Thursday, August 16, 2018
Why Homo Sapiens survived the Ice Age
Cro-Magnon’s Shamans were Women
HOMO SAPIENS & SHAMANISM IN THE CAVES, WOMB-MEMORY & FEMALE SHA-WOMEN
DAVID LEWIS-WILLIAMS, THE MIND IN THE CAVE, 2004-2016
David Lewis-Williams makes a basic mistake by projecting the male-dominated shamanism of the modern world as observed in the 20th century onto the West-European Cro-Magnon's society, forgetting to ask the simple question of the gender division of labor in this society.
Cro-Magnon is spiritually dominated by the women who have the future of the species and its expansion in their own hands due to the frail and dependent kids they deliver. This is proved by the handprints or hand stencils in the very caves Lewis-Williams studies, Lascaux for one.
His retrospective method makes him commit a major mistake: you must study the society you are considering before imposing some - in this case, Marxian - reading filter onto its reality. The crucial dimension of Cro-Magnon's society, and in fact of Homo Sapiens since their emergence 300,000 years ago is to produce enough children to expand the species and guarantee the migrations inscribed in the social tradition even of their ancestors, Homo Erectus for example, and their cousins evolving from Homo Erectus, Neanderthals in the Middle East and Denisovans in northern Central Asia.
It is a mistake not to see the phylogeny of the species that started even before this species evolved. 70,000 years ago and the cognitive revolution of Harari is a misunderstanding of this very phylogeny of our species.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:31 PM 
