Sublime

The earliest archaeological theories favoured the use of rafts and the emphasis was entirely on practicality. All explanations to do with the movement and erection of the stones at Stonehenge were treated as engineering problems. In other words, what was the simplest and most efficient way of achieving a particular task? But we have no reason whats

prehistory,

Most of us have been displaced from those cultures of origin, a global diaspora of refugees severed not only from land but from the sheer genius that comes from belonging in symbiotic relation to it.

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin,

It has recently been suggested that wood might have symbolized the world we live in and stone the permanent, everlasting realm of the ancestors.

If we can combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of archaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limitations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge of these particular ancestors.

The modification of stone to form a tool requires considerable skill, but needs little heat or other technological development. The production of metal from ore (a process known as smelting) involves the careful manipulation of fire, together with other chemical and physical measures, such as the control of oxygen and the addition of carbon. The fi

How do animals know migration routes they have never individually experienced before? How does a woman intuitively recover a weaving technique that disappeared over a century ago? How do ideas and solutions appear to us in our sleep?

Instead of building a network from human-to-human chains alone—as the Neanderthals, for example, did—stories provided Homo sapiens with a new type of chain: human-to-story chains. In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.