prehistory Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Is Humanity’s “Oldest Myth” Really 100,000 Years Old?

If you live in the northern hemisphere in an area with relatively little light pollution, and you look up at the sky on a clear night sometime between November and February, you will see three prominent constellations overhead. The easiest to find is Orion (traditionally imagined as a hunter wielding a bow), a large constellation which contains two of the brightest stars in the sky, Rigel and Betelgeuse, as well as the line of three bright stars known as “Orion’s belt.” If you follow the line of Orion’s belt, you’ll find Taurus (traditionally imagined as a bull’s head), which includes a cluster of stars shaped like the letter V; these are the Hyades, and at the tip of the left side of this cluster is the very bright red star Aldebaran.

If you follow the path of Orion’s belt even further, past Taurus, you’ll find the Pleiades, a very tight cluster of stars, which form the shape of a tiny dipper. In many cultures around the world, the Pleiades are said to be seven in number and are known as the “Seven Sisters,” but most people with clear eyesight can only make out six of them using the naked eye. Various cultures, including the ancient Greeks and some Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas, have told stories to explain why, even though the Pleiades are said to be seven, only six are visible. (With telescopes, astronomers can tell that this cluster actually includes thousands of stars.)

Humans in various cultures around the world have been telling stories about these three constellations (Orion, Taurus, and the Pleiades) for a very, very long time, and myths often associate them together. The question is: How old are the stories that we tell about them? Recently, a pair of researchers has claimed that the myth of the “lost Pleiad” may date as far back as 100,000 years ago, which would make it humanity’s oldest known story. Popular science platforms such as the Museum of Science in Boston and the YouTube channel SciShow have promoted this claim to a mass audience. In this post, I will explain what evidence the claim relies on and why it is almost certainly incorrect.

Why Prehistoric Matriarchy Wasn’t a Thing (A Brief Explanation)

If you are interested in religion and gender in the ancient world like I am, there is a fairly strong likelihood that, at some point, you’ve encountered some version of the claim that, at one point in human prehistory (variously conceived as sometime in the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, or all three), either all human societies worldwide or at least the majority of human societies in Europe belonged to a matriarchal social order, in which women were supreme over men, and that this system preceded the imposition of the current patriarchal order.

The kinds of arguments and evidence that various proponents of the hypothesis of “prehistoric matriarchy” have tried to invoke over the years are so wildly disparate that it is impossible to address all the supposed evidence comprehensively in a single post. At the end of the day, the common denominator of all the arguments is that all the “evidence” they try to cite is weak, irrelevant, and/or open to many other interpretations. In this post, I will very briefly address the arguments that the man who originally formulated the hypothesis used and explain why those arguments do not hold up to scrutiny.

Were Mythical Creatures Inspired by Fossils?

It is popularly believed that stories about dragons and other mythical creatures must have arisen when ancient peoples discovered fossils of prehistoric animals, especially dinosaurs. As we shall see in a moment, there is definitely some evidence that ancient peoples did sometimes discover fossils of prehistoric creatures and interpret them as the remains of mythic beasts.

Fossils, however, seem to have only rarely been the source of belief in such mythic creatures to begin with; it seems to have been far more common for people to interpret fossils in light of mythic creatures they already believed in, rather than inventing entirely new mythic beasts to explain the fossils.

Furthermore, the vast majority of claims about specific mythical creatures being inspired by specific prehistoric creatures don’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. There is almost no solid evidence to support the assumption that dragons, Cyclopes, or griffins were inspired by prehistoric fossils and there is actually quite substantial evidence against these assumptions.

Sorry, Most Prehistoric Peoples Didn’t Live in Caves

If you’ve ever heard anything at all about prehistoric peoples, it’s that they all lived in caves. This is one of the most ingrained ideas in our society about what prehistoric life was like. You can find depictions of so-called “cavemen” all over the place in popular culture, such as in the comic strip B.C. (published 1958 – present), the cartoon The Flintstones (originally broadcast 1960 – 1966), the film One Million Years B.C. (released 1966), the film History of the World, Part I (released 1981), the film Quest for Fire (released 1981), the animated film The Croods (released 2013), and in countless other places.

The truth, though, is that living in caves has never been the norm for any species of hominin. Humans and human ancestors have always lived primarily in dwellings other than caves. The reasons why we always imagine our distant ancestors living in caves, though, are complex and fascinating and they reveal a lot more about us than they do about prehistoric peoples.

Were Ancient People Conscious?

In 1976, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes (lived 1920 – 1997) published a controversial book titled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In this book, Jaynes claimed that human beings were not conscious of their own thoughts until around 1000 BC and that stories about gods speaking to people originated from people hearing their own inner voices and mistaking them for the voices of external deities telling them what to do.

Jaynes’s claims were regarded as fringe, baseless, and bizarre even when he first proposed them back in the 1970s and today they are almost universally regarded by psychologists as the debunked relic of an earlier, less scientific stage in the development of modern psychology. Nonetheless, Jaynes’s hypothesis of the bicameral mind has garnered something of a cult following among non-scholars and has had considerable influence in popular culture, so I suppose it is worth writing a lengthy rebuttal to it.

What Did People in the Paleolithic Really Eat?

The so-called “Paleolithic diet” is a fad diet, which advocates that people can lose weight and live healthier by eating the same foods our distant ancestors ate thousands of years ago during the Paleolithic Era, which lasted from the invention of stone tools roughly 3.3 million years ago until the Agricultural Revolution around 12,000 years ago. This diet originated in the 1970s and was popularized in the 2000s, primarily by the bestselling American writer Loren Cordain.

The Paleolithic diet is predicated on what is known as the “genetic discordance hypothesis,” which holds that, while the environment in which human beings live and the foods human beings eat have drastically changed since the end of the Paleolithic Era, the human genome has hardly changed at all. Therefore, proponents of the diet insist that human beings are not adapted to eat the foods we are now eating and we must return to eating the foods our ancestors ate over 12,000 years ago.

This diet claims that people should eat a diet that consists of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and roots. People on the diet are usually prohibited from eating any grains, dairy products, sugars, legumes, salts, oils, alcohol, or caffeine, since, according to proponents of the diet, these are foods that did not exist during the Paleolithic Era. Unfortunately for practitioners of the diet, it actually bears very little resemblance to what people during the Paleolithic Era actually ate.