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 20th and 21st centuries will be
discovered 10,000-35,000 years from now?






