Events | 2010.01.22
If it turns out the Neanderthals weren't numbskulls, who can we look down on? | Zoe Williams
Archaeology is exploding the comforting myths and yardsticks against which we measure our supposed progress
These are about the only two archaeological truths anyone knows, and they\'ve been blown apart in the same week: Neanderthal man was not stupid; and Egyptian pyramids were not built by slaves. It\'s hard to think of a historical revelation that would have so much impact: Henry VIII not the instigator but actually the victim of divorce proceedings; Richard I did not have the heart of a lion, but a small sheep.
Neanderthal man has been elevated thus: the professor of archaeology at Bristol University, Joao Zilhao , was delivered a painted shell by a second-year student while on a dig in Spain. He thought it was a fossil, until they started cleaning it, when they realised it was actually a painted shell: revelations tumbled from the kind of pretty rustic adornment. Early man had found a pigment, and thought of a use for it. "Its preparation makes no sense unless it was used as a body cosmetic. We can\'t prove it but it makes sense," said Zilhao. The rest is deductive: if they used makeup and were fashion-conscious, they were far more intelligent than supposed, when they simply grunted (ha! So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Michael Buerk).
The second revelation is actually less revelatory: evidence from the graves of the pyramid builders in Egypt – not least the fact that they actually had graves – shows they weren\'t slaves after all but paid workers. Sadly for sensation seekers, this has been common knowledge among Egyptologists for years. A former director of Berlin\'s Egyptian Museum, Dieter Wildung, is on record as saying: "The myth of the slaves building the pyramids is only the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood." (It makes you wonder about German tabloids, doesn\'t it, that they would set themselves to perpetuating the fiction of slave-built ancient structures. I\'m not saying it\'s better than Page 3 and Will the Last Person to Leave Britain Please Turn Out the Lights . Just, you know, different.)
Those melodramatically large erections are testament not to the cruelty of ancient Egypt, but to the devotion it commanded. Workers may have been paid, but it didn\'t begin and end with payment. It began and ended with love (payment notwithstanding, it was still incredibly hard work). Having said that, this was known already and never seeped into the popular consciousness: I bet you, also, that the equivalence between makeup and intelligence will take a while to catch on.
I have heard archaeologists claim theirs as the only discipline that is Marxist. While other students of the past concentrated on recorded history, the lives of kings and other powers, they scrambled for the unrecorded story, the story of pots and pans and small denomination coin and painted shells, that is, by definition, the underdog\'s. You could make an argument that, by the same token, this was the more feminist line of historical inquiry – over periods of centuries the only way written history can prove the participation of women is in the production of yet more men.
But it\'s not the politics of archaeology that leads people to ignore its findings: rather, it\'s that everybody likes to think the worst of the past. If you look at the notions that turn out to be myths, they are always bad, aren\'t they? We never discover that our antecedents were actually less intelligent than we gave them credit for. They never have graves that are surprisingly primitive, or artefacts that are unexpectedly crap. This is the thrill of collective downward comparison: the worse the past looks – the more thick-skulled, the crueller, the less enlightened, the less rational – the better we feel. It\'s the only way to build a cultural identity: how else are you going to do so? Current events are too conflicting. Are we philanthropists or war-mongers? Have we a work ethic or do we still seek to enslave others, slyly? Are we incredibly evolved or intoxicatingly stupid? You cannot answer these questions about "modern western democracy", which does and is all these things. Even if you refine it down to this country, it is still a pendulum. On the other hand, if you can convincingly build a picture in which ancient man was pinheaded, with no sense of fairness or empathy, then that instantly delivers progress. How did we become so much better than him or her? It is unrecorded, we merely did.
The greater the difference, the more effortless our progress appears. Archaeology is brilliant for this, there is so much conjecture – with no evidence to the contrary you can build whatever forefather you fancy. It is interesting that we build ourselves rubbish forefathers. You\'d think we\'d have more self-esteem, that we could fashion a Neanderthal who was only slightly idiotic, a Pharaoh who was only partially bad, and still feel we\'d covered some ground. But no, it has to be binary, and now some beardy spade-wielders have ruined it. If we do digest these new truths, we will need new villains. Maybe concentrate on foreigners? Downward comparison can work against almost anyone, so long as you don\'t dig too deep.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]hal-man-archaelogical-research
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