Jots and Tittles

Through both the textbook readings for Monday and Wednesday, I was continually surprised by how the authors extracted such grand (albeit tentative) conclusions from such little archaeological evidence. For example, Christ suggests that “[b]urial in a fetal position suggests that Neanderthals may have thought that we are returned to the body of the Mother of the Living and the Dead. Perhaps Neanderthals believed as well that we would be reborn, individually or communally, from the womb of the mother” (50-51). While I can understand the temptation to ascribe such interpretations to Neanderthal burial sites like the one she describes, we really have no evidence that the Neanderthals even knew what the fetal position even was – it isn't at all likely that they had the tools to look inside a pregnant female of any species without killing her, and killing a pregnant female, be she Neanderthal or otherwise, seems to me somewhat counter-productive if one intends to maintain a sacred relationship with life, as the books both insist that goddess religions taught. Yet, if they had no way to know what it was like inside a womb, how could they echo it in their burial rituals? It seems to me much more likely that the fetal position was mimicking sleep, as death often looks like sleep and (especially when it's cold outside) the best way to keep warm when one is sleeping is to curl up on one's side. Similarly, in the B&C book, the author points to a painting inside the Lascaux cave and interprets it as a shaman performing a mystic ritual which excites him to the point of having an erection. Since the image was by no means clear in the black-and-white version of the book, I searched for a color picture online, and I discovered many excellent images in both color and black-and-white. Quite simply, it takes an incredible stretch of the imagination to see this image as anything other than a man being trampled by an injured bison, screaming out in terror. The fact that he very clearly has an erect penis can be explained, as an art-major friend of mine told me, by the style of art in which the drawing is done – it was standard for men to be shown with a penis to distinguish their sex quite clearly, and if it was a side-view (as this one is), the penis would be drawn as though erect, not because it was, but because it was clearer that way. This man may well be a shaman, and the bird nearby might be a wand of sorts, but the way his mouth is open as though screaming, the way he appears to be falling over, and the proximity of a disemboweled (and almost certainly enraged) bison with lowered horns suggests much more clearly that he is being trampled to death, and not engaging in some mystical union with the bison's departing spirit. It's a cool thought, but the image simply does not support that interpretation – or at least not nearly as well as it supports the interpretation of “man being trampled by enraged dying bison.” If we are to approach this in a manner at all academic or scientific, Occam's razor must be used and the simplest explanation is not the one offered in the book.