Prehistory By prehistory I am talking about the time before 'civilisation'; from cavemen right through until writing and cities began.
One of the most obvious things about this time is that it is the longest period that I will be talking about. Homo Sapiens was around for tens of thousands of years (perhaps hundreds of thousands, I am not sure of the details...) before the next stage (Greece/Rome) began. The Greece/Rome period lasted for maybe 6000 years, the Middle Ages only 1000, the Industrial Revolution only 200. So there is a compression, a speeding up in the process of evolution as time goes on.
During this time there were no families as we think of them today; often the whole tribe would look after the children, rather than just one of the women. The 'Kalahari Bushmen' of south - west Africa still do this. Everyone is part of a tribe, and they all work together as a unit.
The art which these people made can still be seen in cave paintings, and small sculptures made from bone. The main point I want to make about the art is that the things they drew on the walls was very different from today; the subject of the paintings was often of food (animals), hunting that food, and other tribal activities. The art was not depictions of personal experiences as it is today, the designs and motifs represent the collective experience and traditions of the whole race/tribe.
The gods that these people had were very much a part of nature and the people were totally involved in that nature. (Totally unlike today, where the humans can control nature, right down to the DNA of the cells which make it up.) They worshipped gods of the bears, the jaguar, the god of the forest, the gods of the rocks, the mountain ranges. Gods of all sorts. The main theme with all these gods is that the god is the animal or natural feature. The storm wasn't made by the god, the storm was the god. The lightning streaking across the sky wasn't thrown by the god it was the god itself. The brook running past the cave is part of the water god, rather than controlled by the water god, as happens later on in evolution. The shamans or priests sometimes took psychedelic drugs (often mushrooms or species of frog) in order to speak to their gods more easily, because the plants or the dog which hangs around the camp would start talking to them. Once he stopped tripping the shaman would interpret these experiences. Psychedelic drugs have a different effect on us today because we have internalised the gods, so all we get is images from our unconscious mind playing back at us. More on this internalising when when I mention the Furies in the next section.
When a man went out to hunt he would often become a predatory animal, by dressing in the skins of the animal he wanted to be, wearing make-up and so forth. He took on the qualities of the tiger or whatever, in order to be able to hunt better. There was a real sense that the human is part of the ecosystem, and they were surrounded by their gods, which affected their everyday life constantly. Everyday they would give a prayer, asking the god of the forest to forgive them for taking some of him, or thanking the god-that-is-the-bison for giving one of it's self.
The main point I am trying to get across in this section is that pre-historic humans were less focussed on themselves as individuals; there were no individuals, only the tribe. The tribe is just one of the many of other tribes; the bison are a tribe, the lions are another. They were totally part of the earth and part of nature and their gods were part of that nature; mentally, they were hardly removed from their gods (which was the rest of the world) at all, they spoke to them everyday, the gods had an influence all the time.
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