Labor and Service

 

The so-called Venus of Lespugue, a statuette of a nude female figure of the Gravettian is discovered in 1922 by René de Saint-Périer (1877-1950) in the Rideaux cave of Lespugue (Haute-Garonne) in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Dated to between twenty-six thousand and twenty-four thousand years ago, the figure is approximately six inches (one hundred and fifty millimeters) tall.

Carved from tusk ivory, it was damaged during excavation.

Of all the steatopygous Venus figurines discovered from the upper Paleolithic, the Venus of Lespugue, if the reconstruction is sound, appears to display the most exaggerated female secondary sexual characteristics, especially the extremely large, pendulous breasts.

According to textile expert Elizabeth Wayland Barber, the statue displays the earliest representation found of spun thread, as the carving shows a skirt hanging from below the hips, made of twisted fibers, frayed at the end.

The Venus of Lespugue resides in France, at the Musée de l'Homme.

The oldest known evidence of warfare will be found at Cemetery 117, an ancient burial site near Wadi Halfa, near the northern border of Sudan.

The remains of fifty-nine bodies, as well as numerous other fragmented remains will be discovered here in 1964 by a team led by Fred Wendorf.

Determined to be around 14,340 to 13,140 years old, the remains represent twenty-four females and nineteen males over nineteen years of age, as well as thirteen children ranging in age from infancy to fifteen years old.

Three additional bodies will also be discovered, but their age and sex cannot be determined due to damage and missing pieces.

The site comprises three cemeteries, two of which are called Jebel Sahaba, one on either side of the Nile river and the third cemetery being called Tushka.

About forty percent of the people buried in Jebel Sahaba had died of violent wounds.

Pointed stone projectiles are found in their bodies at places that suggest the bodies had been attacked by spears or arrows.

The wounds are located around the sternum, abdomen, back, and skull (through the lower jaw or neck).

A dramatic and rapid rise in global sea-levels of around fourteen meters is linked by coral off the South Pacific island of Tahiti to the collapse of massive ice sheets fourteen thousand six hundred years ago.

An Aix-Marseille University-led team, including Oxford University scientists Alex Thomas and Gideon Henderson, confirmed that a dramatic and rapid rise in global sea-levels of around fourteen meters occurred at the same time as a period of rapid climate change known as the Bølling oscillation.

The Bølling oscillation, a warm interstadial period between the Oldest Dryas and Older Dryas stadials, at the end of the last glacial period, is used to describe a period of time in relation to Pollen zone Ib—in regions where the Older Dryas is not detected in climatological evidence, the Bølling-Allerød is considered a single interstadial period.

The beginning of the Bølling is also the high-resolution date for the sharp temperature rise marking the end of the Oldest Dryas at 14,670 BP and the beginning of the so-called Humid Period in North Africa.

The region that will later become the Sahara is wet and fertile, its aquifers full.

During the Bølling warming high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere warmed as much as 15 degrees Celsius in a few tens of decades.

The team has used dating evidence from Tahitian corals to constrain the sea level rise to within a period of three hundred and fifty years, although the actual rise may well have occurred much more quickly and would have been distributed unevenly around the world's shorelines.

A leading theory is that the ocean's circulation changed so that more heat was transported into Northern latitudes.

A considerable portion of the water causing the sea-level rise at this time must have come from melting of the ice sheets in Antarctica, which sent a 'pulse' of freshwater around the globe.

However, whether the freshwater pulse helped to warm the climate or was a result of an already warming world remains unclear.

The Domestication of Dogs: Early Human-Canine Cooperation

By 12,000 BCE, humans had likely successfully domesticated dogs, marking one of the earliest known interspecies partnerships. While the exact timeline and process of dog domestication remain debated, it is widely accepted that human interaction played a crucial role in shaping the modern dog (Canis lupus familiaris).

The Timeline of Dog Domestication

• Genetic evidence confirms that dogs genetically diverged from wolves at least 15,000 years ago, though some researchers suggest an even earlier domestication event.
• Mitochondrial DNA studies and archaeological findings place the earliest domesticated dogs within a timeframe of 17,000–14,000 years ago, around the Upper Paleolithic-Pleistocene/Holocene boundary.
• The exact date remains indeterminate, with contradictory evidence complicating the debate.

How Did Domestication Occur?

There are two major hypotheses regarding how dogs evolved from wolves:

1. Active Domestication by Humans

   • Early humans may have intentionally raised and bred certain wolves for hunting, guarding, or companionship, leading to gradual domestication.

2. Self-Domestication through Natural Selection

   • Some wolves may have gathered near human campsites to scavenge leftover food.
   • Over time, wolves that were less fearful and more tolerant of humans would have been more successful in obtaining food, favoring traits that led to domestication.

Scientific Evidence: Archaeology and Genetics

• Archaeological findings provide evidence of dog burials and human-dog associations dating back more than 15,000 years.
• Mitochondrial DNA studies support the idea that dog domestication began at multiple locations, possibly in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East.
• Despite ongoing research, the origin and exact timeline remain controversial, with findings pointing to multiple domestication events or hybridization with wild wolf populations.

Significance of Early Domestication

• The domestication of dogs represents one of the earliest examples of animal domestication, shaping human hunting, security, and companionship practices.
• This relationship likely played a role in human survival and social organization, as domesticated dogs aided in tracking prey, guarding settlements, and forming deep bonds with humans.

Though many aspects of dog domestication remain uncertain, what is clear is that humans and dogs have shared an extraordinary evolutionary journey, forming one of the most enduring and successful interspecies partnerships in history.

Evidence of occupation in caves of the Hindu Kush in northern Afghanistan, dating to between 15,000 and 10,000 BCE, represent the so-called Epipaleolithic Stage.

The domestication of sheep and goats is thought to have begun in this region and period, according to indirect evidence.

The earliest dated remains of domesticated dogs, dated to around 10,500 BCE, are coeval with the emergence of the Natufian culture of the Levant following the close of the Pleistocene Epoch. (First identified in 1928 in the valley of Wadi en Natuf in Israel, major sites have since been found in many parts of Israel and Jordan and in Syria.)

The Natufian culture differs markedly from Late Paleolithic cultures following the close of the Pleistocene Epoch.

The Natufians, although still concerned with hunting, exhibit evidence of a more sedentary life, including the introduction of a new economy preoccupied with intensive collecting of wild seed plants.

Natufians produce microlithic stone reaping tools, stone mortars and pestles, bone sculptures, and luxury goods, such as shell and bone jewelry.

Trade is important to the Natufians, whose economic relations apparently extend from the Mediterranean to the Zagros Mountains.

Like us, the Natufians are artistic, lavishly carving the bone-handled hafts of their flint-bladed sickles, and like us, they honor their dead, burying them with personal ornaments in cemeteries.

They live in caves, as did their Paleolithic predecessors, or occupy incipient villages.

One of these, the first known organized community in the Fertile Crescent, forms at the oasis of Jericho, on the plain on the west bank of the River Jordan.

The earliest occupation of the site consists of remains of the Natufian culture and includes what may have been a shrine.

The site is watered, as it is today, by the copious spring 'as-Sul'n.

The Neolithic way of life is first achieved in Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present Iraq) and in what are today Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.

The sheep, derived mainly from the Asian Mouflon, is domesticated in the Middle East.

Farming settlements appear in southern Mesopotamia.

Cultivation of wheat, barley, peas, and olives had begun in the ninth millennium BCE, along with domestication of sheep, goats, and pigs.

By this time, most animals that are amenable to domestication, such as cattle and poultry, have already been tamed.

Obsidian, like all glass and some other types of naturally occurring rocks, breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture.

A naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock, Stone Age cultures value it because, like flint, it can be fractured to produce sharp blades or arrowheads, or polished to create early mirrors.

Obsidian is widely traded in the Mediterranean and Near East in the eighth millennium BCE.

Bladed tools found in southwest Iran, dating from around 8000 BCE, are made from obsidian that had been transported from Anatolia.

Early human settlers had arrived in West Africa around 12,000 BCE, according to the findings of archaeological studies.

Microlithic stone industries have been found primarily in the region of the Savannah where pastoral tribes existed using chiseled stone blades and spears.

The tribesmen of Guinea and the forested regions of the coast were without microliths for thousands of years, but prospered using bone tools and other means.

Settlements are established at Akure in present-day southwest Nigeria around 8000 BCE.

Rock engravings dating back to the Mesolithic period have been discovered on the outskirts of Akure, as has the oldest Homo sapiens fossil to have been found in West Africa thus far, dating back to around eleven thousand years ago.

Agriculture begins to be practiced along a crescent-shaped swath from Mesopotamia to Egypt as the ice sheet shrinks to its nearly current size and the climate stabilizes to form the rhythms and patterns familiar to us.

Comprising the lower Tigris and Euphrates valleys, Syria, Palestine, and the Nile Valley of Egypt, the Fertile Crescent is very fertile indeed, much more so than today.

To the west, much of northern Africa's vast Sahara Desert, bone-dry in historic times, is semi-arid, even wet.

Rivers flow in Arabia, forests carpet the Levant, and lakes, swamps, and marshes dot the Southwest Asian plains.

Fish, fowl, and game are abundant; the virgin soils rich and deep.

Population densities are lower in the Sahara than along the Nile, where some sedentary communities exploited fish and wild plant foods intensively after 8000, coincident with the beginning of agriculture and animal domestication in the Near East. (Anthropologists continue to debate whether food production was introduced into the Nile Valley, or resulted from indigenous developments.)

Wild barley and emmer, a forerunner of wheat, are the bases from which cereal crops began to be domesticated.

Goats and pigs were domesticated in about 8000, and the domestic cat may have originated around the same time, when nomadic humans settle into village life.

The cat (Felis catus), also known as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from other felines and felids, may have originated about 8000 BCE, when nomadic humans settle into village life.

A 2007 study published in the journal Science asserts that all house cats are descended from a group of self-domesticating desert wildcats, Felis silvestris lybica, circa ten thousand years ago, in the Near East.