<<Why do you get wishy-washy about this. Stand up and defend your
position like a man.>>
As Lloyd Bridges says in Hot Shots: "Ah, I wish I was twenty years
younger. And a woman."
<<So if you believe that spiritual life goes back 35,000 then why did you
object, when I drew the line in the technology chronology at 35,000 and
said
that according to you these were animals below that line. >>
And where did I say that again?
<<Jim, you seem to have a very short memory. Here is your statement AFTER
I said that you believed in a 35,000 year old origin of spirituality.
<Glenn assigns me an arbitrary starting point. He's wrong about that.>>
Um, Glenn, don't look now but that exchange means precisely the opposite of
what you intend.
Be that as it may (and with Glenn it seldom is), you can't go back 1, 2, 3,
4 or 5.5 million years and find biblical humanity.
<<What about the shaman's cape found on a Neanderthal at Hortus France at
50,000 years?? You know, shamanistic art requires a shaman. A shaman
wears
a cape. See my web page for details.>>
The "shaman's cape" Glenn refers to is a questionable extrapolation from
the articulated bones of the paw and tail of a leapord. That's it. That's
all there is. And it is impossible to tell what the arrangement means, if
anything. Even though there are no other bones near it, the discoverers
posit that it MAY have been a "cape." Needless to say, this is a rather
large imaginative leap (except for those who are just itching to have it
mean something).
This sort of leap is what caused one of my favorite journalist, Charley
Reese, to write recently:
"I've known some long-winded journalists and writers, but none who can
match those archaeologists who can find one small shard of bone and write a
whole book about it - 99.9 percent of which is speculation. There is a
definite limit to the information any piece of physical evidence can yield.
In most cases, it's not a
lot."
See Glenn's web page for details.
But let's accept Glenn's view for a moment. Let's call it a shaman's cape.
50k years ago. What happened to all the other capes over 4.5 million years?
Under Mortonian theory, we were just as human then as now, just as capable
of the worship, art and ritual we find with Noah, Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-cain,
Cain and Abel.
So where are ther capes? The shoes? The harps and iron foundries? The
altars? The cave paintings?
Jim