Turning The World Upside-Down
'Genius' Uses Archaeological Evidence To Upend Conventional Narrative
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New Evidence On Origins Of Mankind
A Priestly Slave?
William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic describes the late David Graeber as a genius in his review of a newly released book by Graeber and David Wengrow. Graeber wrote a number of books that offer different takes on the history of human society, and in the new book — the first of three that the authors had planned to publish — the writers trace three elementary forms of domination that mankind has used throughout history: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (politics). Rather than a progression from hunter-gatherers to farmers to civilized society, they say, for most of the past 5,000 years, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”
Using archaeological evidence, they postulate in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity that there was no lineal progression based on the technology available at the time, but that people have always made decisions on how they wanted to conduct their lives. Sometimes they chose not to “follow the crowd” but experimented with other approaches to life that focused on “three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements.”
One intriguing lesson they suggest is that the Enlightenment — the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy attributed to Western European thought — resulted from ideas French explorers, who were mainly Jesuit missionaries, brought back after discussions with the Native Americans “who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as ‘generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment, and liberty.’”Those concepts of freedom, equality, and democracy had been “all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition” prior to that, they say.
New Evidence On Origins Of Mankind
New archaeological research suggests that the oldest known human-like footprints may be even older than previously believed. Jacinta Bowler in Science Alert reports that fossilized imprints that were found on Crete in 2002 are around 6.05 million years old — more than 300,000 years older than originally thought.
The new estimate of the age of the 50 footprints was published in the journal Scientific Reports. Paleontologist Gerard Gierliński had discovered the tracks on a beach near the village of Trachilos while on vacation in western Crete in 2002. The impressions in sediment deposits were linked to the end of the Miocene epoch, when the Mediterranean Sea temporarily dried out.
Believed to be left by hominins, the footprints could show that early humans evolved, not in Africa, but at the Mediterranean Sea. Researchers say it’s possible that the bipedal creature who made the marks was a member of Graecopithecus freyberg, an early human ancestor discovered in 1944 and nicknamed “El Graeco.”
A Priestly Slave?
Excavations around Pompeii have unearthed the remains of a former slave, identified as Marcus Venerius Secundio, who apparently rose through the social ranks to merit burial in a tomb at the necropolis of Porta Sarno, which was one of the main entrance gates into the city. The tomb is believed to date back to the decades before Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.
The partially mummified remains included hair and bones, described as the best-preserved human remains ever discovered in Pompeii, including Secundio’s white hair and a partially visible ear. Initial tests show he died at about the age of 60.
According to the article in The Guardian, Secundio was a slave and the custodian of Pompeii’s Temple of Venus. After being freed from slavery, he joined the ranks of the Augustales, a college of priests who were in charge of a form of emperor-worship. The fact that he was buried in a tomb proves he succeeded in achieving a good social and economic position.
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