Carsten Dominik <address@hidden> writes:
Hi Ross,
great post, thank you very much!
You have made me curious: What argumentation is used to estimate
the age of Myth at 70000 years. I can't be the fossile record,
I guess :-) So I am wondering how something like this is figured
out.
If you feel like putting background stuff about unicorns into the
FAQ, be my guest.
- Carsten
Hi Carsten;
Thanks for the feedback -- and actually, I was wondering if someone
might ask about the 70,000 years. Until recently, the accepted date
for
the appearance of human culture -- as evidenced by complex tools and
apparent symbolic thinking -- was somewhere around thirty or forty
thousand years ago (the so-called Willendorf Venus figures, for
example). But this threshold has now doubled back -- to at least
seventy
thousand before the present. Archaeologists working at the Blombos
cave
in South Africa have found, among other surprises, finely worked
weapons
decorated with symbolic engravings -- within a strata older than
seventy
thousand years.
So, it seems that humans were thinking in terms of symbols at least
70,000 years ago. And symbols always derive from myths (this is the
most
basic rule of myth: symbols indicate myths). So, myths are at least
70,000 years old. By the way, this is not the same as the emergence of
individuality, which is a related but not identical development.
Individuality seems to have taken quite a bit longer: it seems to
first
appear with the ancient Egyptians around 3000 BCE. A statue of the
pharaoh Khafre (the owner of the second-largest pyramid at Giza) is
the
world's oldest surviving individualized work of art. This statue is
now
in room 42 of the Cairo Museum. So indeed, the answer to life, the
universe, and everything is 42! (I devoted quite a bit of time to
Khafre
in my book on myth; he was a very interesting character who may be the
face on the sphinx; and the sphinx, of course, is of the same
mythological family as the unicorn).