Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Free to Bury their Dead & Write their Names

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/free-to-bury-their-dead-write-their-names-292be40fcfd0

Homo Naledi did at least 200,000 years before everyone else things like using fire, burying their dead, inscribing symbols in the stone of their underground burial chambers. Either he was a mysterious precocious Hominin, or we have it all wrong about Homo Sapiens just the same.

Seventh Stage. From oral language to representation.

This shift will take place in two phases.

a- It will use representational images. We can only know what was done on durable media like rocks and cave rockfaces. But before that, they could have used undurable media like leaves, bark, and wood. They only came to bone, ivory, and stone around 45,000 BCE all over the world, most of them signed with the prints of the hands of the people who were there when the paintings were performed, and after, when they were ritually used for various ceremonies. Temples and rituals were not invented by Homo Sapiens after let’s say 10,000 BCE with Gobleki tepe, or some older temple yet to be discovered.

b- At the same time and in the same cave, and without any real paintings in the case of Nadeli, a whole set of geometric symbols were used,  and have been neglected up to a very recent period. Thanks to Geneviève von Petzinger, we have in her book (Petzinger 2017) a universal collection of such symbols. We cannot know if these symbols are the global representation of a ritualistic formula, only one word, one syllable, or one phoneme. Actually, that is not important. What is, is the fact it is some kind of primeval form of writing. And Homo Naledi had reached that level, but 200,000 years before everyone else, and that is a surprise. It might be denied later on, but nevertheless, we have to keep this figure in mind. If human beads were found in the Moroccan mountains, they must have been brought there by some Hominins, if not Homo Sapiens who is the only Hominin who had beads, then who? What’s more, that was in 300,000 BCE.

 Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:51 AM