Civilization Footprints

The poet Longfellow famously wrote that people who make history leave “footprints on the sands of time.” Unfortunately, no matter how famous a person is, these passing footprints are washed away by furious ocean waves, tides, or intense winds, unless the footprints are somehow petrified.

Archeologists have found human and animal remains, fossilized and mummified, skeletal remains from various time periods, buried artifacts, artwork on cave walls, tools, graves, inscribed stones, stone arrowheads, dried up medicinal herbs, beaded items, jewelry, and cloth(ing) which had proven that humans were more civilized than previously thought.

The Neanderthals, for example, cared for the sick and the infirm, and buried their dead. They had a religious belief. We know they had compassion for the weak and reverence for the dead.

Ralph S. Solecki of the Smithsonian found a grave in a cave in the Zagros Mountains of northeastern Iraq. Its discovery and analysis was most remarkable, adding to the knowledge about the Neanderthal man.

Flowers were found around the corpse. After analyzing the 40-year-old man’s fossilized bones, it was discovered that he had lost his right arm as a child and suffered from severe arthritis. Most primitive tribes would not have allowed such a child to survive but the Neanderthals did.

Analysis of the pollen left around the skeleton after the flowers died, yielded a variety of species, i.e., yarrows, cornflowers, hollyhocks, groundsels, grape hyacinths, St. Barnaby’s thistles, woody horsetail, and mallow.

To spread such a variety of flowers means that they either had to go everywhere to collect them or had them on hand as medicinal plants. Knowing when these flowers bloom in the Zagros Mountains, archeologists were able to guess that he had died sometime in June, crushed by a cave rock.

We found art from the Stone Age, the Stone Age Venuses, discovered from the Pyrenees Mountains to the Russian river Don, some carved from ivory, others from soft stone, with a recognizable face, others faceless, all indicating a unifying culture. The oldest figurine found is 35,000 years old. All of them date from 38,000 to 14,000, the Upper Paleolithic Age. These are the oldest known works of prehistoric art.

The figurines are all depicted as obese humans and there are logical interpretations. During this glacial period, to survive the long and harsh winters, one had to store a lot of fat in the summer when food was plentiful. Perhaps it was part of their culture to be obese? We can only speculate.

In the last glacial period, 35,000-10,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherers had a difficult life. The northern hemisphere was covered by a large icesheet. Sea levels were three hundred feet below today’s level.

Land areas were much drier and colder than today, covered by grassland rather than forest. Many areas were bleak subarctic wastelands. Although the climate was cold, humans had skins and furs from Bisons, woolly mammoths, wooly rhinoceros, and silver arctic foxes which roamed as far south as the Pyrenees.

Stone Age humans had all the meat, fur, and bones they needed. We found evidence of their dwellings with fireplaces capable of radiating sufficient heat to cook and to keep humans warm.

Human prints were found in the Gargas cave in France, 150 handprints that are 35,000 years old. The Cave of the Hands lies in the Pyrenees, close to Lourdes. The direct ancestors of Europeans, these humans have left imprints of their hands on the black walls, either stenciled black in a framework of red, or stenciled red. The coloring or the stenciling was done with red ocher (pigmented earth); the hands are mostly left hands, and they glow in the light of a lamp.

Some of the stenciled hands are missing various fingers, never the thumb, indicating potential hunting accidents, ritual mutilation, or frostbite.

One interesting drawing displays a projecting outcropping of stone which an Ice Age human with a sense of humor transformed into the rendering of a wild boar’s head.

Humans have always left traces of their lives for posterity to discover, even humans we consider primitive by our standards. One wonders, what elements of our existence in the 20^th and 21^st centuries will be discovered 10,000-35,000 years from now?