is last documented in Ireland in the early 17th century. In Scotland the rod was used into the 13th century for the inauguration of its last Gaelic kings,[3] and for the Norse-Gaelic Lords of the Isles into the 15th.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_WandThe civil ceremony took place on the rock of Doon in the presence of the Clan. The ruler-elect removed his footwear and stood in the imprint of the feet of the first Chieftain that was cut into the Inauguration Stone. O’Clery, the Ullamh, came forward and read aloud a brief summary of the laws and customs in accordance with which the Clan should be governed. An oath was then administered that these ancient practices would be preserved inviolate.
This done, the candidate set asside the sword and was presented with ‘An Slat Bhan’, a straight white rod, as an emblem of purity and rectitude and a reminder that his judgement should be unbiased and that he should be pure and upright in his actions. It was also an indication that his people would be obedient to him and that no other weapon would be required to command them. A sub-Chieft next replaced one of the wearer’s sandals as a token of submission and threw the other over his shoulder for luck.
http://irishhistoryandgenealogy.wordpress.com/category/rock-of-doon/
Here is an interesting page talking about magic wands through history:
http://www.esotericarchives.com/wands/
I said that i believe that the first fire was made accidentally as a by product of drilling using hand micro drill. Hand micro drill is basically a white rod with a crystal mounted on its tip:
Is this the origin of a scepter, a staff, a wand with a crystal or a ball on its tip representing power?A sceptre (or scepter in U.S. English) is a symbolic ornamental staff or wand held in the hand by a ruling monarch as an item of royal or imperial insignia. Sometimes, it could be used for magical purposes, mainly by skilled magicians.
There is one particular magic wand or staff that I will talk about in a lot of detail later and that is the staff of Hermes called kērukeion meaning "herald's staff":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
Hermes was a messenger between gods and humans, heaven and earth. His staff represents lightning. Lightning is the white shining twirling magic wand of sky god which he uses to light fire on earth. But more of this later...0 -
In Serbia the magic fire wand, staff tradition is preserved in Christmas customs. Christmas log called Badnjak is the magic staff and a branch cut from Badnjak called "bata" is the magic wand used in fire magic:Badnjak
The badnjak is an oak log or branch brought into the house and placed on the fire on the evening of Christmas Eve, much like a yule log in other European traditions. There are many regional variations surrounding the customs and practices connected with the badnjak.[1]
Early in the morning the head of each family, usually accompanied by several male relatives, selects and fells the tree from which the log will be cut for their household. The group announces its departure by firing guns or small celebratory mortars called prangija.[2][3] The Turkey oak is the most popular species of tree selected in most regions, but other oaks, or less frequently other kinds of tree, are also chosen.[1] Generally, each household prepares one badnjak, although more are cut in some regions.[3][4]
When the head of household finds a suitable tree, he stands in front of it facing east. After throwing grain at the tree, he greets it with the words "Good morning and happy Christmas Eve to you", makes the Sign of the Cross, says a prayer, and kisses the tree.[4][5] He then cuts it slantwise on its eastern side, using an axe. The tree should fall to the east, unhindered by surrounding trees.[3] Its top is removed, leaving the badnjak of such a length that allows it to be carried on a man's shoulder, up to about 2.5 meters (8.2 ft) long.[5] Once in the home, each badnjak is leaned vertically against the house beside the entrance door.[3] In some areas, the badnjak is cut into three logs.[4]
In the evening, a man of the family brings their badnjak into the house. If there is more than one badnjak, the thickest of them is regarded as the main one, and is brought in first. Stepping across the threshold, right foot first, the man greets his gathered family with the words "Good evening and happy Christmas Eve to you." The woman of the house greets him back, saying "May God give you well-being, and may you have good luck", or "Good luck to you, and together with you for many years to come [may we be]", or similar, before throwing grain from a sieve at the man and the badnjak he carries.[3]
Upon entering the house the man approaches the fireplace, called ognjište ([ˈɔɡɲiːʃtɛ])—the hearth of an ognjište is similar to a campfire, in that it has no vertical surround. He lays the badnjak down on the fire and moves it a little forward, to summon prosperity for the household.[3] Any other logs are brought in by other males and laid on the fire parallel or perpendicular to the first.[5] The head of the household takes a jug of wine and pours some on the badnjak; in some regions, he may strew wheat grains over the logs.[2][5] He then proposes a toast: "Grant, O God, that there be health and joy in this home, that our grain and grapevines yield well, that children be born healthy to us, that our property increase in the field, pen, and barn!" or similar.[3] The head drinks a draught of wine from the jug, after which it is passed to other members of household.[6] When the log has burnt through, some families let the fire go out, while in others the men keep watch in shifts during the night to keep the badnjak burning.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Christmas_traditionsThe Yule log has frequently been associated with having its origins in the historical Germanic paganism which was practiced across northern Europe prior to Christianization. One of the first people to do so was the English historian Henry Bourne, who, writing in the 1720s, described the practice occurring in the Tyne valley. Bourne theorised that the practice derives from customs in 6th to 7th century Anglo-Saxon paganism.[2]
Robert Chambers, in his 1864 work, Book of Days notes that "two popular observances belonging to Christmas are more especially derived from the worship of our pagan ancestors—the hanging up of the mistletoe and the burning of the Yule log." James George Frazer in his work on anthropology, The Golden Bough (p. 736) holds that "the ancient fire-festival of the winter solstice appears to survive" in the Yule log custom. Frazer records traditions from England, France, among the South Slavs, in Central Germany (Meiningen) and western Switzerland (the Bernese Jura).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule_log
Again when you look at the places where this tradition was recorded, they are all the same ones where we find need fire tradition and where we find fire bird tradition...The only people who preserved the real meaning of this tradition are South Slavs.
Badnjak is normally a young oak tree like the one on the picture below. This is Badnjak (oak staff) and pecenica (sacrificial pig eaten at Christmas):
Here is a short film showing cutting of badnjak staff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNHzPA2LisUOn Christmas Day children sing little songs, at the beginning of which Christmas is said to knock or tread loudly. This may be understood as a theophany: by the sound, Young God makes his arrival known to people.[19][20] The following are the lyrics of two of such songs:
Божић штапом бата,
носи сува злата
од врата до врата.
На чија ће врата
дат' благослов, злата?
На наша ће врата
просут' шаку злата.[21]
Christmas knocks with a stick,[note 4]
he carries solid gold
from a door to a door.
Upon whose door will he
give his blessing and gold?
Upon our door he will
spill a handful of gold.
The first verse of of this song includes the word бата (bata), 3rd person singular present of the verb батати (batati), rarely used in modern Serbian. This verb can mean 'to knock', 'to bang' (see Čajkanović), or 'to tread loudly' (see Dimitrijević).
A polaznik, polažajnik, polaženik, or radovan, is the first person who visits the family on Christmas Day. This visit may be fortuitous or pre-arranged. People expect that it will summon prosperity and well-being for their household in the ensuing year. A family often picks in advance a man or boy, and arranges that he visit them on Christmas morning. If this proves to be lucky for the family, he is invited again next year to be the polaznik. If not, they send word to him not to come any more in that capacity.[2][6][17]
A polaznik steps into the house with his right foot first, greeting the gathered family, "Christ is Born, Happy Christmas." He carries grain in his glove, which he shakes out before the threshold, or throws at the family members. They respond with "Truly He is Born," and throw grain at the polaznik.[2] He then approaches the fireplace, takes a poker or a branch, and strikes repeatedly the burning badnjak to make sparks fly from it. At the same time he utters these words (or similar):[17]
How many sparks, that much happiness in this house.
How many sparks, that much money in the household head's pocket.
How many sparks, that many sheep in the pen.
How many sparks, that many pigs and lambs.
How many sparks, that many geese and chickens,
and most of all, health and joy.
Having said that, he moves the log a little forward and throws a coin into the fire. The woman of the house puts a woolen blanket on the polaznik's back, and seats him on a low stool by the fireplace. In the moment when he sits down, they try to pull away the stool beneath him, as if to make him fall on the floor. The polaznik goes out into the yard, and throws grain inside a circle made with the rope with which Christmas straw has been tied, calling chickens. When they gather in the circle he catches a rooster, whose head is then cut off by him or the head of household on the house's threshold. The rooster will be roasted on a wooden spit as part of Christmas dinner. The polaznik usually stays for dinner with the family. He receives a gift in the form of a round cake with an embedded coin, and a towel, shirt, socks, or some other useful thing.[17]
A custom to use a domestic animal as a polaznik was kept in some regions until the first half of the 20th century. A sheep, ox, swine, or calf was led into the house on Christmas morning.[17] In the west Serbian region of Rađevina, centered on the town of Krupanj, the head of household would place a sheep between himself and the fireplace, and pronounce the aforementioned words while striking the badnjak with a branch cut from it.[4] In the region of Bihor, north-eastern Montenegro, a round loaf of bread with a hole in its center was prepared; four grooves were impressed into its surface along two mutually perpendicular diameters of the loaf. After an ox was led into the house, the loaf was put on his horn, and some grain was thrown on the ox. Yanking his head, the ox would throw off the loaf; having fallen down, the loaf would break into four pieces along the grooves. The pieces were picked up and distributed among the family members. This custom was preserved up to the 1950s even in some Muslim families of the region.[22] Ethnologists consider that the animal polažajnik is more ancient than the human one.[23]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Christmas_traditions#cite_note-djurdjev-6
Here is a film showing a kid performing magic ritual of striking fire with the magic "bata" stick and uttering:How many sparks, that much happiness in this house.
How many sparks, that much money in the household head's pocket.
How many sparks, that many sheep in the pen.
How many sparks, that many pigs and lambs.
How many sparks, that many geese and chickens,
and most of all, health and joy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G5F73EQ5jA0 -
There are a number of factors that can get in-between you and your fire by friction. Some of them are obvious. Wet wood is a no no straight from the start. But some of the other negative factors aren't as obvious. If the wood contains volatile substances like resin or tar, this can evaporate and prevent proper heating. Another factor is using wood that is too soft which disintegrates as opposed to forming dust. What this means that before you begin to try to achieve fire by friction you first need to start off with the right wood. Here is a list of the best UK/European woods to use with bow drills:
Alder, Birch, Clematis, Elder, Elm, Hazel, Horse Chestnut, Ivy, Lime, Oak, Pine, Poplar, Sycamore, Willow
No matter which wood you choose or have available, you need to ensure that it is both dry and not rotten (rotten wood won't make the right kind of dust).
Identifying the right wood to use isn't as easy as it sounds. A good place to begin is by practicing your tree identification skills (one good reason to get good at tree recognition!), but that's just the beginning. Naming a tree is one thing, naming dead wood is harder. Standing dead wood is easier but can still sometime present some difficulties. Finding dry wood is another challenge. This is easier in summer than it is in winter - but remember that you are more likely to "need" a fire in winter. You might be able to dry out damp wood by placing it out in the sun or next to a fire (!!!!) but again this could be tricky in a life-threatening situation. However, it's better to practice skills before you need them for real and to begin with you want everything to be on your side so you can get a feel for the process and maximize your chances for success.
http://www85.homepage.villanova.edu/timothy.ay/BoyScouts/Docs/Fire%20by%20Friction.pdf
This passage from a fire making manual contains description of the biggest problem facing anyone who wants to make fire using fire drill: "Every piece of fire making equipment has to be bone dry if you are to see any fire at all". And this is the most difficult to achieve when you need fire the most, during cold, damp, dark months of autumn, winter and spring. Our lucky bastard who managed to make fire using the micro drill, will very quickly run out of luck if his drill or his board or his tinder becomes damp. But by the time people invented micro drills they probably already new that dry things burn and wet things don't. So I presume our lucky ancestor did it's best to keep his drill, board and tinder (fire nest) dry. How did he do it? The first answer is he kept all his tools in a cave where he lived. But caves are a horrible place for humans to live mostly because they are called and damp:Some prehistoric humans were cave dwellers, but most were not. (See "Homo" and "Human evolution".) Such early cave dwellers, and other prehistoric peoples, are also called cave men (the term also has other meanings). Despite the name, only a small portion of humanity has ever dwelt in caves: caves are rare across most of the world; most caves are dark, cold, and damp; other cave inhabitants, such as bears, cave lions, and cave hyenas, also have made caves inhospitable for people.
The Grotte du Vallonnet, a cave in the French Riviera, was used by people approximately one million years ago. Although stone tools and the remains of eaten animals have been found in the cave, there is no indication that people dwelt in it.
Since about 750,000 years ago, the Zhoukoudian cave system, in Beijing, China, has been inhabited by various species of human being, including Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens).
Approximately 100,000 years ago, some Neanderthal humans dwelt in caves in Europe and western Asia. Caves there also were inhabited by some Cro-Magnons from about 35,000 years ago until approximately 8,000 B.C. Both species built shelters, including tents, at the mouths of caves and used the caves’ dark interiors for ceremonies. The Cro-Magnon people also made representational paintings on cave walls.[1]
Also about 100,000 years ago, some Homo sapiens worked in Blombos Cave, in what became South Africa. They made the earliest paint workshop now known, but apparently did not dwell in the caves.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_dweller
So caves are not kind of place where you could keep fire making equipment dry by just putting it in a corner somewhere. You would need to wrap it in something water proof like a sheet of leather or buckskin or keep it inside a pouch or quiver made of leather, buckskin or bark. That if people actually ever lived in caves. Caves are horrible dark depressing scary full of mud, water and bat droppings. I would seriously doubt that most people, if any, actually lived in them.
Think about it: Why would people seek a shelter?
1. To find refuge from predators. If this is the reason you are looking for shelter, cave is a very bad choice. Some of the most dangerous predators actually live in caves. And those that don't, can fallow you into the cave, where you are trapped with no way out. You are much better off on a tree or anywhere else from where you can run if you need to. But once people started making weapons capable of killing large game and particularly once humans started making spears, they were more than capable to protect themselves out in the open and didn't need caves as shelters from beasts. And Neanderthal was able to make spears 400,000 years ago:Radiocarbon dating has confirmed that three wooden spears found in a coal mine in Schöningen, near Hannover, Germany, are the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found. Some 380,000 to 400,000 years old, the six- to 7.5-foot javelins were found in soil whose acids had been neutralized by a high concentration of chalk near the coal pit. They suggest that early man was able to hunt, and was not just a scavenger. The development of such weapons may have been crucial to the settling of Stone Age northern Europe, whose cold climate and short daylight hours limited hunting.
The spears show design and construction skills previously attributed only to modern humans. "They are really high tech," says Hartmut Thieme of the Institut für Denkmalpflege in Hannover, who discovered them while excavating in advance of a rotary shovel digger used in the mine. "They are made of very tough Picea [spruce] trunk and are similarly carved." Their frontal center of gravity suggests they were used as javelins, says Thieme.
The only comparable find dating to the same period is a yew lance tip from Clacton-on-Sea, England, discovered in 1911. Thieme says the Schöningen discovery is important because it proves that the Clacton lance tip was not just a chance find and that spears were probably being made in large quantities. The Clacton lance tip suggested that people may have been hunting; the three spears from Schöningen now make it fairly certain that they were not merely scavenger-gatherers. That early man hunted big game is supported by the recent discovery of a fossilized rhinoceros shoulder blade with a projectile wound at Boxgrove, England, dated to 500,000 years ago. Studies revealed the wound was probably caused by a spear. As paleoanthropologist Wil Roebroeks of the University of Leiden points out, however, "we still haven't determined whether early man hunted in large groups, or whether they used pits to trap the animals first."
Thousands of pieces of horse, elephant, and deer bone were also found at Schöningen. The bones showed cut marks from stone flints found with grooved wooden tools that probably held the flints. If Thieme can prove the flints were hafted in the wooden tools, they will be the oldest known composite tools in the world.
http://archive.archaeology.org/9705/newsbriefs/spears.html
Schöningen Spear Replication Project - all stone tools
http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?topic=20299.0
2. To find refuge from other humans. During times of war, people often sheltered in caves, especially ones with narrow entrances, because they are easy to defend as attacker needs to crawl in and cant fight while doing so. This works only if you are faced with a bunch of thieves who pass through your territory and don't hang around too long. People could not stay in the cave for a long time as they have no water or food and sooner or later people would have to get out. If you are hiding in a cave, you might even start a fire to make food or warm up. Then thousands of years later someone will find these traces of temporary habitation and will deduce that humans lived in caves...
3. To find refuge from rain because you don't want to get wet. This is very problematic as a reason for choosing caves as permanent places of habitation. Most animals, will just ignore the rain. They will get wet then get dry. End of story. Primitive humans were probably perfectly capable of doing the same. Some people in Ireland are still perfectly capable of doing the same. They walk to work in the morning in pissing rain, with no umbrella or rain gear, then sit at the desk in wet clothes until they dry and carry on through the day.
In particular if you live in hot climate, like in east Africa, getting wet is actually great. It cools you down. Finding a dry shelter only becomes important in cold climates, and or when you want to keep your stuff, like fire making equipment, dry. Sometimes if you are out in the open, and you see a storm approaching, and you are near a cave and you really don't want to get wet, or you are afraid of thunders and lightning, you can go in the cave and shelter temporarily until storm passes by. If you are a hunter gatherer and a migrant, you might stop at the same cave year after year. Or if you are a hunter and you come regularly to the area near the cave because it is a good hunting ground, you might use a cave as a base while you are in the area. You might even start a fire to make food or warm up. Then thousands of years later someone will find these traces of temporary habitation and will deduce that humans lived in caves...
4. To find refuge from cold. Again in hot climate, like in east Africa, this is not a problem. In temperate to cold climates like in Europe, this is only a problem during the winter times. We now know that neanderthals evolved to live in cold climates, so they were probably capable of withstanding much lower temperatures than we are capable to withstand today. They were also smart, and migrated south during cold winters. They were hunter gatherers, they had no reason to stay in one place if it became inhospitable, or offered no food, like north of Europe during the winter. In case of extremely cold winter spells and only for a short time, caves may even be used as temporary dwellings because they have constant year round temperature:The normal temperature of a cave whose only source of heat is from the overlying surface or has a low geothermal gradient is the annual surface temperature of the area where the specific cave is located. For areas with a high geothermal gradient, cave temperatures are influenced by the heat from below and the average annual surface temperature. Such caves tend to be warmer than surface temperatures due to heat emanating from the earth's core.
This fact that the temperature is "the annual surface temperature" means that caves could have been used as warm shelters during extremely cold winters during temperate climate period but only deep caves with narrow entrances. Any wide open shallow cave would be completely exposed to the elements and as cold as the surrounding land. This fact that the temperature is "the annual surface temperature" also means that caves could not have been used as warm shelters during ice ages as the average annual surface temperature would have been way below zero and caves would have been as cold as deep freezers.
One other pretty obvious reason why people probably didn't live in caves, is that cave are rare and usually found far away from good sources of food. The best sources of food are river and lake edges, marshes, estuaries. You are not very likely to find caves there. And if we look at today's hunter gatherer societies, they don't tend to trek far away from their dwellings. Their dwellings are usually situated in the middle of their hunting grounds. This is because they have no way of preserving food for a long time after it was killed. They also have no way of transporting or storing large amounts of food, so the food was usually eaten at the place there it is found or at most very close to it.
So if prehistoric people hunted and spent most of their time in and around water, they must have lived their as well. Which means that they probably built shelters in the surrounding area. How difficult would have been for the primitive people to make shelters? Not difficult at all. When I was a kid my father showed me and my brother how to make shelter from branches of trees, reeds and other plant material lying around. Shelters were of this type:
We made them many times without any tools not even a knife when we were both below age of 12. We used to spend a lot of time in forests playing, picking mushrooms, hunting animals with our spears and bows and arrows, and on river banks fishing, and we used these shelters to protect ourselves from storms. If two small kids with no tools can do it, a group of strong adults with stone blades can do it even easier and better. You don't even need an axe to do it. You can break off long sticks and branches or just collect dead ones and use them for the frame. You don't even need cordage. You can fix the carrying horizontal stick between branches of near trees like this:
Or you can avoid using the horizontal beam by leaning the frame against a rock like this:
To secure the baring posts in position, all you need is a shallow notch or hole in the ground, where you can stick the bottom of the post in, to prevent it from sliding outwards. Then you can pile up some earth around it and place a large stone on top.
You Then get branches and crisscross them and intertwine them in a thick layer which will create a thick mesh. This will allow you to pile dry leaves and any other debris you can find on top of it as an insulation. To secure all that in place you can place more branches on top of the debris. Here is a picture of one of these shelters:
The picture is taken from this very good book on primitive shelters called "Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties":
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28255/28255-h/28255-h.htm
You can make this shelter more permanent and more suited for cold climate by blocking the entrance with a wall built in the same way as the roof, and leaving only a narrow entrance big enough to crawll in and out of the shelter. Inside the shelter, you can place a thick layer of leafy branches on the ground followed by layer of dry grass and leaves, thus insulating yourself from the cold and also making the shelter more comfortable. This type of shelter is nothing earth shuttering. It is built by many animals in hedges and I don't see any reason why it could not have been built by early humans. The final product is something like this:
This picture is taken from a great article on building survival debris shelter from this site:
http://www.natureskills.com/survival/primitive-shelter/
If you have animal skins or furs, you can throw them over the main shelter frame before you start putting the first branches and that way make the shelter water proof and even better insulated. You can also place them on the ground for the same reason. You wouldn't even need to tan the skins as you won't care if they are flexible or not. Tanning is the process of treating skins of animals to produce leather, which is more durable and less susceptible to decomposition. But even untanned skins will sufice for making shelters. All you need to know is how to skin the animal and scrape the gore off the skin. Then wash it and dry it in the sun which will kill off all the bacteria.
You can build a group of shelters like this very quickly and easily and you have a village. If people were able to find and use fire, you might have had a central hearth, or even a sheltered hearth. Because the shelters are made from natural debris and we have no buried posts, the only thing that would survive to our time would be the hearth and what ever stone tools and debris and bones people left behind. I believe that most sites where we found these remains were probably villages consisting of debris houses. A lot of times not even hearths and stone tools would survive due to the fact that these shelters were built in areas that are today under water due to rising of the sea levels in last 10 000 years. If the prehistoric village site was not submerged, the fact that it was near water made it very desirable place for living in later epochs so the site probably ended up under prime agricultural and habitable land destroyed by later human activities like plowing and house building.0 -
Nevertheless our lucky fire maker would have probably had a very good dry place for storing his precious fire making equipment. One thing that building these kind of shelters would produce would be a need for cordage. Without cordage you are relying on the weight of the debris walls to keep everything in place. People probably picked sheltered wooded hillsides or rock outcrops to locate their villages. But it would quickly become obvious that things that are entangled or tied together tend to fall apart a lot less. There are a lot of vines (like ivy) and bendy tree branches (like willow), and roots (like spruce) or barks (like cotton wood or any other bark with long fibers) that can be used as ready made cordage good enough for tying shelter posts together. If people were able to make a wooden spear 400,000 years ago they were able to cut wooden posts, strip them of branches and scrape bark off them. This gives you all the material you need to make quite sophisticated debris shelter reinforced with bark cordage. So I would be pretty confident that people were able to make debris shelters at least 400,000 years ago. While making shelters people would have quickly realized that better cordage would make better shelters so it is quite possible that shelter making inspired cordage making. And cordage making is very important for the next stage of development of fire making equipment:
tongue drill:
two man tongue drill:
Which then lead to bow fire drill:
And eventually to pump fire drill:
Each next stage of the development of the fire drill equipment is more complicated then the previous one and requires more knowledge of how things work and better equipment making skills. But all these fire drills have one thing in common: use of cordage to generate spinning motion of the fire drill. Without good, strong elastic cordage it is not possible to make any of these kind of fire drills. Different people experimented with creating plant fiber cords throughout the year under different conditions to test the limitations of the ability to build bow drills off the landscape. As a result, they were able to build cords any time of year from a variety of materials (bark, herbaceous plant fiber, roots, etc.). Sometimes the test cords weren't durable enough to hold up during the fire making procedure showing that not all plant fiber can be used for fire drill cord. Fire drill cord undergoes extreme friction and bending pressure and only the strongest and the most flexible fibers would do. The cord must be kept moist (if it dries out, it becomes brittle). In the fall, when the dead stems are collected, this isn't a problem. Making natural fiber cords because it represents the hardest part of the skill, and one that is often overlooked or not practiced. Further, there are many subtle details that need to be learned when using these cords that are unnecessary when using store-purchased cord.
Here is a very good tutorial that explains how to make friction bow fire drill using only most primitive stone tools:
http://www.maclab.sk/clanky/en-stone-age-bowdrill.php
The man who made this tutorial was able to make everything except the cordage for which he used a strip of an old cloth. We are so used to the availability of cordage that we wouldn't even know where to start looking for material to make our own. Even if we had a raw material we wouldn't know how to turn it into strong enough cordage that would be able to withstand pressures and strains of powering (fire) drills. So what kind of cordage making material is out there that was available to our paleolithic European Neanderthal and Cro Magnon ancestors, and how did they use it to make cordage?
Tree roots of some trees like the spruce, junipers, walnut, wild cherry are used to make good, strong cordage. Roots that grow in fine or sandy soil are the most favored as they are usually straighter and have fewer deformities. They are split in two or more sections and sometimes the outer bark is rubbed off. Some bark and root binding materials tend to get a little brittle as they dry, so they are often soaked in water for a while before use. From my experience, roots make the best bow drill string of all. Always try to take only a few roots from several different trees. This doesn't kill the tree and insures a future supply of roots.
Spruce roots:
If you are using roots for cordage this is what you need to know:
1. Spruce, Pine, or Balsam Fir roots work fine.
2. Root must be pencil size or larger.
3. Make root as long as possible, in case it breaks it could be shortened.
4. Root must be used fresh or kept wet.
5. A soft flex bow is easier on the cord.
6. A drill size of 1 inch or larger is required.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBLfXBYTMa4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb6V6DXi7Ss
Another thing that makes great cordage is inner bark of certain trees like cedar, poplar, linden (basswod, lime), sweet chestnut, willow, elm, oak... Tree bark is made up of two portions, the inner bark or phloem (which passes the sugary sap around the tree), and the outer bark, which acts as the waterproof skin of the trunk, protecting from disease and extremes of temperature. The bit that is good for making cordage is the inner bark. It consists of long interwoven fibres that form an interlocking weave. It peels readily from the tree and is easy to work with. Bark from dead limbs provides the best material. The best dead limbs are ones that have been dead for a week or two. Any longer and the bark will have dried out a lot.
It is very strong and durable and it stays flexible without cracking when bent when dry. Here you can see how to make inner bark cordage:
Inner basswood bark cordage:
http://www.wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/cordage/basswood/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4GUkgg7GQ
Inner Cedar cordage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2RYQGno_do
Inner poplar cordage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBz41XYEmRA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Tc4J7nGmA
Willow bark cordage:
http://www.skillsforwildlives.com/2010/06/step-by-step-making-cordage-from-tree-bark/
http://weekendwoodsman.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/recent-progress-with-natural-cordage/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYV-GClIAYM
Various plants like flax, cattail, nettle, Sedge (papyri) contain long enough and strong enough fiber that can be used for making cords and treads. As a matter of fact the best cord fibers are plant fibers as they are the thin yet strong and make very good cordage.
Flax fiber cordage:
http://www.primitiveways.com/bowstring.html
Cattail fiber cordage:
http://www.primitiveways.com/cordage.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu2mb9Asl1s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j-uRMX75Yk
Nettle fiber cordage:
http://www.jonsbushcraft.com/Nettle%20cordage.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S1mSkrq4xs
Sedge fiber cordage:
Distribution of Sedge swamps in Central Europe in post glacial period:
http://books.google.ie/books?id=LQNxbuyPxawC&pg=PA301&lpg=PA301&dq=european+lake+sedge&source=bl&ots=OJCyCSg0c3&sig=cj5LhAIT82xcjUPxlJpZM8OwxQk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cfJ8UpiUPKLF7AaEuoDICw&ved=0CGgQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=european%20lake%20sedge&f=false
Here is a very good tutorial explaining how to make cords from natural plant fibers:
http://www.jonsbushcraft.com/cordage%20making.htm
Apart from plant fibers our paleolithic ancestors could have made cordage from animal fibers like wool or hair. Europe was at the time of Cro Magnons teaming with woolly animals whose wool was perfect for making cords. Their wool was perfect for making cords. You didn't even need to kill the animal to get the fiber and they all shaded the long winter wool in the spring and all you need to do was find enough of it and spin it into yarn.
Woolly mammoth:
Drawing:
Real thing:
Wild sheep from balkan. Sorry i seem to be only able to find pictures of the dead ones...
The same with wild cattle:
Here is how you can make wool fiber by hand. This procedure is still used in my grandparents village:
Romania
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShSIOF0o5js
Serbia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BGfw6bgXbU
One of the easiest and most durable natural cords is brain tan Leather Buckskin Raw Cordage Also known as hide striplings. These are the cutoffs from the outer layer of the hide were the holes for stretching were made. After trimming these strips they can be twisted to make leather rope or string that is super strong and flexible, exactly what we need for fire bow string.
Braintanned buckskin is one of the oldest ways of turning a hide into leather. The process is long and hard, as anyone who has done it will attest, but the outcome is far better then any other leather. It is stronger then Carhartt yet softer then velvet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckskin_(leather)
Here is how you can make buckskin using primitive tools available to our Cro Magnon ancestors:
without cooking in cold sub arctic climate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eAnCwd1NYU
with cooking in warmer climate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgRngDtk7xA
Another very good animal based material for making cordage is sinew. Here is a tutorial that explain how to make cordage out of dear sinew:
http://sustainablelivingproject.blogspot.ie/2012/01/processing-sinew-into-sewing-thread-and.html0 -
We can see that Paleolithic people in Europe had lots of materials they could use to make ropes and cord. So when did people actually start making and using ropes? This is what Wikipedia says:The use of ropes for hunting, pulling, fastening, attaching, carrying, lifting, and climbing dates back to prehistoric times. It is likely that the earliest "ropes" were naturally occurring lengths of plant fiber, such as vines, followed soon by the first attempts at twisting and braiding these strands together to form the first proper ropes in the modern sense of the word. Impressions of cordage found on fired clay provide evidence of string and rope-making technology in Europe dating back 28,000 years.[3] Fossilized fragments of "probably two-ply laid rope of about 7 mm diameter" were found in one of the caves at Lascaux, dating to approximately 15,000 BC.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope
However there seem to be proof that people were making fine coloured plant fibres even earlier:A team of archaeologists and paleobiologists has discovered flax fibers that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to have been used by humans. The fibers, discovered during systematic excavations in a cave in the Republic of Georgia, are described in this week’s issue of Science.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/oldest-known-fibers-discovered/
However if you go and look at Wikipedia page on bows and arrows we see this:The bow and arrow was not the first composite projectile weapon to be invented. It was preceded by the sling and by spear throwers such as the atlatl of the Americas and the woomera of Australia. A number of cultures in historical times lacked the bow and arrow, and in others oral history records a time before its acquisition.
The earliest potential arrow heads date from about 64,000 years ago in the South African Sibudu Cave.[6][7] By 16,000 BCE flint points were being bound by sinews to split shafts. Fletching was being practiced, with feathers glued and bound to shafts.[citation needed]
The first actual bow fragments are the Stellmoor bows from northern Germany.[8] They were dated to about 8,000 BCE but were destroyed in Hamburg during the Second World War, before carbon 14 dating was available; their age is attributed by archaeological association. The oldest bows in one piece are the elm Holmegaard bows from Denmark which were dated to 9,000 BCE. High performance wooden bows are currently made following the Holmegaard design.
The bow and arrow are still used in tribal warfare in Africa to this day. An example was documented in 2009 in Kenya when the Kisii-tribe and Kalenjin-tribe clashed resulting in four deaths.[9][10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_and_arrow
If first arrow heads date from 64,000 years ago, then people must have already been able to make strong good quality cordage 64,000 years ago, good enough to make a bow. What is the point of haveing arrows without a bow? However it is very important to see that they were only "potential" arrow heads, meaning small pointy pieces of stone that could have been used as arrow heads.
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ie/2010/08/oldest-arrow-heads-found-in-south.html
Do they really look like arrow heads to you? Or just sharp pointy pieces of rock?
It is quite possible that people were able to make bow quality cordage 64,000 years ago. We definitely don't have any evidence that people were able to make any type of bow quality plant cord until much later. But bow quality cord does not need to be made of plant fiber. One of the best materials for making bow string is sinew:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-nHeTQN04
We haven't found any 64,000 years old sinew strings. But if we look at the earliest estimated dates for the beginning of leather production based on artifacts, we see that Neanderthals could have been able to make leather by tanning skins 100,000 years ago. Research into how mammals – including humans – keep their body temperature at healthy levels suggests that even during the warmer parts of the last ice age, they would have needed decent body coverings. Skins thrown over their shoulders – Palaeo-pashminas? – wouldn't have cut it.
Another study looked at what modern day hunter-gatherers wear according to the local climate, and built a model predicting what Neanderthals would have needed to wear to stay warm. Even after correcting for Neanderthals being able to cope better with the cold, the results suggested they would have needed to cover at least 80% of their body during cold periods, especially hands and feet.
Quite astonishingly, there is physical evidence that Neanderthals more than 100,000 years ago were tanning animal skins – a stone tool from the site of Neumark-Nord in Germany has preserved scraps of organic material stuck to it that were soaked in tannin, the substance in oak bark used to make leather. It was probably part of the tool handle that got wet while the hides were being worked.
Although they lacked fine needles of the sort found much later, Neanderthals didn't need these to sew their leather, as their abilities to make stone and wood tools were easily enough to produce a sharp piercing object for threading thong.
Further back in time things get more fuzzy, but also really interesting. We have to get down and dirty – with lice. Body lice are adapted to living in clothes, and so must have evolved once humans started to wear them.DNA evidence suggests this happened at least 170,000 years ago and so people must have been wearing clothes even earlier than the oldest archeological evidence.
So if Neanderthal was able to process animal skins into leather 100,000 years ago, he was probably able learn how to make sinew cordage at some stage after that? Sinew cord making is very complicated procedure but give people 40,000 years and they will figure it out.
How does all of this affect the dating of the development of fire making equipment?
The first hand fire drill probably developed from hand hafted micro drill which probably developed from an arrow. If you think about it, people would have used sharp stones to make holes for a long time before first of these stones was hafted onto a spear, then onto an arrow. After that it was a matter of time before someone who needed to make a hole would have used an arrow to do so. He would have twirled it first in the way you would twirl a screwdriver. And then he might have decided to twirl it using both hands, and bingo you have a hand micro drill.
The first arrows are at most 64,000 years old. This would make the oldest hand drills potentially also at most 64,000 years old. This would then make the earliest hand fire drills also at most 64,000 years old. But not older.
I would say they are all probably a lot younger than 64,000 year. We have a huge gap between the first "potential" arrow heads dated to 64,000 years ago and first actual proof of arrow heads shafting dated to 16,000 years ago. Surely if we arrows were invented 64,000 years ago they would have quickly caught on and we would have a solid evidence of arrow use between 64,000 and 16,000 years ago. Do we?
We have the first proven signs of drilling dated closer to 35,000 years ago and it was with pointy stones not arrows:Around 35,000 BCE, Homo sapiens discovered the benefits of the application of rotary tools. This would have rudimentarily consisted of a pointed rock being spun between the hands to bore a hole through another material.[1] This led to the hand drill, a smooth stick, that was sometimes attached to flint point, and was rubbed between the palms. This was used by many ancient civilizations around the world including the Mayans.[2] The earliest perforated artifacts, such as bone, ivory, shells and antlers found, are from the Upper Paleolithic era.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill
Regardless whether we decide to go with earlier date or later date for bow and arrow invention, the date falls after the date when "Neanderthal" Europeans and "Modern" Africans met in the middle east. I would say that without Neanderthal leather making knowledge and technology, arrows would not have been invented as we would not have had anything to use as a bow string. Why do I think that "Modern" Africans did not know how to make leather? Because they did not have to know. You start needing leather when you star wearing skins and they turn hard and brittle if they are not tanned. If you are living in tropical Africa the last thing you want to wear is leather clothes or any clothes at all. And what you don't need you don't invent. Even today Kalahari bushmen use plant fibers and not sinews for bow string.
https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jelldragon.com%2Ftheoldways%2Fgrashoek.htm&ei=CImMUqqxEOzA7AatioGoBw&usg=AFQjCNHNSARx6fPeRmdS468g9T6YUJvFHQ&sig2=-b6yBby0fhqWKdDXBE30cA
And they wear no cloths except for the loin cover:
And still live in flimsy debris huts which are basically built to protect people from the sun:
This does not make them stupid or unable to think or invent. It just means that they are extremely addopted to living in their surrounding. All hunter gatherer cultures live the same type of life: they work as little as necessary to survive and spend the rest of their time having fun basically. They were perfectly capable of developing extremely potent poisonous chemical mixtures that they use for their arrow tips, which is only possible if you are capable of analysis, abstract thinking and planing. But they never needed warm clothes or worm dwellings so they never bothered inventing them. It is the same with all surviving hunter gatherer communities. They all still live in stone age, because where they live, in tropical areas where food is plentiful, the stone age technology would do just fine.
But Neanderthals lived in continental Europe, and there if you weren't able to stay warm during winters, you didn't survive. So inventing ways to stay warm, like warm fur and leather clothes and shoes and warm padded water proof shelters, was a matter of survival. And it is amazing how inventive people get when they are faced with life and death situation.
I saw a documentary on the television few months ago. It described an experiment which tried to determine if harsher living condition will produce smarter individuals of the same species. They used a small bird which lives in north America from Alaska to Mexico. In Alaska it has to really try hard to find food. In Mexico its a all year long party. They took eggs from nests in Alaska and nests in Mexico. They raised both birds in captivity without any adult birds around them. They did this to exclude any possible transmission of knowledge from adult birds to chicks. When both birds were grown up, they gave them the same test: they have put seeds in little holes and covered the holes with glass tops. Birds were able to see the seeds but not to get at them without finding the way to lift the glass top. The bird which grew from the Alaskan egg found the solution to the problem within couple of seconds. The bird which grew from Mexican egg didn't even know where to start and never solved the problem. This is a ground braking experiment It proves couple of very important things:
1. Harsh living conditions which force you to constantly adopt, change, solve problems will make you more clever, wise, able to solve problems. I don't think this equates with intelligence, as intelligence is more a potential for solving problems. If you have two equally intelligent people, of which one grows up using his brain for solving problems and the other doesn't, they will quickly diverge in their ability to solve problems. This is exactly what the bird experiment has shown.
2. These living conditions and experiences will actually cause epigenetic changes in your body. This intelligence carrying epigenetic changes will be passed on to next generation, We know that our life experiences cause epigenetic changes which can then be passed onto our children which would then be affected by those epigenetic changes. The bird experiment shows that ability to solve problems could be at least in part governed by epigenetic changes caused by our parents experience. Basically if you are a child of smart parents you have more chance to be smart yourself.
What we used to call instinct isn't instinct at all, but genetically stored experience (problem - solution pairs) of past generations.
Archaeological data shows that "Neaderthal" Europeans were as clever as "Modern" Africans. This bird experiment shows that they could potentially have been a lot better at solving problems and inventing things then "Modern" Africans, simply because they had to. And if we look at the human history since Paleolithic times, we see the same pattern repeated to this day: If you don't have to invent it you will not invent it. Necessity and Laziness are mother and father of all invention.
But we also have to consider "expectation" as an important factor which determines whether one culture will progress technologically or not. Take for example subsistence farmers in Serbia. In the mid 20th century they still lived technologically on the same level as Vinca people 7000 years before them. The houses were the same, furniture, clothes, agricultural and other tools, livestock, vehicles. Everything was the same. This was not because these people were not intelligent, but because they did not see reason to change anything. What they had worked, and gave them life they wanted. Their expectations were met perfectly by their technology and they simply didn't bother changing anything. As soon as electricity, roads, radio, television reached these villages, expectations changed and life changed. And it changed so rapidly that today you will be hard pressed to find anyone living the way they lived only 40 years ago. New technology is everywhere but not all the old ways were forgotten. People adopted new things, like electrical appliances, cars, mobile phones...which did not exist before. They also replaced oxen pulled plows with tractors because they are more efficient then the old tools. But they still do a lot of things "the old way" simply because there isn't a better way to do it, either because better tools are too expensive or just not available. The use of wooden sledges as main transport vehicle is one example:
If you look at the house in the background you will see that it is made from wattle and daub but it has double glazed windows...:)
Here is another example of what i am talking about. Bushmen with bows and arrows, shorts and mobile phones:
So people forced to deal with problems will solve them or perish. Once solutions are found they are adopted by other people if they serve some practical purpose.
Back to fire making. Everything I have discovered so far, points to Neanderthals as being the important carriers of the technological development necessary for discovery of fire making equipment. It also points to period after 65,000 BN, but more probably period after 35,000 BN as the period when fire making equipment was discovered. It also points to Europe as the place where that discovery took place.
And this finally (thank god) brings me to the end of my paleolithic excursion. I ventured into Paleolithic to find the answer to the question:
If the memories of the time when man had to hunt the fire bird, and the time when man stole fire from gods survived to historical time, when did man discover fire making?
I believed that the only way these memories could have survived was if fire making was not invented millions of years ago, but thousands of years ago.
And if the inventors of fire making belonged to our human species who were able to pass this memory down to us. I believe that i have managed to prove (at least to myself) that that was actually the case. Fire making was invented by Cro Magnons withing last 35,000 years. And descendants of Cro Magnons preserved the memory of the time before the fire making was invented and the time after it was invented.
This brings me back to Triglav, Trimurti, Agni. In my next post I will talk about the first man who used the fire drill, and the memories of him preserved in Sanskrit and Serbian.0 -
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Hi Everyone
To all of you, Happy holidays, what ever you are celebrating. I hope you are all healthy, happy and are looking forward to another year of luck and good fortune.
Viett.
Thank you for reading and i am glad that you are finding my writing helpful and informative. Thank you for letting us know about I La Galigo manuscript. It sounds very interesting. Do you know of any resources on the net where we can find translations of the manuscript? You say that In Indonesia you have preserved a lot of the terms from Hindu mythology in their original form and meaning. This is quite typical of isolated minorities. They cling to their language and culture in order to preserve their identity, because they feel threatened by the foreign culture they are surrounded with. In that way then often manage to preserve old and archaic cultural traits, which have been long abandoned in the area where they are a cultural majority, and where they were secure enough to let their culture evolve. This is why such minorities are so important for reconstructing ancient cultures and languages. Again thank you for your comments and I hope that you will continue reading this thread as the best is yet to come.
I haven't written anything here for a while. I have been busy looking for the father of Agni. But the more i found about him, the more questions i had that needed to be answered. And a month later I am almost ready to present my findings. I will start today, and hopefully i will finish my story about the father of Agni in next couple of weeks. So here it goes:
The father of the sacred fire, Agni, was named Tvastri, the divine carpenter. He made swastika the equipment for producing fire. Swastika consists of pramantha, the upper stick, the spindle, drill, and arani or under stick, the board. By rubbing pramantha against arani, the friction produces the heat and subsequently flame, divine Agni. Agni is born in a depression made at the intersection-point of two pieces of wood, which are orthogonal to each other.
If we look at the names of the two parts of swastika, we find that they have these meanings in Sanskrit and Serbian:
mantha
Sanskrit
pra - before, forward, in front, forth, very, like, resembling
manthA - churning-stick, sun or a sun-ray, shaking about, agitating, stirring round, churning, drink in which other ingredients are mixed by stirring, instrument for kindling fire by friction
pramantha - the spindle used to produce fire in fire drill
Serbian
pra- prefix with meaning great, ancient
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pra-
pràmājka f (Cyrillic spelling пра̀ма̄јка) - progenitress, ancestress
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pramajka
manta - to spin, spinning, something that is spinning. mantati - to spin, manta mi se - i am dizzy, the world is spinning
Pramantha means the ancient spinning stick, spindle of a fire drill, the original, the ancient way of making fire. In Serbian mantati means to spin. mandati means to sway, to wander there and back aimlesly, to make a movement with your hand like playing string instrument with a bow, pulling back and forth, or like kindling fire with pramantha.
arani
Sanskrit
araNi - mother, sun, the bottom piece of wood used for kindling fire by attrition
Serbian
aran - good, fertile, something that gives birth to something
arnica, aranica - medow that used to be wheet field
oranica, oranje - plowed field
oran, aran - plowed
orač - plowman
orati - to plow
Plowing the land is the equivalent to having a sexual intercourse with the land, where the plow is a penis penetrating and opening the earth up for sowing. The product of this union between the man and the earth, is grain, bread.
aran - bread in irish. from àr - plough, Early Irish ar, Welsh ar, ploughed land; Latin aro; Lithuanian ariù Gothic arjan, English ear, plough.
ἀρόω
From Proto-Indo-European *h₂erh₃- (“to plough”). Cognates include Old Armenian արաւր (arawr), Latin arō, Old Church Slavonic орати (orati), and Old English erian (archaic English ear).
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CF%81%CF%8C%CF%89#Ancient_Greek
We find the same sexual metaphor in fire making. Oran, aran means something that is plowed. In Sanskrit, ending "i" is used to create feminine words. So arani is a female piece of wood, the one which is plowed, penetrated by pramantha, the male piece of wood. The product of their union is charcoal, Agni which appears in the hollow created by rubbing of pramantha against arani. This is the fire womb, the hiding-place, the cave, where Vedas say that Agni was "squatting in a hiding" before Matarisvan or Mitarisvan brought Him out. Here is a picture of Agni brought out of his hiding place:
This sexual intercourse which creates life is the main meaning of lingam and yoni symbol. The creation of new life, animal or plant, as well as creation of fire, which was considered alive, was always performed by interaction of lingam and yoni, be it penis and vagina, plow and earth, thunder and earth, pramantha and arani...
So who was Matarisvan?
Here you can read what vedas say about Matarisvan:
http://worldhinduism.org/documents/rigveda.html
This is what Arthur Anthony Macdonell says about Matarisvan in his book "Vedic Mythology":Matarisvan. Matarisvan is not celebrated in any hymn of the
RV., and the name is found there only twenty-seven times, occurring twenty-
one times in the latest portions of that Veda and otherwise only five times
in the third and once in the sixth book. In these six older passages
Matarisvan is always either identified with Agni or is the producer of fire.
Though the myth of Matarisvan is based on the distinction between fire and
aT personification which produces it, the analysis of the myth shows these
Two to be identical. Nothing even in any of the later books of the RV.,
can be said to show clearly that the conception of Matarisvan prevailing in
the other Vedas and in the post-Vedic period, had begun to appear in
that Veda...
Matarisvan would thus appear to be a personification of a celestial form
of Agni, who at the same time is thought of as having like Prometheus
brought down the hidden fire from heaven to earth. Hardly anything but
lightning can be his natural basis. This would account for his being the
messenger of Vivasvat from heaven to earth (6,8 4 ), just as Agni himself
is a messenger of Vivasvat (35) between the two worlds 1 . In the AV.
Matarisvan is still found as a mystic name of Agni (AV. 10, 8^9- 4). but
generally in that (AV. 12, i 51 &c.) and other Samhitas, the Brahmanas and
all the subsequent literature, the name is a designation of wind. The transition
to this conception is to be found in a passage already quoted (3, 29"):
Agni, when as Matarisvan he was formed in his mother, became the swift
flight of wind 2 , and Agni in the air as a raging serpent is elsewhere com
pared with the rushing wind (i, 79 1 ). Such a statement might easily have
been taken later to interpret Matarisvan as the wind.
The word matarisvan, which is without a cognate in any other Indo-
European language, has every appearance of being a purely Indian compound...
https://archive.org/stream/vedicmythology00macduoft/vedicmythology00macduoft_djvu.txt
In the above text it is said that Matarisvan has no equivalent in any other Indo European language.
In Serbian and in Irish Ban, Van means white, bright. In Serbian svan = s van means with whiteness, with brighteness = light. Svanuti = S Van uti = with white (light) be = to dawn, to get bright, to get white. Svanuće = Dawn
In Serbian mater is the equivalent of the English word mother or Sanskrit Matr.
Materisvan = Materi svan = the mother of light - the giver of birth to light, the one who produced light, who gives life. This producer of light is fire, Agni, both celestial, sun fire, and terrestrial, human fire, and so Matarisvan is Agni. But also the producer of fire is the producer of light by extension. So Matarisvan is the heavenly swastika, Slavic Svarog, that produces the fire of the sun. Matarisvan is also the lightning, the fire bird (žar ptica), the East Slavic (Russian) Bird Mater sva, that brought the fire from heavens to Earth and gave it to people.
This is what Book of Veles says about bird Mater Sva:I evo ptica Mater Sva peva o tom danu i mi očekujemo to vreme kada će se Svaroži krug kod nas završiti. Potom će Mater Sva doći k nama. Govoraše nam Mater Sva kad bejasmo bedni: Branite zemlju našu dobro...Nad nama nadleće Mater Sva, jer nedaće nove nam pritiču. Granice naše behu slabe te neprijatelji mnogi nam domove i ognjišta pališe. Tuga nadvi naš kraj. Dim spaljenih stepa izvi se do Svarge. Mater Sva kliče do Višnjeg da nam šumu za vatre ognjišta naših podari...Mater Sva o slavi nam pojaše, o pobedama nad neprijateljem i mi joj verovasmo jer slava po ptici Višnjoj nebom ruskim pronosila se o nama ...A ustremi se na neprijatelja bijući krilima Mater Sva i klicaše nam da zemlju branimo.
I borili smo se za ognjišta plemena našeg jer smo Rusiči...A govoraše Mater Sva da je budućnost naša slavna. I odlazimo u smrt kao u praznik...Molimo Boga da oganj pošalje kako bi Mater Sva slavu pronela na krilima svojim do predaka naših. I tu pesmu pojemo uz vatre večernje i staro slovo govorimo o slavi, o svetom Sedmorečju gde su bili naši gradovi i za koje su naši očevi ratovali. A tu smo zemlju napustili
a sada se u drugoj zemlji za opstanak borimo...A ptica Mater Sva o slavi nam je govorila i molila nas da slavu očeva povratimo...I ptica Mater Sva peva o nama i slavu nam proriče: i nama samima i mačevima našim...Ptica Mater Sva poje nam da podignemo mačeve u odbranu. Bije ona krilima i prašinu do Svarge podiže. Od neprijatelja nas brani, jer je za nas brižna. Mi pobeđujemo, jer krik njen dopire do srca naših.
http://www.ivantic.net/Ostale_knjiige/Velesova_knjiga.pdf
Here is the translation of the above excerpts from book of Veles:
And here is bird Mater sva, singing about the day which we are eagerly awaiting, when the circle of Svarog will end. Then Mater sva will come to us. Mater Sva spoke to us when we were miserable: defend your land well...Mater Sva flies over our heads, because new adversities are coming. Our borders were weak, so our enemies came in great numbers, and burned many of our homes and destroyed many of our fire hearths. Sorrow is everywhere in our land. Smoke from burned steppes rises all the way to Svarga (heaven). Mater Sva shouts all the way to the heavenly father (Vishnji, Vishnu), to give us forests for our fire hearths... Mater Sva sang to us about our passed glory, about our victories over our enemies and we believed her. Because the our glory was spread throughout Russia by the bird of Vishnu...And Mater Sva rushed down on our enemies, hitting them with her wings, and whe shouted to us to defend our land. And we did fight for firehearths of our ancestors because we are Russians...And Mater Sva said to us that our future is glorious. And we go to death like to a celebration...We pray to god to give us fore (Oganj, Agni), so that Mater Sva could take our glory to our ancestors (this is description of a funeral fire). And we sing this song around the evening fire, and we tell the old stories about our glorious past, about the land of seven rivers, where our cities were once, and for which our fathers fought. And we had deserted that land or our fathers, and are now fighting for survival in a foreign land...And bird Mater Sva was telling us about our past glory, and was begging us to regain the glory that our fathers once possessed...And bird Mater Sva sings about us and is foretelling us a great glory to come, both to our swords and to us...Bird Mater Sva is telling us to raise our swords in defence. She is flapping her wings, and dust (smoke) is raising all the way to Svarga (heaven). She is defending us from our enemies, because she cares for us. And we are victorious, because her cry reaches our hearts.
We can see that Russian Mater Sva is heavenly Materisvan, but that by the time book of Veles was written down, the name has already been altered and the original meaning was forgotten.
And in the end Matarisvan is the man who produced fire using terrestrial swastika, fire drill. In some vedic translations Matarisvan is called MItariswan or Mitarisvan:
http://www.forgottenbooks.org/readbook_text/Rig-Veda_Sanhita_1000189602/237
In Serbian Dar is a present, dariti, darivati is to give present. Mi means to me. Svan means light. So Mitarisvan = Mi dari svan = the one who gives me light (as present). So the meaning of the name stays unchanged.0 -
Swastika is the symbol of fire, Agni. I will here give you a short chronology of the appearance of swastika symbol going back in time. You will see that Swastika is still used as a sacred symbol Among Slavs in Central Europe in medieval time. You can trace swastika all the way to Vinca and sixth millennium bc. But the oldest swastika in the world is the artifacts unearthed from keiv(Ukraine), dating back to ice age(10,000 BC), which shows a bird figure with swastika inscriptions carved from mammoth ivory. What bird is this? It is Mater Svan, Mater Sva, žar ptica, the fire bird, the mother of fire, the creator of fire, Martaisvan, Midarisvan...
You can read more about Swastika here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
and here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40812/40812-h/40812-h.htm
Here i would just like to draw your attention to few particularly interesting examples:
Svastika on standing stone Stećak from Bosnia. Dating uncertain but not older than 12th century ad.
Hands of God, a symbol of early Slavic pre-Christian religions in central Europe
Tools of the Pater (highest rank of the Mithraian brotherhood: bowl, rod (arrow), Phrygian style hat, and knife. From article, from Wikipedia Commons. Please note the sign v the symbol of vid, svetovid, sun, summer solstice on the hat.
An example of how the swastika was also used as a symbol in Classical Greece.
Greek helmet with swastika marks on the top part (circled), 350-325 BC from Taranto, found at Herculanum. Does it look suspiciously like a head wearing a Phrygian hat?
There is a strong link between swastika, agni and Bregians (Phrygians). I will talk about it soon.
Troy (3000-500 bc), swastikas, symbols of fire, were inscribed on spindle whorls of fire drills.
The spindle whorls were on pump fire drills like this one:
So it seems that Troyans, the allies of Phrygians were also Aryans. Who were then the invading Greeks?
5th Millennium BC Swastika Found in Bulgaria during archeology excavations near the village of Altimir, in the northern Vratsa Region.
Selection of Neolithic European Vinča symbols (5500−4000 BC[9]) including a swastika. If swastika is spread throughout R1a genetic territory, and originates in Central Russia the heartland of R1a 4000 years before Vinca, and we then find it in Vinca 4000 years later, were vincans R1a and not I2?
I will continue as soon as possible. In the meantime have a great Christmas.0 -
In his amazing book and TV series "Atlantean Irish", Bob Quin talked about cultural similarities between Huns, Tatars, Avars and other Steppe people from Eurasia and the Irish and had postulated hypothesis, based on purely cultural similarities, that (at least some) Irish (Gaels) come from the same stock as these steppe people. His incredible vision has been confirmed by genetic data which places both the Irish and the Steppe people within the Arbin (R1b) genetic family. This would place the arrival of Gaels into Europe firmly into the Indoeuropean or even post Indoeuropean invasion time. But Bob Quin also said that the Irish language (at least part of it) is very old, and predates the the Indoeuropean invasions. He based this claim on a peculiar fact that the west of Ireland, even in Burren area, is full of toponimes which contain root "doire" meaning oak. What is amazing about this is that there have not been any oaks growing in these areas since the 4th millennium bc. They were all cut by the first farmers and the stumps were covered by bogs at the latest at 2000 bc.
It would be a mistake to think that the Mesolithic people of Ireland suddenly invented farming and became Neolithic. Rather, Ireland's Mesolithic hunters were displaced or assimilated by Neolithic settlers who gradually arrived in Ireland from Britain and brought the technology with them. The practice of farming had spread from the Middle East, through eastern and southern Europe to reach Britain around 4000BC. Again it seems that it arrived in Ireland via the Scotland-Antrim link. Evidence from Cashelkeelty, county Kerry, suggests that this happened between 3900BC and 3000BC [4 p28].
The Neolithic settlers set about clearing upland forest (which was thinner and easier to clear than lowland forest) with stone axes, or by burning it, in order to build their permanent farms. As Ireland did not have many native cereal crops, and wild pigs were the only farm animals native to Ireland, the settlers brought with them cows, goats and sheep. It is conjectured that these aninals were transported across the Irish Sea on wooden rafts towed by skin-boats or dugout canoes (hollowed tree trunks). They also brought wheat and barley which they planted in their farms. The newly-cleared upland was used for agriculture, but erosion and overgrazing was soon to cause it to stagnate, acidify and eventually evolve into peat bogs. Thus most of Ireland's upland peat bogs (although not the lower ones) are actually artificial features inadvertently created by Neolithic farmers.
How is it possible that we have all these place names related to oak forests in the areas where the last oak stump was covered by bogs before 2000 bc? Bob postulated that these place names survived from the time when oaks still grew in the west of Ireland. Everyone laughed. They said that it is ridiculous to even imagine that words and place names would survive for 5000 years. But it seems that Bob Quin, one of the people who inspired me to start my own investigation, was right. Language and culture are far more resilient then people think. We are seeing, in case of the fire bird, "Mi dari svan", "Mater Svan", "Mater Sva", that words, concepts can survive not 5000 years but for at least 12000 years and probably a lot longer. I want to thank Bob Quin for his work and I would recommend his work to anyone interested in understanding the Irish culture.
I would like to make few comments about swastika. Because Swastika (fire drill) is constructed by just two orthogonal sticks, we have many different complex Swastikas with two, three, four, six, eight and more fire drills.
This first picture shows how you construct the rotating fire wheels from swastikas:
This second picture shows the link between the snake (zmija in Serbian), the cross, the circle, the swastika, and the fire crosses of Europe:
And here are Vinca script symbols. Can you find the above symbols among them?
Also, the swastika found of the 12000 years old fire bird was already stylized, which means that Swastika as a symbol of fire was already old at 10,000 bc. This means that the fire cult symbolized by the fire Bird and Swastika predates the last glacial maximum and comes to us from the times of Cro Magnons through the R1a population of Eurasia and their language and myths. How old are then some of the myths from Eurasia? And how old is this "old European" language I think I am uncovering?
Now let's go back to Tvashtar, the god (man) who created swastika. In vedic sources he is known under various names: Tvashtri, Tastar, Tastar, Tvashtri, Tvashtar, Tvashtar, Tvastar, Tvastar, Tvastr, Tvastr, Tvashtri, Twashtar, Twashtar, Tvashtri, Twashtri, Twashtri or Tvashtri.
Tvastr is said to be the father of Agni (the god), but also a man who made agni (fire). So Tvastr who made fire became the father of Agni the god. But Tvastr is also the father of Viśvarūpa or Triśiras. Triśiras means three headed, Triglav, Trimurti. So Triśiras is Agni as Trimurti. With one head he constantly read the Vedas, with the second he took in nourishment, and with the third he observed all that was happening around him. He daily increased his power, and Indra grew wary of him, fearing that he would eventually absorb all of the universe. Indra sent the most beautiful women from the heavens to seduce the ascetic, but he ignored them, continuing his studies. Indra grew desperate and decided to kill the youth, sending his thunderbolt down. This still did not alleviate Indra's fears, for the body still radiated a divine light. Finally, Indra ordered a wood cutter to remove Trisiras' three heads. Here we can see clearly that Trisiras is Agni, fire, as only wood cutter could extinguish his light.
Tvashtri was enraged by Indra's actions, and created the demon Vritra to avenge his son's death.
In the early Vedic religion, Vritra (Vṛtra "the enveloper"), is an Asura and also a serpent or dragon, the personification of drought and enemy of Indra. Vritra was also known in the Vedas as Ahi ("snake"). He appears as a dragon blocking the course of the rivers and is heroically slain by Indra...For this feat, Indra became known as Vritrahan "slayer of Vritra" and also as "slayer of the first-born of dragons". Vritra's mother, Danu (who was also the mother of the Danava race of Asuras), was then attacked and defeated by Indra with his thunderbolt. In one of the versions of the story, three Devas - Varuna, Soma and Agni - were coaxed by Indra into aiding him in the fight against Vritra whereas before they had been on the side of Vritra (who they called "Father").
We can see here that Vritra is clearly associated with fire as he is a "dragon" and dragons are creatures of fire. He is the personification of drought, meaning he is the fire of the sun which causes drought. Dragon and snake are also symbol of force, electricity and also symbol of the cord wrapped around the fire drill, whose writhing and coiling around the fire stick creates the force that produces fire, Agni. The snake or dragon which bites it's tail represents the sun, the fire of the sun. It coils around the sun's axes and creates the same force like the fire drill, which ignites the sun's fire. It is very interesting that the mother of Vritra, the fire of the sun, is Dana, Danica ("dan" is day in Serbian), the morning star, the mother of the sun who announces his birth every morning. She opens the gates of the sun's palace, to let the sun's chariot out. The fact that Agni calls Vritra it's father means that Vritra is fire himself, or to be more precise the fire drill which produces the original charcoal, the baby fire. The same goes for Varuna, Vuruna the oven, hearth in which Agni burns. Varuna was also created by Tvastar, the maker of Agni to house Agni in it.
Do you remember Serbian word "vatra" which means fire? Official etymology is that it's root is unknown, probably pre Indoeuropean. But as i already said before, vatra has clear etymology in Serbian: vatra = vrtr = vr + tr = vrt + trl = spin + rub = this is the motion of the fire drill while it is making fire. But "vrrr" and "trrr" are also sounds that spinning spindle and rubbing stick make. So "vrtr" is probably one of the oldest names for man made fire because it is onomatopoeic, it is made from sounds of making fire. And here we see that vrtra is made by Tvastar (is the son of Tvastar). So Vrtra is Vatra - Agni.
In this video demonstrating the use of a bow fire drill, starting from 3:29 you can clearly hear the sound of fire making, which became the word for fire vrtr, vatra:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0bEoVhxFJ8
How old is this word? 10000 years? More?
In Bhagavata Purana we read this discription of the creation of Vrtra and his battle with Indra:
http://tinyurl.com/phqqy7eBhagavata Purana: Tvastri became enraged at the death of his son (Trisiras). He gave offerings to Agni for the destruction of Indra. A huge and fearful Asura rose out of the sacrificial fire.
This is direct link between Agni and Vritra (vrtr, vatra, fire).Bhagavata Purana: The Devas threw their weapons at him, but he swallowed them all.
Fire melts metal and burns wood.Bhagavata Purana: Wonderstruck they prayed to Vishnu for help. Vishnu asked them to go to Dadhichi and pray for his body and assured them that the weapon made of his bones by Visvakarma would cut off the head of Vritra. The Devas went to Dadhichi and got his body. Visvakarma made the thunderbolt instru ment (Vajra) out of his bones.
So Visvakarma (the other name for Tvastr) made Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt so Indra can fight Tvastr's son Vrtra.Bhagavata Purana: Indra went with this instrument at the head of the Devas to fight with Vritra. The fight took place at the commencement of Treta Yuga in the first Yuga cycle of Vaivas-vata Manvantara, on the banks of the Narmadci.
This is very important.According to the Laws of Manu, one of the earliest known texts describing the yugas, the length is 4800 years + 3600 years + 2400 years + 1200 years for a total of 12,000 years for one arc, or 24,000 years to complete the cycle (one precession of the equinox). There is no mention of a year of the demigods or any years longer than the solar year, which is consistent with description in The Holy Science.
The long count view of the yuga cycle with its vast time scale was challenged by the 19th/20th-century Indian yogi Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, guru of Paramahansa Yogananda.[3]
In his book, The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar explained that the descending phase of Satya Yuga lasts 4800 years, the Treta Yuga 3600 years, Dwapara Yuga 2400 years, and the Kali Yuga 1200 years. The ascending phase of the Kali Yuga then begins, also lasting 1200 years. The ascending phase of the Kali Yuga began in September 499 AD. Since September 1699, we have been in the ascending phase of the Dwapara Yuga, according to Sri Yukteswar.[3]
In The Holy Science, Sri Yukteswar wrote that the traditional or long count view is based on a misunderstanding. He says that at the end of the last descending Dvapara Yuga (about 700 BC), "Maharaja Yudhisthira, noticing the appearance of the dark Kali Yuga, made over his throne to his grandson [and]...together with all of his wise men...retired to the Himalaya Mountains... Thus there was none in the court...who could understand the principle of correctly accounting the ages of the several Yugas."[3]
According to Sri Yukteswar, nobody wanted to announce the bad news of the beginning of the descending Kali Yuga, so they kept adding years to the Dvapara date (at that time 2400 Dvapara) only retitling the epoch to Kali. As the Kali began to ascend again, scholars of the time recognized that there was a mistake in the date (then being called 3600+ Kali, even their texts said Kali had only 1200 years). "By way of reconciliation, they fancied that 1200 years, the real age of Kali, were not the ordinary years of our earth, but were so many daiva (or deva) years ("years of the gods"), consisting of 12 daiva months of 30 daiva days each, with each daiva day being equal to one ordinary solar year of our earth. Hence according to these men 1200 years of Kali Yuga must be equal to 432,000 years of our earth."[3]
Sri Yukteswar explained that just as the cycle of day and night is caused by a celestial motion (the earth spinning on its axis in relation to the sun), and just as the cycle of the seasons are caused by a celestial motion (the earth with tilted axis orbiting the sun) so too is the yuga cycle (seen as the precession of the equinox), caused by a celestial motion. He explained this celestial motion as the movement of the whole solar system around another star. As our sun moves through this orbit, it takes the solar system (and earth) closer to and then further from a point in space known as the "grand centre" also called 'Vishnunabhi', which is the seat of the creative power, 'Brahma', [which]...regulates...the mental virtue of the internal world." He implied that it is the proximity of the earth and sun to this grand centre that determines which season of man or yuga it is.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga
If this is true, and it is very likely to be true, considering that the sun was the main god of the Vedic people, then the battle between Vritra and Indra occured 6700 bc. And it seems that the 7th millennium Bc was a period of drastic long lasting climate changes, which severely affected people throughout the world:c. 7000 BC: Wild horse populations drop in mainland Europe; horse disappears from the island of Great Britain, but was never found in Ireland (Horse & Man, Clutton-Brock) Extinction probably caused by climatic shift, leading to excessively rich spring feed and mass lameness from founder, making them easy prey (Bolich & Ingraham)
c. 7000 BC: English Channel formed[2]
c. 7000 BC: Neolithic Subpluvial begins in northern Africa
6440±25 BC: Kurile volcano on Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula has VEI 7 eruption. It is one of the largest of the Holocene epoch.
6250 BC: Eruptions occur in the Indian Heaven Volcanic field in central Washington State
c. 6200 BC: The 8.2 kiloyear event was a sharp decrease in global temperatures that lasted for 2-4 hundred years, possibly caused by an influx of glacial meltwater into the North Atlantic ocean.
c. 6100 BC: The Storegga Slide, causing a megatsunami in the Norwegian Sea
c. 6000 BC: Rising sea levels form the Torres Strait, separating Australia from New Guinea
c. 6000 BC: Between 12,000 BC and 5000 BC it appears that massive inland flooding was taking place in several regions of the world, making for subsequent sea level rises which could be relatively abrupt in many places worldwide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_millennium_BC
Is this the fight between Vrtra (fire of the sun) and Indra (clouds, thunder and rain) that is described in Vedas? Quite possible.
But maybe things are actually even simpler. Maybe four yugas are just four seasons, four quarters, four three months periods which together make one solar year. In Sanskrit, trita means third but also trinity.
http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=trita&trans=Translate&direction=SE
Trita yuga would then be third quarter. Starting from winter solstice, third qarter would begin at the summer solstice. This is St John's day, day of St Vid, the day of Svetovid, Vishnji, Vishnu, which marks the beginning of summer. This is when sun starts ruling the year. This is also when the thunderstorm season starts. The sun becomes the most powerful in the middle of the third quarter, trita yuga, around the beginning of August. This is when the sun's heat, sun's fire is the strongest and the drought is the worst, and when all eyes are turned towards the sky, in expectation of the first August thunderstorms. The second of August is the Crom Dubh day, Lugh day, Lughnasad in Ireland. This is also the day of St Elias, Ilios, the holly sun, but also the day of Perun in Serbia. On that day Perun kills Vid (sun) in the shape of Veles who had stolen his cows (clouds) and releases the waters of heaven (rain) on Earth.
No need for three legged cows, and fancy maths. But only if you live in the Balkans and Central Europe, where climate has four seasons and where the driest part of the year is the end of July, beginning of August. This makes no sense in tropical India, where period from Jun to September is the wettest period of monsoon rains. They do fill the rivers, but the meaning of the third season was lost to Indians:Monsoon is a tropical phenomenon. Indian subcontinent, lies northwards of the equator up to the Himalayas and Hindukush, primarily in the tropical zone of the Northern Hemisphere. Weather pattern involves winds blowing from the south-west direction (known as South-West Monsoon) from the Indian Ocean onto the Indian landmass during the months of June through September. These are generally rain-bearing winds, blowing from sea to land, and bring rains to most parts of the subcontinent. They split into two branches, the Arabian Sea Branch and the Bay of Bengal Branch near the southernmost end of the Indian Peninsula. They are eagerly awaited in most parts of India for their agricultural and economic importance.
Subsequently later in the year, around October, these winds reverse direction and start blowing from a north-easterly direction. Given their land to sea flow, from subcontinent onto the Indian Ocean, the system with less moisture brings rain to only limited parts of India like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. This is known as the North-East Monsoon. However, this rain is responsible for the rice bowls of South India. This mechanism completes the annual Monsoon cycle of the Indian subcontinent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon_of_South_Asia
This is another proof that Vedas did not originate in Asia but in Europe and were brought to Asia but European Invaders.
Yukteswar wrote The Holy Science in 1894. In the introduction, he wrote:The purpose of this book is to show as clearly as possible that there is an essential unity in all religions; that there is no difference in the truths inculcated by the various faiths; that there is but one method by which the world, both external and internal, has evolved; and that there is but one Goal admitted by all scriptures.[20]
The work introduced many ideas that were revolutionary for the time — for instance Yukteswar broke from Hindu tradition in stating that the earth is not in the age of Kali Yuga, but has advanced to Dwapara Yuga.[20] His proof was based on a new perspective of the precession of the equinoxes. He also introduced the idea that the sun takes a ‘star for its dual’, and revolves around it in a period of 24,000 years, which accounts for the precession of the equinox.[20]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukteswar_Giri
The "dual star" of our Sun, around which it revolves in a period of 24,000 years and which accounts for the precession of the equinox, is Sirius. The small dark "dog" star, the boy with long hand, which commands our bright Sun and which is most powerful during "dog days" of summer, the days dedicated to Crom Dubh and Lugh. Here is an excerpt from a very interesting article on Sun - Sirius system and how it causes precession of the equinox:The vast majority of observable stars are binary or multiple star systems. In these systems, two or more stars share a common focus of revolution and are gravitationally bound to each other in defined orbits. This is such a common observation such that the gravitational interaction of multiple stars appears to be the "normal" mode of stellar system formation...
...Is the idea of a solar companion to our Sun unprecedented? Not at all, in fact there have been numerous scientific publications examining the evidence for a "dark star", literally speaking, to which our Sun could be gravitationally bound in a definite orbit [3]. This alternate dark star is known as Nemesis, and its proposition comes primarily from observed perturbations of orbiting objects such as the planet-sized Kuiper belt object named Sedna [4]...
...Walter Cruttenden of the Binary Star research institute has propounded that a solar companion need not necessarily be of the "dark star" variety. Given the paucity of empirical observations and measurements of the movement of many of the bright stars within our own local galactic sector, it is with some justification that visible stars be examined to see if any may share a common focal point with our own Solar System [5]. At the heart of the poly-solar system theory is a simplification of the mechanics of constellation precession (precession observable) with a more logical model, one that does not rely on a putative wobble of the Earth but instead explains the precession observable with the movement of the Solar System itself...
...Is there a candidate for binary revolution among the visible stars? Logically we could begin with the closest star to our own, which is Alpha Centauri. At a distance of 4.37 light years, it is the third brightest star and, as is common, it is itself a binary system.
Another star that shows evidence of being gravitationally bound within the system and is called Alpha Proxima. Alpha Proxima is 0.2 light years from Alpha Centauri AB, about 400 times the distance of Neptune's orbit from the Sun. This shows that a dual or poly star system does not have to necessarily be in close orbital interaction. However Alpha Centauri lies at a declination of -60°, which is well out of the plane of the Solar System, and as such, has a near circumpolar motion in the sky.
A more suitable candidate would be a star closer to the plane of the Solar System, or celestial equator. Sirius meets this criteria, at a declination of -17°. It is also the brightest star in the night sky, three times brighter than Alpha Centauri and twice as bright as the next brightest star Canopus. Sirius is also the 5th closest system of stars to our own [6]. More significant is the fact that The Sirius Research Group has been recording the position of Sirius for approximately 20 years now and has not recorded any measurable alteration in its location relative to the precession [7]....
http://www.viewzone.com/sirius.html
Let's continue with the description of the fight between Indra and Vrtra:Bhagavata Purana: After a severe fight, the chances shewed themselves favourable to the Devas. The Daitya and Danava chiefs began to shew their backs to the enemies. " What is this my companions ? " exclaimed Vritra, " Is not death inevitable ? And what death is more enviable than that with honor and glory? There are two modes of death, rare though they be, that are given the palm in all religious books one is by control of the Pranas by means of Yoga and the other is by facing enemies foremost of all, in the battle field. "
This Vritra's speech from the desrcription of the fight between Vrtra and Indra, has a direct counterpart in Serbian medieval tradition:Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović (Serbian Cyrillic: Лазар Хребељановић; ca. 1329 – 15 June 1389) was a medieval Serbian ruler, who created the largest and most powerful state on the territory of the disintegrated Serbian Empire. Lazar's state, known in historiography as Moravian Serbia, comprised the basins of the Great Morava, West Morava, and South Morava Rivers. Lazar ruled it from 1373 until his death in 1389. Lazar's political programme was the reunification of the disintegrated Serbian state under him as the direct successor of the Nemanjić dynasty, which ended in 1371 after two centuries of rule over Serbia. Lazar had a full support from the Serbian Church for this programme, but powerful Serbian nobles did not recognize him as their supreme ruler.
In the Battle of Kosovo fought on 15 June 1389, Lazar led the army which confronted a massive invading army of the Ottoman Empire commanded by Sultan Murad I. Both Prince Lazar and Sultan Murad lost their lives in the battle. Although the battle was tactically inconclusive, the mutual heavy losses were devastating only for the Serbs. Lazar's widow, Milica, who ruled as regent for her minor son Stefan Lazarević, Lazar's successor, accepted Ottoman suzerainty in the summer of 1390.
Lazar is venerated in the Serbian Orthodox Church as a martyr and saint, and is highly regarded in Serbian history, culture and tradition of the Serbs. In Serbian epic poetry he is called Tsar Lazar.
Lazar is celebrated as a saint and martyr in ten cultic writings composed in Serbia between 1389 and 1420;[39] nine of them could be dated closer to the former year than to the latter.[40] These writings were the principal means of spreading the cult of Saint Lazar, and most of them were used in liturgy on his feast day.[41] The Encomium of Prince Lazar by nun Jefimija is considered to have the highest literary quality of the ten texts.[28] Nun Jefimija (whose secular name was Jelena) was a relative of Princess Milica,[40] and the widow of Jovan Uglješa Mrnjavčević. After his death she lived on with Milica and Lazar. Jefimija embroidered her Encomium with a gilded thread on the silken shroud covering Lazar's relics. Stefan Lazarević is regarded as the author of the text carved on a marble pillar that was erected at the site of the Battle of Kosovo.[28] The pillar was destroyed by the Ottomans,[28] but the text is preserved in a 16th-century manuscript.[42] Patriarch Danilo III wrote Narration about Prince Lazar around the time of the translation of Lazar's relics. It is regarded as historically the most informative of the ten writings,[40] though it is a synthesis of hagiography, eulogy, and homily. The prince is celebrated not only as a martyr, but also as a warrior.[43] The patriarch wrote that the Battle of Kosovo ended when both sides became exhausted; both the Serbs and the Turks suffered heavy losses.[44] The central part of Narration is the patriarch's version of Lazar's speech to Serbian warriors before the battle:[45]
You, O comrades and brothers, lords and nobles, soldiers and vojvodas—great and small. You yourselves are witnesses and observers of that great goodness God has given us in this life... But if the sword, if wounds, or if the darkness of death comes to us, we accept it sweetly for Christ and for the godliness of our homeland. It is better to die in battle than to live in shame. Better it is for us to accept death from the sword in battle than to offer our shoulders to the enemy. We have lived a long time for the world; in the end we seek to accept the martyr's struggle and to live forever in heaven. We call ourselves Christian soldiers, martyrs for godliness to be recorded in the Book of Life. We do not spare our bodies in fighting in order that we may accept the holy wreathes from that One who judges all accomplishments. Sufferings beget glory and labours lead to peace.[46]
In Serbian epic tradition, Lazar is said to have been visited by an angel of God on the night before battle, and offered a choice between an earthly or a heavenly kingdom, which choice would result in a peaceful capitulation or bloody defeat, respectively, at the Battle of Kosovo.
"...the Prophet Elijah then appeared as a gray falcon to Lazar, bearing a letter from the Mother of God that told him the choice was between holding an earthly kingdom and entering the kingdom of heaven..." [67]
According to the epics, Lazar opted for the Heavenly kingdom, which will last "forever and ever",[68] but had to perish on the battlefield. “We die with Christ, to live forever”, he told his soldiers. That Kosovo’s declaration and testament is regarded as s covenant which the Serb people made with God – and sealed with martyrs’ blood. Since then all Serbs faithful to that Testament regard themselves as the people of God, Christ’s New Testament nation, heavenly Serbia, part of God’s New Israel. This is why Serbs sometimes refer to themselves as the people of Heaven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazar_of_Serbia
The "gray falcon" that brought the message to Lazar from "mother of God" is no other than "Mater Svan", Shiva, Živa, the messenger of Agni, Triglav, the light of Enlightening. "We die with Christ, to live forever" is actually we "We die with Agni, Triglav and his "Sun" Vid, Svetovid, to live forever". The names have changed, but for the Serbs, the ancient warrior caste of the Vedas, the message stayed the same even today. I might personally prefer the Irish motto: "Beidh lá eile ag an bPaorach." which literally translated means: The power fellow will have another day, and actually means: We will live to fight another day. After all there are now almost 100 million Irish in the world and less then 10 million Serbs. But you have to admire the endurance of this belief among the Serbs through millenniums.
Let's continue with the description of the fight between Indra and Vrtra:Bhagavata Purana: Vritra remembered the wicked deeds of Indra and addressed him thus " O thou assassinator of a Brahmana ! Thou didst kill thy own Guru, my brother Visvarupa. Thou didst raise faith and trust in my brother s mind and still thou didst kill that innocent, wise Brahmana, your own Guru, having been initiated by him in Yajna. Your karma makes you worse than even Rakshasas. I shall kill thee with this Trident and make over thy body as food for vultures...Vritra then took the trident in hand and attacked Indra Indra then had recourse to Vajra and he easily cut off both the trident and one hand of Vritra.
Vritra's weapon is trident, trishula, the weapon of Shiva, the energy of Agni. Indra's weapon is vajra, which can be single or double trident, trishula. Thus Indra is effectively fighting Shiva and therefore Agni. But this next passage is clearly showing us that this is not real battle, but just a natural phenomenon of drought being "killed" by rain and that the whole "game" is being governed by the sun, here called Bhagavan - Bhaga van - the god of light, the sun.Bhagavata Purana: Vritra took a club in the other hand and struck both Indra and the elephant. The Vajra slipped out of the hands of Indra and he felt ashamed to pick it up in the presence of his enemy. " Pick it up, O King of Devas, and kill your enemy. This is no time for shame or sorrow. It is not you or I that are the real actors. Bhagavan is guiding us all. He guides the whole Universe. Look at me. I have been worsted, hand and weapon gone, still I am trying my best to kill you. This our fight is but like the game of dice in which the life of one of us is the stake."
When we look at Bhagavan on Wikipedia we find this:
Bhagavan, also written Bhagwan or Bhagawan, from the Sanskrit nt-stem bhaga-vant- (nominative भगवान् Bhagavān) literally means "possessing fortune, prosperous" (from the noun bhaga, meaning "fortune, wealth", cognate to Slavic bog "god", Russian богатый (boga'ch) "wealthy"), and hence "illustrious, divine, venerable, holy", etc.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavan
This above translation is wrong. Both bhaga and vant mean to give, to distribute, to allot, to share...So bhaga vant means give give, which makes no sense.
http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=+vant&trans=Translate&direction=SE
http://www.spokensanskrit.de/index.php?script=HK&beginning=0+&tinput=bhaga&trans=Translate&direction=AU
But Bhaga van means giver of light, which is the exact description of the Sun and of Agni, the fire which burns in three worlds and gives us light.In some traditions of Hinduism Bhagavan is used to indicate the Supreme Being or Absolute Truth, but with specific reference to that Supreme Being as possessing a personality (a personal God).[2] This personal feature indicated in Bhagavan differentiates its usage from other similar terms[3] such as Brahman, the "Supreme Spirit" or "spirit", and thus, in this usage, Bhagavan is in many ways analogous to the general Christian conception of God.
Bhagavan used as a title of veneration is often translated as "Lord"...
The Bhagavata Purana (1.2.11) states the definition of Bhagavan to mean the supreme most being:
The Learned Know the Absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramatma or Bhagavan.[a]
The Sanskrit word bhagavan is explained in the Vishnu Purana (6.5.74, Venkateshvara edition 1910) by the great authority, Parashara Muni,
the father of Vyasa Deva, defines Bhagavan as one who possesses six opulences completely, as follows:
The Supreme Personality who possesses all riches, all strength, all fame, all beauty, all knowledge and all renunciation is called Bhagavan. There are many persons who are very rich, very powerful, very beautiful, very famous, very learned, and very much detached, but no one can claim that he possesses all riches, all strength, etc., entirely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavan
This bog (Serbian word for god) who gives light and all the ritchies is Dabog (the giving god of the Serbs, also known as Hromi Daba) and Dagda (the giving god of the Irish, who I believe is Crom Dubh). But Hromi daba or Crom Dubh is also Triglav, Agni, and so is the Bhagavan who directs the "game of dice" played by it's two heads, Vishnu and Shiva, Sun and Lightning, Vrtra and Indra.
Let's continue with the description of the fight between Indra and Vrtra:Bhagavata Purana: They again engaged in fight. This time Indra cut off both the club and the other hand with the help of Vajra Vritra then opened his mouth and swallowed Indra. There was loud wailing and lamentation all round. But Indra broke through the interior of Vritra with the help of Vajra, and he then forcibly applied the bolt to cut off the head of Vritra. The bolt though actively employed could only sever the head of the Asura King in 360 days.
This last sentence confirms that we are talking about the natural cycle of the sun, as the old sun year in India and around the world before 8th century BC had 360 days.
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-ancient.html
So Indra killed two Tvastar's sons. How come then Indra is also depicted as the son of Tvastar? Because lightning is direct consequence of the interaction between Sun (sky) and Earth, both being the "home of Tvastar" and his creations. But electricity is also the energy that powers the universe, the Agni unmanifested.
So who is Indra, the slayer of Vrtra? This is what Wikipedia says about Indra:Indra, also known as Śakra (power) in the Vedas, is the leader of the Devas or gods and the lord of Svargaloka or heaven in the Hindu religion. He is the god of rain and thunderstorms.[1] He wields a lightning thunderbolt known as vajra and rides on a white elephant known as Airavata. Indra is the supreme deity and is the twin brother of Agni and is also mentioned as an Āditya, son of Aditi. Indra is, with Varuna and Mitra, one of the Ādityas, the chief gods of the Rigveda (besides Agni and others such as the Ashvins). Here again we see the holy trinity, Triglav, Agni, but this time under names of Mitra (Vishnu, Vishnji, Vid, Svetovid, Sun), Varuna (Brahma, Svarog, Fire), Indra (Shiva, Živa, Perun, Thunder, Electricity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra
Indra is the son of Tvastar because he is Agni at his most powerful and dangerous: the sun of "dog days", the sun of Lugh and of lughnasa , the sun of Crom Dubh, the sun of Perun, the sun of Mithra, burning and thundering sun, Ilios.In Vedic religion,Tvastar, is the first born creator of the universe. He is the visible form of creativity emerged from the navel of the invisible Viswakarman[1] In Yajurveda purusha suktha and in the 10th mandala of the Rigveda his character and attributes are merged with the concept of Hiranyagharbha/Prajapathy or Brahma. The term, also transliterated as Tvaṣṭr, nominative Tvaṣṭā, is the heavenly builder, the maker of divine implements, especially Indra's Vajra and the guardian of Soma. Tvastar is mentioned 65 times in the Ṛgveda[2] and is the former of the bodies of men and animals,' and invoked when desiring offspring, called garbha-pati or the lord of the womb.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tvastar
Tvastr is a divine artificer, who created the universe. Very important thing for understanding who Tvastar was is the fact that he created Vajra, the divine weapon of Indra, the thunder god. So Tvastar created lightning, the heavenly fire drill which ignites stars and brings fire to earth. I believe that Tvastr was the originally a man, a carpenter, a maker of a fire drill who became idolized and was then deified. One of the most common tools people use when trying to understand processes in nature is extrapolation. Basically people try to explain one process using the available knowledge about another similar process. Faced with the mystery of the universe, the sun and lightning, people used extrapolation to explain their existence and their workings. If man Tvastr creates material things on Earth, there must be equally god Twastr which created universe in the first place. This heavenly Tvastr is also known as visible form of Viswakarman emerging from his (her, it's) navel. Basically if the man Tvastr was born out of a navel (womb) of his mother, Tvastr must have been born out of the navel (womb) of Viśwákarman. But in essence Viśwákarman and Tvastr are one and the same:Viśwákarman ("all-accomplishing, maker of all," "all doer"; Tamil: Vicuvakaruman; Thai: Witsawakam) is the personified Omnipotence and the abstract form of the creator God according to the Rigveda. He is the presiding deity of all craftsmen and architects. He is believed to be the "Principal Architect of the Universe ", and the root concept of the later Upanishadic Brahman / Purusha....Vishwakarma is visualized as Ultimate reality (later developed as Brahman) in the Rig Veda, from whose navel all visible things Hiranyagarbha emanate. The same imagery is seen in Yajurveda purusha sukta, in which the divine smith Tvastar emerging from Vishwakarma...In later puranas he is sometimes identified with vedic Tvastar...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vishvakarman
There is no surprise then that Yajurveda pictured Tvastar/Viśwákarman as the Prajapati[8] and in the Atharva veda he is mentioned as Pashupati. Shwethashwatharopanishad described him as Rudrasiva, the one who is dwelling in all living forms. In Serbian and in English we still say "to make kids" "praviti decu". So "maker" is another word for "father".
There is a saying "as above so bellow" from hermetic texts:
Here is a picture of the Magician displaying the Hermetic concept of "As above, so below."These words circulate throughout occult and magical circles. They are recorded in Hermetic texts, although they originated in the Vedas.The actual text of that maxim, as translated by Dennis W. Hauck from The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, is: "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing."[28] Thus, whatever happens on any level of reality (physical, emotional, or mental) also happens on every other level.
This principle, however, is more often used in the sense of the microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm is oneself, and the macrocosm is the universe. The macrocosm is as the microcosm and vice versa; within each lies the other, and through understanding one (usually the microcosm) a man may understand the other.[29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#.22As_above.2C_so_below.22
So hermetic texts tell us that earthly world is a reflection of a heavenly world. This could well be true. But I believe that people came to this conclusion by explaining the heavenly world using their knowledge of the terrestrial world, and that they created gods in heaven to match the man on earth, not the other way round. The saying "as above so bellow" should really be "as bellow so above", and Tvastr and Agni are crucial for understanding of this process of god creation.
The man Tvastr (carpenter) created tools, weapons, vehicles (chariots) and houses for men. So heavenly Tvastr, Vishwakarma must have created the flying chariots of the gods, and all their weapons and divine attributes and cities in which they dwelt.
Vishwakarma/Tvastar is particularly credited with creating the missiles used in the mythological era, including the Vajra (lightning), the sacred weapon of Lord Indra...Hindu scriptures describe many of Vishwakarma's architectural accomplishments. Through the four yugas (aeons of Hindu mythology), he had built several towns and palaces for the gods. Among them were, in chronological order, Svarga (Heaven) in the Satya Yuga, Lanka in the Treta Yuga, and Dwarka (Krishna's capital) in the Dwapara Yuga...It is said that when Lord Shiva married Parvati, he asked Viswakarma to build a beautiful palace for them to reside in. Vishwakarma built a palace made of gold....
In a battle with Tripurasura, Shiva called Vishvakarma and asked him to make a suitable chariot, bow and arrow. The chariot was made entirely out of gold...Shiva installed a divine weapon known as pashupatiastra (the arrow of pashupati- another name given to Lord Shiva ) into his arrow and shot it at Tripura. The arrow burnt up Tripura into ashes in a split second....
Tvastar/Vishwakarma is therefore the maker of Shiva, lightning, electricity. Tvastr was the maker of Vajra, the thunderbolt, lightning, which was the weapon of both Indra and Shiva and which was in essence Shiva himself. Tvastr was also the maker of Shiva's "golden" chariots, bows and arrows and of Shiva's golden palace. Shiva, the electricity, the lightning, through Tvastar, the creator, creates golden cities and palaces (suns and galaxies) in which he lives. He shoots vajras, golden arrows (lightning bolts) from heaven, while riding in golden chariots (sun). So it is not a surprise that in the Vedic period the term Vishwakarma first appeared as an epithet of Indra (thunder, Shiva, Perun), Surya (sun, Vishnu, Vid, Svetovid), and Agni (fire, Brahma, Svarog), or Trimurti who is Agni (fire) in it's three forms. The things that connects these three entities, gods, is electricity, Shiva, so Agni is material form of Shiva in the same way Tvastr is material face of Vishvakarma.
I will talk i detail about Indra and Shiva later.
So we see here that Tvastar made fire and lightning, two heads of Agni, Triglav. But Tvastar is also a solar deity in the epic of Mahābhārata and the Harivaṃśa. He is the father of Surya, the sun god, and used pieces of Surya to make the three worlds (heaven, earth and underworld). Some other sources say that he was Surya. And other that he was Surya's brother.Surya is extremely important god in Vedic pantheon. Since the dawn of civilization, both human and animal life have been dependent on the creative and destructive powers of of the Sun God. Man therefore showed great reverence to it. Spiritually the Sun played the symbolic role of the male, with Mother Earth as the female receiving the seed, nourishing and nurturing growth. The Sun’s importance is reflected in all Vedic hymns such as Rig Veda. Some hymns of the Rig Veda indicate that he is the only god. This is not in contradiction with the belief that Agni was the only god or that Shiva was the only god. This is because of interconnection between the Sun, Electricity and Fire, and the way they all are each other's brothers and fathers. In the Hindu way of life, the Sun is present in all the Vedic hymns. The solar orb signifies the hymns of the Rig Veda, and Vedic Aryans loved the brighter side of life and the Sun with his dazzling light formed an important object of worship. He is described as the giver of all life on the earth, and the upholder of Dharma. He is ever traveling in his chariot keeping a vigilant eye on the good and bad deeds of mortals and gods alike.
Vedic Sun is also translated as three bodied so the Trinity is also traced to the Sun. He has triple capacity for "producing forms by his heat, preserving them by his light, or destroying them by his concentrated force of heat. This is Serbian Triglav, Vishnji (Svetovid, Vishnu, the high one, the creator), Branjan (Svarog, Brahman, the defender) and Živa (Perun, Shiva, the destroyer in a shape of lightning).Mahabaratha states about the Sun "The Sun is the gateway to the path of the gods". Taittiriya Upanishad: “He who dwells in man and who dwells in the sun is one". Chandogya Upanishad: “The sun thus represents the supreme Principle, first non-manifest, then manifest".
http://vedicgoddess.weebly.com/3/post/2012/10/chaya-ma-chaya-devi-goddess-ghhaya.html
Who is this "one who dwells in the sun and in man, the unmanifested then manifested"? It is Shiva, electricity in the form of solar radiation, the energy that powers both the Sun and Man and without which there would be no life.
Here we see that Tvastar is the father of all three heads of Agni. He is the Creator, Progenitor, Craftsmen par exelance. His power was so great, that he was credited not only with creating human tools, houses and vehicles, but also with creating the human race, animals, earth, heaven and gods themselves.
I hope you are finding this interesting. I hope to continue with my story about Tvastar soon. Until then stay happy.0 -
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The description of Twastri as a divine carpenter opened a very important question: If Twastri was a carpenter, when did carpentry as a craft start? Finding the answer to this question, would help us also find out when the fire making was actually invented. I believe i have managed to prove that it did actually happen within last 50 thousand years and probably in Europe by Cro Magnons. Considering that Cro Magnon descendants still live among us today, it is perfectly possible that they have preserved the memory of the time before fire making was invented (the Fire bird time) in their myths and legends. They have also preserved memory of the first craftsmen who became holy stone masons and holy carpenters of later religions. They also preserved the memory of first cordage makers who later became holy weavers. And they preserved the memory of the first fire makers, who eventually were deified in Twastr the father of Agni.
But this respect for craftsmen and their craft is not possible without the existence of craft and craftsmen, and crafts and craftsmen can not exist without division of labor. And anthropology is telling us that in hunter gatherer communities there is no division of labor. Everyone is taught and does everything. And this is done as a preservation mechanism as a group of generalists is more likely to survive then a group of specialists. You kill a generalists and that has minimal effect on the group. You kill a specialist and that has a huge effect and can lead to the demise of the whole group.By 12,000 years ago, human populations had spread into most of the habitable regions of the globe, including Australia and the Americas. With the aid of their flexible, rapidly evolving cultures, these groups, loosely organized as small bands of "hunter-gatherers" were able to adapt to virtually any environmental situation.
The essence of hunting and gathering or what we might think of as foraging economies is to exploit many resources rather than to depend heavily on only a few. This means they tend to have a generalized subsistence strategy rather than a specialized one. Small, mobile human groups subsist on whatever resources are available within a defined territory. They adapt to conditions as they find them, using what is already there. They tend to move on a seasonal basis lacking any permanent settlements in an effort to optimize different sources of food throughout a relatively large territorial range. Having a fairly large range has relatively little impact on the environment. Hunter-gatherers tend to accumulate a large and intimate knowledge of their range and the food sources, dangers, and opportunities which exist within it. This knowledge is largely communal; it is shared by the group.
In most circumstances, the activity of gathering of resources is very important providing 75 to 80% of the total calories consumed. We often think that hunting provides the major portion of the diet but it tends to only provide the balance. Technically, we ought to speak in terms of "gathering and hunting" rather than "hunting and gathering." In existing hunting and gathering cultures, women usually do most of the gathering, while the men specialize in hunting. This is recognized as division of labor. Other than this kind of gender specialization--and it is by no means universal--there is little specialization of roles within the Hunter-gatherer group.
Hunter gatherer societies typically enjoy a surprisingly diverse diet and abundant leisure. They live in a small, personal world seldom consisting of more than 250 people. Hunter gatherers have no accumulated wealth; they have marriage rules that require them to marry outside of their immediate group; the form bonds with neighbors largely through marriage and can rely on neighboring groups in time of need. Strong marriage bonds form alliances between groups making it unlikely that hostilities will ever exist.
http://web.mesacc.edu/dept/d10/asb/lifeways/hunt_gather.html
It seems that hunter gatherers preferred to enjoy life rather then labor and toil to invent new things.It used to be believed that food surpluses made social complexity and craft specialization possible with the increased time for leisure and occupational specialization. This was until it was pointed out that many egalitarian societies with plentiful resources had plenty of leisure time but no craft specialization. More recently it has been shown that food surpluses did not produce social complexity and specialization per se but rather made those things possible.
http://anthromama.com/2012/03/26/craft-specialization-social-complexity/
It seems that hunter gatherers found the way to live as well as possible with as little work as possible and stopped there. If you have everything that you want why bother inventing anything new.The "original affluent society" is a theory postulating that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. This theory was first articulated by Marshall Sahlins at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" held in Chicago in 1966. The significance of the theory stems from its role in shifting anthropological thought away from seeing hunter-gatherer societies as primitive, to seeing them as practitioners of a refined mode of subsistence.
At the time of the symposium new research by anthropologists, such as Richard B. Lee’s work on the !Kung of southern Africa, was challenging popular notions that hunter-gatherer societies were always near the brink of starvation and continuously engaged in a struggle for survival.[1] Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the people’s wants are easily satisfied."[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
If we look at archaeological data we see this:There is no archaeological evidence of social complexity during the first two million years of human history. For most of our history, humans have lived in small and mobile egalitarian bands. Evidence of social inequality doesn't appear until the Middle Paleolithic (120 kya to 35 kya) in Mousterian deposits found in Europe (Hungary, France, Spain, etc), Near East (Qafzeh, Israel) and Northern Africa (Hayden 2007:235). These artifacts include elaborate Neanderthal burials decorated with flowers, prestige items (such as pyrites transported from long distances and elephant tusks), body ornaments of decorative and pierced seashells, pierced animal teeth and ocher (Hayden 2007:236). The shift towards social inequality became significant around 30,000 years ago and widespread by 15,000 during the Upper Paleolithic period with the emergence of elaborate burials, higher population densities, special ritual areas in caves and evidence of food surpluses, food storage and finely made prestige goods (such as 9000 ivory beads found in a burial in Sungir, Russia) which required technical skill, standardization of form, and hundreds of hours of labor (Hayden 2007:231-236). From the elaborate burials and prestige goods, one can infer private ownership of property and a social hierarchy.
http://anthromama.com/2012/03/26/craft-specialization-social-complexity/
Even this does not prove that we have craft specialization, just social specialization and social inequality. This can happen without craft specialization. Look at tribal chiefs in hunter gatherer societies of today. They enjoy special status, the society is stratified, yet there is no craft specialization. But the above dates for social inequality are very significant. They show us that there was no social inequality and certainly no craft specialization until well after "modern African humans" met Neanderthals and the only place where we see craft specialization is in the areas heavily influenced and populated by Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons and other Norther human groups, who we now know were a mixed breed between "modern African humans" and Neanderthals and Denisovans.
If we look at where primitive non specialized societies still exist, we see that they only exist in tropical places with plenty of resources and populated by people who are only descended from "modern African humans" but not Neanderthal....
I will repeat the most important thing here: "The shift towards social inequality became significant around 30,000 years ago and widespread by 15,000 during the Upper Paleolithic period"
What could have happened during this period which could have influenced such a huge shift in social organization of our Cro Magnon ancestor? The thing that changed everything was the invention of a hafted and particularly polished hafted axes.
Making simple flake stone tools is easy, and can be "invented" by accident. Because of this it can actually be done as a non specialized activity. This is exactly what we find in archaeological material. Stone flakes all the way.
It takes months of hard work to learn how to make stone blades, and it is possible to learn how to do it only if you are being shown how to do it, because it is not intuitive and easy.
So to progress from simple flake to complex worked stone tool, you need lots of experimentation and practice. Which is unheard of in observed hunter gatherer societies. Until they met Neanderthals, mad hard working, no fun Europeans...Who preferred to knock stones together all day to partying. The reason why i think Neanderthals did this was because they had to. While "modern African humans" and their descendants were partying and having sex naked on tropical beaches, Neanderthals were freezing their buts in Europe and northern Asia, and when you are cold and hungry your brain has to start working hard in order to enable you to survive. And also banging stones will worm you up... The invention of stone tools in the first place is directly linked with availability of fine grained stones which produce sharp flakes by single blow. And they are not that common.
So eventually someone somewhere started making complex stone tools.
The oldest dated "complex" worked stone tool which would take say few hours of work to make is dated to Upper Palaeolithic and Europe:The long blades (rather than flakes) of the Upper Palaeolithic Mode 4 industries appeared during the Upper Palaeolithic.[10] The Aurignacian culture is a good example of mode 4 tool
production.[11]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool
This can not be done without work specialization. And it fits time wise with other division of labor evidence.
Remember the choice: partying - stone banging...Unless you can live well (better) from stone banging why bother.
From archaeological data we can see that until first hafted stone axes were invented we had sporadic evidence of complex and no evidence of massive wood work. Basically without hafted axes you can not chop a tree down. You can cut saplings and branches but that would be it. The flake tools are too brittle and too flimsy if thin and sharp, or too blunt if thick to allow you to efficiently chop wood. And if you can't do that, you can't make anything that requires planks, beams, panels...But then after the invention of hafted axes, we have an explosion of wood work. Houses, furniture, boats, sledges, weapons, tools...There is so much demand for good wood chopping equipment that making stone axes becomes the fastest growing industry. And good stones for axes were hard to find. One other thing. Without ability to chop wood, you can not have steady supply of fire wood. So even if you new how to make fire, you could not for instance use ovens for baking pottery on industrial scale, or smelt metal....I believe that hafted axes was the single most important invention in human history. Probably more important than fire itself. No wonder then that hafted axes feature so prominently as a holy object all around the world. To make a hafted axe you need someone to make a good smooth sharp axe head of a particular shape. You also need someone to make a sturdy strong tightly fitted handle. And you need someone to make good long strong cordage and maybe some resin glue.
These are oldest known polished stone tools. Hinatabayashi B site, Shinanomachi, Nagano. Pre-Jōmon (Paleolithic) period, 30,000 BC. Tokyo National Museum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Paleolithic
As you can see they are possibly axe heads, but this is not sure, as there is no evidence of them being hafted. These stone tools are associated with ancestors of Ainu people who are Caucasoid people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people
Then we have stone axes found in Siberia, dated to 20,000 bpIn Siberia the oldest ground axes date to 20,000 bp
in the valley of Yenisei (Oda & Keally 1973, 19, cited
by Anderson & Summerhayes 2008, 49).
The first ground-edge axes are found at the
beginning of the Mesolithic in Ireland, such as at
Lough Boora (Co. Offaly), in habitation levels dated
to 7160–6260 bc.
http://connectingcountry.arts.monash.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Geneste-et-al-20122.pdf
Right in the middle of this time period Swastika emerged as a sign associated with the fire bird. The world's OLDEST swastika is this one here associated with these carvings in the shape of birds found in the Mezin, Ukraine region. It is dated to about 10,000 BCE.
This is the actual swastika symbol from the fire bird:
So I believe that no division of labor and craft specialization occurred until the time of the Cro Magnons and other Northern Euroasian cultures which would explain the deification of early crafts like stone work, wood work and cordage production as well as fire making which persisted to modern times. This veneration of craftsmen, which clearly does not exists in primitive egalitarian societies, also brought us Twastr and other Artificer gods.
I hope you are all well and happy.0 -
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dublinviking wrote: »Difficult to explain. You find the same type in the rest of Balkans and a lot in Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia. Sharp facial features, pale skin, wavy mostly dark hair, light color eyes. A sub type of Dinaric, Noric sub type i believe. Ireland is full of people like this.
This would be more typical dinaric north albanian, serbian type:
Nonsense, Ireland is much closer to the people of northwestern Europe with whom they cluster genetically. Almost half of the Irish population possess the ginger gene and "Irish skin" is very white skin often with freckles!! Most Balkanites tan quite well, the same is definitely not true of the Irish who hardly tan! Ireland also has one of the highest frequencies for people with blue and green eyes in Europe. Yes there are quite a few Irish who have dark brown hair, but they are still over-all quite pale.
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcz9xzxmoh1qkvqr4o1_1280.jpg0 -
ingvaeonicusThe Irish are north-west Europeans by excellence and have the lowest haplotype genetical diversity in Europe. While Serbs are south-eastern Europeans have a much higher genetical diversity than the Irish and other people of north-west Europe. The Irish populace clusters with the British and other north-western European population. They are not Balkanites or Iberians!About 50% of the Irish population are genetical carriers of the red-head gene, 76% have a very pale skin which cannot tan or tan only slightly and at least 80% have blue and green eyes.
Do you know anything about the people from Balkans? What are the Balkanites? There is no such a thing. Look at the genetic map of the Balkans and you will see why. Balkan is a mix of genes, from Nordic to Irish to middle eastern, to Slavic...Which makes the place so interesting and so fu*ked up at the same time....My father has blue green eyes, reddish blond hair and burns every summer. Has the exact look I am talking about you find in Serbia, Albania and Ireland. My mother is the opposite, black eyes and gets black every summer.
I can't believe that the only thing that made you comment is the fact that i said that there could be link between Irish people Serbians and Albanians. Are you offended by it?
The pictures you i posted of Albanian people, show two characteristic groups of people who call themselves "Albanians". Second group are the Dinarides, who do tan well, have dark hair, big noses. First group is completely different and has the exact features you describe as "Irish". Look at the people in uniforms. Pictures were taken in the summer. Do you see anyone with tan? Do you see all the people with pale skin and light colored reddish hair? Look at the picture with three guys in uniforms with red berets. Do you see how much the one on the left looks like wayne rooney:
This is the type i am talking about. Look at these Albanian children:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania
These people wear short sleeves. How many tanned people do you see:
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ingvaeonicusAbout 50% of the Irish population are genetical carriers of the red-head geneSeveral accounts by Greek writers mention redheaded people. A fragment by the poet Xenophanes describes the Thracians as blue-eyed and red haired.[5] Herodotus described the Budini people as being predominantly red haired. Dio Cassius described Boudica, Queen of the Iceni, of the ancient Britons, to be "tall and terrifying in appearance... a great mass of red hair... over her shoulders."
The Roman historian Tacitus commented on the "red hair and large limbs of the inhabitants of Caledonia",[6] which he connected with some red haired Gaulish tribes of Germanic and Belgic relation.
In Asia, red hair has been found among the ancient Tocharians, who occupied the Tarim Basin in what is now the northwesternmost province of China. Caucasian Tarim mummies have been found with red hair dating to the 2nd millennium BC.[7]
Red hair is also found amongst Polynesians, and is especially common in some tribes and family groups. In Polynesian culture red hair has traditionally been seen as a sign of descent from high ranking ancestors and a mark of rulership.[8][9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair
Tocharians spoke language which has many similarities with old Irish, but they were R1a haplogroup, which creates a big problem for "Indoeuropean" theory:
At the time of the creation of the Indoeuropeans, same people lived from Ireland to China, spoke one language, and had lots of people with red hair and were R1a genetic type.
Red haired Thracian. The only surviving fresco, Tomb of Ostrusha, Valley of Thracian Kings
http://journals.worldnomads.com/vagabonds/story/78374/Bulgaria/Valley-of-the-Thracian-Kings#axzz2sd58elET
This is the map of the distribution of the red hair in Eurasia:
The bright red spot, Udmurtia, and the reddish vertical line emanating from it is along the Volga river. Do you remember what i wrote about the Volga trading trading route?
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=84722035&postcount=33Anthropologists relate Udmurts to the Urals branch of Europeans. Most of them are of the middle size, often have blue or gray eyes, high cheek-bones and wide face.[citation needed] The Udmurt people are not of an athletic build but they are very hardy.[6] and there have been claims that they are the "most red-headed" people in the world.[7] Additionally, the ancient Budini tribe, which is speculated to be an ancestor of the modern Udmurts, were described by Herodotus as being predominantly red-headed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udmurt_people
Pictures of red haired Udmurts:
Red hair Gypsy kids Serbia
Red hair central Asia:
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In Serbian there are two words that describe red hair: rus and ridj. Were Rus, founders of Russia the red heads?
Pictures of red haired Slavs (with freckles and all):
Kids from Serbian kindergarten:
So the "Irish" skin and hair is not so exclusively "Irish" after all. I spoke a lot about the connection between Ireland and Central, southern and eastern Europe. Red hair and pale, freckly skin is just one proof of that link.0 -
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While i was trying to find out when and where was fire making invented, i began to learn about the process of invention itself.
Every discovery is based on observation of things that happen in nature. For instance stone thrown into the water sinks. Wood thrown into the water floats. Even really big trees float. And sometimes during floods animals float on top of trees as well. Even big animals will float on top of big trees... Without ability to observe things like this, a man would have never been able to arrive to this: If i am caught in a flood, i should grab onto a floating fallen tree if i don't want to sink...The analysis of the observed phenomenon has brought the realization that if piece of wood floats, and big piece of wood floats and can support big animals, then big piece of wood will float and will support me. From here it is one step to: How can i cross this river? I need a big piece of wood...And eventually you have a canoe and raft and boat...That is of course if you have necessary tools, like hafted axes and adzes to chop a tree down and make a boat or raft. I will talk about axes and adzes later.
These are the steps necessary to make any invention:
1. A person observes something in nature enough times to begin to see the pattern.
2. A person analyses the observed phenomenon. He thinks about what he has seen.
3. A person has the first realization, the one that makes sense of observed phenomenon.
4. A person has a problem that needs to be solved.
5. A person has the second realization. He remembers that he has learned something similar that can be used to solve the problem.
6. A person applies the previously acquired knowledge to solve the problem.
7. A person gets better and better at solving the problem the more times he applies the solution. This is practice.
8. A person applies the knowledge acquired from solving this problem to solving similar problems.
This process is repeated every time something is invented. Take for instance fire making using fire drill. I already spoke about how fire drill was discovered by accident while people were drilling things using hand micro drill. But how was hand micro drill invented? Just apply the above 8 steps:
1. This twig just made hole in this leaf. This animal just made a hole in my uncle's stomach with it's horn. This thorn just made a hole in my hand.
2. There is something that makes twig, horn and thorn similar and able to make holes in things...
3. Pointy sharp things make holes in things.
4. I need to make a hole in this piece of bark.
5. Sharp pointy things can make holes.
6. I need a sharp pointy thing. This piece of splintered wood is sharp and pointy. Let me see if it can make a hole. Great. It worked.
7. I can make holes quicker and easier if i twirl the pointy piece of wood around, rather than just pushing it through.
8. I need to make a hole in this bone. **** the sharp piece of wood breaks every time i try to do it. I need something sharp and pointy but harder. How about this piece of broken shell? Or this stone....
From this moment on you are improving the process of making holes in order to make it faster, easier, more powerful, more precise. Lots of things get invented along the way which help you improve this process, like spear, arrow, cordage, glue, hafting...But each of them was an invention in its own right which was made by fallowing the same eight steps. Eventually application of each of these inventions, like tying things together with a piece of cordage, eventually lead to hafting of a stone to a spear and an arrow, which lead to hand micro drill. And that leads to accidental discovery of fire making which I already talked about. Even if things are invented by accident as a consequence of one of our actions, the process is still the same: observe the accidental result of our action (smoldering char), analyse it (i have just made smoldering char by rubbing these two pieces of wood together), compare it with what we already know about other observed things ( we use natural smoldering char to start a fire), apply it (put the smoldering char into something combustible and make fire)...And we have fire drill...
During my fire investigation, I also realized that there are great many things which determine not just what is invented but also when it is invented. Things have to be invented in order. You can't invent hand fire drill without having invented hand drill. Also being able to produce smoldering char, would be useless unless you already had a knowledge how to preserve the smoldering char and to use it to ignite fire. You can not invent bow fire drill before you invent a bow and you can't invent a bow before you invent a cordage...
We have already seen how occurrence of problems forces people to apply their knowledge in order to solve these problems. There are standard problems that every human faces: how to get food, how to stay warm in cold and cool in heat, how to shelter from the elements, how to protect yourself from animals and other humans. These problems then get modified and new ones get added based on the geographic location and climate the people live in. For instance, how to shelter from a sand storm is a problem that people only face if they are living in deserts. How to cross big rivers and where to sleep in flood lands is a problem that people only face if they are living in flood plains of big rivers. How to stay warm during long cold snowy winters is a problem that people only face if they are living in temperate climates. How to deal with monsoon and hurricanes on the other hand is a problem that people only face if they are living in tropical areas.
Each habitat will provide it's own natural resources and it's own observable natural phenomena. Because of this, the same or similar problems faced by people in different habitats, will be solved in different ways. For instance hand micro drill shaft will be made from bamboo in the areas where bamboo is available and hollow wood in areas where bamboo doesn't grow. Bamboo is a great example of how natural environment shapes the development of a local human population. Bamboo is such a great natural material, it is so strong and elastic and so durable and it grows so abundantly, that in bamboo growing areas everything is made from bamboo, from tools, to weapons, to houses to boats to fire making equipment like fire saw or fire piston. In areas where bamboo doesn't grow, a much wider set of materials had to be used to solve the same problems, and a because of that a lot wider set of skills had to be developed in order to solve these problems.
Here is a great example of how different natural habitat can produce different solution to the same problem. The problem is how to transport heavy weights over a long distance. In snowy and boggy areas as well as in hilly areas with frequently soggy ground people invented sledges. In dry grassy plains and sub deserts they invented wheeled carts. In deltas, along rivers and sees they invented boats. In jungles of Asia they used elephants, and in south America they used Lamas. For a long time we thought that south american civilizations didn't invent wheel. Then small toy models of wheeled vehicles were found. The question was asked: if they new how to build these wheeled vehicle why did they not use them? And the answer is that there was no suitable animal to pull the cart or a sledge as cows and hoses did not exist in South America at the time. Also the therein was either too soft and soggy or to rocky an mountainous to build roads which you must have if you want to use wheeled carts. So they played with wheeled carts and used Lamas to transport goods.
But different natural habitats can also determine if the human group living in that particular habitat will develop technologically or not. Here is an example how much the geographic location and the environment can influence human technological development.
Take making stone blades. They are made by banging two stones together under a certain angle, which brakes off sharp flakes which can be used for cutting.
Why would people start banging stones together in the first place? Probably because people tried to break something hard that contained edible bits like nuts or shells or eggs. Chimps have been documented in the wild using bipolar percussion to break into nutshells for their meats. When a mis-strike occurs and the hammer stone hits the anvil stone instead of the nut, one or both stones might break. The piece of stone which is hit is called a core, and the stone with which you hit the core is called a hammer stone. The result of this accidental banging of stones can have many different results depending on the type of stones used. The best types of stone are rich in silica, hard and brittle. These include quartzite, chert, flint, silcrete and quartz. People quarried such stone from outcrops of bedrock or collected it as pebbles from stream beds and beaches. So these stones are geographically restricted.
This map shows distribution of flint baring rocks in Europe.
http://www.flintsource.net/nav/frm_mapflint.html
If you were a prehistoric man living outside of the areas of Europe where flint pebbles could be found, then if you picked two pebbles and if you banged them against each other, most likely nothing interesting would happen. If the pebbles were made from a hard stone, one or both pebbles could have chipped a bit or scratched but that would be it. If one was soft, it might shatter or splinter or split into two halves, but the broken bits would be too soft to do anything with them. If you tried to cut anything with the bits you produced, you would soon realized that they just don't do good enough job. If you are very interested in finding stone that is good for producing sharp splinters, you would then continue banging stones you can find in your surrounding, but you would end up with the same result as you don't live in the flint rich area. So you would probably quickly give up the useless task and go on living as before.
But if you lived in any of the flint rich areas, then the situation would have been completely different. if you picked two pebbles and if you banged them against each other, they would (if you were lucky) shatter into narrow flakes with very sharp edges. If you then accidentally cut yourself on one of the flint flakes, that would set your mind into overdrive. If i can cut myself i can cut others. And you have a knife. If you picked one of the flakes and tried to cut through a skin of a dead animal, you will see that your new flint blade is doing a fine job indeed. You will soon realize that you can also cut green plants, and even thin soft branches. New flakes were very sharp, but quickly became blunt or broke during use especially if you tried to cut something hard like wood or bone. This means that you had to make more flakes. To do that you needed to find another flint stone, recognize it among all the other pebbles, and then try to repeat the accidental strike you did earlier. Once you learn how to do these two things, you're in business. But reproducing something that you have seen in nature or that you have produced by accident is not easy. It requires practice and leaves a trail of failed attempts. But if the action of creating a particular shape is deliberate, we see more and more attempt results that converge around the intended result. This should be evident in archaeological records.
An awful lot of luck is involved in this discovery combined with a lot of figuring out and a lot of perseverance.
Is this how first human discoveries happened?
I believe so. I believe that unless humans observed an accidental production of a sharp stone flake, they would have never "discovered" stone tools. For it to be accidental, it had to happen as a consequence of a single simple action and not as a product of long hard labor. From what we know about hunter gatherers, they are not very keen on hard labor. Instead they prefer to do as little as possible to sustain life and then just hang around, enjoy that same life. Do you think they would go about banging or polishing stones for hours to see what happens? This is not how human brain works. We only invent tools if we need them to solve a particular problem. A thorn is just a thorn until we need to make a hole in a leaf. Then it becomes a tool for making holes. A stick and stone are just a stick and stone until we need to lift a heavy rock. Then they become a lever. Sharp stone is just a sharp stone that is dangerous and needs to be avoided, until we need to cut something. Then it becomes a blade. People will not spend years inventing screwdriver if there was no screw that needed to be screwed or unscrewed. Once we invent a tool which helps us solve a particular problem, then every time we are faced with the same problem, we will use the same tool to help us solve it. This stops being the case only if a better tool was invented that will help us solve the problem more effectively. What is more effective tool? There are two criteria which determine if a new tool is more effective then the old one.
Is the new tool as good in doing the job as the old tool, but can be made by local craftsmen from locally sourced material and is easier to make than the old tool, or is the new tool cheaper to buy than the old tool, or does the new tool last longer than the old tool? Is the new tool much better in doing the job than the old tool?
If the answer to both questions is yes, new tool replaces the old tool. If the new tool is much better in doing the job than the old tool but it is more difficult to make or is more expensive, then we see that both old and new tool will be used. People who can make or afford the new better tool will use that one, and people who can't will use the old one.
If the newly invented tool is more effective, it will soon be adopted by the immediate and then extended family of the man who invented the tool. The tool maker will, as it is customary in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies, teach the other members of his own tribe how to make the tool. Soon we will have a tool making industry. If the tribe comes in contact with other tribes, they might share the knowledge of how to use the new tool to others. Or they might not. Members of other tribes might observe the newly invented tool being used, and might try to copy it. If the tool is difficult to make, or can be made only from the material found on the territory of the tribe which invented the tool, the inventors might trade the tools for other things. If we look at archaeological data, we should find that the data shows this evidence of invention, adaptation and spreading of useful tools.0 -
Why would a new tool not be adopted by the people who are in contact with the inventor? Only if the new tool is not actually more effective than the old. If we find something in the archaeological material, which to us looks like it could have been one of the tools we know about, this does not mean that it actually is a tool at all. What we have found could be just something that by pure accident looks like one of the tools we know about. If we find what looks like a deliberately man made stone tool in one of the clustered sites from the same period but not in the other ones, we are probably looking at accidental byproduct of some completely different human action or a naturally occurring stone. If what we have found looks like an effective tool, and if it really was intended to be that tool, then it would have been adopted as tool, replicated, mass produced, used. Isolated pointy sharp stones that look like a spear tips, could just be a pointy sharp stones, which were never used as a spear tips. This can be because people did not know how to securely haft them as spear tips so they used them as piercing hand held tools instead. Or because it never even occurred to people that they could make stone spear tips, so the stones were actually intended to be used for something different, or the stones were just byproducts of the process of making something completely different.
Take for example stone spear tips from Kathu Pan 1 in South Africa. Archaeologists Alas, Wilkins and Chazan, claim that they have discovered the oldest stone spear tip in the world. They say:Experimental and metric data indicate that the points could function well as spear tips. Shape analysis demonstrates that the smaller retouched points are as symmetrical as larger retouched points, which fits expectations for spear tips. The distribution of edge damage is similar to that in an experimental sample of spear tips and is inconsistent with expectations for cutting or scraping tools. Thus, early humans were manufacturing hafted multicomponent tools ~200,000 years earlier than previously thought.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6109/942
Here is the picture of different shapes of "blades" they claim they have discovered. N is the infamous spear tip.
On The Subversive Archaeologist blog, archaeologist Robert H. Gargett says this about this claim:Once more, an example of how well-meaning archaeologists cherry-pick (never disingenuously) their assemblages for specimens that put their claims in the best light. I really, really like M. That must have been one fine flint-knapper to have prepared a core to take off that one at the end of the sequence!
The authors seem to think that they have indisputable evidence of a blade industry at give-or-take 500 kya (i.e. the product of Homo beforeneanderthalensis, no less). But when you look for their empirical basis you find virtually nothing.
Wilkins and Chazan looked at 3,786 pieces of rock (out of the more-than 2 metric tonnes of lithics culled from the site!). Of the 3,786 bits, 955 were categorized as complete flakes and 972 were called blades. A 50:50 ratio of 'flakes' to 'blades' will be important later in this discussion. So, keep 1/2 and 1/2 in mind.
The average length-to-width ratio for the blades is 2.5 (s.d. = 0.4). Therefore, approximately half of the blades are in the upper part of the range (i.e. 2.5:1 to 2.9:1) of length to width. The other 50% of the blades would just make it into the 'blade' category (i.e. between 2.0:1 and 2.49:1). Given that a) the minimum ratio to qualify as a blade is 2.0:1, b) the mean is 2.5:1 and c) the standard deviation is 0.4:1, it's impossible to say on the basis of the date presented whether the distribution of 'blade' length to width is uniform, platykurtic, normal, or leptokurtic. That's a crucial datum, as you'll see in a moment. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the distribution is somewhat skewed toward the upper end, given that the actual range of 'blade' length-to-width ratio goes from 2.0:1 to 4.5:1, strongly suggesting that it's more platykurtic than not. You see, a mystery as to the shape of distribution for 'blade' length to width casts a deep, dark cloud over Wilkins and Chazan's whole argument, because it's quite possible that the length-to-width ratio for the entire assemblage (i.e. flakes + blades) is uniform or unimodal, with a mean closer to 2.0:1 than 2.5:1. That would call into question the wisdom of creating the flake/blade cutoff in the first place. Actually, it would make it seem silly.
What of the complete flakes? Wilkins and Chazan provide no metrics for those flakes that had a length-to-width ratio of less than 2:1. I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of complete flakes in any assemblage are at least as long as they are wide (i.e. >1:1). That would mean that most of the non-blade flakes in the Kathu Pan 1 sample are between 1:1 and 2:1 in a comparison of length to width. Therefore, when compared with the entire collection of 'flakes' and 'blades' the authors examined for this study, nearly 1/2 are just on the shy side of being blades.
On that basis alone, were it not for the arbitrary 2:1 cutoff between flakes and blades, the complete flakes and blades would more than likely form a continuous and uniform distribution of length to width from near 1:1 up to 2.9:1 (with the rest of the range scattered with outliers). If that be the case (and neither you nor I have any reason to think otherwise in the absence of sufficient descriptive metrics in Wilkins and Chazan's article) it would be very difficult for the authors to sustain their inference that the blades they find at 500 kya, and in such abundance, are anything other than artifacts of the arbitrary line drawn between a 'flake' and a 'blade.'
If the authors had so much as a shred of evidence that there was preferential blade manufacturing going on at Kathu Pan 1, I'd very much like to see it. In fact, you have to wonder at some of the data presentation decisions the authors have made, such as presenting a histogram of the widths of their 'blades' rather than their lengths, and leaving out the metrics for the non-blade flakes altogether.
http://www.thesubversivearchaeologist.com/2012/02/journal-of-archaeological-pseudo.html
What the above analysis is basically confirming is that there is no detectable deliberate learning and production trail for making blade and spear tips, which would concentrate the blade production results around certain desired blade type. All the flakes are statistically random showing no sign of deliberate attempt to produce any particular type or shape of blade.
Also, all the data Alas, Wilkins and Chazan present as evidence that the stones were hafted spear tips can also prove that the stones were awls (stone tools used for making holes in wood or bone or skin). In order for a stone spear tip to be hafted onto a wooden shaft, we have to use cordage and resin. Alas, Wilkins and Chazan new this because their experiment that "proved" that stone "N" was a spear tip included hafting it onto a shaft using acacia resin and sinew.
Examples of experimental hafted points. Points were hafted to wooden dowels using Acacia resin and sinew and then thrust into a springbok carcass target using a calibrated crossbow. The Kathu Pan 1 archaeological points show a similar pattern of edge damage to these experimental points.
https://asunews.asu.edu/20121115_stonespears
The problem is we have no record of cordage and resin production from that time, and without cordage and resin it is not possible to successfully haft stone spear tip onto a wooden shaft. When I say cordage, I mean any string like material strong and elastic enough to be used for tightening things together. For that you don't need a "cordage industry" to have developed, to have material to haft with. Sinew does not need any special treatment to be used as hafting material. It can be used fresh from the animal or dried and then reconstituted, by soaking or chewing. No specialized industry is needed to twine it into "cordage". But you still need a lot of skill to be able to extract long enough sinew strips that you can use to tighten spear tips. So it is more likely that buckskin strips were used instead of sinew. To determine when the effective stone spear tip hafting became possible, we can use archaeological evidence for the use of skins and hides, and associated tools as well as evidence for production of resin. Extraction of sinews and turning them into cord and making of resin is not easy. This is why we find such late dates for confirmed usage of skin and hide and for manufacture of resin:
First proven use of hides. Hide scraper: 50,000 years old
http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2013/08/13/neanderthals-invented-leather-tool-still-used-today/
First proven use of resin. Birch pitch: 80,000 years old
http://eja.sagepub.com/content/4/3/385.abstract
It is possible that some people somewhere used sinew and buckskin cords and resin before, but we don't have any evidence for it. Even if we say that it is possible that people started using resin 100,000 years before now, that is still 400,000 years later than the proposed first stone spear tip hafting date. Even if we presume that the Kathu Pan 1 "spear points" were hafted using resin and sinew, they were definitely not hafted the way hafting was done in the above experiment. Why? Because the way the above experimental spear tips were hafted on spear shafts, does not make them effective spears, and if the new spear design is not effective it will never be used in practice.
What is an effective spear?
First we have to specify that all the original spears were thrusting spears not throwing spears.
So what is an effective thrusting spear?
Effective thrusting spear is sharp enough to pierce intended target. This is not a problem as spear tips made from flint are extremely sharp.
Effective thrusting spear has a tip which is strong enough not to get damaged by the impact of hitting the target. This is a problem if the spear tip is big wide and thin. If the spear tip hits a rib, it is most likely going to break. But small narrow tips will slide off the rib. This is where design of the stone tip becomes very important.
You can read more about effectiveness of small flint tips here:
http://primitivepathways.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=65_66
Effective thrusting spear has a shaft which is strong enough not to get damaged by the impact of hitting the target.
Effective thrusting spear has a shaft which is long enough to put enough space between the hunter and the pray, preventing the pray from attacking the hunter.
Effective thrusting spear has the spear tip which is hafted in such a way that the tip does not fall off when the spear is pulled out of the target.
Effective thrusting spear has the spear tip which is hafted in such a way that the tip does not fall off when the target is moving and jerking during the fight between the hunter and the pray.
Now have a look again at the above experimental hafting done to prove that the Kathu Pan 1 stone "N" was a spear tip, and tell me what do you think, is that effective way to haft stone tip onto a thrusting spear shaft? I don't think so. It is a possible way to attach a stone to a stick. But not an effective spear tip hafting.
I have seen experiments that prove that that it is possible to attach event the the infamous "hand axes" cores to thick shaft as spear tips using friction. People who performed these experiments use them as proof that hafting could have started before resin and cordage were invented. On this youtube video you can see is what is "possible":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZoPPczZpF8&feature=c4-overview&list=UUpgZkmbz9X4QTmMuqn9pHDw
So it is "possible" to haft "hand axes" without even using resin or cordage. The force holding the "axe" in place is friction. This is possible but not likely to have been used in practice. I could have even been done as an experiment by someone (i doubt it though). But the first time they tried to use it in practice, they would have realized that it was a bad idea. Have a look at 41 second of the film. Do you see how easy it is to remove the stone hand axe (the stone tip) out of the handle by pushing it sideways? Imagine using the spear in real life situation. So you try to spear a man or an animal. The intended target will be moving and will be covered in thick skin and fur. The moment the stone tip touches the target it will be pulled to the side by the force that the moving target produces by side stepping, walking, running, bending or any other movement orthogonal to the trajectory of the spear, and this force will make the spear tip slip out, rendering the weapon useless. If spear is your only or main weapon, you really don't want to risk the main part of it, the tip, falling out after you spent so much time making it....Especially when you are standing in front of a hurt lion, or a buffalo. If your stone spear tip falls out, all you are left with is blunt stick.
Here is the diagram of what i am talking about:
Thrusting spear with a hafted stone tip has another problem. If you strike a hard target straight on with a considerable force (as you would in real life), and your stone does not shatter on impact, which thin, sharp flint tips are liable to do if you hit a bone, it will exert so much force into the shaft, that it would at best widen the gap holding the stone and at worst it would cause the shaft to split. If the force of friction is the only thing keeping the whole contraption together, this will again render the weapon useless. Here is the diagram showing what i mean:
If we use some kind of pitch we minimize the first problem of the tip being dislodged by orthogonal force. It would become more difficult to dislodge the stone tip, but not much more difficult. You have to remember that the forces at work are huge. The second problem, the shaft splitting, would stay as a problem and would not be minimized by using resin. The longitudinal force would basically split the shaft wide enough for the resin links to be broken or the whole shaft to split, and we are back to square one.
So to avoid these problems, and in order to haft a spear tip onto a spear shaft effectively, you need to secure it in such a way that the force produced by it hitting the target does not dislodge the stone tip when the spear is used in real life situations. You also want to make sure that the stone tip is hafted in such a way that if the spear is thrust through the skin, or if it gets entangled into fur or wool, that it does not fall off when the spear is pulled back.
The only way to achieve effective hafting is by carefully designing the tip and the shaft, and by using a combination of resin and cordage to tie them together. And we see that that exact technique is used for hafting spear tips by primitive people world over: you use resing to secure the stone spear tip to the spear shaft, and cordage to strengthen the connection point and prevent the tip being dislodged by the side force and to prevent the shaft being split by longitudinal force.
What does well hafted spear tip look like?
Like this:
Or like this:
Or like this:
So unless people were able to securely haft stone points on spear shafts, they did not have effective tool for killing. Which is why we don't see wide adoption and proliferation of stone spear tips until much much later. We see a lot of sharp pointy stones, which could have been used as spear tips, if the resin and cordage was available to perform effective hafting. But without ability to perform effective hafting, these sharp pointy stones were just sharp pointy stones, not spear tips. As soon as people were able to securely haft a sharp stone tip to the wooden shaft, the combination became effective tool for killing. and we see quick adoption and spreading of this new tool.0 -
But was stone tip spear more effective tool than just plain sharpened wooden fire hardened spear?
Like this one: THE CLACTON SPEAR TIP, CLACTON-ON-SEA, ESSEX, UNITED KINGDOM, LOWER PALEOLITHIC PERIOD, est.300,000 to 450,000 YEARS AGO
Or this one: Coastal Sepik New Guinea Spear
Or this one:
Here is a good article explaining how to make plain wooden fire hardened spear:
http://preparedforthat.com/survival-defense-crafting-fire-hardened-spear/
Have a look at this spear. Schoningen Spear, Neanderthal wooden thrusting spear, Schöningen, Germany, about 400,000 years old. Please note how much this spear tips look like horns or even more like antlers.
Here you can find description of the experimental replication of the above Neanderthal spear using stone tool:
http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?topic=20299.0
All of the above spears look pretty deadly to me, and look like they would do a pretty good job as killing tools.
Remember what I said about cost effectiveness and how it influences adoption of new tools. So let's compare cost effectiveness of plain wooden spear and stone tipped spear.
We know that flint tipped spear is sharper than plain wooden spear. But plain wooden spear is much easier to make.
The skills you need to have in order to make plain wooden spear are:
1. the ability to make simple flint flakes
2. the ability to find and recognize hard wood saplings
3. the ability to use these flint flakes to cut tree sapling and to scrape the bark off it
4. the ability to use fire (not make it but use it) to harden the wood while sharpening the stick
Learning time very short. Probably not more than few hours. You can make dozens of spears in one day. To repair your spear all you need to carry with you is a flint flake. Repair consists of sharpening the tip and maybe additional fire hardening. For your spear to be rendered unusable, you have to completely smash the spear tip by hitting something hard like a skull or a stone with a considerable force.
The skills you need to have in order to make flint tipped spear are:
1. the ability to make simple flint flakes
2. the ability to find and recognize hard wood saplings
3. the ability to use these flint flakes to cut tree sapling and to scrape the bark off it and to cut a notch in one of its ends which matches the thickness of the stone tip
4. the ability to use fire (not make it but use it) to harden the wood
5. the ability to knap sharp thin small precisely shaped spear tips
6. the ability to make cordage from sinew, skin, plant fiber
7. the ability to make resin
8. the to securely haft stone tip using cordage and resin
Learning time: months if not years of full time dedicated supervised practicing. Once you become proficient in all the above crafts, it takes almost a whole day to make just one spear if you include cordage, resin, shaft and tip making and assembling. To repair your spear you need: a flint pebble to make flakes and new tips and a hammer stone and knapping bone tools. You will also need resin and cordage. Depending on the damage, the repair can be as simple as retouching the stone tip, or as complicated as making a whole new spear, because the stone tip had broken off. For your spear to be rendered unusable, all you need to do is to chip the stone tip enough to make it blunt. Because stone tips are made thin in order to be sharp, this is not very difficult to do.
This actually makes plain wooden fire hardened spears more cost effective for primitive hunter gatherers. And this is why stone tipped spears don't appear until much much later. Basically people had to achieve certain level of technological and organizational development in order to be able to make stone tipped spears in a cost effective way. And that did not seem to have occurred until social specialization and craft specialization, which coincidentally falls in the period close to 50,000 bc. Only when all the technologies required to make effective stone tipped spear became widely available and accepted, only then this new stone tipped tool for killing replaced the old plain wooden one.
But once stone tips for spears became widely accepted, they quickly became standardized. This process of standardization is inevitable, and stems from several facts:
1. There are only few effective spear tip shapes which give good penetration with resistance to breaking and ease of hafting. What works gets made again and again. What doesn't gets discarded. Here are all known designs of confirmed arrow and spear tips:
2. We learn how to make spear tips by trying to imitate spear tips we already saw. So shapes of our spear tips will inevitably congregate around the example we are trying to imitate. If we are taught how to make spear tips by a teacher, this is even more likely to happen.
3. Any proven improvement leads to even more standardization in design.
4. Local differences may occur, due to difference in available material, and skill of local craftsmen, but the main design pattern stays the same because it is driven by usefulness and functionality.
That this process is inevitable, is proven by what we know about second best tool making creature after humans, Caledonian crow.New Caledonian crows are renowned for their tool making skills. In the complexity, fluidity and sophistication of their tool use, their ability to manipulate and bird-handle sticks, leaves, wires, strings and any other natural or artificial object they can find into the perfect device for fishing out food, or fishing out second-, third- or higher-order tools, the crows have no peers in the nonhuman vivarium, and that includes such textbook dexterous smarties as elephants, macaques and chimpanzees.
Videos of laboratory studies with the crows have gone viral, showing the birds doing things that look practically faked. In one famous example from Oxford University, a female named Betty methodically bends a straight piece of wire against the outside of a plastic cylinder to form the shape of a hook, which she then inserts into the plastic cylinder to extract a handled plug from the bottom as deftly as one might pull a stopper from a drain. The problem is how to hook something out of a hole. The best tool for solving this problem is a hook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg
So how do the birds get so crafty at crafting? New reports in the journals Animal Behaviour and Learning and Behavior by researchers at the University of Auckland suggest that the formula for crow success may not be terribly different from the nostrums commonly served up to people: Let your offspring have an extended childhood in a stable and loving home; lead by example; offer positive reinforcement; be patient and persistent; indulge even a near-adult offspring by occasionally popping a fresh cockroach into its mouth; and realize that at any moment a goshawk might swoop down and put an end to the entire pedagogical program.
“It’s a big puzzle,” said Russell D. Gray, head of the Auckland lab. “Why them? Why is this species on a small island in the Pacific able to not just use but to manufacture a variety of tools, and in a flexible rather than a rote or programmatic way? Why are they able to do at least as well as chimpanzees on experiments of cognition that show an understanding of the physical properties of the world and an ability to generalize from one problem to the next?”
“All corvid brains are relatively big,” said Dr. Gray, “but preliminary evidence suggests that the New Caledonian brain is big even for corvids.” Moreover, the brain is preferentially enlarged, displaying impressive bulk in the avian equivalent of the cogitating forebrain, particularly structures involved in associative learning and fine motor skills.
Their bills are also exceptional, “more like a human opposable thumb than the standard corvid beak,” said Dr. Gray.
The bills “appear specialized to hold tools,” said Anne Clark, who studies American crows at the State University of New York at Binghamton but who also has observed New Caledonian crows in the field. “When I was watching them, they seemed to grab a stick whenever they appeared unable to figure something out,” she said, rather as a mathematician has trouble solving a problem without a pencil in hand.
The birds are indefatigable toolmakers out in the field. They find just the right twigs, crack them free of the branch, and then twist the twig ends into needle-sharp hooks. They tear strips from the saw-toothed borders of Pandanus leaves, and then shape the strips into elegant barbed spears.
With their hooks and their spears they extract slugs, insects and other invertebrates from deep crevices in the ground or in trees. The birds are followers of local custom.
Through an arduous transisland survey of patterns left behind in Pandanus leaves by the edge-stripping crows, Gavin Hunt of the University of Auckland determined that toolmaking styles varied from spot to spot, and those styles remained stable over time. In sum, New Caledonian crows have their version of culture.
Being cultured is hard work. In studying the birds’ social life, Dr. Holzhaider and her colleagues confirmed previous observations that New Caledonian crows are not group-living social butterflies, as many crows and ravens are, but instead adhere to a nuclear family arrangement. Males and females pair up and stay together year-round, reaffirming their bond with charming gestures like feeding and grooming each other, sitting close enough to touch, and not even minding when their partner plays with their tools.
Young birds stay with their parents for two years or more — a very extended dependency, by bird standards — and they forage together as a family, chattering all the while. “They have this way of talking in a quiet voice, ‘Waak, waak, waak,’ that sounds really lovely,” said Dr. Holzhaider.
The juveniles need their extended apprenticeship. “They’re incredibly persistent, wildly ripping and hacking at Pandanus leaves, trying to make it work,” said Dr. Holzhaider, “but for six months or so, juveniles are no way able to make a tool.”
The parents step into the breach, offering the trainee food they have secured with their own finely honed tools. “By seeing their parents get a slug out of a tree, they learn that there’s something down there worth searching for,” she said. “That keeps them going.”
The carrot-on-stick approach: It works every time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01angier.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
So once tool gets excepted it quickly gets standardized. When do we see this standardization in spear tip designs? Not until around 50,000 years ago.Although there had been different types of tools created prior to this technique, mostly that of handaxes and cleavers this new technique was a great advancement for early man. Believed roughly to have been first used 200,000 years ago this technique involved a removal of flakes from a piece of stone to achieve desired shape and thickness. The use of this technique is believed to be a significant change in culture and shows an increasing growth of cognitive ability, as one that is using this method must be able to imagine the end product and maintain that image while conditioning the stone to the desired shape and end result tool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared-core_technique
I would also strongly argue that the dating given here of 200,000 years ago, is the date of the beginning of the development of complex knapping technique, rather than the beginning of standardization of the spear and arrow tips. It took considerable amount of time to perfect the knapping and pecking technique. This improvement only happened when and it was needed. Remember first rule of hunter gatherers: why bother if you don't have to. But also remember the first rule of tool making: something is only a tool if it can effectively solve a problem we are facing. If we need to break a nut, a stone is a good enough tool. So we will stick with a stone for nut cracking. If we need to crack someone's scull, stone is still a good tool, but a wooden club is better. It generates more cracking power but it also allows us to reach further so that the other guy, who only has a stone can't hit us. We can also use wooden clubs to hammer in wooden pins if we are constructing something. So why was a stone head hammer invented then? Well what if we need to repeatedly hit something which is very hot, like hot metal? We can't use just a stone, because we would burn ourselves. And we can't use wooden clubs, because wood would catch fire and it is not hard enough. So we combine wooden club for distance and force generation and stone for hardness and fire resistance and we get a hammer.An ongoing controversy about the nature of Middle Paleolithic tools is whether there were a series of functionally specific and preconceived tool forms or whether there was a simple continuum of tool morphology that reflect the extent of edge maintenance, as Harold Dibble has suggested.[25]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_PaleolithicMousterian tools that have been found in Europe were made by Neanderthals and date from between 300,000 BP and 30,000 BP (from Layer 2A dated 330 ± 5 ka, (OIS) 9 at Pradayrol, France).[3] In Northern Africa and the Near East they were also produced by anatomically modern humans. In the Levant for example, assemblages produced by Neanderthals are indistinguishable from those produced by Qafzeh type modern humans.[4] It may be an example of acculturation of modern humans by Neanderthals because the culture after 130,000 years reached the Levant from Europe (the first Mousterian industry appears there 200,000 BP) and the modern Qafzeh type humans appear in the Levant another 100,000 years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian
This is a proof that it is the function that drives the development of tools and standardization of shapes.
The standardization of spear tip designs only appears when we get closer to 100,000 years before now, and we see clear standardization in Aterian layers.
The Aterian is the name given to a distinctive stone tool industry made by anatomically modern humans between about 80,000 and 40,000 years ago. The tools are found on sites in northern Africa between the Atlantic coast to the Kharga Oasis and the western edge of the Nile river basin.
http://archaeology.about.com/od/aterms/qt/aterian.htm
This brings us right at the time when we find evidence for the production and use of animal skins and for the production and use of resin, two things necessary for proper hafting of spear tips.
So much for 500,000 year old spear tips. Only people who don't understand how and why tools are made and used will come up with a claim as silly as that.
As Rob Gargett says:The problem is that once a story like this gets into a refereed journal there are many impressionable minds that'll just consume it without looking closely, and the myth will just continue to grow. There are also those very serious archaeologists out there who're predisposed to expecting stories like this one. Any chance they're gonna be critical? Hardly likely. The referees who gave this paper a thumbs-up ought, truly, to be ashamed of themselves. The Editors of the Journal of Archaeological Science oughta be ashamed of themselves, too. Elsevier, the publisher, ought to be asking why this paper was accepted when, presumably, the vast majority of submissions are rejected for better reasons. Whatever happened to critical thinking? Whatever happened to common sense? Oh, yeah, well, it's never been all than common.0 -
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How did people come up with an idea for stone spear tips?
In the above excerpt about prepared core knapping technique, we read this:The use of this technique is believed to be a significant change in culture and shows an increasing growth of cognitive ability, as one that is using this method must be able to imagine the end product and maintain that image while conditioning the stone to the desired shape and end result tool.
This statement was clearly made by someone who does not understand how humans learn how to make things. People learn how to make things through imitation. They either try to imitate the shape of some thing they can see in front of them and which they want to copy. Or they imitate the way their teacher makes some thing they want to copy. Even today people learn in exactly the same way. At home you are imitating your parents. In schools you are imitating your teachers. When you are learning from a book, you are imitating the thought processes described in the book.
When we invent something new, this is just an improvement of something we learned how to imitate or combination of things we learned how to imitate. When we are solving a problem, we have in our minds the problem we are facing and the array of tools that we know of which can potentially solve the problem. We invent new tools, when none of the tools at our disposal is good enough to solve the problem at hand. This results in better tools. Only people with good understanding of the problem and the available tools can come up with better tools. Even if the invention is accidental, we can benefit from it if we know of a problem which can be solved by this accidental invention, and we can realize that the new invention can be used as a tool for solving that problem.
Our problem solving ability is based on our pattern recognition and comparison ability. This is ancient ability clearly shared by us, primates and crows. The difference seems to be not nature, but nurture. Parents and groups gathering knowledge and passing it onto their offspring through teaching and through epigenetics. If someone observes a problem - solution pattern in nature, he will remember it and invoke it when similar problem arises. Combine that with shape patterns, material patterns, force patterns and you start getting into tool making.
Where did people get the idea to make a first plain sharpen wooden stick spear? Well look at the example i gave already. Thorn pierces skin. Animal horns pierce skin. Something pointy and sharp pierces skin. If I can make this stick to resemble the shape of a thorn and horn, it will be pointy and sharp and it will pierce the skin. And we have the idea for a tool called plain wooden spear. What is left is to find the way to sharpen the wooden stick. How about these sharp stone flakes. And remember that sticks which are smoldered are harder than raw sticks. And remember that this particular type of wood is harder than that one....So you pick a hardwood sapling, cut it and sharpen it with stone flake while hardening it with fire, all the time trying to imitate the shape of a thorn or horn. And you turn your idea of a spear into a spear. After many mistakes through which you learn how to do it better and better.
Where did people get the idea to make stone arrow and spear tips in the shape they made them? Could people have observed similar object somewhere in nature which has a shape similar to a spear tip and is sharp and serrated? A natural tool which solves the piercing problem in an effective way, is hafted and has a shape similar to a stone spear tip? Are standardized stone arrow and spear tips shapes maybe similar to the shape of that natural tool? Well have a look for yourself:
Shark teeth
1. Shark teeth are not attached to gums on a root like our teeth.
2. Sharks typically lose at least one tooth per week.
3. Sharks lose their teeth because they may become stuck in prey or broken and forced out.
4. Shark teeth are popularly found as beach treasures because sharks shed 1000s of teeth in a lifetime.
5. Well after a shark dies and its body decomposes its teeth will fossilize.
6. Fossilized shark teeth are not white because they are usually covered with sediment (which prevents oxygen and bacteria from getting to them).
7. It takes about 10,000 years for a shark tooth to fossilize. The most commonly found shark teeth fossils are from 65,000 year ago (the Cenozoic era).
8. A shark’s tooth shape is dependent upon its diet. For instance, the short fin mako razor like teeth tear flesh, the tiger shark has piercing teeth to cut flesh, and the zebra shark has dense flattened teeth because it feasts upon mollusks.
Arrow and spear tips
Does anyone see any similarity here? If shark teeth are so easy to find on beaches even today when we know that shark population is only fraction of what it used to be, how common must they have been on paleolithic beaches? Shark teeth are very good tools for cutting and slicing. Flint flake is a super sharp cutting tool. All people needed to do is perfect their knapping and pecking technique to be able to produce their own flint version of shark tooth shape while looking at a shark tooth. And you get stone arrow and spear heads.
While we are talking about teeth, does anyone see any similarity between carnivore jaws and particularly shark jaws and their ability to cleanly cut they pray in half and later human toothed cutting tools like saws?
Mamal carnivore jaws:
Shark jows:
Human imitations:
Late Magdalenian saws from the Dordogne
To be able to use these kind of pattern similarities you need to be good at noticing and processing them. The main problems people needed to solve were how to make the artificial teeth and how to haft the artificial teeth onto wood. But the idea of the existence of a tooth like tools was there in nature. It just had to be recognized.For those of you who are wondering how you weaponise shark teeth, which are already regenerating, serrated meat knives at the business end of a streamlined, electric-sensing torpedo, here’s how. You drill a tiny hole in them, and then bind them in long rows to a piece of wood to make a sword. Or a trident. Or a four-metre-long lance. And then, presumably, you hit people really hard with them.
That’s what the people of the Gilbert Islands have been doing for centuries. Sharks are an ingrained part of their culture and their teeth have been an ingrained part of their weapons. Tiger sharks feature heavily – they have thick, cleaver-like teeth that can slice through turtle shells so they make a good cutting edge. But the weapons also include the teeth from spottail, dusky and bignose sharks (you can identify species from their teeth), and none of these actually live around the Gilbert Islands today.
Shark tooth weapons from Micronesia:
Not everyone's pattern recognition and comparison ability is the same. Also, out of two people who have the same pattern recognition and comparison ability, the one faced with more varied problems will develop these abilities to a higher degree, and will be able to pass this ability to his offspring through teaching and epigenetics. If smart parents used their smartness to solve problems, their children will be smarter and better at solving problems but only if the children use their smartness to solve problems as well...Having brains is not enough. You have to use them.
Scientist are telling us that living in environments with lots of problems that need to be solved lead to development of bigger brains in individuals of the same species. Bigger brains make us more intelligent:Researchers first began to gather evidence that big brains were advantageous after 19th century U.S. biologist Hermon Bumpus examined the brains of sparrows, some of whom had succumbed in a blizzard and some of whom survived. The survivors had relatively larger brains. More recently, evolutionary biologist Alexei Maklakov from Uppsala University in Sweden found evidence that songbirds that colonize cities tend to have larger brains relative to their body size than species still confined to the countryside. The challenge of urban life might require bigger brains, he and his colleagues concluded last year in Biology Letters.
Yet in humans and in certain electric fish, larger brain size seems to have trade-offs: smaller guts and fewer offspring. That's led some scientists to suggest there are constraints on how big brains can become because they are expensive to build and maintain.
http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2012/07/bad-news-big-brains
So more varied the problems you are faced with are the more you will have to use your analytic and synthetic skills and better you will become in solving more and more complex problems. Also the more frequent the practical problems you are faced with are, the more skillful you become in solving them which includes developing of tools for solving the problems more efficiently. Also the more varied the practical problems you are faced with are, the more varied your skills and your tools become leading quicker to creation of composite tools. So cultures who lived in the climate that changed throughout the year had to develop skills, clothes, tools and equipment that would enable them to survive and thrive in all these different climatic periods. They would also need to become aware of time and natural cycles in order to predict the arrival of winter for instance. This is exactly what happened in Europe where first calendars were developed.
Here is an 8000 years old lunar calendar (first pocket calendar) found in Serbia.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2511828/Could-worlds-oldest-pocket-calendar-Engraved-tusk-told-farmers-harvest-crops-8-000-years-ago.html
The time of the invention of calendar coincides with the last glacial meltdown, when people started moving up north again, and when we started getting seasons again. We had people living in the temperate zones of Europe before, but I guess they were not yet smart enough to figure out correlation between moon patterns, sun patterns and climate patterns. Or maybe before 10,000 bc, these patterns were different and not so pronounced so they were more difficult to recognize. Or maybe it was just not important to calculate these patterns precisely. It was enough to see leaves turning yellow and red and to see birds flying south, to realize winter is coming and to start moving south. Maybe the real question is why did it become important to people to calculate the change of moon patterns, sun patterns and climate patterns precisely when it did? We know why knowing the date is important for herders and farmers. But why was it important for hunter gatherers 8000 years ago? Unless they were already involved in activities which required knowing the precise date, that we yet don't know about.
What ever the reason, once people did decide that calculating change in moon patterns, sun patterns and climate patterns is important, we see emergence of calendars as a tool for solving this problem.
If we apply the rule "more varied problems more brains", we would expect to find more technologically advanced civilizations in the areas that had much more volatile climate which would force people to deal with ever changing array of problems. This is exactly what we do find.
So we can see that through the interaction of our pattern recognition and comparison ability and different environmental influences which present different populations with different problems, we soon end up with different cultures characterized by different accumulated knowledge. But even within one human group we will see different accumulation of knowledge. Not all people within the same group living in the same habitat have the same observation and analytic skills. And among those who do have the same observation and analytic skills, some are lucky to see the right things at the right time which would help them to make right conclusions at the right moment.
The importance of luck in early human activities is preserved in the Irish language. Word Curadh (kurad) means one who is sticking out, who stands out, who is distinguished, hero, brave man, champion. this word consists of two words: Cur + Adh. Adh is word ending which is used in the Irish language to create a noun from a verb which is a description of an action. This word also means luck, in a sense that someone got lucky. This is very old construction because it describes exactly what happened in the oldest times when action did not always have intended consequence or result. One needed to be lucky, otherwise his work would not yield a result. So Curadh is someone who was lucky to survive all dangerous actions and by doing so he became someone who sticks out. In Serbian "biti Kurat" "biti kuronja" means hero, brave man, champion. It can also mean to have a big penis (kur), and so literally to stick out.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=85915234&postcount=150
In Serbian words for both luck and happiness are the same: "sreća". You can not be happy (srećan) unless you are lucky (srećan). Understanding of this relationship between luck and happiness is extremely important for understanding of the development of gods and religions. After realizing that there is a relationship between luck and happiness, people started wandering who decides who gets lucky and why. So they figured out that there must be some unseen force or creature which has the control over luck. So they invented gods as the ones who decide who is going to be lucky or unlucky. And this is my favorite bit: People created religions, as practices which if performed will please gods and make them bestow luck on those who perform the same pleasing religious rights. This is why all religious ceremonies involve some kind of sacrifice. Gain is linked with luck. You only gain if you are lucky. You loose if you are unlucky. If you want a big gain you need to suffer small loss. It is like giving a bit of luck back to the gods in exchange for a lot of luck. Very interesting and definitely worth exploring more.
Once a person discovers something which can benefit his survival and prosperity, he will use it. He is also most likely to only disclose it to the closest relatives and allies. This was the case in prehistory and is still the case today in an environment where multiple human groups are competing for the same resources. For instance if someone discovered how to make a spear, he would teach the members of his clan how to do it but not the members of the neighboring clan. Soon you would have a division into a spear people and the others. Spear people would as time passed become better and more skillful in making spears. They would use better stronger wood, they would make spears sharper. The spear people would become more successful in hunting and fighting. They would multiply. More spear people means more spears and more spears means more success in hunting and fighting with other human groups. The spear people can start to expand pushing and wiping out other people.
Soon enough the spear people wouldn't have to think about food gathering all the time. They would be able to use spears to kill large game which would provide them with lots of food and skin and fur.
The large game hunt probably looked like this:
Actually we know exactly that it looked like it, because we have large game hunt with spears on film:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxPtb397Dxc
Spear completely changed human world. People would as a consequence have more time to think about things like inventing and making shelters, clothes, footwear. They would, because of this, be eventually able to move into the areas which require clothes and shelter in order to survive, but which are empty of people and full of food. They would have more time for leisure and art and music...All along, the knowledge in both making and using the spears as well as the experience of success and power that spears bring, would be passed and accumulated from generation to generation orally and genetically through epigenetic changes.0 -
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Haplogroup I2 is the most common paternal lineage in former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Sardinia, and a major lineage in most Slavic countries. Its maximum frequencies are observed in Bosnia (55%, including 71% in Bosnian Croats), Sardinia (39.5%), Croatia (38%), Serbia (33%), Montenegro (31%), Romania (28%), Moldova (24%), Macedonia (24%), Slovenia (22%), Bulgaria (22%), Belarus (18.5%), Hungary (18%), Slovakia (17.5%), Ukraine (13.5%), and Albania (13.5%). It is found at a frequency of 5 to 10% in Germanic countries.
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I2_Y-DNA.shtml
These dolmens are dated to third millennium bc.
vuruna dolmen Bulgaria:
vuruna dolmen Sardinia
vuruna dolmen Gramont, Hérault
Does anyone know of any other dolmens of this type?
Are these dolmens temples of Agni? Are these dolmens the original Vuruna? Is this where Agni lived? Does this mean that Agni was created by I2 population and passed onto R1a?
In Serbian word "vuruna", "furuna", Vurnja means furnace.
Here is a picture of vuruna, vurnja:
The word comes from vur, var + u + nj = fire + in + it = furnace.
Stone oven still used in Russia:
Cromlech is a Brythonic word (Breton/Cornish/Welsh) used to describe prehistoric megalithic structures, where crom means "bent" or "curved" and llech means "slab" or "flagstone".[1] The term is now virtually obsolete in archaeology, but remains in use as a colloquial term for two different types of megalithic monument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CromlechShortly before 4,000 BC, farming was introduced into Ireland and this move from the Mesolithic hunter gatherer culture to a Neolithic farming society, was the single greatest social revolution there has ever been. The most prominent remains of this early prehistoric period are the megalithic tombs, the majority of which were constructed in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC (4000-2000 BC). These are the 'Giant's Grave' & 'Druid's Altar' of the Victorian Antiquarians, the 'Leaba Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne' of popular folklore and the 'Cromlech' and 'Dolmen' of earlier writers.
http://www.newgrange.com/druids-alters-giants-graves.htmThere are thousands of tumuli throughout all Croatia, built of stone (Croatian: gomila, gromila) in the carst areas (by the Adriatic Sea) or made of earth (Croatian: humak) in the inland plains and hills. The most of these prehistoric structures were built in the 2nd and 1st millennium BC, from the middle Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age, by the Illyrians or their direct ancestors in the same place; the Liburnian inhumation of dead under tumuli was certainly inherited from the earlier times, as early as the Copper Age. Smaller tumuli were used as the burial mounds, while bigger (some up to 7 metres high with 60 metres long base) were the cenotaphs (empty tombs) and ritual places.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumulus
In South Slavic lands, any material piled up is called "gomila". Stone is called "kamen". Large stone is called "gromada". Pile of large rocks is called gromila = gromada + gomila = large rocks + pile. Any ancient stone structure from cairns, tumuluses, old ring forts they are all called gromile or gomile. So is this where word Cromlech comes from?
In Serbian word for "to lie down" is "leg". Word for thunder is "grom". Word for giant is "div".
Crom Dubh = Hromi Daba = Grom Div = Thunder Giant. Who is this thunder giant? The day of Crom Dubh is 2. of August. In Serbia this is Sveti Ilija, the day of thundering sun, Ilios. But also Perun dan, the day of Thunder god Perun.
If ancient people imagined Triglav in any way shape of form, then it would have been a giant, with the sun as its head or eye, thunder as his spear or club and fire as his essence.
If Cromlech is a "Giant's Grave" then giant would be placed to lie in it. Cromlech = the place where grom (div) leg = thunder giants lies.
Triglav, Dabog, Dagda, Hromi Daba, Crom Dubh, Grom Div, the Thunder Giant. Gromile, are his temples. Dabog was god of Life and Death. The dead were burned, to unite with Agni, Triglav, Dabog. The ashes were placed in Gromila the home of Grom Div, the house of god.0 -
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dublinviking wrote: »http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I2_Y-DNA.shtml
These dolmens are dated to third millennium bc.
vuruna dolmen Bulgaria:
vuruna dolmen Sardinia
vuruna dolmen Gramont, Hérault
Does anyone know of any other dolmens of this type?
Are these dolmens temples of Agni? Are these dolmens the original Vuruna? Is this where Agni lived? Does this mean that Agni was created by I2 population and passed onto R1a?
In Serbian word "vuruna", "furuna", Vurnja means furnace.
Here is a picture of vuruna, vurnja:
The word comes from vur, var + u + nj = fire + in + it = furnace.
Stone oven still used in Russia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromlech
http://www.newgrange.com/druids-alters-giants-graves.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumulus
In South Slavic lands, any material piled up is called "gomila". Stone is called "kamen". Large stone is called "gromada". Pile of large rocks is called gromila = gromada + gomila = large rocks + pile. Any ancient stone structure from cairns, tumuluses, old ring forts they are all called gromile or gomile. So is this where word Cromlech comes from?
In Serbian word for "to lie down" is "leg". Word for thunder is "grom". Word for giant is "div".
Crom Dubh = Hromi Daba = Grom Div = Thunder Giant. Who is this thunder giant? The day of Crom Dubh is 2. of August. In Serbia this is Sveti Ilija, the day of thundering sun, Ilios. But also Perun dan, the day of Thunder god Perun.
If ancient people imagined Triglav in any way shape of form, then it would have been a giant, with the sun as its head or eye, thunder as his spear or club and fire as his essence.
If Cromlech is a "Giant's Grave" then giant would be placed to lie in it. Cromlech = the place where grom (div) leg = thunder giants lies.
Triglav, Dabog, Dagda, Hromi Daba, Crom Dubh, Grom Div, the Thunder Giant. Gromile, are his temples. Dabog was god of Life and Death. The dead were burned, to unite with Agni, Triglav, Dabog. The ashes were placed in Gromila the home of Grom Div, the house of god.
No. Absolutely not.
Cromlech comes from the welsh words crom and leach.0
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