the Pyrenees and eastern Cantabria and the many thermal and mineral springs in the vicinity of these sites. Perhaps, he says, these centres played a role in the mythology of Palaeolithic times. The widespread occurrence of serpentine and zig-zag lines, almost invariably associated with water, is no accident and, he speculates, may be associated with a mother-goddess cult. The zig-zag is a common motif, often associated with fish, and a human-like figure at Les Eyzies in France, a site dating back 30,000 years, shows a zig-zag inscribed on the figure's torso.60 A bone fragment discovered in 1970 at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria suggests this sign may go back to the time of the Neanderthals. The same applies to M-shaped and V-shaped carvings, which recall feminine symbols, such as the uterus and vulva. These symbols were repeated well into the Bronze Age on water vessels. Many specialists claim that carved or notched bones are tallies of hunters, others say that the signs can be divided into male (lines and dots) and female (ovals and triangles) and that Ice Age humans really were on the brink of an alphabet. This may be going too far but what does seem clear is that, in covering bones with carved images alongside a series of dots, in rows and columns, early humans were constructing what anthropologists call Artificial Memory Systems-and that, after all, is what writing is. Embryonic writing is perhaps the best description. The essential similarity of these signs is particularly intriguing, so much so that some archaeologists now believe that 'a considerable number of the deliberate marks found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages, extending from the Mediterranean to China'.61 (See Figure 2.) In rebuttal, it might be said that there are only so many signs the human mind can invent. But even if this is true, the similarities would still amount to something, implying that there is perhaps a genetically determined limit to our imagination in this field. At present we just do not know, although in 2005 a study of 115 different alphabets found that most languages average three strokes a character. This is no coincidence, says Mark Changizi, the researcher concerned. 'Three happens to be the biggest number our brains can recognise without having to count.'62 Figure 2: Similar signs among early forms of writing and proto-writing [Source: Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age , New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 78] For archaeologists, the term 'civilisation' generally implies four characteristics-writing, cities with monumental architecture, organised religion and specialised occupations. We cannot say that Palaeolithic humans got there fully-cities, for example, lay some way in the future. But the study of language, and writing, in civilisation-advanced though it now is-may still have some way to go. Merlin Donald, for example, has highlighted certain important stages in language development, in particular rhetoric, logic (dialectic) and grammar.63 As he also points out, these comprised the medieval trivium in Christendom, which separated these basic skills, these rules of thinking, from the quadrivium -mathematics, astronomy, geometry and music, which were specific subjects. In so far as ideographic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical systems of writing vary in their rhetorical, logistical and grammatical possibilities, does this difference help account for the different trajectories of the disparate civilisations around the world? Does the physical form of writing affect thinking in a fundamental way? The trivium was based on the idea that dispute-argument-was a trainable skill. Was it this which, at base, would provide the crucial difference between the West and the rest, which is the subject of Parts Three, Four and Five of this book, and did it encourage the assault on religious authority, the all-important break with mythic thinking? It is something to keep in the back of one's mind as we proceed.
3 The Birth of the Gods, the Evolution of House and Home To Chapter 3 Notes and References As we have seen, for Merlin Donald the great transformation in human history was the change from episodic thinking to mimetic, because it allowed the development of culture, 'the great escape from the nervous system'. Before this book reaches its conclusion we shall have encountered many other candidates for the single most important idea in history: the soul, the experiment, the One True God, the heliocentric universe, evolution-each of them has passionate supporters. Some of these ideas are highly abstract concepts. For most archaeologists, however, humans' 'greatest idea' is a far more down-to-earth practical notion. For them, the domestication of plants and animals-the invention of agriculture-was easily the greatest idea because it produced what was by far the most profound transformation in the way that humans have lived. The domestication of plants and animals took place some time between 14,000 and 6,500 years ago and it is one of the most heavily studied ideas in pre-history. Its origins at that time in history are intimately related to the climatological record of the earth. Until, roughly speaking, 12,000 years ago, the average temperature of the earth was both much colder and more variable than it is now. Temperature might vary by as much as 7 in less than a decade, compared with 3 in a century now.1 Around 12,000 years ago, however, the earth warmed up considerably, as the last ice age finally ended and, no less important, the climate stabilised. This warming and stabilisation marks the transition between the two major periods in earth's history, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. This was in effect the 'big trigger' in history and made our world possible.2 It is safe to say that while we are now fairly clear about where agriculture began, how it began, and with what plants and animals, there is no general agreement, even today, about why this momentous change occurred. The theories, as we shall see, fall into two types. On the one hand, there are the environmental/economic theories, of which there are several; and there are the religious theories, of which at the moment there is only one. The domestication of plants and animals (in that order) occurred independently in two areas of the world that we can be certain about, and perhaps in seven. These areas are: first, south-west Asia-the Middle East-in particular the 'fertile crescent' that stretches from the Jordan valley in Israel, up into Lebanon and Syria, taking in a corner of southeast Turkey, and round via the Zagros mountains into modern Iraq and Iran, the area known in antiquity as Mesopotamia. The second area of undoubted independent domestication lies in Mesoamerica, between what is now Panama and the northern reaches of Mexico. In addition, there are five other areas of the world where domestication also occurred but where we cannot be certain whether it was independent, or derived from earlier developments in the Middle East and Mesoamerica. These areas are the highlands of New Guinea; China, where the domestication of rice seems to have had its own history; a narrow band of sub-Saharan Africa running from what is now the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria across to the Sudan and Ethiopia; the Andes/Amazon region, where the unusual geography may have prompted domestication independently; and the eastern United States.3 One reason for the distribution about the globe of these areas has been provided by Andrew Sherratt, from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His theory is that three of these areas-the Middle East, Mesoamerica and the south-east Asian island chain-are what he calls 'hot spots': geologically and geographically they have been regions of constant change, where incredible pressures generated by tectonic plates moving over the surface of the earth created in these three places narrow isthmuses, producing a conjunction of