December 22, 2006
A team of archaeologists has discovered what it says is evidence of
humankind's oldest ritual.
Africa's San people may have used a remote cave for ceremonies of
python worship as much as 70,000 years ago—30,000 years earlier than
the oldest previously known human rites—the team says.
"The level of abstract thinking within the peoples of [this period] and
the continuity of their cultural patterns is proving to be astonishing
for such an early date," said Sheila Coulson, an archaeologist at
Norway's University of Oslo.
Coulson and colleague Nick Walker base their findings on
artifacts found in Rhino Cave, a cavern discovered in the 1990s in the
remote Tsodilo Hills of Botswana.
The researchers found a large rock inside the cave that they say
resembles a giant python, with natural features in the stone forming an
eye and a mouth.
The 20-foot-by-6.5-foot (6-meter-by-2-meter) stone was also scarred by
several hundred human-made grooves that may have been meant to resemble
scales.
Beneath the python rock, scientists found a section of curved
wall, which they believe may have collapsed during work on the
"python." The researchers also discovered quartz flakes packed in some
of the cave's crevices.
And the team unearthed spearheads identical to those found at
another site in Botswana, which had been dated to 77,000 years ago.
The hundred-plus, brightly colored projectile points appear to have
been brought to the cave unfinished, sometimes from great distances,
and were finished at the site.
Some points were intentionally broken or burned in what Coulson believes was a ritual destruction of artifacts.
"They did not burn the spearheads by chance," Coulson said.
"They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally
burned them."
But Coulson's findings have been received with skepticism from
some scientists, who say that more research is needed to confirm the
age and purpose of the site.
Until recently most anthropologists believed that "modern" human
behavior requiring symbolic thought did not originate until 40,000 or
50,000 years ago—around the same time that early humans first migrated
out of Africa.
(See an interactive map of human migration.)
The archaeological record, particularly in Europe, suggests an explosive proliferation of such behavior about 45,000 years ago.
But a 2001 discovery by archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood shifted the debate on such theories.
Henshilwood's team found specialized bone tools and engraved red ocher
in South Africa's Blombos Cave and dated them to 70,000 years ago,
suggesting that the humans who left Africa might have already exhibited
"modern" behaviors.
(Read "African Bone Tools Dispute Key Idea About Human Evolution" [November 8, 2001].)
Rupert Isaacson is an Austin, Texas-based journalist and the author of The Healing Land: The Bushmen and the Kalahari Desert.
He says that rituals like those Coulson describes are depicted in
ancient paintings throughout the Tsodilo Hills and endure among today's
San, also known as Bushmen.
"That tradition remains unbroken," said Isaacson, who also advocates for the San through the Indigenous Land Rights Fund.
"Anywhere you go where Bushmen still exist you'll find trained
healers who know how to go into trances, and they do them for the
community at sacred sites, where they are more powerful."
Controversial Findings
Michigan State University anthropologist Larry Robbins studied Rhino
Cave in the mid-1990s and has previously suggested that the site might
have been used for rituals, based on rock paintings found there.
But he's not certain that such rituals were being practiced as
far back as 70,000 years ago or that the "python rock" played a role.
"I'm not convinced that the rock is an intentional snake at
all, or that all those depressions and grooves belong together in terms
of their age," he said.
"It could be that perhaps even quite recently someone decided to make it look a little bit more like a snake."
"I'm also not convinced that the evidence shows a 70,000-year-old
ritual," he added, "but I'd be very happy if that turns out to be the
case."
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, has similar reservations about the findings of
Coulson's team.
He notes that dating artifacts in such a locale is a very
difficult task, with different techniques producing widely divergent
results.
"In this case I don't see anything that can unambiguously date these
[artifacts]—not in that time period and that place," he said.
Alec Campbell, founder of Botswanas National Museum and an authority on
the Tsodilo Hills, suggested that some of the grooves on the python
rock may have been made around the time that Coulson's team suggests.
But he believes that other grooves were made perhaps as recently as a
thousand years ago.
"You get these [grooves] all over the world, and they go back a very
long time, possibly 300,000 years in one Indian location," he said.
Campbell is also unconvinced that the rock is meant to resemble a snake.
"The [grooves] likely possess some sort of symbolic purpose and possibly a religious one," he said.
"But to say that this particular frieze of [grooves] represents a snake
and it's the earliest religious site that's known, I just don't think
that makes sense."
The cumulative evidence, however, is convincing to Coulson.
"It is the whole package of … behavior traits from our excavations that
has led us to conclude that the only plausible explanation is that this
site was used for ritual purposes," she said.
"The intentional stuffing of quartz flakes into a crack in the wall
beneath the snake, the exceptional treatment of all the points
recovered, [these] are behavioral patterns that do not fit any patterns
we know of from the many other sites [from this era]."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061222-python-ritual.html
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