Penelope
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[highlight]horizon event[/highlight]
To my reading of modern archeology, Eden is not a mythical place. It was a real one.
This place was bounded:
- On the east by the Caspian Ocean.
- On the north by the Caucasus Mountains and by a (then) mammoth freshwater lake (which is, now, an even larger body of water - the saltwater Black Sea).
- On the west and south by the Mediterranean Sea and the prairies of the Fertile Crescent.
The place which is, today, the nation of Turkey.
This Eden existed from about 11,000 years ago (perhaps as early as 14,500 years ago) and lasted until the end of the Flandrian Transgression (the receding of the last ice age and the raising of the oceans to around their current levels), about 6,000 years ago.
The Turkish plain, during this period, contained vast animal herds of numerous variety. And contained a multitude of wild grains, native fruit trees, and natural vegetables. The Turkish plain was a veritable garden for hunter/gatherer (Paleolithic) peoples migrating thru this territory from the north, or from the east, or from the south.
These people moved from place to place, following the herds, knowing the places and times of year when grains and fruits ripen, and can be gathered and eaten. They took only what they needed, to be consumed within the tribe, or only enough extra to use for trade with other tribes. Their superstitions were animistic. That trees and animals have powers which must be mollified. These superstitions helped keep hunter/gatherer peoples from wantonly depleting their (and fellow tribes') food supplies. It was a kind of moral contract with nature. Nature will provide, if you do NOT objectify animals and trees, and thus NOT abuse these entities' 'spirit.' And NOT abuse the laws of the natural world. Good behavior insures survival of the tribe.
But on the plains of Turkey, something began to change.
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This is where it gets interesting to me.
The procedure by which Neolithic transformation happened - as this "rise to Civilization" has been described by traditional archeology - goes something like this:
1. Domestication of plants and animals began.
2. Agriculture became more organized, necessitating more 'workers' and increased social control beyond tribal customs.
3. Cities developed as centers for trade, and Organized Religion was instituted as an overarching social control, to keep individuals marching to the same drumbeat.
But the Postprocessual movement in archeological, from their recent findings from archeological sites across Turkey, have been turning these long-held assumptions upon their head. The 9000 year old sites which they are unearthing in Turkey (and as far away as the Jordan River in Palestine) were cities.
Early cities, some walled and some not. But cities.
And in these cities, a very close look at their surviving art ... reveals that a new kind of Religious Belief was already beginning to replace the old Animistic tribal religions of hunter/gatherers. And careful statistical analysis from these urban latrines ... reveal that virtually the entire diet of these urban dwellers consisted of wild grains and wild fruit and wild animal meat. Only a small fragment of a citizen's diet consisted of domesticated plant or animal.
Pretty cool what archeological forensics can figure out these days, isn't it?
But to explain the findings takes a tad of [highlight]speculation[/highlight].
Each of these cities likely began, originally, as the location of a typical multi-tribal trading rendezvous - seasonal sites where tribes meet to trade surpluses and to socially interact, forge bonds, arrange marriages. Permanent settlements eventually develop at some of these locations. And year-round inhabitants of these trading posts have become specialists in preserving wild food-product past its natural season (e.g. sealed pottery). Or they have become specialists in developing more expertly sharpened tools and weapons for trade with members of wandering tribes, in exchange for food-product. But, at some of these ancient sites, the urban collection of peoples also instigated a change in human consciousness. These urban craftsmen/specialists/traders began to see their world in a new way.
At the same time, some accidental, and disorganized, domestication of this plant or that animal occurred - by this wandering tribe or that one. And some domesticated product began to come thru these trading-centers. But, thinking differently about the world than those they traded with, some of these urban dwellers see potential in domestication. See profit. Some then actively seek to domesticate local plants and animals - in an ORGANZIED way. The hunter/gatherers do not see the point of doing this - because they are looking season to season: they are not looking long term. But the urban entrepreneurs do recognize this long-term potentiality ... because an entirely different mindset has begun to brew in these proto-cities.
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These proto-cities are undergoing a social change. And they are evolving into more organized cities. And this change takes place in their family and communal ritual practices - changes in ritual practices which is keenly reflected in their unearthed art.
These early urban dwellers come to require of themselves ... a new kind of (non-animistic) religion where humans "had dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, over the beasts of the field." To tame wild animals or replant wild seeds ... is a kind of arrogance against Nature. It says nature can be improved. Humans can improve nature.
This is an affront to Animistic tribal belief-structures. It claims that the human spirit is superior to nature-spirits. Claims the human gene is meant to dominate nature. Thus a person's human genetic ancestors are revered. (They are not feared, as ghosts are feared - in the case of hunter/gatherer societies). Here, the graves of one's urban ancestors lie underneath the floorboards of the family house. Each generation rebuilds their family dwelling, literally, on top of the remains of the family's forbearers. Other forms of chromosome-based reverential rituals develop. This is evidenced by early Neolithic urban art. No hunter/gatherer cartoon drawings of hunters chasing their prey - but new rituals connecting the idea of death to the idea of the human face. The literal human being as the supreme image.
Death ... is no longer part of nature's cycles ...
Death becomes emblematic of family (genetic) continuity. Building on the past. Honoring the past but seeing the distant (multi-generational) future, up ahead. (A promised future. A nationhood.)
This I find to be unmistakably crucial.
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The future is a concept which cannot be found within animistic hunter/gatherer mindsets.
Once people have a belief-structure in place which cleanly conceptualizes the relationship between their past and their future (not living in a hunter/gatherer's eternal, if seasonal, 'present') ... then a mindset exists to - in an increasingly conscious way - domesticate the plants and animals in their locality. Domesticating a plant or animal is no longer a lucky accident. (Those who breed new stains of domesticated plants and animals have concepts which now understand something about gene-splicing - about breeding and crossbreeding of genes. About changing nature. About "improving" nature.) The act of domestication becomes, increasingly, a conscious social endeavor.
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Compared with other locales on the planet, during the Neolithic era, a widely disproportionate amount of the earliest human domestication of plants and animals had come from the Turkish plain (domestication of plants and animals was slower to develop elsewhere). And as these Turkish cities became self-confident in their new world view, they inevitably would come into some conflict with the migratory hunter/gatherers who had, once, been their suppliers.
Now, these wandering peoples, these Paleolithic throwbacks, were likely seen - by the Neolithic city-dwellers - as pilferers of domesticated herd-animals and of domesticated orchards and fields of grain. Not quite thieves - but seen by the urban-dwellers as mindless like children.
Incognizant of the 'new morality.'
'Us city-dwellers' have to teach these wandering children to see the difference between wild animals and domesticated beasts of the field, the difference between wild fruit trees & grains and domesticated fruit trees & grain-crops. The wild ones are FREE - and fair game for all. The domesticated ones are OUR PROPERTY.
And, as these cities become increasingly powerful, able to sustain larger and larger populations with their domesticated surpluses, they eventually obtain the power to lay down the law:
"DON'T TOUCH OUR TREES."
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Whatever morality tale you think you read in Genesis 2 of the Bible ...
It seems to me ...
Where Eden is concerned, THIS morality tale is the only one which is definitively true.
. I like your new avatar 
