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A 1985 on-site reconstruction of the oldest known human habitation on the North American continent, used by Paleo-Indians in what is now the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. What they were doing there, for 12,000 years, could be a lesson for us all. (Photo by Douglas Campbell/Flickr)
When we talk about re-ordering human life to suppress the sicknesses that have brought the planet to the brink of destruction — greed, heedless exploitation of limited resources, and so on — the discussion often founders on claims that these traits are fixed in human nature or to put it in more modern techno-jargon, they are “hard wired” in our brains and/or in our genes. So it doesn’t matter, it is argued, \ how we try to organize society, human nature will assert itself and a few years after the total crash of industrial society someone will invent a futures market and away we go again. One of the reasons that I will never buy that argument is that I have been to the Thunderbird Site.
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If you were to drive 70 miles straight west of Washington D.C. on Interstate 66, over the Blue Ridge to the town of Front Royal, Virginia, and then south for about five miles on Route 340, not far past the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway, you’d be there. Not that you’d know it, there’s nothing to be seen in the area except a junkyard. Find the two-track dirt road that leads down toward the South Fork of the Shenandoah River.
There’s a shallow part of the river there, it was used as a ford back in the day, and you should pick your way across the river (on foot, dammit, park that BMW) and on the opposite bank walk downriver, north, maybe half a mile, and there you will be. Standing on the site of the oldest known human habitations on the North American continent. On a site that appears to have been used continually for 12,000 years.
Interesting enough, as is the story of its discovery in the 1960s by amateur archaeologists, its ratification and excavation in the 1970s by teams led by Dr. William Gardner of Catholic University, of the opening of the Thunderbird Museum as a window into the life of North American Paleo-Indians not long after they crossed the land bridge from Mongolia. The glaciers of the Ice Age were still in Pennsylvania when they started to use this site.
But for our purposes, the truly fascinating thing is why they were using this site, and how. The technology that made their lives possible was based on stone — stone that could be not only shaped, but sharpened, into arrow and spear points, knives, scrapers, choppers and drills. Only certain rock, with a high content of quartz, can be worked to form a lasting, cutting edge. Jasper, like flint, was one of those rocks and just across the river from the site of the shelters is a large, easily accessible outcrop of jasper. There were only about half a dozen of them in what is now Virginia. Knowing where they were, and getting to them at least once a year, was essential to the survival of the People.
Probably once a year, and probably in the winter, the bands would come to the Thunderbird Site so their stoneworkers could pore over the jasper outcrop, seeking cobbles suitable for working into the tools of their life. When they had replenished their materials, they left.
Let’s review. The jasper outcrop was the source of all the tools needed for the survival of all the people living in a big chunk of what is now Virginia. It was used by the people from 9,500 BC to 1760 AD. And the outcrop is still there!
Don’t get ahead of me. The fact that they did not exhaust the jasper is not due to any high mindedness on the part of the people. They took what they needed and left the rest, true, but most likely because they could not carry any more rock away than they did.
No, what electrified me about the jasper outcrop is that for 12,000 years people sustained their lives with that rock and in all that time there is no evidence that any one group of people tried to claim it and to deny it or sell it to others. You know what would have happened if any group of French, Spanish or English explorers had stumbled on the jasper and had understood its value to the people. (It’s hard to estimate which event is less likely, since they recognized only silver and gold as valuable and didn’t think of the natives as people.) Overnight you would have had a palisade, an armed guard, and we would be commemorating the site of the very first payday loan store in North America.
Please don’t try to convince me that humans are incapable of valuing something without exploiting it, without converting it to “money” in order to profit from it, without claiming it for their group and denying it to others. I know better. I’ve been to the Thunderbird Site.
Now that’s a fine example Mr. Lewis. I don’t know what it is about large groups of humanity (beyond Dunbar’s number or over about 150) that somehow ’causes’ (‘makes it possible for’) the psychopathic contingent to establish itself on the rest of us, but by now we’re about saturated with the sickos. In fact we’re about to be allowed to choose between two of them to “lead” us (into the abyss I suppose) soon.
At this point, we’re so far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet that this article is a somewhat nostalgic look back at how it once was for the indigenous population – one could drink out of any stream, lake or other body of water. Huge herds of buffalo stretched across the middle of the country and fish, birds and trees abounded in splendor. But that was before WHITEY invaded and took over. I don’t know what the Commanche translation for “fucking assholes who don’t know their dicks from corn” is, but I’m sure they had their names for our screwed up ancestors.
So here we are, after ruining the entire planet in our mad rush to go nowhere and trashing the entire biosphere with our pollution, and it’s both too late to change course from complete extinction, and our once predictable and accommodating climate can’t possibly be reset, regained or enjoyed because it’s gone and we’ll never see it again. It’ll continue to get worse for humanity and life on the planet from here on out to our demise. Maybe something will survive, but it probably won’t breathe air and will have to adapt to increasing radiation.
Watch for increasing crop failures due to extended droughts, 1000 year floods, monster hail, off the chart earthquakes and unimaginable storms (including blizzards and hurricanes) to become regular occurrences, and often at the “wrong time.” It’s already happening if one looks, and it will be at our door “sooner than expected.”
See – the natives learned to adapt and become one with their location; we set up this global supply chain that has become so fragile that it will collapse at the first event that messes it up, be it currency wars, crop failure, truckers strike, or any of probably a dozen more reasons.
We’re just bearing witness now as it all unravels. Looking forward to reading all you have to offer along the way, Mr. Lewis.
I don’t hate my own race perse, but the Europeans might as well have been aliens – possessing superior technology, unknown materials, overwhelming numbers, ability to come and go… just like we see in the movies.
Maybe there’s a reason alien-invasion movies strike such a strong impression on us, like zombie-apocalypse movies do now. Good comparison.
To be clear, I don’t hate my own race, either, but I’m interested in its history. If my grandfather, of whom I have fond memories, and who shaped the nature of the family in which I reside, turns out to have been a mass murderer, I don’t have to hate him, or the rest of my family, but I sure want to know something about why he did it. (My family has requested that I point out that the above is an hypothetical example, any resemblance to Gramps is an accident.)
I strongly suspect the predominant religious worldviews/narratives of the Western world since antiquity are among the major causes which (in a very special way, as I shall explain) led ‘whitey’ to do what he did and lead us all to the state of affairs we face today. If you look carefully at Christianity and the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, you find that in both these narratives man can NEVER, EVER reach the Divine through his own efforts. He is strictly at the mercy of an external agency for his salvation. The only difference between the two narratives is that in the former God still offers us a way to Him — a way not created by us, but by Him, it needs to be stressed — whereas in the latter, sorry, we’re doomed to remain mortals forever. Perhaps not surprisingly, people in the West eventually stopped worshipping Zeus and Apollo and turned to Christ instead. And clearly this sort of outlook (man’s strictly passive status vis-a-vis the Divine) enables religious institutions to acquire limitless secular power by posing themselves as the exclusive custodians of the way to God, who can therefore scare entire societies into docile obedience with the threat of Hell. If the individual could reach the Divine by his own effort — if indeed the Divine were viewed as in some sense already in him (as was incidentally widely accepted in East Asian cultures) — then no church could wield such terrible power.
Now interestingly enough many in the West during the 16th and 17th centuries, representative of a school of thought referred to by contemporary theologian/philosopher David Ray Griffin as the Neoplatonic-Magical-Spiritualist tradition, championed very similar ideas — that the Divine is present in us and indeed in all creation, that our minds can know the Divine, that various aspects of the world around us point clearly to the existence of the Divine, etc. (Details can be found in Chapter 5 of the book Religion and Scientific Naturalism by Griffin.) Such ideas were threatening to the established order, mainly the church (as explained above), which to preserve the power in its possession retorted with all sorts of ideas to oppose them. Hence God stood completely apart from our world, no aspect of which should be thought of as being indicative of his existence, and the only valid sources of knowledge we can appeal to are bare sensory perception and logical reasoning. (Scripture was supposed to be a very special exception to this last rule, of course.)
These ideas eventually won the day and became firmly planted in the Western intellectual scene — and they opened up a whole can of worms. For one thing, if nothing I see, hear, smell, read, think of etc etc can be considered as indicative of the existence of a God, then how am I supposed to know whether there’s a God? For all we know, maybe there isn’t. Philosophers in the West since Descartes tried to answer this serious question — in vain. So now Western man is stuck: he is trapped in, to all appearances, a spiritually dead Universe. How to deal with the terrible anxiety resulting from this state of affairs? One way could be to distract oneself through the endless pursuit of worldly wealth and power. Welcome to the modern industrial world.
The norm in societies at conflict is the establishment of a buffer zone between groups. Could that not explain why no other group needed to be exploited or fought off at the quarry site? From primates to the present, territorial aggressiveness has been the norm, as has been lack of conservation. The above must be missing some detail for it to appear otherwise. If strategic material is the same as farmland, necessary to survival, it will be coveted and defended.
Science, journalism, politics — all of them offer almost daily examples of the emergence of facts that do not fit the prevailing narrative, with the result that the emergent facts are discarded as flawed, or missing something. But what if it’s the narrative that’s missing something. The archeological record, which is scant and very much open to various interpretations, suggests to people more learned than I that there was virtually no conflict among Paleo-Indian bands or their descendants until the 14th Century AD.
I have a theory on theories. If you are an optimist or a pessimist, you follow that paradigm on all other theories. Being a gloomy fellow, I tend to read widely that humans are mean and they suck. Being a ray of sunshine, you read widely that hugs and kisses are more universal. Neither one of us is right, or wrong. Each can support his facts, being widely read. What we are really arguing about is just defending our paradigm. Of course, having said that, knowing what I’m doing I still can’t stop! Peace, my brother, and looking forward to any and all future writings.
In the time before our demented government invented the policy to burn our western forests to the ground in order to “save” them, a small spring trickled enough water to form a pool and a stream.
Existing as it did in a remote canyon, it was relied upon by area wildlife to provide healthy drinks. Deer, Bear, Rattlesnakes, countless birds, and others all depended upon this water, yet no creature ever, in the time I knew this place, attempted to control, dominate, or possess this spring. Never once was an ambush set up, a home placed upon it, or any attempt at permanent residence. The rule of the spring was for all to satisfy their need, and move along.
The similarity to the jasper should be obvious.
Wildlife doesn’t seek unnecessary conflict, and neither did early man.
This is simple, basic sense.
Today, this place is a devastated waste, the whine of chainsaws fills the air. Multinational corporations convert what once lived into money.
Darwin got it wrong.
At a certain level of population we are genetically predisposed to cooperation as a survival technique, as are all great apes.
Above levels found in native American populations and stone age groups in Europe for example, such as in the invading countries mentioned above, Incas and Mayans, and which are made possible by discoveries like agriculture and fossil fuels, these traits become hindrances to an individual’s overall success. Larger populations cannot keep track and eliminate those prediosed to antisocial and psycopathic tendencies and so they flourish. Different studies put the percentage of such individuals at 1-10%. Quite enough to take over and control a subordinate population.
…a subordinate population programmed to cooperate, I should have said.
No other large scale group of humans has ever acted in any other way.