Spiritually Necessary Humility — Perspective from Archaeology

© 2011 Peter Free

 

14 May 2011

 

 

Stone-age tools and no bones — who made them, and what were their lives like?

 

Archaeology’s long perspective focuses attention on our own lack of big-picture permanence.

 

The recent discovery of (previously thought to be inadequate to the climate) “Mousterian” stone-age tools near the Arctic Circle — without associated bones to identify the people who made them — reminds us that our lives’ meaning is also made up of fleeting moments, rather than permanence.

 

At the 32,000-year-old site of Byzovaya in Russia's Polar Ural Mountains, which at 65 degrees latitude is as far north as Iceland, archaeologists found stone tools they argue are typical of those long associated with Neandertals in Europe.

 

If Neandertals did make the tools, it would be a “very big thing,” says archaeologist Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

 

Byzovaya would push Neandertals' range northward by 1000 kilometers, and the site would be one of the youngest claimed for Neandertals, especially since recent redating has moved many Neandertal sites earlier in time . . . . It would also show that the cold-adapted Neandertals could survive the rigors of the Arctic.

 

But because the new evidence is tools rather than the bones of Neandertals themselves, the Byzovaya team appears to have walked into the whirling blades of one of archaeology's sharpest debates: Can a hominin species be identified solely by the stone tools it left behind?

 

© 2011 Michael Balter, Did Neandertals Linger in Russia's Far North?, Science 332(6031): 778 (13 May 2011) (paragraph split)

 

The archaeologists who examined the Byzovaya site said:

 

Most of the Russian Arctic was free of glacier ice throughout the past 50,000 years, including during the Last Glacial Maximum. . . .

 

A varied herbivorous fauna existed in high Arctic areas that are presently wet tundra or almost barren Arctic deserts.

 

Recent archaeological evidence demonstrates that Ice Age humans also at least temporarily lived and hunted in these northern landscapes beginning around 35,000 to 36,000 14C years before the present . . . .

 

It has not been clear whether the early visitors were members of a fossil population [such as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and affiliated groups or whether modern humans (H. sapiens sapiens) expanded northward into a previously uninhabited area.

 

This interstadial (31,000 to 24,000 14C yr B.P.) was slightly warmer than the preceding and following periods, but the climate was still much colder than at present.

 

© 2011 Ludovic Slimak, John Inge Svendsen, Jan Mangerud, Hugues Plisson, Herbjørn Presthus Heggen, Alexis Brugère, and Pavel Yurievich Pavlov, Late Mousterian Persistence near the Arctic Circle, Science 332(6031): 841-845 (13 May 2011) (paragraph split, footnotes omitted)

 

 

“Well, duh, Pete, we all know that we die — what’s the big deal?”

 

This archaeological vignette about a forgotten people’s struggles against cold reminds us that Life is solely made up of our moments.  The accumulation of transitory experiences into memory does not last.

 

Impermanence is inviolable, and humility becomes an unavoidable corollary insight.

 

Humility’s lesson is missed, when empathy is lacking.

 

 

Imagination and empathy may be necessary components of humility

 

Empathy has an imagination component.

 

Can you see and feel the Byzovaya group's minute-to-minute struggle against conditions colder than today’s, with tools previously thought to be inadequate for survival so close to the Arctic Circle?

 

Their days must often have been unrelievedly miserable.  And too frequently punctuated with injury, disease, and death.  The blunt force of emotional trauma, regularly administered, leaving no decipherable record to commemorate it.

 

Memory will be no more gracious with us.

 

Therein steps humility.  And an opportunity to open to the suffering of the world’s currently impoverished.

 

 

Why humility matters — doorway to compassion

 

Humility is a virtue rarely modeled in these days of grasping celebrity.

 

Humility is necessary for spiritual insight.  Its absence accounts for many of our personal and national woes.

 

Lack of humility motivates our grandiose national experiment with perpetual war as a mechanism for furthering national safety and wealth.  Lack of personal and national humility puts our desires too far ahead of others’ needs.

 

Humility’s soulful presence encourages an appreciation for ungraspable moments.  Ours and others’.

 

Humility may become entrance to compassion.