WHEN EUROPE WAS IN TRIBES
Each of the episodes in the series called “Bone Detectives” has a theme or focus based on a specific set of recovered skeletons from ancient burial places, sometimes removed to make way for modern building. The story in Series 1: episode 7, which looks at bones from a place called Caithness in Scotland, is about the Beaker people, named for the bell-shaped vessels they made, presumably for drinking mead.
Here are shortcut links to Wikipedia entries about two “tribes”. Unetice people are similar, as related to Bell Beaker as Blackfeet and Dakota are to each other, similarity that comes from sharing culture drawn from ecologies that call for the same kind of strategies for survival and sometimes competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unetice_culture
There are other programs and writing about the Bell Beaker people, who existed about 2,000 years before the beginning of Christendom, right at the beginning of the Bronze Age. They came to Britain from the continent where they had been spreading for a very long time, evidently from the high plateau area of what is now Russia. The history of peoples in tribes who took their culture dynamically across time and place in Europe is very much like that of North America — in fact, both describe the moving population of humans and hominins as they spread around the planet.
On the rez a great deal of focus is on the invasion of the indigenous people by the European empires looking for resources so they could be rich enough to make war. In ancient Caithness a similar thing happened: the indigenous Neolithic people were invaded and overwhelmed by the Bell Beaker people. What remarkably became the material for this on “Bone Detective” was that the Neolithic people had skulls that were what we around here call “rail heads.” That is, they were narrow-faced. The Bell Beaker people had more round skulls.
Of course, no one knows what difference that made in terms of brain development or what genes controlled the skull shape. There was a passing reference to female skulls typically having rather flat foreheads — not like tribes elsewhere that bind heads of babies to flatten them nor like babies who aren’t regularly turned in their cribs to keep them from flattening — but evidently because the prefrontal lobe of the brain in these dimorphic people didn’t push out the bone over the eyebrows as a part of normal development of females. This implies they would not be lobotomized but possibly operating as though they were. Was it hereditary? Was it because the females didn’t get enough to eat? Was there some kind of gender difference in child-raising of little girls? Unknown.
These differences are remarkably recent, only five or six thousand years ago, and not persistent. Rail heads and flat foreheads are not typical today. This sort of focus on individuals in tiny detail, sometimes not about obvious shape differences in bone but about chemically analyzed structure and development are not the broad strokes of culture and artifacts we have followed in the past. But they are several lines of inquiry brought into congruent tracing and mapping of the interaction of persons and their environments.
As though tracing DNA patterns that change over time and place as people migrate and intermarry, it is possible to trace the travel of language development across wide areas of time and place. In the past before written language existed, we depended on material culture like the Bell Beakers to imagine prehistoric people. Now we gather much more information.
Sometimes the objects are small and subtle. For instance, when bows were invented, the bowstring often slapped, stinging forearms, so people began wearing a little arm-guard of leather. Then, possibly as a gesture to wealth and importance, some arm-guards were made of finely honed stone, near jewelry, which lab analysis identified as from places relatively far away, implying trade. Found in graves with bodies, their identity and origin was puzzling at first until modern users of bows recognized them.
As the people investigating skeletons in Caithness proceed, one of them travels to consult experts and writing that exists from early days. The place of burial, the position of the remains like where they faced, whether it was a spot thought to be holy and important, what the society of the time was like — all these are part of the story.
When studying the evolution of mammals before humans developed, the problem of soft tissue records is particularly hard unless geological conditions like acid soil or fossilizing from mineral saturation might have at least preserved shapes. Even so, something like the brain is hard to understand when it’s recently living or even during surgery, because it just looks like a blob. Small structures seem to have different and mysterious functions even from one of its ends to the other. The flickering of neurocells can only be seen by electron microscopes that can capture change over time.
Yet some sensory information is recorded by single specialized cells. “Neuronal cell bodies also vary widely both in size (small, medium, large, and giant) and in shape (star-shaped, fusiform, conical, polyhedral, spherical, pyramidal). The geometry of a neuron’s dendrites and axon also vary tremdously with its role in the neural circuit.”
On Twitter paleoanthropologist John Hawkes says:”KNM-ER 3733 [the name of a particiular fossil skull] helped establish that hominin evolution was a branching tree and not a straight line. Alan Walker famously cracked the skull into three pieces with a chisel to remove the hard rock from inside, enabling reconstruction of the face.
“In case anyone wonders, best practices in hominin fossil preparation have changed quite a lot since the 1970s. Today we can combine high-resolution methods with scribes and magnification together with microCT and virtual reconstruction to enable us to study a fossil’s form.”
Also on Twitter a person who signs himself “The Cosmist Insurrection (TM) @yungneocon suggests on Aug 5, 2018: “I have posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Collins “Sociology of Philosophy” where he shows human thought clusters in small networked groups, located in bounded geographic areas, that mutual recognition & embodiment are necessary preconditions for thought.”
The remarkable explosion of world-changing, religion-challenging, mental-reconfiguring information challenges what we know about ourselves and our ancestors. We are “reading” stone and bone, implying how electrochemical blobs in the skull develop knowledge of underlying networks and boundaries as they relate to environment. Sometimes we are shaken by what we don’t know, and other times we are challenged to reinterpret what we do know. Our bodies also adapt because we change what we do.
This is far beyond the self-congratulating ideas that we thought led to our superiority and therefore entitlement, both in terms of physical evolution and cultural adaptation. The uncertainty makes some people very angry. To others this opens the future to ideas never dreamed before.
