The Blackberry Walk

I was in Oxford a few weeks ago revisiting one of my favourite museums, the Pitt-Rivers museum. There you can find all sorts of treasures of the many peoples of the Earth; but today's article isn't about the Pitt-Rivers museum (though you certainly should go). No, today's article begins with the Natural History museum there in Oxford. The Natural History museum is not unimpressive by any means, but in scale to the exhibits found in the Pitt-Rivers, to my mind it is a mere foyer. Though others do not share my opinion. Built into what could only be an old railway station, the Natural History museum appears to have far more visitors than the main attraction behind it. Many of the visitors are families, their kids looking at the skeletons of giant sloths and dinosaurs. For the children, it is probably wise not to bring them into the Pitt-Rivers: some of those African idols are enough to make me afraid and give me nightmares, let alone a poor child. Yes, it is the Natural History museum I want to begin with today. You see these skeletons of extinct beasts, and you wonder: what did they look like? We have our laymen's conception of a dinosaur which has iguana-like skin taut around a lean muscular body, but then these scientists come along and say they have feathers! It's almost as bad as the Classicists who say the Greek statues were painted. It's as if in both these cases there's a pop conception, one formed when there was less evidence, and a bleeding edge interpretation held by experts which has yet to penetrate into the popular imagination. This pop conception of a dinosaur is miles apart from what the experts believe. But how much credence ought we give to the experts? Like with Greek statues, where experts rely on small residues of paint and recreating their impressions, with dinosaurs we do just the same: look at residues of proteins, or worse look at other like-creatures and extrapolate. It was around this time walking around the exhibits that my girlfriend, RiceIsNice, showed me a funny meme. The meme took skeletons of extant theria, like bison, and gave them the same treatment the dinosaurs received, an artist's reconstruction. With nothing but the bison's skeleton, the artist saw the funny outcrop of bones which make up the bison's muscular hump, and, with a bit of artistic license, turned it into a strange fin of bone and skin atop his back. It looked quite ridiculous. Though it is just the same treatment given to the spinosaurus who has such a frilly crest. Perhaps, some speculated, the spinosaurus was built like a tank, just like the bison. It's possible; but I'm not a zoologist. All that I can say is that it is very easy to be deceived by evidence without context. When looking at dinosaurs, the musculature and organs would give context to the skeleton being studied, if we were fortunate enough to have them; and without these details, we can only, if you would excuse the pun, get a bare bones understanding of what these antediluvian creatures looked like. Now, from here I'll like to pivot to a different though related area of study, that being ancient hominids. The prehistory of man is a topic that has always interested me. The history of man is seen through shaded lenses, shaded by the writers who wrote, rewrote, and retained the knowledge of the past. From the great writers dating back to ancient times like Herodotus and Thucydides, knowledge of how life was lived has been preserved, and we can write with some accuracy on the rulers, the wars, the happenings, but also the thinkers of these times, and what these peoples worshipped. Comparing this to the palaeontology discussed prior, history and textual sources form the musculature, skin, and viscera of the past. The skeleton, on the other hand, is the archaeology. Without archaeology, each ancient civilisation is as real as Laputa; or maybe Atlantis (though I reckon on Atlantis the jury is still out). You may argue that great mud floods have wiped out your civilisation, or that whole swathes of classical history have been cooked up by monks bored in their cloisters, but the numismatics don't lie: if you find a coin in a Serbian ditch with Heraclius' face upon it, Heraclius must've been a real Roman emperor, lest Ockham weeps. But there is a time before such technologies like coins were invented - or at least metal coins as we understand them - and that time was prehistory. In prehistory, we are without the musculature of the texts, and instead are left to rely upon the archaeological skeleton and a little imagination. A little artistic interpretation. The word Aryan has some unfortunate connotations today, but in prehistory there is something concrete being referenced. There was a wave of culture which swept up across Europe and down into modern day Iran (Iran is a cognate of Aryan) and India. In India, the Aryan invaders brought Vedic religion, called by researchers Brahmanism as opposed to the later reformed Hinduism (the differences may be an article for another time), and through their invasion, those with power, the warrior class and the priestly class, bred amongst themselves. This is the modern caste system: in genetics, we see far more steppe Aryan ancestry in higher caste Hindus than in lower caste Hindus, the caste system guiding their Aryan heritage. Now, with all I've just expounded, how much can we prove? There is genetic evidence sure - and genetic evidence is one of the greatest modern tools in the study of historic peoples - and there's linguistic evidence too - also powerful, used by earlier researchers of ancient civilisations - but how much can we prove? We find clay pots here and there which show similar methods of construction and patterns of decoration, but that merely shows this people - or a people influenced by the style - lived there. The answer unfortunately is we really can't know much. What kind of lives did these people lead? Who or what did they worship? Were the invasions of the Aryans into India peaceful or violent? With the Aryans of India, we aren't as deep into prehistory as you would expect, for we have what might be the oldest book in the world to give us context, the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda details a kind of invasion of the subcontinent by Aryans against local Dravidians, though I haven't read it in truth. Though researchers today continue to argue, as is their wont, whether such an invasion ever happened. Was it a Willie the Conqueror-style event, with one large invasion and a circling of elites, or a Hengist and Horsa, with gradual immigration, assimilation, and takeover: we really can't know for certain. Like the artist trying to reconstruct a spinosaurus, it ends up looking awfully silly. But like an artist trying to reconstruct a bison, such can figure out the truth of prehistory. Speaking as an analytical chemist, it is a kind of titration of prehistory. For those who have purged themselves of their secondary school chemistry curriculum, I'll give you a brief reminder. A titration involves an instantaneous reaction between one known concentration and one unknown concentration; and by adding the right amount of the solution of known concentration so as to use up all of the solution of unknown concentration, the concentration of the solution of unknown concentration may be calculated. Such a technique may be used for prehistory too. With history with have both the skeleton and the musculature, the textual sources and the archaeology - a known concentration - whereas with prehistory we have a skeleton without musculature, archaeology with no textual sources - an unknown concentration. No reactions take place in the titration of prehistory, of course; but instead there are comparisons and parallels which are to be observed. The titrator must look upon all of recorded history and look at it through the eyes of how a student of prehistory might observe it. He must look at the archaeology, the genetic evidence, any linguistic evidence, and try to piece together a theory as to what has taken place. Then, like some kind of Sudoku where the answers are in the back of the book, he may look at the textual sources to see if his hypothesis was correct. And only through practice and repetition may the student learn how to accurately read prehistoric sites. Only by looking at the kind of musculature which ought to adorn the skeleton of prehistory may we come up with correct interpretations of prehistory; lest we be left with the archaeologists equivalent of a lean spiny bison. To end, I'll throw in a favourite joke of mine. That is, to call everything discovered in prehistory a fertility ritual. Through ideology, structuralism - who knows what - students of prehistory have a kind of obsession with fertility rituals. Every graffiti of a phallus on a wall to them is yet more evidence of ancient fertility rituals. So, in lockstep, there is an awful lot of pleasure to be had at pointing out modern fertility rituals in our everyday lives. Prehistory with so few hard solid facts - only the evidence beneath the dirt - is rife with projection. Proper, old-fashion, Freudian projection. Anything suppressed is found on the blank canvas of the ruins. It's why fertility rituals are seen everywhere; but more generally why religious rituals suffused with divine significance are above all projected onto what easily may have been banal secular acts of the prehistorics, like threshing grain. There were rituals with these things, sure, but I'd wager not as commonly as the researcher might hope. Maybe there's something missing in their lives. Who knows.