Our sapien ancestors appear to have carved a snakeskin pattern into a small ochre block and left it in a South African cave about 100,000 years ago. It's often cited as evidence of an awakening artistic consciousness. Yet, a similarly manipulated sea shell was found in Southeast Asia dating back 500,000 years, a time that predates what we know of sapiens.
Etched ochre at Blombos Cave, ca 100,000 years ago (left); etched shell from Indonesia, ca. 500,000 years ago (right)
Around 175,000 years ago, Neanderthals assembled bones and cave drippings – stalactites and stalagmites – into symbolic circles around central hearths deep inside a cave in Southwestern France. Circles plural: there were two of them and they served no obvious utility.
It seems we inherited the practice of using minerals in our rituals. The stone circles and pyramids that follow are our contribution to this lineage. Sapiens appear to have brought the lessons of the cave to the landscape.
But what are those lessons? What is the practice?
Pendulum.
And it also seems that doing so is a kind of
To any sufficiently advanced society, technology may be misclassified as magic.