The American man wished to know a little about how families worked in the Zapotec civilisation. On being told that it was common for the whole of the town to bring up children, the curious visitor was flummoxed. He simply could not begin to comprehend any other kind of family except the nuclear, 2.4 children, family he, and most people he'd ever known, had grown up in.
So conditioned was he to his own way of living, it'd become impossible to imagine that anybody, anywhere, could live, or ever could have lived, differently. Dr Stacy Hackner's enjoyable talk in Camden, Paleo-fantasy and Alien Contact:How we misunderstand the ancient world, aimed to overturn a few canards about the past and how we used to live while at the same time explaining why we so often imagine people who lived millions of years ago to, somehow, live lives much like our own. It's funny when it's done in The Flintstones but when serious historians repeat the same mistakes it can, Dr Hackner asserted, be more than a little problematic.
2019 had got off to a predictably shitty start (Anna Soubry had been surrounded and harassed on her way to work by a group of angry Brexiteers screaming 'scum' and 'Nazi' in her face, Chris Grayling had pissed away nearly £14,000,000 giving a potential no deal Brexit shipping contract to a company that doesn't have any boats, Katie Hopkins had resurfaced to spread vile racist lies on the Internet, and, most sadly of all for me, members of my own family were regurgitating those lies and using sexist, racist, and xenophobic language while doing so). Not only was it a pleasure to be among like minded souls at London Skeptics in the Pub, it felt like an much needed safe house away from the seemingly inexorable slide into demagoguery, victim blaming, and, in some cases, outright fascism that we're witnessing at the moment.
It's not always that interesting if someone begins an evening by, essentially, reading out their CV, even if it's to assert their credentials rather than boast, but Dr Hackner's curious career proved an exception. I think I can safely say I have never before been in the company of a "bioarchaeologist focusing on ancient activity patterns in Sudan and diseases in 19th century Cyprus" who has "excavated human remains in four countries and lectures at UCL and Glyndwr University"
Thankfully, Dr Hackner wore her learning and experience lightly, remembered there were lay folk such as myself in the audience, and peppered the whole talk with some humorous asides. Which went down as well as my veggie dog and the pint of Red Stripe I accompanied it with.
CV done and dusted, Dr Hackner led off by outlining a few of the common archaeological biases those in her profession regularly have to contend with. The conservative bias is when people tend to ignore new evidence, even when it's overwhelming, because they've become so ingrained with long held ideas. Confirmation bias differs slightly in that this is due to people only believing things that already reinforce their view.
Underpinning both these, and other less prevalent, biases is, Dr Hackner contended - with little dispute, the fact that, historically, most archaeological studies have been carried out by white, middle class men and white, middle class men (like our American friend in Monte Alban) tend to see things through the prismatic worldview of, you guessed it, white, middle class men.
When people talk of the Paleolithic age they tend to mean the Paleolithic age in Europe. The Paleolithic era happened in different times in different parts of the world. It began in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley, about 3,300,000 years ago and only reached Europe more than two million years later. Africans were using stone tools (one of which was passed around the audience, I had a fondle) for 2,000,000 years before Europeans.
Fire was first harnessed in the area that is now Kenya roughly one and half million years ago and it not only meant people could keep warm, a luxury that eluded those on the European continent until about 50,000 years ago, but they could cook their food. A theory exists, an interesting but as yet not proven one, that being able to cook such foodstuffs as carrots provided us with not just fibre but also vitamins. and it was these vitamins that caused our brains to expand and made us, ultimately, the humans we are now. The most dominant species on the planet.
Don't think that means either Dr Hackner or myself are promoting the paleo diet though. Paleo is an old Greek word meaning 'ancient' and anything that calls itself paleo will almost definitely be (a) wrong and (b) a marketing device. Charts taken from the Internet showed most foodstuffs that have been lumped under 'paleo' actually originated in the much later Neolithic age or even after that.
So if you're on a paleo diet you shouldn't be eating strawberries, lemons, bananas, peppers, aubergines, onions, or cauliflowers. None of that is paleo food. A lot of the time what is being promoted as paleo food is something very different. That of the hunter-gatherers or, as Dr Hackner prefers - not liking the insinuation of the gender balanced division of labour between hunters (assumed to be male) and gatherers (assumed to be female), foragers.
Even these hunter-gatherer/forager diets vary due to geography and food availability. In some places meat made up the bulk of the diet. Elsewhere seeds and nuts were prevalent. If the paleos and the hunter-gatherers had been misrepresented in the past that's nothing to the bum rap the poor old Neanderthals get.
Neanderthals, contrary to popular belief, were not as boorish and were less primitive than we tend to think. They had culture, they had art (it's fairly rudimentary - but still), they had jewellery (necklaces made of bones, shell, and teeth have been discovered), and, it's just possible, they even had music as a photography of a very crude looking flute suggests. Studies of Neanderthal caves have discovered they were fond of heating and eating turtles. As the turtles came in their own bowl, once cooked they could be seen as a primitive form of Pot Noodle.
We shouldn't be ragging on the Neanderthals anyway. On average each of us has 8% Neanderthal DNA so they are, in a very real way, our ancestors. White people, white homo sapiens, didn't appear on the planet until as recently as 11,000 years ago but there is evidence that Neanderthals were 'white' (their bones have been mostly found in present day France and Spain) while Cro-Magnon were certainly not.
Despite this. 'cavemen' of all stripes have, often, historically, been depicted as white whether they were or not. Which Dr Hackner went on to talk about in a section she'd cleverly titled The Unbearable Whiteness of (Hominim) Beings, got to enjoy a nod to Kundera. Beginning with the famous 'march to progress' picture which shows apes evolving into dark skinned cavemen and, finally, strong white men.
I'm generally quite irked by recent spoofs of it that try to suggest that evolving into wearing comfortable clothes, and inventing chairs and technology is somehow a retrograde step but that's as nothing compared to how offensive the idea is that somehow white people are more evolved than black people.
Museum dioramas showing scenes of the ancients propagate stereotypical and sexist gender roles too. Ones that may reflect the way things are now more than they ever were back then. There's a tendency to present the women as feeders and carers and men as animal killers and painters of extraordinary cave art. Woman feed. Man make art.
Even when ludicrous ideas such as aliens creating the pyramids, the Nazca lines, or Teotihuacan began to take hold, these soon became imbued with the spirit of hegemony, patriarchy, and colonialism. Although the idea was first posited as far back as the second century (in a parodic text, it's worth noting) by the Syrian satirist and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata, it started to really take hold when the American astronomer Garrett P.Serviss started to expound it from 1898 onwards.
Thomas Edison's worthy attempts to pooh-pooh such nonsense didn't entirely stop the belief from taking hold and when the Swiss author Erich von Daniken released his best selling book Chariots of the Gods? in 1968 no archaeologist could have been expected to know that they'd still have to regularly debunk its proposals half a century later.
But, of course, it was (for the most part) only the monuments of ancient civilisations in Africa and Latin America that were built by aliens or astronaut gods. On the whole, people weren't saying the Colosseum or the Great Wall of China were built by spacemen. No, white (and Chinese) humans would have been perfectly capable of overseeing such grand building schemes but dark skinned people, nah!
Julien Benoit from the Evolutionary Studies Institute in Johannesburg claimed this tendency came from "a feeling of white superiority that emanates from the rotting corpse of colonialism" and if that's a fairly dramatic way to put it, Dr Hackner's thoughtful, myth busting, and, in places, very funny talk underlined that it was not an incorrect reading of the situation.
I had caveats, sure, I usually do but, for the most part, I once again thank London Skeptics in the Pub (and, of course, Dr Stacy Hackner) for another wonderful talk and one that marked their twentieth anniversary. They're the oldest SitP group in the world and it was testament to the great work they do that the event was so packed (in the first week of January, on a Monday night) that I had to perch upon the stage.
Most of all though I thank everyone involved in these groups, everyone who attends these events, and everyone who continues to apply critical thinking and skepticism when so many around rely on hearsay, rumour, and hate speech. These illuminating events have always lit up my life but in the dark days we're being forced to live in at the moment the light needs to, and thankfully does, shine brighter than ever before.
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