New Big Ideas About Stone Age Evolution, Language, Technology

3 New Big Ideas 
About Stone Age
Human Evolution, Language and Technology
by Rick Doble

This grass house (mudhif) was built entirely out of reeds, including the rope and mats. Many archaeologists believe this basic design was older than the first Mesopotamian cities and these types of buildings housed many people after the Sumerian civilizations had risen.

"Iraq's Marsh Arabs use reeds to build vaulted reception halls called mudhifs, such as this one at Albu Hamrah near the ancient Sumerian archaeological site of Lagash."

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mudhif_Reception_Hall_(30943793762).jpg

INTRODUCTION

I am a generalist when most people who study a subject are specialists. This is *not* a criticism of specialization but it is a criticism of overvaluing specialization. There is room for both disciplines although they approach their subject matter quite differently: the specialist approaches from the bottom up so to speak, the generalist from the top down.

What often gets lost, when a discussion about generalism occurs, is that there are rules. It is much too easy to weave together a number of ideas and then come up with a theory that attempts to prove aliens built Stonehenge, for example.

Like specialization, a generalist should rely on proven facts and accepted ideas. It is my opinion that generalists should provide ample substantiated evidence pointing to the truth of their ideas. And this evidence should come from a range of reliable sources and disciplines. Just because they/we are generalists does not free us from the burden of the scientific process. If anything, it requires that we do more.

The problem is that generalists often think outside the box. They often do not have major academic credentials, they often propose ideas about disciplines that they have not specialized in. They often have wide-ranging knowledge of several fields, for example, which they then weave together.

A good example is that of Charles Darwin whose wide-ranging interests allowed him to come up with his theory of evolution. It was his study of geology (and not biology) that provided the key because it became clear that the world was much, much older than previously believed which also meant that natural forms, including humans, could have evolved over long periods of time. He discovered clear evidence of this timetable when he found seashells in Cape Verde, high up in the mountains, indicating that the mountains had once been at sea level and then, over thousands if not millions of years, had moved. 

"Fossilized sea shells in sandstone outcroppings at the summit
of Mount Diablo, Contra Costa County, California (Altitude: 3,864 feet)"

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fossilized_seashells_at_the_summit_of_Mt._Diablo,_CA.jpg

Plate tectonics and continental drift are examples of a theory that was initially rejected as absurd, but that now is central to our understanding of the Earth's geology. There was considerable evidence pointing to the truth of this idea but no one, including its founder Wegener, could explain the dynamics that caused the continents to move. Alfred Wegener came up with this idea around 1915 but was often ridiculed by major authorities such as George Gaylord Simpson who attacked it as nonsense and instead promoted his own idea, which now seems absurd, a theory of periodic huge floods. Admittedly Wegener's ideas needed further proof. Yet when positive proof did appear the prestigious journal Nature refused to print an article that considered this theory. In the 1950s solid irrefutable proof was found based on the new study and technology of paleomagnetism which was able to show "seafloor spreading," i.e., that the floor of the oceans had moved, as shown by the timetable of the shifting polarity of undersea volcanic rock which records the shifting magnetism of the Earth over time. Continental drift is now considered one of the great scientific ideas of the last 100 years. And it caused a paradigm shift.

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The history of the continents and continental drift

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fig2-5globes.gif

While I, of course, do not consider myself to be in the same 'league' as these two monumental scientists, I think their examples are important. 

ABOUT MY WORK AND THIS BLOG

As of 10/26/2021, my blog has recorded: 116,561 page views along with total combined views of another 100k at two academic websites, academia.edu and figshare.com, along with about 17k PDF downloads of these articles.

I started this blog about the human experience of time in 2012. When I began I did not know where this inquiry would take me. But now years later it has yielded more ideas than I ever imagined. Often one initial idea lead to another and then another and before I knew it I had begun to map out a certain aspect. My blogs about basket weaving technology are a good example. I began with a basic idea that basket weaving technology (or woven-fiber technology as I have suggested it be called) had created a wide variety of products in prehistoric cultures. But almost two years later, I thought it was possible that this technology might have begun 2 million years ago with Homo habilis (or other hominins) who could have learned from the intricate nests of weaverbirds and also that the first civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt could not have emerged without a highly developed woven-fiber technology. 

So with this introduction, I will list three of my major ideas that I have formulated over the last ten years in this blog about the human experience of time. While I have an M.A. in Communication (minor in Anthropology) and a B.A. in English (with many Anthropology and Sociology courses), I clearly do not have the credentials in Anthropology, for example, that would normally be required if I were working in the academic world. Nevertheless, I have a lifelong interest in Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures -- as I collected Neolithic stone tools and other artifacts for my own personal "museum" starting at the age of 9. And now at the age of 75+, I want to put my ideas 'out there' while my thinking process is still clear and before old age closes in.

My hope is that some of my ideas have "legs" and that other researchers and specialists will consider them. In any case, I have hoped to add to the ongoing dialogue about the human condition.

All of my work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Copyright meaning that you can quote as much as you like as long as you give me credit.

THE HUMAN SENSE OF TIME

In Brief: Homo sapiens have a unique part of the brain that may have led to the development of a 'sense' of linear time -- time with a past, present, future, and duration.

Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/08/animal-senses-compared-to-human-sense.html

LEFT: Compound eyes of a Robber fly

RIGHT: Left eye of a girl

As we all know dogs have a much better sense of smell than we humans do. Their sense of smell is at least 1000 times more acute than that of Homo sapiens. Different animals often have different senses and their ability to sense things in the world can be quite unusual. In this article, I make the argument that humans have a unique sense of time -- a sense just like touch and sight. We are the only animal that understands linear time -- time with a past, present, and future and also a sense of duration. No other animal has this, although most have a sense of cyclical time, such as a dog knowing when it is time to be fed. 

Furthermore, it is this sense of linear time that allows us to work with time, to plan, and to coordinate. This gives us a power no other animal has and has allowed us to become the dominant species on the planet. Brain research has shown that we have a unique part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) which we are only beginning to understand but which definitely does involve working with time. Much of this was not understood when I wrote this article in August 2014 so my blog may be one of the first to suggest this.

This is my most popular article which has been viewed over 11,000 times: 9,064 times on my blog and these two academic sites: 1,408 (views & downloads) on Academia.edu and 855 (views & downloads) on Figshare.com. This has been viewed by researchers in about 90 countries.

THE PDF FILE ON ACADEMIC WEBSITES

Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time

Academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/8413225/Animal_Senses_Compared_to_the_Human_Sense_of_Time_By_Rick_Doble

Figshare.com

https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Animal_Senses_Compared_to_the_Human_Sense_of_Time_by_Rick_Doble/3443591

HOW LANGUAGE BEGAN AND THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME

In Brief: If language developed over a million years as Dan Everett has suggested, the earliest languages would probably have had immediate concepts of time, since Homo sapiens or earlier species had just begun to emerge from the immediacy of animal existence.

How Language Began and the Human Understanding of Time: Daniel Everett's New Theories About the Evolution of Language

https://www.academia.edu/37624870/How_Language_Began_and_the_Human_Understanding_of_Time_Daniel_Everetts_New_Theories_About_the_Evolution_of_Language

All linguists agree that reference to time is a universal aspect of all languages. In fact, language is the primary tool for communicating time concepts, for working with time, and for planning and coordinating. 

But since animals live in the immediate moment and we emerged from our animal existence to invent language and conceive of linear time, the concept of time was probably quite different in the beginning. In this article, I suggest that the early concepts of time were concepts of immediacy. And there is a 'primitive' tribe in the Amazon that refers to time in this manner. While the tribe is thought of as 'primitive' the language is quite sophisticated and is able to express a complex view of immediate time. 

This fits very nicely with Daniel Everett's new theory about the development of language. He believes that it developed over a million or so years. I believe an evolving concept of time from the immediate to the modern sense of linear time might have taken that long to come into being.

This article has been well received by the academic community. I posted this article on my blog and also on two academic websites, Academia.edu and Figshare.com. At these two academic sites, I recorded a combined 800 page views and 235 downloads. Here is one comment I got on Academia.edu from Terence Meaden, Alumnus of the University of Oxford, "Originality and likely correctness."

The initial posting on my blog.

Daniel Everett's New Theories About The Evolution Of Language 

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/10/everett-how-language-began-and-human-time-keeping.html

Read more of my articles about the development of language:

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/p/time-concepts-origins-of-language-it-is.html

Deafblind Helen Keller reading the lips of First Lady, Mrs. Coolidge, in 1926. Helen wrote that time did not exist for her until she learned language. "My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future...There were no stars—no earth—no time."

See my blog about Helen Keller: 

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/12/time-consciousness.html

Photo credit:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helen_Keller5.jpg

EVIDENCE FOR A BASKET WEAVING AND WOVEN-FIBER TECHNOLOGY IN THE PALEOLITHIC ERA

In Brief: Basket weaving technology may have begun in the earliest days of hominin existence and helped these species survive and evolve. Later, when basket weaving technology was fully developed, it was a crucial technology for the emergence of the earliest civilizations.

Evidence for a Basket Weaving and Woven-Fiber Technology in the Paleolithic Era

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2019/09/evidence-for-basket-weaving-technology.html

LEFT: "Weaver bird (Southern Masked Weaver) nest of dry grass.
Near Pretoria, South Africa."

RIGHT: Random weave basket (Basket/Photo by Nan Bowles)

The third big idea is that 'basket weaving technology' (or 'woven-fiber technology' as I have suggested it be called) began very early in the evolution of hominins and continued to be a crucial technology for the emergence of civilization. 

Simple baskets made with a random weave at the beginning would have allowed more food to be gathered along with more resources such as carefully chosen quartz used in tool making that was collected at a distant location and for which there is evidence. In addition, I have shown that hominins lived in close association with weaverbirds who made elaborate strong nests, so these nests could have served as an early model for a basket technology. The problem, as I have pointed out, is that 'basketry can't get no respect'. 

Yet during the emergence of the world's first civilizations in Mesopotamia, this technology was used to build huge sophisticated grass houses and large boats along with important items for irrigation and the management of agriculture. So this was not a minor contribution to the rise of Sumerian civilizations but a major factor. From cuneiform tablet evidence I have shown that a robust reed industry existed in ancient Mesopotamia.

I have spent almost two years writing about this in detail, attempting to construct a timeline from about 2 million years ago to about 6,000 years ago when a fully developed technology was available. My first fully detailed blog about this is now my second most popular blog article, from month to month. 

NOTE: It is one of the ironies of life, that I had begun to formulate my ideas about basket weaving technology when the COVID 19 virus became rampant and my wife and I stayed home most of the time. So during the next year or so I concentrated on this idea about basketry, as I had the time to do so. I wonder if I would have done such a complete study if the virus shut-down had not occurred.

This is a fanciful, but perhaps not inaccurate, painting of a large ship made of reeds at the port of Eridu, considered to be the oldest city of the first civilization in Mesopotamia, about 5000-6000 years ago. The ship as pictured is not unrealistic and was constructed using bundled reeds, a large version of coiled basket weaving techniques.

View the original Russian language page.

PDF FILE

Evidence for a Basket Weaving and Woven-Fiber Technology in the Paleolithic Era

https://www.academia.edu/40430521/Evidence_for_a_Basket_Weaving_and_Woven_Fiber_Technology_in_the_Paleolithic_Era

See a listing of more than a dozen blog-articles about basket weaving technology:

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

Download a complete set of articles in PDF format:

The Illustrated Theory of Paleo Basket-Weaving Technology by Rick Doble

https://www.academia.edu/44237715/The_Illustrated_Theory_of_Paleo_Basket_Weaving_Technology_by_Rick_Doble

Two PDF articles that focus on basketry in the earliest civilization:

Mesopotamian Ancient Basket Weaving Technology and the Sumerian Reed Industry

https://www.academia.edu/49359896/Mesopotamian_Ancient_Basket_Weaving_Technology_and_the_Sumerian_Reed_Industry

A traditional South American suspension bridge made entirely of rope. It has now been established that rope was being made 40 ka by early hominins and that the rope technology was probably much older.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IRB-6-BringingDeckMat-KC603-8.jpg

CURRENT ACADEMIC THINKING ABOUT THESE TOPICS

The subject of time has been recognized as important but there are very few academic papers that examine the human development of time concepts in any detail.

"It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present."

Whitrow G.L., Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day,  Oxford University Press, 1988.

"Time reference is a universal property of language..."

Jacqueline Lecarme, Ph.D., Linguistics

The subject of time has not really been dealt with. While it is clear that humans must have grasped a sense of time over thousands of years, starting with the immediate animal sense of time to the linear time we live with today, there has been very little academic discussion. My work tries to bring this topic to the fore. Clearly our concepts and understanding of time play a major role in our technology, language, culture, and our lives.

For almost 100 years it was assumed that basketry could not have started before the Neolithic era. This assumption was not based on facts or science. Recent discoveries have shown that sophisticated basketry was being made 27 ka. And very recently rope was discovered that is 40 ka. 

My work suggests that even today current academic assumptions about basket technology are incorrect. It could have begun millions of years ago, for example, and I may be the first or one of the first to make this assertion. If true then this technology not only aided the survival of hominins but played a role in the evolution of humans. My work also suggests that basketry was a key technology, if not the key technology, that allowed the first civilizations to emerge in Mesopotamia and Egypt. This is a new idea about the development of civilization.

If any of these ideas become accepted or influence the inquiry and research into these topics, it would be a major shift in current thinking. 

The Mystery of Gobekli Tepe: The World's Oldest Temple

THE WORLD'S OLDEST TEMPLE:

THE MYSTERY OF GOBEKLI TEPE

How A New Understanding Of Time 

Gave Birth To The Gods

Time is fundamental. Like food or shelter, it one of the critical elements of every person, every civilization, every period in history. BUT the human use and understanding of time are not the same from era to era. It is this difference that has been ignored but which is crucial. 

I believe that early Homo sapiens, for example, who were hunter-gatherers and nomadic, had a present, immediate, 'now' oriented sense of time -- one which we would have a hard time understanding. 

Daniel Everett who wrote How Language Began has studied the hunter-gatherer nomadic Amazonian tribe, the Piraha. It seems that their culture is very old. He believes they speak a more basic, perhaps earlier language and live a more basic existence than most people on the Earth. Everything they do is based in the here and now. Their working understanding of time involves about a day or two in the past and a day or two into the future. Time exists but within a narrow window. As a result, they do not have a religion or creation myths and they are not afraid of death. Everything is now.

If the Piraha are a model for earlier and primary concepts of time, then the next stages that followed must have been quite disturbing. Because this is when the experience of time began to change toward our modern view -- our view that time is a long continuum with a past, present, and future. This was a seismic shift. And this shift was so fundamental, I believe it may have led to the emergence of religion. 

The Birth Of Gods 

Came Before The Birth Of Cities

This transition to a new view of time may have been played out in southern Turkey 11,000 years ago. 

The recently discovered ancient site, Gobekli Tepe, is the oldest known religious site in the world. It is located in the hills near the source of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. "Radiocarbon dating as well as comparative, stylistical analysis indicate that it is the oldest religious site yet discovered anywhere." It is twice as old as the oldest Egyptian pyramid having been built 6,000 years earlier.
Quotation from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

One of two hundred columns, weighing up to ten tons, that were made with stone tools about 10,000 years ago by nomadic hunter-gatherers. Notice the precise crafting of the column and the carved figure that is part of the column.

Gobekli Tepe is an extensive site with carefully crafted huge stone pillars weighing up to ten tons that were made by hunter-gatherers using only stone tools. These people came together at various times during the year to work on the site and for ceremonies. Created by Pre-Neolithic people, its discovery has completely changed ideas about the development of civilization and religion and the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle of early humans to the sedentary lifestyle of Neolithic farmers. Before Gobekli Tepe it was assumed that Neolithic people created villages and farms; then from this culture, religion and large cities and civilizations evolved and emerged. 

But the discovery of Gobekli Tepe has turned this idea on its ear. Klaus Schmidt, who spent most of his life excavating Gobekli Tepe said, "First came the temple, then the city." 

An overview of the Gobekli Tepe excavation site.
Only a very small percentage has been uncovered.

"Gobekli Tepe appears to signal the beginning of new beliefs, which principal archeologist Klaus Schmidt thought were probably Shamanistic, but which also needed the structure of a religious complex to express these beliefs. It perhaps signals a transitional point between Shamanism and a later mythology of gods and goddesses."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

About Shamanism:  According to most anthropologists the first religious beliefs were a shamanistic type of religion in which the Shaman could communicate with the Otherworld. The Otherworld was a spiritual timeless world or a world that existed on a very different time plane. The Shaman usually went into a trance and then acted as an intermediary between the Otherworld and the people in his tribe. 

Before the discovery of Gobekli Tepe, the French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin wrote a revolutionary book. He believed that the Neolithic/agricultural Revolution happened not because people needed to survive, but rather because there was a "Revolution of Symbols" which changed how human beings related to nature. He believed that the modern concept of gods and God occurred at this time. In 1994 when he proposed this in his book, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, it was a radical idea.

"French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin believed this change in consciousness was a 'revolution of symbols,' a conceptual shift that allowed humans to imagine gods—supernatural beings resembling humans—that existed in a universe beyond the physical world. Schmidt sees Gobekli Tepe as evidence for Cauvin's theory. 'The animals were guardians to the spirit world,' he says. 'The reliefs on the T-shaped pillars illustrate that other world.' "

Gobekli Tepe "suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it."  Mann, Charles. The Birth of Religion. National Geographic Magazine, June 2011, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/06/gobeki-tepe/

The thought that "...humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it" highlights the idea that at this point, humans no longer believed they were part of the animal and natural world but in a new and superior realm. Humans had power because they could do a number of things which animals could not do, such as speak a language -- which distinguished humans from the natural world. But humans also acquired a concept of time along with an ability to manage time. This was an ability which animals did not have and which gave humans mastery over the natural world because humans could plan and predict and also shape their own environment. And concepts of time have always been part of every language. 

Time reference is a universal property of language...

Jacqueline Lecarme, Ph.D., Linguistics

Then in the same year that Cauvin's book came out, Gobekli Tepe was found. The site had been buried for ten thousand years. But because it was buried, it was well preserved and the quality of the workmanship was superb. Nevertheless, the people who built this complex were not yet at the Neolithic point of development. They had not even started to make pottery, for example, or farm crops. The site appeared to be a religious gathering place that was used regularly by hunter-gatherers who did not live there. Klaus Schmidt said it was a "cathedral on a hill." 

Looking At This Transition 

From A Time Perspective

While Cauvin and Schmidt look at this from a religious perspective, I instead want to look at this huge Pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer 'cathedral' from a human-sense-of-time point of view. I believe that there was something even more fundamental than religion at play here -- that it was a changing concept of time which caused a major shift in the belief system and it was this shift that later led to myths and gods.

From the point of view of the development of the human-sense-of-time, it is probable that these hunter-gatherers had begun to acquire a new sense of time, a sense of time that was not immediate like the Amazonian Piraha but that had a past, present, and future. But they had not yet developed agriculture or a Neolithic sedentary lifestyle. This new sense of time as a continuum would have had profound spiritual implications. For one thing, it meant that people could now envision their own death which must have been frightening. And since they knew that time now had a past, they needed explanations for the creation of the world. 

Known as "winged hourglasses," variations of this symbol were common in cemeteries for hundreds of years in Europe and North America. The wings come from the Roman expression "tempus fugit" or "time flies" and the hourglass is a symbol for the limited time of a person's life. So an understanding of time also resulted in a fear of death and religious warnings about the transience of life.

How do we know that these people had a sophisticated understanding of time? Simple. Although they lived in various places in the vicinity of the 'temple' (Schmidt estimates a radius of 100 miles), they were able to communicate and coordinate their activities. This required a shared and accurate method for keeping time -- otherwise, they would not have been able to work together and create this huge complex and these precisely crafted ten ton stone columns using stone tools. 

"The planning and building of such a site as Göbekli Tepe would have required a degree of organization and resources hitherto unknown in hunter-gatherer societies..." "In the absence of houses or domestic buildings of any sort in the area, Schmidt sees Göbekli Tepe as akin to a pilgrimage destination which attracted worshipers from as far away as a hundred miles. "  Haughton, Brian. Gobekli Tepe - the World's First Temple?  https://www.ancient.eu/article/234/gobekli-tepe---the-worlds-first-temple/

My point is simple. A developing sense of continuous time would have preceded religion and then this new understanding of time would have led to religion. This new sense of time was the fundamental primary force that caused religion to come into being.

Then later, and soon after, the Neolithic culture in this part of the world could have emerged -- which it did a few hundred years later. The Neolithic way of life required and depended on a sense of time for a number of reasons. First people needed to understand the yearly solar cycle because that determined the growing season. Second farming required in-depth knowledge of when to prepare the ground, when to plant and when to harvest. In addition, tools needed to be made in anticipation of needed work, grain needed to be stored and seeds needed to be saved for the following year's crops. 

"Area of the fertile crescent, circa 7500 BC, with main sites. Göbekli Tepe is one of the important sites of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. The area of Mesopotamia proper was not yet settled by humans."

"The region has been called the "cradle of civilization", because it is where settled farming first began to emerge as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation in order to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer flourished as a result. Technological advances in the region include the development of writing, glass, the wheel, agriculture, and the use of irrigation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_Crescent

"Investigations of other sites surrounding Göbekli Tepe have revealed a prehistoric village just 20 miles away where evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat has been recovered. According to radio carbon dates agriculture developed in the area around 10,500 years ago, just a few hundred years after the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Other sites in the region show evidence for the domestication of sheep, cattle, pigs, and animals 1,000 years after Göbekli Tepe’s monuments were erected. All this evidence suggests that the area around Göbekli Tepe was at the forefront of the agricultural revolution."  Brian Haughton, Gobekli Tepe - the World's First Temple?https://www.ancient.eu/article/234/gobekli-tepe---the-worlds-first-temple/

"Paradoxically, Göbekli Tepe appeared to be both a harbinger of the civilized world that was to come and the last, greatest emblem of a nomadic past that was already disappearing. " Mann, Charles. The Birth of Religion. National Geographic Magazine, June 2011, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/06/gobeki-tepe/

When hunter-gatherers reached the stage indicated by Gobekli Tepe, they had become fully aware of the past and fearful of their future. Humans now understood that everything had a past and came from the past. They also understood about the future -- that it was uncertain and that events which had happened in the past, such as floods, earthquakes, diseases, crop failures, and invasions, could happen again. This understanding about the past and future (a kind of linear timeline) eventually led to creation myths which explained where the world came from and a mythology of gods and goddesses who might be influenced by human rituals to assure a satisfactory future.

Then at some later point, when agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution had taken hold, time and religion became closely intertwined.

In the first book of the Bible, (a sacred text for Jews, Christians, and Muslims) in Genesis 1:14, (Common English Bible):
God said, "Let there be lights [ED: i.e., stars] in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night. They will mark events, sacred seasons, days, and years."  

In Greek mythology, Prometheus, whose name in Greek means forethought and who Greek mythology considers the father of mankind, also taught mankind how to tell time from the stars. 

Prometheus creating man from dirt, helped by Athena.

Prometheus said, "Listen to the miseries that beset mankind -- how they were witless before and I made them have sense and endowed them with reason... [They] managed everything without judgment, until I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings, which are difficult to distinguish." [ED: i.e., how to tell time and the timing of the seasons by the stars]
This quote is from the ancient Greek play
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, 5th Century BCE  (trans. Weir Smyth)
http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanPrometheus.html

The stars, the Zodiac, and the moon were giant clocks that humans learned to read. Most groups of people also thought of the heavens as the realm of the gods, gods who were removed and distant but who controlled events on Earth. They believed this because the stars always remained the same year after year and signaled the precise time of the year's cycle. While there might be storms, floods, forest fires and earthquakes on Earth, the stars were always the same, pure and untouched. This untouchable domain that the sun, moon, and planets inhabited was considered the spirit world. And the wandering planets were often considered gods and goddesses. 

This 4,000-year-old relief, known as the Burney Relief, came from the Babylonian civilization.
The figure is probably the goddess Ishtar who was associated with the planet Venus and was known as the "Queen of Heaven." 

Telling time via the stars and believing that the spirit world and the gods were in the Heavens was common when complex civilizations developed after Gobekli Tepe. 

Gobekli Tepe also foreshadowed the Neolithic obsession with megaliths. Its 200 megaliths that weigh as much as ten tons are the oldest known megaliths. Later, megaliths would be central to Neolithic cultures and their rituals.

"Experts now believe that megaliths stood at the very heart of ritual practice for the networks of communities scattered across western Europe later in the new Stone Age, or Neolithic period, that had begun around 10,000 B.C. Their function was both earthly and celestial: a focus for rites concerning the movement of the heavenly bodies across the skies, a memorial to the community’s ancestors, and an awe-inspiring site to cement local loyalty and solidarity...The incorporation of astronomical alignments suggests that neolithic ceremonies were closely bound with the changing seasons. These cycles were critical to agrarian communities, whose leaders would benefit from this essential knowledge."  Gantley, Michael J. Europe’s Mighty Megaliths "Rock" the Winter Solstice. National Geographic, December 21, 2017,  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/archaeology-and-history/magazine/2017/11-12/history-europe-megaliths-solstice/

Stonehenge is the most famous group of megaliths, but Gobekli Tepe is about twice as old and built by a much earlier people who were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Megalithic 'temples' were widespread and a common construction of Neolithic cultures for 5,000 years after Gobekli Tepe.

Conclusion

My point is simple. I believe a new understanding of time led to an increase in power for human beings just before the Neolithic Revolution. This happened when humans were still hunter-gatherers and nomadic. We know these people had an advanced sense of time because of their ability to coordinate their activities and to build the complex Gobekli Tepe site for more than 1000 years. This new sense of continuous time with a past, present, and future helped people in their struggle to survive and eventually led to agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution but it also was unsettling. 

As a result, gods, goddesses, and religions emerged after this stage. Humans learned to tell time by looking at the heavens where they also believed their gods dwelled. So an understanding of time and a belief in religion were closely related from the beginning. This also led to the telling of creation myths, plus rituals, rites, prayers, and supplications that people hoped would influence the gods and assure a bountiful future.

"I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind."
Klaus Schmidt

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See My Blogs

About The Development Of The Human-Sense-Of-Time 

From The Earliest Homo Sapiens To The Modern Day

Animal Senses Compared to the Human Sense of Time

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/08/animal-senses-compared-to-human-sense.html

Patterns & Memory

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2013/11/patterns-memory.html

Dan Everett's How Language Began & Human Time Keeping

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/10/everett-how-language-began-and-human-time-keeping.html

Toward a Comprehensive Hypothesis About the Development of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time Based in Part on Daniel Everett's 'How Language Began'

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/11/comprehensive-hypothesis-human-sense-of-time.html

An Expanded Hypothesis About the Human-Experience-Of-Time

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2019/01/expanded-hypothesis-about-human-experience-of-time.html

And Also:

The Birth Of Gods In The Neolithic

A Response to the Ideas of Jacques Cauvin

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2017/12/birth-of-gods-in-neolithic-ideas-of-jacques-cauvin.html

The AHA Moment: My Personal Story

The AHA! Moment: My Personal Story

The Aha Moment: definition
The moment or instant at which the solution to a problem or other significant realization becomes clear.
Also The Aha! Moment
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aha_moment

My Definition:
The AHA! moment is when your disparate ideas suddenly rearrange themselves together into a new and insightful pattern.

An enigmatic Rembrandt etching, showing, perhaps, 

a thinker receiving a sudden insight.

It's something that every artist, writer, scientist, thinker hopes will happen sooner or later. It usually comes after an extended period of work in an effort to solve a difficult problem. Frustrated, a person gives up and focuses their mind elsewhere. Then suddenly something triggers an insight and the various disconnected pieces of the puzzle now come together to form one coherent picture. 

After seven years of writing this blog about the human experience of time, I had one of these moments while driving through drenching thunderstorms as I was fleeing a monster hurricane. 


SO HERE IS MY STORY:

I had just finished writing several historical eBooks for a client at Upwork.com about the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Neolithic Revolution, Greek Mythology and Galileo. Each 10,000 word eBook was long enough to go into some detail but short enough that I would not get bogged down in endless minutia. It was the perfect assignment for me -- because I like to look for the big overview, the big picture, while also finding substantial facts and historical events to back up my conclusions. And after writing these eBooks I was musing about the many theories and discoveries that had become part of civilization today.

Then I started to think about my own ideas concerning the human experience of time -- the purpose of this blog, DeconstructingTime. I have been working on this subject for seven years. I was confident that I had mapped out a pretty good set of ideas and yet at the same time, I felt there was something missing. I wanted a larger hypothesis that could tie many, if not most, of my ideas together.

Around this time I also had begun to entertain a new point of view about the human condition. Rather than thinking of us as civilized people who occasionally succumbed to animal behavior, I began to think of us as basically animals who were doing their best to be civilized. And this switch in perspective opened up an entirely new way of looking at things.

Fresh from my eBook research, I thought of Mendeleev who put together the first working chart of the elements that make up all matter, a chart that is now known as the periodic table. He had put each element and what he knew about it, such as its atomic weight, on a card and then laid out these cards as though he was playing a kind of solitaire. He did this for a number of years until one night he had a dream and saw the entire periodic table almost perfectly arranged. 

"I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place
did a correction later seem necessary." 
Dmitri Mendeleev

Mendeleev (left) and his notes about the periodic table. His work has become the basis for our understanding of the material world and is considered a milestone in scientific thought.

One of my own personal quests has been to go back as far as possible in history to find the moment when we Homo sapiens began to think about time in terms of past, present, and future and then, as a result, were able to make plans. I assumed that before that, like virtually all animals, Homo sapiens were locked into the present, into the here and now, and that they lived entirely in the moment. So before this, we/they could not plan. 

I also knew that after perhaps hundreds of thousands of years when we/they had emerged from their instinctual animal existence, they did develop modern languages with a full set of expressions, concepts, and metaphors to describe and work with time in a linear fashion, i.e., past, present, and future. And this allowed planning, coordinating and sharing, i.e., all the things that made Homo sapiens so powerful and dominant on the planet. In other words, language gave us the tools to work with time.

But the period in between our original animal existence and a fully developed language was a dark mystery. I could not imagine an early language nor could I imagine an initial or early developing sense of time.

Then as chance would have it, a huge hurricane, Hurricane Florence, threatened the home where I lived, and I had to leave in the middle of the night after getting an ominous phone message from the government. There was a mandatory evacuation order for my area of North Carolina.

Once I had loaded the car, locked up the house, and was on the road at 2 AM, I began to think about my work on the subject of time. Alone in my car with virtually no traffic, it was kind of dreamy but foreboding as well. To give myself something to think about I decided to talk to myself and see if I could make some headway. 

I have always been interested in the passage of time, starting perhaps with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets which give the best definition of time that I know of. As I have quoted many times before in this blog, Eliot points out that time is always now -- and without the now moment time would not happen.

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards;

At the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance,

And there is only the dance.

...

And all is always now

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, 1936,  Four Quartets

In the 1980s I had studied the time lapse photos of Eadweard Muybridge for two years and then made computer art based on his study of human locomotion. And as a photographer for fifty years, I understood time and timing because photography concerns itself with both. More recently I created an extensive study of what I call time-flow photography, photography in which I took pictures with long shutter speeds to show blur, motion, and the passage of time.

A reworked digital image from Muybridge's 

Woman in Motion photography series.

A candid photograph created entirely with slow shutter speed 

'time-flow' effects and not with software.

I had also made the connection between language and our concepts of time. I had written a blog about a year ago on that subject. In the process of writing, it became clear to me that language was in many ways the key, as it gave us humans the tools to conceive of time in complicated ways and also to express those concepts to others. But that was as far as I got.

How Our Concept of Time Is Embedded & Derived from Our Language 

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2017/02/concept-of-time-embedded-in-language.html

For words are to thought what tools are to work; 

the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.

Will Durant, History of Civilization: Part 1

Then in the occasional bursts of heavy rain that made it almost impossible to see the road with my headlights, even though the wipers were going full speed, the first clue came to me. 

A hurricane track over the coast 

in North Carolina where I live.

I remembered reading that there was a tribe in the Amazon that spoke a very different language -- some called it a more basic language -- which no linguist or researcher had come across before. It did not follow any of the normally accepted rules that virtually all other languages followed. 

Around dawn after five hours on the dark road, I reached my destination, the home of a long time friend, Harry. Harry lived in Durham and had graciously allowed me and my wife, who was already there, to stay with him.


AFTER THE STORM

So my lonely night journey to escape the storm brought together a number of ideas.

I announced to Harry the following morning that I was going to use this time, while we waited out the storm, to find out about this tribe. A quick search of the Internet told me that the tribe was called the Piraha and that Daniel Everett, a kind of revolutionary linguist, was the accepted expert of their culture and language.

After watching everything I could on YouTube, listening to Dan Everett's TED talks, and reading numerous articles by Everett and others on the Internet, there it was: The Missing Piece. 

When I had read about the tribe years earlier, Everett had not formulated a comprehensive hypothesis of language. But now he had and to my incredible surprise, it was a perfect fit with my own ideas. It turned out that about six months earlier -- but about a year after I had written my own post about the connection between time and language -- Everett had written a book entitled, How Language Began. 

Without realizing it, I had laid out cards in my mind, as Mendeleev had done, yet there was this big blank card in the middle. But now the Piraha and the ideas of Dan Everett had filled this gap. 

Time reference is a universal property of language...
Jacqueline Lecarme, PH. D., Linguistics

The following is what I grasped from Everett's ideas:
Language is much much older than previously thought and goes back to the predecessors of us humans (Homo sapiens); it goes back to Homo erectus more than a million years earlier. Everett decided that altogether there were probably three language stages: G1, G2, and G3. The languages today are all G3 except that of the Piraha which is an earlier language, a G2 language. Everett suspects there are many more in the world, they just have not been understood properly. 

We use language in a sophisticated manner without realizing that it has given us 

the symbols to work with time in complex ways.

Language, however, began with the earliest language, G1, which was spoken by Homo erectus a million years ago, and which gradually developed due to the cultural and survival needs of these people. 

I always felt that the human sense of time must have developed slowly (meaning a million or so years) but there was no evidence to support that. And so it seemed unlikely that we would ever discover an early language since it was probably spoken by prehistoric people who had left no record. In addition, it was generally assumed that language began with us, Homo sapiens, and that it might not have developed until relatively recently, such as one hundred thousand years ago. Everett's timetable, however, pushed the start of language back much further.

NOTE: While I believe language may have taken a million or so years to develop, this time table is not crucial for my hypothesis. A shorter timetable could definitely be possible. What's important is the sequence and nature of the development of language and the concepts of time as I have outlined them here.

So with Dan's hypothesis and the clear evidence of the Piraha's basic language, it now seemed to me that the history of language was quite different. A living language of the contemporary tribe, the Piraha, with a very old tradition of hunting-and-gathering showed what an earlier language could sound like. 


THE AHA MOMENT

The AHA moment came when I realized that not only had Dan Everett found an earlier language but the language and culture were entirely based in the moment and in the here and now -- in the Immediacy Of Experience Principle, as Dan called it. 

This language and culture had a very different sense of time and that understanding of time was anchored in the present -- a sense of time that was much closer to instinctual animal behavior. Since my work has been about the human experience of time and how the concept and experience of time have changed as lifestyles and technology changed, the Piraha sense of time was exactly what I had predicted if an earlier language could be found. This was especially true for people living a day-to-day hunter-gatherer existence as early humans must have done. 

And also if that was true, then a hypothetical earliest G1 language would also be based in the here and now with an even greater sense of immediacy. Until I learned about the Piraha, I could not imagine an early language. But now because of their language, it was possible to project back to the beginning and sketch out how the first stages would be put together and also what their sense of time would be like. 

------------------------- EUREKA! -------------------------

QUICK SUMMARY OF MY AHA! UNDERSTANDING: As we know, all languages reference time but the earliest languages probably had a very different concept of time than we have today. These early languages had a here-and-now immediate sense of time that then took hundreds of thousands of years to develop into the modern linear sense of time.

It turned out that the Piraha language provided the crucial intermediate point in between our early animal behavior and today's fully developed modern languages. 

So here is how my ideas fit so nicely with those of Everett.

This is a recreation of Australopithecus who is considered our distant ancestor

and who almost certainly had not developed language at this point.

Since we were animals first and humans later, there must have been a time when we humans lived like the animals, i.e., entirely in the present. In other words, past and future did not exist along with planning and coordinating. So the human sense of time must have evolved gradually from an animal state and done so in coordination with the gradual development of language. This was because language was the primary tool that could conceptualize time and then allow the sharing of plans and the manipulation of time. 

It was clear from the stone tool evidence left by Homo erectus that they understood processes which required a sense of time and that this knowledge was passed down from generation to generation. 

These sophisticated stone tools have been accurately dated back to 300,000 BCE. 

They were made by the earliest Homo sapiens. Homo erectus tools are much older.

An early sense of human time would be part animal that lived in the present and part human that conceived of time in a limited way and that coincided with Everett's language stages. And now I could make an educated guess about the concepts of time in each language stage. Early time concepts would be very different from the sense of time we experience today. 

In other words, early members of the genus Homo invented our concepts of time and then during the long development of these ideas, there were markedly different concepts of time. These depended on the needs of the culture, the environment, the technology, and the changing weather. The sense of time we have today in the industrial world is quite different from the sense of time in the Neolithic/agricultural era which in turn was quite different from the sense of time when people lived in tribes and were nomadic and/or hunters and gatherers in the forest or the jungle.

These are members of the hunter-gatherer Piraha tribe in the Amazon today who live by the Immediacy Of Experience Principle according to Daniel Everett. 

This means their concept of time is anchored in the near-present

and quite different from the modern world. 
Everett also believes they speak a G2 language 
which might be an earlier form of spoken language.

And with that my hypothesis of the human-sense-of-time now had a pedigree, meaning that human ideas about time had a clear beginning and that they then continued to develop right up to today. And it was completely intertwined with the development of language because language provided the tools for working with time.

About a month after this, I formulated "A Comprehensive Hypothesis About the Evolution of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time." In this paper, I outlined a basic sequence for the development of language and the development of time concepts. The AHA! moment had now turned into a full-blown hypothesis. Voila!

A Comprehensive Hypothesis About the 

Evolution of Language and the Human-Sense-Of-Time

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/11/comprehensive-hypothesis-human-sense-of-time.html

After this theory about language, I went one step further and expanded these ideas to include culture, technology, and belief systems.

An Expanded Hypothesis That Relates the History of the Human-Experience-Of-Time

to Culture, Technology and Belief Systems in Addition to Language

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2019/01/expanded-hypothesis-about-human-experience-of-time.html

The many languages of the world.

AFTERWORD

Archimedes in his bath, just before his Eureka moment.

The most famous Eureka story occurred when Archimedes of Syracuse around 250 BCE was trying to discover a way to determine whether an intricate gold crown was really solid gold as the King of Syracuse, Hieron, had ordered from a metalsmith. The king suspected that it was partly silver which was hidden behind the gold and so ordered Archimedes to determine its true composition. According to legend, Archimedes had been struggling with the problem for some time and finally gave up and took a bath. When he got into the full bath, he realized that water now overflowed due to the density of his body. Then in a flash, he understood that placing an object in water would displace the water and that the volume of displaced water would allow him to make a calculation about the density of the metal -- since silver and gold had different densities. And that was the Eureka moment. Eureka means, "I have found it" and according to legend Archimedes forgot that he was naked, jumped from his bath and ran through the streets shouting, "Eureka! Eureka!" And, BTW, it turned out that the crown was not entirely gold, so the king was justified in his suspicion.

Galileo had an AHA! moment when he saw a lamp swinging from a long cord while he was at a church service. He then measured the time of its swings with his pulse. His work led to the first formulas that included a complex understanding of time.

After frustrating months of work, Einstein either got in a trolley or imagined that he did, as he had ridden it many times. In any case, the ringing of the bell by the ancient clock (behind the trolley) in Bern Switzerland triggered a vision in which the trolley was suddenly moving at the speed of light. Einstein then realized that the time showing on the Bern clock-face could never catch up with the trolley. And this became the basis for his Special Theory of Relativity.  

MORE ABOUT MENDELEEV & THE PERIODIC TABLE


The Mendeleev insight is particularly interesting because it was not entirely correct but was close enough that it eventually led to both a precise understanding of the nature of each element and also how these elements came to exist. So the periodic table became a basic road map of all matter that makes up everything that exists.

If all the elements are arranged in the order of their atomic weights, a periodic repetition of properties is obtained. This is expressed by the law of periodicity. 

— Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev

NOTE: Mendeleev was close but not quite right. It turned out that elements needed to be arranged in order of their atomic number (the number of protons) and not their weights. But the atomic number was not well understood until almost 45 years later.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. 

C.P. Snow

The eighth element, starting from a given one, is a kind of repetition of the first, like the eighth note of an octave in music.

— John Alexander Newlands

Mendeleev's insight led eventually to theories about how each element was created. It turns out they were mostly created (cooked as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says next) in the centers of stars and the explosions of stars. So Mendeleev's concept reached far into the nature of mater itself.

One of the great triumphs of 20th Century astrophysics, was tracing the elements of your body, of all the elements around us, to the actions of stars—that crucible in the centers of stars that cooked basic elements into heavier elements, light elements into heavy elements. (I say “cooked”—I mean thermonuclear fusion.) The heat brings them together, gets you bigger atoms, that then do other interesting chemical things, fleshing out the contents of the Periodic Table. 

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

MORE ABOUT THE IDEAS IN THIS BLOG

For people who are not familiar with this blog over the last seven years, here are some of my most important blog-posts:

== In my most popular blog-article I wrote that humans have a unique sense of time, an enhanced sense such as dogs have with smell, due to the prefrontal cortex in the brain. Dan Everett seemed to agree with this idea in his book How Language Began published more than three years after my blog article. This blog-article is my most important one and has been viewed and downloaded over 7000 times. 
https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/08/animal-senses-compared-to-human-sense.html

== Another blog-article made the point that all languages include ways of expressing time and conceptualizing time. This blog-article would become a key part of my thinking.
https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2017/02/concept-of-time-embedded-in-language.html

== I have also shown that Neolithic people had a precise pre-scientific method for measuring the yearly seasonal cycles which was key to their sense of time.
https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2015/03/computing-winter-solstice-at-newgrange.html

And while I was pleased with these different pieces of research, I was looking for an overall hypothesis that would tie many of these ideas together.