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| One of the Motala skulls Photo: Fredrik Hallgren, Stiftelsen Kulturmiljövård |
A couple of years ago I participated in an archaeological excavation of a settlement and burial site from the Mesolithic period in Motala in South-Eastern Sweden. The site is called Kanaljorden and you can find more information (in Swedish) here. Today the site consisted of a peat bog, but during the Mesolithic it was a shallow lake. In this lake was a large stone packing and among other some human skulls were found. At least some of these skulls seem to have been placed on sticks. To us, living in the Western world today, this might seem confusing, scary and awful, but it might not have been to the Mesolithic people that gathered in Motala 8000 years ago.
I do not think we should talk about evolution as something that is constantly striving to get better. This gives a hierarchy to cultures and societies both in the past and present and history is reduced to being a constant struggle to evolve (in a unilinear way and with our contemporary Western society as the norm for ultimate goal of evolution). I think it is better to think in terms of cultural differences. The Stone Age people were not more stupid than us. They just lived different lives.
But why do we need to study the Stone Age? Is it really relevant to us today? It was so long ago and their societis were so different.
Well first of all, not all Stone Age societies were hunter-gatherers. Remember the Neolithic was a time of farming. Besides there were cities in the Middle East and the Egyptians built their famous pyramids during the Stone Age. But there is a special way in which the Stone Age can be very useful for us today. We live in a time of climate change and the Stone Age people did the same. They were forced to invent a new way of living and looking at the world. That is something I think we all need to consider today as well. The big question is if we are willing to do so.
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