The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire by Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus Page A
Authors: Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus
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who do the bidding of the alphas and protect their living descendants from harm. The reason human foragers seem, superficially, to have no dominance hierarchy is because no living human can be considered more than a gamma within this system.
Confirmation of this hierarchy will appear later in the book, as we watch inequality emerge in human society. We will see would-be hereditary leaders who attempt to link themselves to revered ancestors or even to supernatural beings. By the time we reach the civilizations of Egypt and the Inca, we will be introduced to kings who actually claimed to be deities. Such strategies for justifying inequality would not have worked if humans did not already consider themselves part of a natural/supernatural dominance hierarchy.
The celestial alphas were the source of the ultimate sacred propositions. Our beta ancestors were the focus of many rituals. The emotions of living gammas made possible the awe-inspiring experience.
Religious conservatives have long argued that secular laws are derived from ultimate sacred propositions. They will be pleased to learn that their view is supported by what we know of foragers. They may be less pleased to learn that ultimate sacred propositions are not eternal and unchanging. In the Aranda view of Creation, humans were once told that initiation required the knocking out of a tooth. They later decided that they had been told to circumcise initiates. Still later, they decided that they had been told to create sections and subsections. Religions transmitted by word of mouth changed constantly to keep up with innovations and altered circumstances.
There is, therefore, nothing wrong with religion per se. Its role in establishing the morals, ethics, values, and stability of early human society is well documented. What bothers some leading scientists is that many of today’s huge multinational religions refuse to take significant scientific information into account.
One roadblock preventing these major religions from adjusting to social and scientific progress is the fact that their sacred propositions are now set in type. Several of the world’s great monotheistic religions preserve, largely unaltered, the ultimate sacred propositions of Aramaic-speaking societies that lived too long ago to have heard of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Crick, and Watson. Had those sacred propositions been passed on by word of mouth instead of in printed texts, religious cosmology might very well have changed slowly over the centuries to keep pace with scientific cosmology. What no one could have foreseen was the invention of the printing press and the fossilization of a pre-Copernican view of the world. So if today’s multinational religions sometimes seem resistant to social and scientific breakthroughs, Gutenberg will have to share some of the blame.
That Old-Time Religion
During the Ice Age, the ultimate sacred propositions were transmitted not through scripture but through ritual performance. For examples of how this might have happened, we can return to Spencer and Gillen’s nineteenth-century accounts of Australia’s Aranda and Warramunga people. Their ultimate sacred propositions can be found in their creation myth, which took place in an era the Aranda referred to as the Alcheringa.
During the Alcheringa, Earth was only partly formed. Creation took four stages. During the first stage, two self-created beings called the ungambikula discovered rudimentary half-human, half-animal creatures from which true humans could be made. These creatures were limbless, deaf, and blind, living in a featureless world that had just emerged from the sea. The ungambikula used flint knives to release these creatures’ limbs, carve fingers and toes, bore nostril openings, make cuts for mouths, and slit open their closed eyelids so that they could see. The half-animals out of which some of the first people were made—dingoes, emus, cicadas, crows—became the totems, or mascots,
Confirmation of this hierarchy will appear later in the book, as we watch inequality emerge in human society. We will see would-be hereditary leaders who attempt to link themselves to revered ancestors or even to supernatural beings. By the time we reach the civilizations of Egypt and the Inca, we will be introduced to kings who actually claimed to be deities. Such strategies for justifying inequality would not have worked if humans did not already consider themselves part of a natural/supernatural dominance hierarchy.
The celestial alphas were the source of the ultimate sacred propositions. Our beta ancestors were the focus of many rituals. The emotions of living gammas made possible the awe-inspiring experience.
Religious conservatives have long argued that secular laws are derived from ultimate sacred propositions. They will be pleased to learn that their view is supported by what we know of foragers. They may be less pleased to learn that ultimate sacred propositions are not eternal and unchanging. In the Aranda view of Creation, humans were once told that initiation required the knocking out of a tooth. They later decided that they had been told to circumcise initiates. Still later, they decided that they had been told to create sections and subsections. Religions transmitted by word of mouth changed constantly to keep up with innovations and altered circumstances.
There is, therefore, nothing wrong with religion per se. Its role in establishing the morals, ethics, values, and stability of early human society is well documented. What bothers some leading scientists is that many of today’s huge multinational religions refuse to take significant scientific information into account.
One roadblock preventing these major religions from adjusting to social and scientific progress is the fact that their sacred propositions are now set in type. Several of the world’s great monotheistic religions preserve, largely unaltered, the ultimate sacred propositions of Aramaic-speaking societies that lived too long ago to have heard of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Crick, and Watson. Had those sacred propositions been passed on by word of mouth instead of in printed texts, religious cosmology might very well have changed slowly over the centuries to keep pace with scientific cosmology. What no one could have foreseen was the invention of the printing press and the fossilization of a pre-Copernican view of the world. So if today’s multinational religions sometimes seem resistant to social and scientific breakthroughs, Gutenberg will have to share some of the blame.
That Old-Time Religion
During the Ice Age, the ultimate sacred propositions were transmitted not through scripture but through ritual performance. For examples of how this might have happened, we can return to Spencer and Gillen’s nineteenth-century accounts of Australia’s Aranda and Warramunga people. Their ultimate sacred propositions can be found in their creation myth, which took place in an era the Aranda referred to as the Alcheringa.
During the Alcheringa, Earth was only partly formed. Creation took four stages. During the first stage, two self-created beings called the ungambikula discovered rudimentary half-human, half-animal creatures from which true humans could be made. These creatures were limbless, deaf, and blind, living in a featureless world that had just emerged from the sea. The ungambikula used flint knives to release these creatures’ limbs, carve fingers and toes, bore nostril openings, make cuts for mouths, and slit open their closed eyelids so that they could see. The half-animals out of which some of the first people were made—dingoes, emus, cicadas, crows—became the totems, or mascots,
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