As a rule, it seems reasonable to contend that any practice which has been historically prevalent among non-agriculturalist groups, and which does not rely upon demonstrably recent technologies, is just as likely to have occurred 50,000 years ago as 500 years ago.
(2) To this category can be counted armour made of materials such as wood or animal hides. The practice of strapping protective material to yourself is hardly rocket-science, and is known to have occurred in hunter-gatherer societies such as the Haida.
(3) Hygenic/aesthetic practices such as complex facial- and body-paint as well as hair-braiding and cropping do not require advanced technology, and are documented from Palaeolithic art as well as modern hunter-gatherers.
(4) Complex maritime exploitation and habitat-management such as clam-gardens are known from historical peoples in the Pacific Northwest dating back more than 3000 years. Societies such as the non-agriculturalist Floridan Calusa exploited aquatic resources on a massive scale.
(5) Evidence of pet-keeping in various forms is ubiquitous in forager-societies across the world, from the raising of orphaned juveniles to the intentional maintenance of semi-domestic game. Melanesians intentionally spread cuscuses to islands for food as early as 20kya.
(6) The Okiek hunter-gathers of Southwestern Kenya create and maintain artificial bee-hives, as well as tending to wild ones. They migrate throughout their area, moving their hives in rhythm with the seasonal flowerings.
(7) Though stone-craftsmanship was comparatively primitive during the Palaeolithic, spears were fashioned with beautifully carved atlatls to increase thrust and throwing-distance.
(8) Into recent times, complex and intricate wooden clubs and spears have been fashioned by stone-limited societies all across the world. Little evidence of such things would be expected to survive to today, but it seems inexplicable to suppose they weren't made.
(9) Despite typical conceptions of non-agriculturalist stone-wielders as living in tiny, socially simple bands, members of ppls as culturally simple as the Mbuti pygmies live in settlements of up to 250 individuals. The Calusa hosted thousands in vast, monumental settlements.
More could be added, but the point is simple: People were not dumber in the late Pleistocene than we are now. A good deal were probably sharper. They didn't dress in dirty rags, they didn't live in caves, their hair didn't fall in wild manes and doubtless they had poets.
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The way a lot of archaeologists will talk about the Indo-European invasions becomes fairly funny if the same rhetoric is applied to situations like the Reconquista:
"In the end, it is impossible to say how exactly the process of Hispanicization proceeded; it was a slow, gradual movement of people south into Iberia over many centuries, with much evidence of cultural mingling and intermarriage. In light of this, traditional notions of a violent conquest have been increasingly replaced by a model of prolonged migrations, as Christian culture diffused down from the north."
Even to this day, and despite the droves of recent evidence, a very profound squeamishness still surrounds this topic for many academics.
I am tempted to coin Rapp's Rule of Cultural Turnovers: "If, in a clear historical chronology, one culture is directly succeeded by another, unrelated culture, a primary instrument of this change was in all cases violence."
I've long found the distinction between the Anglosphere "Santa's elves" and the Scandinavian nisse/tomte traditions quite interesting. They fill roughly the same role in modern Yuletide lore, as the quintessential Christmas critters and associates of St. Nick.
Their origins, though, are wildly different. The American Christmas elves derive from mid-19th-century children's literature, and tend towards the very twee and saccharine: they're often associated with the colour green, and portrayed as childlike.
The nisser/tomtar, by contrast, are creatures of authentic Nordic folklore, but ones not originally associated with Christmas in any particular way. There were house nisser, barn nisser, church nisser, nisser of the hills. They are essentially mischievous, dwarf-like land spirits
It is a rather disturbing aspect of human nature that, by all accounts of historical and anthropological inquiry, practically the only thing separating those cultures which have, in history, committed great atrocities from those that have not is capacity.
Those who think otherwise generally suffer simply from limited reading:
It is not a virtue (though it may be the truth) to preach meekness from beneath the boot. Virtue is to possess the capacity for cruelty, and yet to reject it. Citing a culture's inability to dominate as evidence of some pacifistic magnanimity is simply unsound.
Folk horror is a very interesting genre to me, one I have quite an affection for (if that's the right word), but most of the discussion and analysis you will find surrounding it is rather frustrating - the genre is much more than simply "aren't rural folks & traditions scary?"
There is a level at which much folk horror does seemingly reduce to "naive urbanite goes into the countryside, bad things happen" - horror essentially deriving from a semi-exoticising, semi-othering view of rural life. Midsommar is largely this, and I dislike it rather strongly.
Yet this does not seem to me to be the crux of the genre's appeal.
What folk horror touches upon, more than anything, is a sense of the atavistic, of deep continuity and the fear (and perhaps suppressed desire) that the past might not yet be altogether past, but retain a power.
Woolly mammoths may have been alive in Europe at the same time as the Trojan War.
Yes, I mean that seriously. Also yes, the word "may" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I will elaborate.
It is at this point a fairly well-known fact that a small population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until only around 1600 BC, a thousand years after the building of the Pyramid of Giza.
What is still less known is the story on the mainland.
Over the last few years, environmental genomics surveys have increasingly been employed as new tool to investigate the ecosystems of the past, scanning not for the bones of past animals, but for signatures of their DNA. What has been revealed is remarkable.
An extremely fascinating bit of obscure history is that of the Kongsi republics in Western Borneo - Chinese 'company-states' predicated on gold and tin mining that existed on the island between the 1700s-1800s
The term 'kongsi' (公司) is not a Mandarin Chinese word, but instead from Hokkien, a Chinese language spoken primarily in southeastern Fujian, while the related form 'Kung-sze' exists in Hakka, another regional Sinitic language spoken in the south.
This etymology is significant because it belies the origin of the Southeast Asian kongsis. Both the Hakka and Hokkien peoples originated from the north of China, arriving in a south already populated by other Chinese groups. Pushed to the margins, they formed a mercantile culture