FROM THE ES ARCHIVES
BONES OF CANNIBALS A PALESTINE RIDDLE
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
New York Times 1857; Aug 4, 1932; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003)
pg. 21
Negroid people of 5000 B. C.Unlike Any Modern Race Described by Keith.
ATE BODIES OF ENEMIES
Men, Short of Stature, Burned Bones of Dead After Burial, London Session Hears.
TEETH OF WOMEN DRAWN
Linking relics to Burnt Skeletons from Ur scientist speculate an old cremation custom.
Wireless to NEW YORK TIMES London Aug. 3
Seven or eight thousand years ago in what geologist call modern times a race of negroid cannibals lived In Palestine, burned the bones of their dead after burial, and devoured the bodies of their enemies.
Skulls and thighbones of this race were unearthed within the last four years, first at Shukbah near Jerusalem and later in caves at Mount Carmel, and because they puzzled the excavators who found them they received the new name “Natufians.”
Today the first authoritative account of them was given by Sir Arthur Keith to the congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences and showed them to be one of the greatest riddles of archaeology.
They were clearly a Negroid people, said Sir Arthur, with wide faces flat- noses and long large heads.
They were short of stature 5 feet 3 or 4 inches tall-and their thighs and legs were remarkably strong. While their arms and shoulders were weak.
Alone Among prehistoric peoples they had a custom of extracting the two upper central incisor teeth of their women. Jagged holes in the fronts of their skulls indicate that they ate human brains.
Unlike Any present Race.
They may have been ancestors or the Arabs or Semites of biblical times, in Sir Arthur's opinion. They had some facial characteristics like those of the Neolithic or late Stone Age men of Malta and the remoter Aurignacian men of Southern Europe. But whatever the similarities sir Arthur declared, they lived between 5000 and 6000 B. C. and cannot be identified with any race on earth today.
In addition to all these riddles, Sir Arthur propounded another linking them unaccountably to ancient Ur of the Chaldees and the prehistoric man of South Africa.
From piles of charred and fragmented bones found in Palestine-mostly women's bones- Sir Arthur concluded they did not cremate their dead, but burned them long after burial.
"By a strange coincidence," he said. "At the time the burnt remains came to me Leonard Woolley sent me a box of human remains from under the foundations of Ur. These burnt bones from Ur-of about the third dynasty also represented not ordinary cremation-cremation of dead bodies clothed with flesh-but Cremation of dried skeletons. In the remains from Ur women's bones were preponderant.
“Two years ago Miss Gertrude Catton-Thompson sent me burned bones from under the foundations of Zimbabwe in Southern Rhodesia.
These represented the skulls of two women which had been burned long after the flesh had disappeared from them.
Was there once a custom in ancient times of digging up the bones of ancestors and then subjecting them to an ordeal of fire?”
Boxes of charred bones from Palestine were on the table while Sir Arthur spoke, together with a dozen curiously shaped reddish skulls that stared across the lecture room. Scientists who listened were startled and bewildered. Miss Dorothy Garrod, British Archaeologist, who had found the remains while working for the British School of Archaeology and the American School of Prehistoric Studies, assured the audience that they were comparatively modern and they were of the Mesolithic period.
Natufian remains, it should be remembered, are in no way connected with the more recent discoveries of a new race of fossil men, also in caves, near Mt Carmel. The fossil men, so remarkably different from all others yet found, became extinct in the remotely distant past, while the Natufians may still have been living when the first city-states of Sumeria arose.
Sir Arthur based his conclusions today on twenty comparatively complete skulls of eighty-seven found by Miss Garrod.
Cites Features of Race
“Several features stand out quite definitely'' he asserted; first the Natufians were a long-headed people - they had cap-shaped occiputs (the lower back part of the head). Secondly, the dimensions or their heads were greater than in the pre-dynastic Egyptians. Thirdly, their faces were short and wide. Fourthly, they were prognathous (with projecting jaws). Fifthly, their nasal bones were not narrow and high, but formed a wide, low arch. Sixthly, their chins were not prominent, but were masked by the fullness of the teeth-bearing parts of the jaw.
“The Natufians at Shukbah seem to have practiced cannibalism, for it is only by making this supposition that one can explain the cutting and fracturing of bones. The characters of the cuts and the broken surfaces show the bones were still in a fresh state when the damage was done. I believe the Shukbah people ate human brains.”
The cannibalism theory was strongly disputed by Professor Elliott smith, eminent geologist, who said he was entirely skeptical of it. Also Professor Smith said it was not uncommon in Egypt to find burned bones in graves.
“But it is a question of remarkable interest to know what these charred bones mean,” he said. “And if it should be shown that cutting teeth was in vogue it will make us revise all our knowledge, for the earliest instance we know is in 300 B.C.”
Professor Smith objected, too, that it was hardly possible that these people had had Negro blood, but Sir Arthur speedily corrected him. By the word Negroid he meant merely Negro-like characteristics such as are found throughout Europe and even in Scandinavia. Sir Arthur drew the inference that the Natufians had carried Aurignacian culture into Palestine after the last glacier age, which was approximately 35000 years ago.
Later Sir Arthur read and discussed a paper form Lewis S. B. Leakey, British Archaeologist working in East Africa, announcing the discovery of a new kind of anthropoid ape from an imaginary far-off Lower Pliocene period of perhaps a million years ago.
It was just a fragment of bone that Sir Arthur held up for the audience to see – a piece of limb bone, he said, of a great ape like the chimpanzee.
“Maybe this is the Miocene ancestor of the chimpanzee,” he said, “or the common ancestor of the gorilla and the chimpanzee.”
Unlike Dr. Leakey’s announcement of Oldoway man, now thoroughly discredited, his latest find made a deep impression on the scientists present.
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The finds of these remains would amount to over a hundred specimens, over the course of the excavations by Miss Garrod and her team. Of course, subsequent excavations followed those of Miss Garrod through the ages, and Bar-Yosef is among the notable figures of such excavations:
Mugharet El- Wad (also spelled Magharet El-Wad or Wady El-Magarah) is a cave on the western side of Mt. Carmel, near the town of Athlit, in present day Israel. Translated into English, Mugharet El-Wad means 'cave of the valley.' It is the largest cave found on Mt. Carmel.
Proof of human occupation at this site has been found dating back approximately 45,000 years. The most significant finds, however, belong to the Natufian Culture of approximately 10,500 to 8,500 years ago (after the retreat of the last glaciation). This was a highly developed culture that made the transition from a Paleolithic to a Neolithic culture and transformed from a hunter-gatherer life-style to one of plant cultivation and animal domestication. The term Natufian was coined by Miss Dorothy Garrod. She was a pre-historian at Cambridge University, who was responsible for a large number of excavations in Palestine from 1928 to 1934, under the direction of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research. Some of the subsequent excavations at this site include a (1980-1981) dig by F. Falla and O. Bar Yosef, and since 1980 by M. Weinstein-Evron.
The findings at this site include more than one hundred individual human burials on the terrace directly in front of the cave. The burials reveal body positions that were tightly flexed, like that of a fetal position. Some were found with ornamentation of bone, stone, or dentalia shell.
Many flint tools were also found at the site, many of these were the lunate, a crescent or arc shaped blade probably used to tip reed arrows (Albright P.59). Other tools found include scrapers for treating animal skins, points for wood and bone working, awls for piercing, stones used as fishing weights, skins and decorative beads (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Also of note were the sickle blades attached to a wooden or bone scythe which would indicate the agricultural inclinations of the Natufians. An ornately carved deer scapula was found to have use-wear markings that wound indicate that it was used in the smoothing and straightening of wooded shafts (Campana P. 237).
Sources:
Mugharet El Wad Cave (Israel).
www.maxpages.com/ribbentrop/Mugharet_El_Wad_Cave_Israel 14 April 2001
Albright, William Foxwell. The Archaeology of Palestine. Baltimore, Maryland Penguin Books 1961.
Campana, Douglas V. "A Natufian Shaft-Straightener from Mugharet El Wad, Israel: An Example of Wear Pattern Analysis" Journal of Field Archaeology 6 (1979): 237-242.
Written by: Travis Calvert
And now, courtesy of the University of Cambridge, the department of archeology:
Garrod’s unpublished Shukbah field diary, first day of exca-vation, 5 April 1928. 65 “Trench started against E. wall . . . Some pottery, flint (some derived Mousterian), bones. At 70 cm depth found skeleton of child. It lay on its side with legs drawn up . . . Fragments of a second juvenile skeleton lay against the wall at the same level.” On 5 April 1928, as well as finding evidence of a Mousterian unknown in Europe, Garrod also immediately unearthed the first remains of the Natufians who were “perhaps the earliest farmers” (Bar-Yosef 1998b: 162).“Larger blunted-back knives are common,” Garrod (1932a: 258) observed, “and a number of these have on their edges the peculiar polish produced by cutting corn or grass.” These discoveries at Shukbah set the agenda for future research by raising new and persistent questions concerning the origin of agriculture and the proper definition of the Neolithic. (By courtesy of the MAN.)
According to Bar-Yosef (1998b: 159), the most documented sequence from foraging to farming is in the Near East and the Natufian, with its evidence of cereal harvesting, is the “threshold for this major evolutionary change.” “The Natufian,” wrote Caton-Thompson (1969: 346) “is the turning point between the desert and the sown, between food gatherers and food producers, between wild animal and the domestic.” Garrod did not seem to recognise the importance of the Natufian finds at first; she was surprised that there was no pottery nor domesticated animals as would be expected in Europe (Garrod 1932a). Although Dorothea Bate later found that the then Middle Natufian, or Shukbah Natufian, had domesticated dogs, Garrod’s 1928 report concentrated on the Mousterian with its implications for the origins of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe rather than the origins of agriculture or the Neolithic revolution in the Near East. “Little at that time could she have realised that she had found the nucleus of future discoveries,” observed Caton- Thompson (1969: 346). Only later did Garrod (1957: 226) clearly note that her discovery of evidence of harvesting and of the domestication of dogs, without evidence of pottery, questioned the European definition of the Neolithic; “the old terms Mesolithic and Neolithic are no longer strictly applicable,” she concluded…
In 1928, Charles Lambert had uncovered, during a preliminary investigation at el- Wad, the first prehistoric art object discovered in the Near East, a finely carved bone animal head. He had also discovered human, later identified as Natufian, burials.
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In the 1932 article: They were clearly a Negroid people, said Sir Arthur, with wide faces flat- noses and long large heads.
And more recently
Larry Angel (1972): one can identify Negroid traits of nose and prognathism appearing in Natufian latest hunters.(McCown, 1939)...
C.L. Brace (2005): If the late Pleistocene Natufian sample from Israel is the source from which that Neolithic spread was derived, there was clearly a sub-Saharan African element present of almost equal importance as the Late Prehistoric Eurasian element.
Brace's new Cranio-facial map
the rest of Larry Angel's statement: and in Anatolian and Macedonian first farmers (Angel, 1972), probably from Nubia via the predecesors of the Badarians and Tasians"
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www.uh.edu/engines/epi540.htmEngines of Ingenuity: #540--INVENTING AGRICULTURE
Today, a new look at the birth of a very old technology. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
Scholars have been turning their lenses back on the invention of farming. We know farming began eight to ten thousand years ago in the Middle East and the Holy Land. We also know it began after certain wild wheats mutated.
The seeds of those wild grains weren't as fat and rich as modern wheat, but they blew in the wind. They sowed themselves. You could harvest them without having to plant them.
Modern wheat was a fertile mutation of wild wheat. It made much better food. But its seeds don't go anywhere. They're bound more firmly to the stalk, and they cannot ride the wind. Without farmers to collect and sow wheat, it dies. Modern wheat creates farming by wedding its own survival to that of the farmer.
In 8000 B.C. the Natufians -- a hunting-gathering people -- lived in the region around Jericho and the Dead Sea. They were first to cultivate this new mutation -- this modern wheat. They became the first farmers.
By then, the climate had been warming for 2000 years. Once the area had been fairly lush. Now it grew arid. Game moved north. The vegetation changed. But the wild grains did well in the drier climate. The Natufians began eating a lot more grain.
And here we come to a great riddle. How did modern wheat replace those wild grains? Isolated mutations died without human help. Was some human clever enough to recognize and pick out that lone stalk of fat wheat in a field of grain?
We used to think so. But maybe the drama played out in quite a different way. By 8000 B.C. the Natufians needed much more grain. They probably began doing some planting to create it. Once they did, the fat wheat had its chance. It was easier to harvest. The seeds stayed in place when you cut it. Every time the Natufians harvested seed, they got proportionately more of the mutations. They lost more of the wild grain.
It took only a generation or so of that before a single mutation took over. The result was an unexpected wedding. In no time at all, modern wheat dominated the fields. And that was both a blessing and a curse.
The Natufians unwittingly replaced the old wild wheat with far richer food. But it was a food that could survive only by their continued intervention. No more lilies of the field. From now on we would live better, but we would also be forever bound to this wonderful new food by the new technology of agriculture.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badarian The Badarian culture provides the earliest direct evidence of agriculture in Upper Egypt. It flourished between 4400 to 4000 BCE, and might have already existed as far back as 5000 BCE. It was first identified in Badari, near Sohag.
About forty settlements and six hundred graves have been located. Social stratification has been inferred from the burying of more prosperous members of the community in a different part of the cemetery. The Badarian economy was mostly based on agriculture, fishing and animal husbandry. Tools included end-scrapers, perforators, axes, bifacial sickles and concave-base arrowheads. Remains of cattle, dogs and sheep were found in the cemeteries. Wheat, barley, lentils and tubers were consumed.
The culture is known largely from cemeteries in the low desert. The deceased were placed on mats and buried in pits with their heads usually laid to the south, looking west. The pottery that was buried with them is the most characteristic element of the Badarian culture. It had been given a distinctive, decorative rippled surface.
quote:http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/exclusives-nfrm/051217_egypt1.htm
Study traces Egyptians’ stone-age roots
Dec. 17, 2005
Special to World Science
Some 64 centuries ago, a prehistoric people of obscure origins farmed an area along Egypt’s Nile River.
Barely out of the Stone Age, they produced simple but well-made pottery, jewelry and stone tools, and carefully buried their dead with ritual objects in apparent preparation for an afterlife. These items often included doll-like female figurines with exaggerated sexual features, thought to possibly symbolize rebirth.
Despite the simplicity of their possessions, a new study suggests these people, the Badarians, may have ultimately given rise to one of the world’s first major civilizations some 14 centuries later: the glittering culture of Egypt.
Indeed, the Egyptians seem to have been basically the same people from the end of the Stone Age through late Roman times, the research found.
Interesting...
quote:http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/508/fo3.htm
Egypt before the Pharaohs
By Gamal Nkrumah
...Archaeologists divide the predynastic period into separate stages of development. The first relatively sophisticated Neolithic culture in Egypt proper, as opposed to Nubia, was of a people today commonly described as Badarians, in reference to the site at the village of Al-Badari, to the immediate south of Assiut, Upper Egypt, where many of their cultural remains were found. Next came the Amratian and Gerzean civilisations, also referred to as Naqada I and Naqada II -- a site a few kilometres north of Luxor, where an impressive array of their cultural remains was located. The Amratians and especially the Gerzeans displayed an even more sophisticated cultural distinction than the Badarians. The Gerzean Civilisation can be regarded as the immediate forerunner of dynastic Egypt..
In Egypt, the Chalcolithic Period, sometimes also called Primitive predynastic, saw the emergence of Badarian agrarians. The Badarian culture also witnessed the first beginnings of stonemasonry in Egypt, which differed qualitatively from the primitive art of Stone Age toolmaking that had existed for millennia. The Badarians appear to have lived in shelters made of animal skins and dressed also in animal skins. They were skilled artisans who, while not entirely giving up hunting, bartered trade goods, had began to experiment with agriculture, and domesticated many animals. The Badarians obviously were a gregarious people who, judging from the artifacts they left behind, were fond of dance. The preponderance of female figurines in Badarian tombs hint at a more matrilineal political system or female-oriented religion than that which prevailed in Egypt in dynastic times, when male-gods predominated. Dancer figurines, mostly female, with upraised arms were common in graves. Perhaps these figurines represented the original belly dancers. Such figures are now scattered in museums all over the world. One especially expressive and mirthful figurine is deposited at the Musée de Lyon, France. Other figures are to be found in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the University of Chicago Oriental Institute Museum; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and several museums in London including the Victoria and Albert; the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology; and the British Museum.
The Badarians' wardrobe must have been essentially a collection of animal skins. But strong evidence suggests that the Badarians discovered the loom and were, therefore, producing textiles as well. A pottery dish depicting a horizontal ground-loom was found at a tomb at Al-Badari. The earliest known Egyptian flax and Neolithic linen goes back to the Badarian period.
The Badarians also cleverly crafted combs of ivory, bone and wood which are remarkably reminiscent of traditional African combs. But perhaps the most impressive feature of Badarian culture was their highly distinctive pottery. Of superlative quality, the Badarians' pottery was of a reddish brown finish and the tops were burned black, by being inverted in the ashes of the kiln. The walls of the Badarian ceramics were fired to something of a metallic hardness even though they were often eggshell-thin.
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We know how the Natufians looked like as the article stated:
“Several features stand out quite definitely'' he asserted; first the Natufians were a long-headed people - they had cap-shaped occiputs (the lower back part of the head). Secondly, the dimensions or their heads were greater than in the pre-dynastic Egyptians. Thirdly, their faces were short and wide. Fourthly, they were prognathous (with projecting jaws). Fifthly, their nasal bones were not narrow and high, but formed a wide, low arch. Sixthly, their chins were not prominent, but were masked by the fullness of the teeth-bearing parts of the jaw.
Sir Alan Gardiner, an Egyptologist said this of the Badarians:
"These... were long-headed-dolicocephalic is the learned term-and below even medium stature, but Negroid features are often to be observed. Whatever may be said of the northerners, it is safe to describe the dwellers in Upper Egypt as of essentially African stock, a character always retained despite alien influences brought to bear on them from time to time." (pg. 392; Egypt of the Pharaohs 1966)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qySKSXgNX1s&feature=relmfu
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