Non-linear Human Development

As an aside, I would note that, about the same time as prehistorians ⁹ were coming to terms with the problem of the disjointedness or discontinuity of early human history, and by implication the discontinuity of all human history, Voegelin was working on a number of problems that he discussed in “Historiogenesis,” the first version of which appeared in 1960.

Of particular interest in this context was his eventual rejection of a single line of historical meaning along which various events, societies, civilizations, and so on, can be strung, which was rather similar to Renfrew’s criticism of Childe (Cf. HI, 30:2). Only a brief gesture towards the problem can be made here. Those familiar with Voegelin’s argument can, one hopes, see its bearing on the present problem.

During the 1950s and 1960s archeologists and prehistorians discovered another problem: dating the appearance of Homo sapiens and charting the spread of anatomically or morphologically modern human beings across the globe. There have been plenty of revisions during the past half century: today there is a general agreement that genetic and anatomical evidence suggests the appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa between 100,000 to 200,000 years B.C. The margin of uncertainty is impressive.

Evidence suggestive of what archeologists call symbolic behaviour –the use of pigment, for example—can be dated to around 164,000 years B.C. (± 12,000 years), a more modest margin of uncertainty.

The Mystery of the Mussel Shell

The interesting point for political science concerning the sites from which the evidence has been collected to make these early estimates, seaside caves in South Africa at Bolombos and Pinnacle Point, is not just that the inhabitants used red ochre for symbolic purposes, but that they ate shellfish, mostly brown mussels that South Africans still consume.

Gastronomic continuity is always interesting to contemplate, but the real significance of these early mussel-eaters lies elsewhere. As the team leader, Curtis Marean, explained to his boss at the Institute of Human Origins, Don Johanson, people think shellfish are an easy food source to exploit because they don’t bite or run away.

Not so. They live underwater most of the time and even at normal low tides there is a danger of being washed off the rocks by waves. The only time brown mussels are fully exposed is during low spring tides caused (we would say) by the combined gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. From earth, such tides occur during the appearance of a full and a new moon.

The significance of the mussel shells in cave 13B at Pinnacle Point dating from 164,000  years ago (± 12,000 years ) is that it is highly likely that the fisherman would have developed a tide chart based on the lunar cycle to time their visits to the shore.¹⁰

The conclusion of importance to political science is this: about the same time as the genotype Homo sapiens was more or less stabilized, which, as noted sometime between 100,000 to 200,000 years B.C.(or to use the site 13B date, around 164,000 years B.C.), this type of human began to engage in “symbolic behaviour” and began to develop a calendar.

The calendar in question linked what happened in the sky, namely changes in the appearance of the moon, to changes on earth, namely the appearance of spring tides that made it relatively safe to collect brown mussels from the intertidal area. The first person to make this connection in the remote past (and obviously somebody did) had a great imagination or, to sound more scientific, he or she had a rare cognitive ability.