Day 13: our leading scholar #IanWatts takes us to the heart of #Hadza cosmology by following the zigzag trail of the mysterious entity !o!oko, cannibal grandmother and mantis trickster and transformer.

Stories and beliefs associated to the Mantis among the Hadzabe of Tanzania compare with the well-known figure of the Mantis among the /Xam Southern #San #huntergatherers. This suggests great antiquity of the concepts related to #lunar time.

The word itself -- !o!oko -- is probably very ancient with double alveolar-palatal click (pop sound from taking your tongue quickly away from the alveolar ridge). The -ko ending implies femaleness, but this entity has gender fluidity.

#13daysofXmas #RAGtoptalks
#egalitarianism #gender #trickster #IndigenousCosmology

https://vimeo.com/761741261

In 'Before The Dawn of Everything', archaeologist #IanWatts questions Graeber and Wengrow's premise that searching for original human society 'can only be a matter of myth-making'. He argues, for Graeber and Wengrow, a ‘single human “us” can only be inferred from ~30,000 years ago'. The actual stretch of time when we became all-singing, all-dancing, language-speaking symbolic culture-bearing humans -- in Africa-- is abandoned as unknowable.

The latest archaeological findings and their interpretation suggest pan-African habitual performance of collective ritual, with a uniform signature of red cosmetic usage, from ~160,000 years ago around the end of speciation, grounding symbolic culture’s first shared imaginaries. While #TheDawnofEverything was clearly intended to be collectively empowering, it marginalises evolutionary theory, the archaeology of our speciation and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. Thereby, it resembles the decried ‘sapient paradox’! That is the fairly racist (!) idea that we got human bodies in Africa but had to reach Europe to show intelligence (or interesting archaeology!)

#archaeology #humanorigins #Africa #MiddleStoneAge #sapientparadox

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.3

The authors, led by Dapschauskas and including @sommer "try to answer the question of when and where habitual ochre use emerged and what significance this had for the development of ritual behavior during the Middle Stone Age" with a meta-analysis of 100 African sites.

They directly address the model developed by myself #CamillaPower with #ChrisKnight and world-leading pigment specialist #IanWatts -- the #FemaleCosmeticCoalitions (FCC) hypothesis. We made predictions three decades ago. How do they hold up?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_cosmetic_coalitions

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Image: map of Africa showing over 100 Middle Stone Age sites, some with lithics, some ochre, some both, stretching the length of the continent south, east and north.