Selections: Neolithic Beginnings

This sounds like another ‘axial’ era lurking in the data. Since we can see that even at the later phases of emerging civilization a mysterious driver is at work, we must remain suspicious that our eonic data shows us what is missing in our perception of the Great Explosion , so called, and the onset of the Neolithic . It is clear that something doesn’t add up in the Darwinian account, if we compute backwards in fifty thousand year blocks. We have about four such blocks, starting from –200,000. The last block has to be written off since man as we know him is relatively static throughout this final interval as he emerges from Africa. If nothing much happens in the fourth, what shall we say of the first three? No use saying some lucky mutation did the whole thing.

Something sudden occurred somewhere here, in Africa we suppose, and the later eonic effect leaves us altogether suspicious. We should note one important difference here, however: the eonic effect shows global integration in a world system. The crossing of a threshold for earliest man would seem to have been a highly concentrated sourcing process, of differentiation and dispersal, almost the opposite. We cannot therefore safely extrapolate. Let us hope that our brief mention of the Great Explosion (when, and where?) is not still another Origins Myth to which we have succumbed after all our vows to remain within the evidence. At any rate, perception of the eonic effect induces loss of faith in the standard Darwinian account, and, its credibility up in smoke, we permitted ourselves a conjecture in passing as to the possibility of some earlier ‘eonic sequence’ at the threshold of behaviorally modern man. And our invocation of ‘suddenness’ must be understood in perspective, for it is entirely compatible, in a stream and sequence analysis, with alternations of slow lead up and transient relative transformations of ten millennia or so. In any case, the last of our 50,000 blocks shows us a human with the potential for language, art, religion, technics (science) and, by the way, yoga.

The Tower of Babel In the throes of the Darwin debate and beset with the Creationist design arguments, Robert Pennock in The Tower of Babel, attempts to compare the ‘evolution’ of language with Darwinian evolution. But we must already wonder if this differentiation of languages does not rather correspond to a type of ‘microevolution’, leaving the real ‘macroevolution’ as obscure as before. The various theories of an original superfamily of human languages, perhaps taking us back to the Great Explosion, are highly suggestive here.[ii]

Axial literature The eonic effect puts an ace up our sleeve: we see distinct eonic sequences of linguistic phenomena at the level of poetic art. Examine the eonic sequence in terms of Axial Greek epic and lyric poetry, Homer to Archilochus onward, and its precise eonic timing. Everything falls into place, down to the poetic meters. This clear relative transformation (given the unknown but clearly indicated stream entry phenomenon of bards and their sagas) shows us that ‘macroevolution’ in short bursts definitely exists in the most exotic form as the advanced linguistic-poetic behavior of the man, whatever that tells us about early linguistic evolution. Nearby, a similar phenomenon is occurring in the emergence of the Old Testament literature.

Oral Traditions The collation of history with the invention of writing is misleading, perhaps, in so far as even in historical times traditions of oral literature remain outstanding. Homer is notable because he put an oral tradition into writing, one that he did not invent. The oral traditions of Indian yoga should remind us that millennia of religion in the Neolithic or before could have maintained continuity before the onset of written documents. Lao Tse, in fact, often seems to be protesting the misleading character of written documents, as if these were a decline from a deeper form of transmission. Buddhists often indicated just such an issue, and spoke of the direct transmission of teachings, forever grumbling at the limits of written sutras. The Old Testament is thoroughly modern in this regard, the first of the great literary religions armed with the new ‘hi-tech’ technology of democratized alphabetic writing. These hotshots are pointing to the future of ‘religion by the book’.

As we examine the core eonic effect, especially the Axial Age, we can see that a long-range evolutionary driver is at work, able to micromanage art, philosophy and religion, in short three century bursts, hopscotching across the surface of a planet. We can, by reverse fingerwagging, charge Darwinians with their Origins Myth. Our eonic model is designed for this situation, where the standard account is stuck in a demand for consistency and reductionist uniformity, beginning to end. We can only start with man as we find him, whatever his earlier evolution, and we further discover that we can barely know this man if our consciousness is caught in the typical mechanizations of ideology generated in the mideonic declines of the master sequence. Every yogi in

India

dreads this danger and ‘returns to the forest’ to cast his reflection in the mirror of Self, to see who he is. Frankly, Alfred Wallace is a better guide in this situation, because he sensed that early man appeared with a mysterious potential, such as his capacity for song, that was not explained by any scenario of adaptation. And the facts of human language, again suggesting a distinct interval of transformation, whatever its absolute beginnings, somewhere near this threshold point of the Great Explosion.

Looking at the core eonic effect we were led to the suspicion that we have only one half of our data, and a frequency hypothesis gave us the following speculative possibility, based on a quite reasonable assumption of monotone cycles:

Our basic history is still very thin, what to say of the search for overlaid transitions. And yet it is nonetheless remarkable that during these intervals from the so-called Natufian (roughly our ‘ET1’) onward the history of the Fertile Crescent roughly correlates with this series of blocks. We should definitely advance a prediction that a series of eonic transitions of our type is hidden here in the Middle East behind the rapidly divergent diffusion of the Neolithic. It is in fact easy to spot how this sequence proceeds and our perception of the ‘frontier effect’ suggests each stage will show adjacency relations with the prior and next (although in such thin manifestations its logic would seem less inevitable), and this is just what we see as the series curls around the Fertile Crescent, from the Levant to Northern Mesopotamia to the field of Sumer.

?‘ET1,…’: The so-called Natufian with its transitional cultures of proto-agricultural hunter gatherers.

‘ET2,…’: The Neolithic Revolution is underway and we see the transition to village life.

‘ET3,…’: The series moves to the northern Mesopotamian region, and we see the Hassuna/Halaaf cultures, along with the first prehistoric phase of

Egypt

. This era begins the lead up to the take-off in Sumer and

Egypt

in the next step. By this point agriculture has diffused almost globally, and yet the great advance will occur in the frontier zone to the south, the realm of

Sumer

The Neolilthic is spreading globally by the end of this period, and we make no claim that this is the sole interesting zone of Neolithic development. And yet the great advance of the next stages clearly source in this early progression.

Çatal Hüyük We are hard-pressed to trace this remarkable florescence of the Neolithic to a transitional phase, yet we can see that this gem of mideonic culture amply shows the first grand phase of a ‘high Neolithic’, along with Jericho, complete with seminal religious formations, and organized ‘civil existence’, if not civilization. This culture, in the Anatolian zone, easily satisfies our ‘frontier effect’ requirement, and it is also interesting that this complex suddenly dies out close to the onset of ‘ET3’. Our system jumps toward a new diffusion field in Northern Mesopotamia.[iii]

The period ‘ET3’ ought to have been the real beginning of civilization, but it will be millennia before higher civilization emerges. In fact, this period we suspect contains the clue to the Great Religions that will follow the Axial Age. It is here that great temple complexes begin to emerge in the network of village Neolithic. It is significant that ‘religion’ in this sense predates the rise of civilization, leaving us to ponder the relativity in the meaning of the term. This period is reminiscent of the long Medieval period preceeding modernity, readying populations for the jump to the advanced requirements of the modern system.

This raises many questions of the independent discovery of agriculture, and at this point we must recall our distinction of technostream and eonic sequence. The discovery of agriculture is well within the capacity of a smart ape, slowly but surely stumbling on the phenomena of seeds and seasons. As with so much technology this often occurs outside the eonic sequence, and several times in different places.

Chronology of metal ages These periods are often correlated with the sequence of metals ages, but the association is misleading. ‘ET3’, ‘ET4’, and ‘ET5’, show, no doubt, a rough correlation with the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, but there is no direct association, what of ‘ET1, 2, 6’? The Age of Steel? Won’t work. The discoveries of these metals, along with pottery and much else, depends only on human invention and most likely takes place outside the eonic mainline (which might however integrate their application into a culture nexus).

And thus this discovery of bare agriculture might occur independently in several regions. It is rather the large-scale integration of infrastructure with its comprensive package of artistic, political, and religious, effects able to manifest an ordered advance of civilization that characterizes our eonic sequence. And this seems to begin after ‘ET2’, and very clearly after ‘ET3’. Unless it is really ‘ET1’!

It seems that this larger integration happened only once, in the Fertile Cresent. With the possible exception of the New World, which we will discuss in the next section, we can trace the diffusion from this great beginning. It seems that the case of the New World is misleading us. We must note in passing that if you wish to evolve Civilization on a planet, this ‘middle east’ is a good middle, the roughly equidistant point from the farflung sectors of Eurasia/st1:place>. Diffusion will rapidly reach the entire continental surface.

To understand what we must be missing, it might be useful to imagine a history of Archaic and Classical Greece, if this had occurred without the technology of writing, to realize that a complete transition could be right under our noses and we wouldn’t see it. The bards would have sung their tales, with no Homer to record their saga. The Greek world shows a field of city states, one of which, Athens, especially flagships ‘premonitions’ of the future, and flowers over a very brief interval. Such incidents in earlier periods are so far beyond our resolving power. We see that our position for earlier time may be hopeless. Further the factor of self-consciousness can exist behind primitive thinking and crude knowledge, the feeling we often get with Gilgamesh . Accounts of the Neolithic are thus under suspicion of showing us the rough outlines of ‘stream history’ and the mideonic surges of larger scale formations (viz. the way the Roman Empire follows the Axial period), but not the generative flash points, if any, leading the system on.

We can post a bookmark, and move swiftly to the beginning of our core eonic effect, the rise of Dynastic Egypt, and

Sumer

at the close of the Third Millennium. It is clear that five millennia of development precede this ‘beginning’.

[i] Steven Mithen, After The Ice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 506, Alan Simmons, The Neolithic Revolution in The Near East (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), Alan Simmons, The Neolithic Revolution In The Near East (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), Hans Nissen, The Early History of The Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

[ii] Robert Pennock, The Tower Of Babel (Cambridge: The MIT press, 1999), Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn (New York: Penguin 2006), Steve Olson, Mapping Human History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

[iii] Michael Balter, The Goddess And The Bull (Walnut Creek: California, 2006), Ian Wilson, Before The Flood (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001).