The Endurance of the Human Spirit
Frozen winds cut against a community gathered in mourning. Swaddled in thick layers of hide and fur, they stand stoic against the ceaseless cold. Some lower themselves to their knees and plunge stone blades into the frozen tundra to begin carving the final resting place for two of their children, aged ten and twelve. The grandeur of these children’s adornment belies their youth. Sewn into their clothes are 10,400 ivory beads. Upon the head of the elder is a crown fashioned from 40 fox canines and across his waist, a belt of 250 more. Beside the younger child are two pierced antlers, several ivory carvings, and 16 ivory spears. Laid to rest thirty millennia ago, beneath a shroud of iron-red ochre, the graves of these Sunghir children are a testament to the human spirit that animates the people of their age just as it animates us now.
The Sunghir did not live in an age of abundance: even a single ivory bead was hard won. They were hewn from the tusks of literal mammoth beasts towering 12 feet high and weighing as much as 16,000 tons (or 2,000 full bags of groceries, for a more relatable measure). While the mammoth was alive, these two 15-foot tusks could toss even the strongest warrior like a rag doll. Yet the Sunghir fought and won with nothing more than stone weapons and human ingenuity. Once slain, flint tools were used to patiently extract each of these 10,400 beads, a process which probably took around 45 minutes per bead. These children were laid to rest with the work-product of nearly four years’ labor and unquantifiable risk.
Why were these two children worthy of such extraordinary effort? Were they viewed as gods? The children of a king, even himself not so richly interred? Whatever the reason, we know that they were not buried in such splendor for any utilitarian reason. Rather, it fulfilled a spiritual and cultural purpose and indicates a powerful mythology, the specifics of which we can only guess. The fundamental human impulses that motivated them are as familiar to a family burying their dead now as to the Sunghir on this day, 30,000 years ago.
Communities have commemorated the dead for at least 100 millennia. The universality of this practice is a testament to the common spark of humanity that illuminates the heart of all men. Offering one last act of kindness before the dead are returned to the earth is an affirmation of the value of life even as we are reminded that we, too, will die. Our time is scarce and therefore, precious.
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return
Genesis 3:19
Burial is so core to our humanity that great sacrifices have been made for it. A community eking out a living in the far north buried children with four years worth of labor along with spears which were life-sustaining tools. Sophocles, an ancient Greek playwright, wrote of Antigone, a woman who defied an edict that would have her brother’s body be left to the carrion birds. Antigone gave him a proper burial, but was swiftly rewarded with one of her own. Today, soldiers risk their lives to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades.
The Veil of Time
The extent of civilization for which we have any written record is around 5,000 years. The entirety of known civilization: the code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta, the moon landing, all the literature ever written, everything is contained within 1/20th the span of meaningful human cultural activity. For the other 19 spans of civilization, nearly all the product of this activity has been lost: all the gods, all the heroes, all the tragedies, all the triumphs, all the heartbreaks, conquests, and comedies, and all the mundanity that comprises the greater share of all lives.
Nearly every trace of this is lost. Until recently, the creative human spirit was corporealized in ephemera. Wood, clay, and natural pigments are perfectly capable materials for receiving the imprint of the creative human spirit, but soon return to the earth from which they came without a trace of the human hand that made them. Even crafts made from more durable materials, such as stone, are subject to degradation over such a long expanse of time, if they can be found at all. Nomadic life doesn’t leave the signs of human activity that permanent settlements do which makes it even more challenging to excavate. Oral traditions can transmit myths through the generations, but it only takes one broken link for a myth to be lost. Nearly every story that has been told, every person who won the admiration or ire of their community, every creative act has been lost behind the veil of time.
The Age of Heroes
Though the specifics are all lost behind the veil, this was an age of heroes and expedition. Earth was home to one million humans, less than the population of Philadelphia. Nothing was given to them. Each relied on their own will and ingenuity to obtain the necessities of life and, where possible, something extra. Though each meal was the labor of long hours, they did more than merely subsist. Some set out across vast deserts and blustering mountains and in doing so, pushed the frontier of humanity steadily forward.
OUR names are the light that glows on the sea waves at night and then dies without leaving its signature.
— Rabindranath Tagore
When they encountered cold beyond what their bodies could endure, they overcame their evolutionary limitation and crafted bone needles to sew thick, insulating clothes. By the oceans, bones were crafted into fishhooks which gave access to a new food source. Around 45,000 years ago, fishermen, whether intrepid or unfortunate, rowed far into the open sea on bamboo rafts until they found a new island. Then they found another, and another still until, at the end of a treacherous 5,000 mile journey, they stepped off their raft and left the first human footprints in the red soil of Australia.
Ours was a species of one million Davids in a world of Goliaths. Today, we are apex predators so long as we have our guns. They were apex predators with only stone tools, and the apex was much higher then. The Siberian Unicorn weighed in at 7,000 lbs, stood taller than the tallest man and more than twice as long. Its horn was long enough to skewer a man from head to toe. The Irish Elk, which roamed from the Emerald Island to Siberia were half-again as large as an adult moose with antlers 11 feet across or more. This is to say nothing of the giant cave lions and bears that were endemic across Europe and Asia.
These we battled with tools of stone and bone.
And we won.
No longer were we the scavengers and carrion eaters of early humanity when we hid in trees to escape predators. By 70,000 BC, we were the predator. Merely a couple millennia after humans crossed into the Americas and Australia, nearly all of the megafauna of these continents had died out. The great camels, horses, cheetah, and dire wolves of North America and giant ground sloths, diprotodon and glyptodon of South America, along with the elephant birds of Madagascar (flightless, if that needed clarifying). Even as we opened up new lands, we changed them.
Becoming Human
Over these 19 civilization spans, mankind emerged as a novel sort of life and differentiated itself from every other being on earth. This did not happen because we were no longer subject to natural forces, but because we could adapt ourselves and our environment to overcome them. No longer were we passive subjects. Whatever challenges we faced, together we found a solution and left things better than we found them.
Our spirit was forged in this era. To be human is to hope, to seek new horizons. It is to not be content with what we are given, but to take our fate into our own hands and seek something better. To be human is to actively participate in a project that is larger than even the greatest man. Through cooperation and storytelling, we steadily build on each others work and that of all who have come before to steadily advance the human condition.
What is common to all men? Hope. Because those who have nothing else possess hope still.
—Thales of Miletus
It is an immense loss that nearly all artifacts from this formative period have been lost. But in those that remain, we can see a glimpse of lives as rich and meaningful as our own. As Bobby Kennedy saw his own spirit in the words of Aeschylus, we can see our own spirit in the markings of the past. Chauvet cave, in France, is decorated with paintings from 30 millennia ago, around the time that the Sunghir were shrouding their children with ivory and ochre. Most are gorgeous, skilled depictions of large animals: the sort that we associate with “cave men”. Amidst these though, there are a few, more personal works: hand prints. A person laid their hand against the cave and blew red ochre in a circle around their hand, leaving its imprint against the wall.
20 millennia later in Argentina, that same method is used by nearly a thousand people, creating a ghostly mural. Hundreds of hands appear to be reaching out from the cave walls. It is as if they are pushing against the veil of time, just beyond reach, to say “I was here.”
Next in the Prehistory series
Resources Used:
A visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Multiple visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Additionally:
Burroughs, John. 1909. Review of The Long Road. The Atlantic, April 1909. https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1909/04/103-4/129556371.pdf.
Diamond, Jared M. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Society. New York ; London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2011. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Perennial.
Macgregor, Neil. 2011. A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Penguin.
Snow, Peter. 2018. History of the World Map by Map. London: Dorling Kindersley.
Trinkaus, Erik, and Alexandra P. Buzhilova. 2018. “Diversity and Differential Disposal of the Dead at Sunghir.” Antiquity 92, no. 361 (February): 7–21. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2017.223.
Wrangham, Richard W. 2010. Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.
yes thank you, that was incredibly riveting.
Thanks wholeheartedly, Nika. Your post is pure art. Wonderful. Amazing.