During the last week, I’ve been looking over the work I did in the 1970′s on the cycle of static and creative phases, hoping to come up with clues as to the nature of the “romantic break.” But instead of finding answers, I keep being reminded of puzzles I was never able to resolve at the time.

By far the most significant of these has to do with the role played by changes in fashion.

I suggested in the previous entry that the concept of a recurring cycle of cultural phases grew out of my study of the development of science fiction — and that is true enough as far as it goes. Between January and August of 1972, Alexei and I wrote a series of columns on the history of SF, in the course of which I began toying with the notion that periods of major thematic innovation, like the 1930′s-40′s, seem to alternate with periods like the 1960′s when authors are mainly concerned with fine points of style and attitude.

That idea was only half-formed, however, when we finished the historical series and turned to other things. Alexei spent the fall of 1972 working on an essay about SF as modern myth, and I took up one of my other interests, the history of fashion.

But I must have brought some of my new historical perspective with me, because as I pored over images of 18th and 19th century styles, I was suddenly hit with an insight that women’s clothing seemed to alternate every few decades between two basic silhouettes, which I dubbed “organic” and “geometrical.” And when I jotted down my initial observations, I casually noted at the bottom of the page that “there seem to be marked correspondences with periods of modern science fiction.”

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In the previous entry, I began exploring the idea that there may have been an evolutionary leap from almost-modern to fully-modern humans as recently as 80,000 years ago, when art and personal ornament first appear in the archaeological record.

A further piece of evidence for this theory is the extremely low genetic diversity of the human population, even today. It was estimated in 2003 that all modern humans are descended from no more than 2000 individuals who lived around 80,000 years ago.

Some scientists argue that this figure may be a bit on the low side, but it seems generally accepted that there was a significant population bottleneck. The reasons for the contraction, however, remain unclear. One possibility is that a natural disaster caused a significant die-back — but there is no geological evidence for such a disaster.

In addition, the bottleneck was immediately followed by the Great Migration, when modern humans spread from Africa throughout the world. That would seem like an odd adventure for a species which had just avoided extinction by the skin of its teeth.

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In recent entries, I have sketched out two different ancient visions of the fundamental principles of existence, which together underlie the beliefs and practices of all archaic societies.

The first of these visions is likely to have grown out of the discovery that natural materials could be altered by means of fire to make them more useful. It emphasizes flux and change and metamorphosis and is closely tied to the mysteries of childbirth and the female body.

The second vision probably began with the elaboration of formal kinship systems that was necessary when humans began to live in social groupings larger than the biological family. In sharp contrast to the first, it emphasizes order, control, and the superseding of natural processes by socially-determined rules and rituals.

The roots of the transformative vision may go back at least 164,000 years, to a time when the earliest modern humans were already engaging in complex alchemical operations. The kinship vision probably began somewhat later, but it was well-established by 80,000 years ago, when archaeological remains first hint at social complexity and long-distance trading networks.

Despite their profound differences, these two visions operate jointly in all present-day archaic societies. Depending on circumstances, either one or the other may predominate. They may be viewed as mutually complementary, as antagonistic, or as some mixture of both. They are often compartmentalized, with the transformative vision being associated with the female sphere and the kinship vision with the male.

Further complicating matters, however, is a third vision which is also present in all archaic societies. That vision involves a belief in things unseen — in spirits, in a long-ago Dreamtime where spirit-people laid down norms for those who came after, and in the possibility of contacting the spirits for guidance through trance or other shamanistic practices.

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A few months ago, I discussed recent findings on the ancient use of fire to produce a kind of glue which was used to attach stone axe heads to wooden handles. Now another early example of the sophisticated use of fire in tool-making has been described — and like the glue, it comes from South Africa and has been dated around 72,000 years ago.

The technique in question involves heat-treating a yellowish stone called silcrete, which is not well-adapted to tool-making, so that it turns a deep, glossy red and is very easily flaked.

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Primate studies suggest that the first modern humans would have lived in small bands of some two dozen individuals in which relationships among the women were central to the structure of the group. The men may have been dominant, but their own status would have been largely dependent on that of their mothers.

At some very early point, however, all that changed. Even the simplest and most archaic present-day societies tend to have bewilderingly complex kinship structures, where every individual is expected to conform to an elaborate set of rules that govern their relationships with every other member of the group.

In these societies, there are not only rigid guidelines for such matters as who can marry whom but even prescriptions for how each individual is to address every other individual, depending on their biological relationship and relative status. Modern vestiges of this sort of system — such as the use of titles and honorifics, or the choice between last name, first name, and nickname — represent only a pale shadow of what it was like at its peak of elaboration.

In addition to participating in a spectrum of socially-defined relationships, each individual in these societies also passes through a series of different statuses in course of their lifetime — child, adult, spouse, parent, elder — generally by means of formal transitions that may involve elaborate and often grueling rites of passage.

Nothing about this extravagant structure of statuses and relationships is hard-wired into the human psyche, and none of it is self-evident. That means it had to be invented at some point by people with an idea of what they were trying to accomplish.

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In my previous post, I suggested that the making of string figures goes back 70,000 years or more and represents both an ancient mode of performance art and a very early exercise in abstract thinking. However, string figures are far more than that. They are also a form of magic.

Nearly a hundred years ago, the mathematician W.W. Rouse Ball delivered a lecture on string figures in which he noted:

Among existing aborigines, it is usually the women who teach the passtime to the children, and in most cases now-a-days the lads and men, though familiar with the methods used, do not of their own accord make designs in the presence of strangers. …

The Eskimo … have a prejudice against boys playing the game for fear it should lead to their getting entangled with harpoon lines, and hold that such figures, if made at all should be constructed in the autumn so as to entangle the sun in the string and delay the advent of the long winter night.

The notion that knotted strings can be used as a form of voodoo to entangle and hold things back is both very old and more widely distributed than string figures themselves. For example, the Scottish ballad “Willie’s Lady” tells of a man whose mother is jealous of her son’s young wife and uses several kinds of binding magic to prevent the girl’s baby from being born. With the aid of a friendly household spirit, Willie manages to learn the secrets of this “vile rank witch” and successfully undoes the binding spells:

O Willie has loosed the nine witch knots
That was amo that ladie’s locks …

And Willie has loosed her left-foot shee,
And letten his ladie be.

And now he’s gotten a bonny young son,
And mickle grace be him upon.

The ballad suggests both the positive and negative sides of what is sometimes known as female magic. In its positive aspect, it has a close association with midwifery and childbirth. But in its negative aspect, it is feared — particularly by men — as “vile” witchcraft that can cause crops to fail to grow and cows to cease giving milk. In both aspects, it is closely bound up with the imagery of knotting and unknotting, binding and releasing.

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Since I started blogging a couple of months ago, I have to some degree just been tossing in whatever catches my eye — but at the same time, my flights of speculation have been far from random. They all orbit around a small number of topics which I find of particular interest, and many of them grow out of a major project that I’ve been working at for many years.

The organizing principle of this project is the notion that human history has been structured by a progression of contending visions of the nature of the universe.

Each of these visions arises out of a unique area of human experience and practical knowledge and gradually acquires greater organization in the form of a theoretical framework that both explains that experience and extrapolates beyond it. Those extrapolations then become a rich source of culture innovation and creativity.

Eventually, though, theory hardens into dogma and vision into ideology. Then new visions arise to challenge and overthrow the old ones and to enjoy their own moment of cultural dominance before they are overthrown in in turn.

Even after being rejected, however, the older visions never vanish entirely. Every one of them leaves residual traces in the form of art and story and other symbolic expressions that are so powerful and archetypal that they continue to be maintained indefinitely.

Thanks to those traces, even the most ancient visions can still be identified and to some extent reconstructed — though with less certainty as you go further back in time. Much of what I’ve written here about prehistory and early civilizations reflects my ongoing attempt to identify the assumptions and theories and mythic elaborations associated with the very earliest visions.

Hardest of all to make out is the starting point, the very first human vision of existence, in part because it seems to predate even the earliest known myths. But there are certain components that can be tentatively assigned to it, working both from archaeology and from those elements in the earliest myths that seem to reflect a state of belief even older than the myths themselves.

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It occurred to me after doing the previous entry that someone with a skeptical eye might object that I seem to be cherry-picking my examples in order to make a case for the prehistoric origins of mystical beliefs and practices.

In fact, from my point of view, it’s quite the opposite. Until recently, I shared the prevailing assumption that sophisticated intellectual and philosophical systems go back to not much earlier than 500 BC and that human knowledge before then was relatively unsystematic, intuitive, or “mythopoeic.”

It’s been only with the emergence of geek culture over the last couple of years that I’ve become convinced that geeks as a personality type have existed since the origins of modern humanity. (I doubt there were Neanderthal geeks — there’s certainly no sign of them in the archeological record — which may be why we’re still here, for all our flaws, and they’re not.)

And it’s in the nature of geeks to mess around with stuff, try to make sense of it, create intellectual systems of dizzying complexity to explain it, exchange wild metaphysical speculations with their fellow geeks, and generally geek out to the max at any opportunity.

See, for example, the Mayan calendar as an example of geekitude run amok. Or the I Ching. Or the pyramids. Geeks just can’t help themselves. Intellectual complexity mated to metaphysical subtlety is what they do. It’s the water in which they swim.

So, no, I’m not cherry-picking my examples. I’m just being struck by the fact that there are signs saying “Geeks at Work” in big flashing letters all over the archaeological record.

It was announced earlier this week that a Paleolithic flute, carved some 35,000 years ago from the hollow bone of a vulture’s forearm, has been discovered in Germany.

The discovery is being heralded as demonstrating the “high-level of musical and technological sophistication” present at that time. It is also being suggested that such flutes might have contributed to their makers’ evolutionary fitness by enhancing social bonding.

All of that may be perfectly true — but it may also fall far short of explaining the real intentions of the flutes’ makers.

Flutes have ancient mystical connotations. It is not the physical body of the flute that produces the musical sound, but the nothingness within it. A flute is of no value as an instrument until it is hollowed out and becomes receptive to the breath and will of the musician.

Because of these qualities, flutes provide a ready analogy for the subtle relationship between body and soul, as well as for the mystical directive to empty oneself of ego in order to be filled from outside.

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According to a story at Wired this week, “Researchers who reverse-engineered an ancient superglue have found that Stone Age people were smarter than we thought. Making the glue, originally used on 70,000-year-old composite tools, clearly required high-level cognitive powers.”

That’s pretty neat in itself — even though this whole “smarter than we thought” business does tend to inspire kind of a “What You Mean ‘We,’ Kimosabe” reaction.

But the really interesting part is how this superglue was created. It seems that when the researchers tried to use acacia gum — of which they’d found traces on the ancient stone tools — to attach their replicas to wooden handles, it didn’t work. It wasn’t until they added in the iron-rich pigment of which they’d also found traces that everything held together.

“Making the glue required much more than simple mixing,” the Wired article continues. “It demanded careful and sustained attention. Keeping the fire at the right temperature required certain types of wood, with a certain degree of moisture content. If glues were mixed too close to the fire, they contained air bubbles. If too dry, they weren’t cohesive; if too wet, they were weak. The Sibudu Cave’s Stone Age inhabitants, wrote the researchers, were ‘competent chemists, alchemists and pyrotechnologists.’”

Yeah — alchemists. Their word, not mine. But it was very aptly chosen.

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