"It's understandable, I suppose, in the sense that we want to think of them as 'uncorrupted' beings that were more spiritually advanced than us, living in harmony with their environment, etc, but it just doesn't wash."
Quite. The internet is full of such claims but where's the evidence? Maybe the fact that being a hunter gatherer allows you to not exhaust the environment has been interpreted as evidence of intention not to. But there's no reason to link the two. The moment we settled down and made a clearing in the forest we started the exploitation game and we're still at it.
All we know is that this lady was worn (as there's a loop) and she's sexually explicit - which means she could have pornographic intention (once again, no evidence we've changed in that respect) and/or she denoted fertility (because she seems to be the earliest of a long line of such totems)
“If there’s one conclusion you want to draw from this, it’s that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years,” said Cambridge anthropologist Prof Paul Mellars" http://www.irishtimes.com/news[...]d/2009/0515/1224246568017.html
Reply | with quote | Posted by nigelswift 18th May 2009ce 01:30 |
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