Ancestors
The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials
Alice Roberts
Audiobook narrated by Alice Roberts
Having read it
★★★★☆
A really interesting insight into the early days of archaeology (and associated subjects and categorisation with an ology or two) and it’s early and modern prehistoric findings in Britain and the many connections further afield and interpretations of those discoveries.
Ancestors belong to everyone – and no one.
Delivered with a humanist perspective, professional skills and talents (and a lightness of humour and reality) for the subjects in and around the author’s abilities and experiences; it was like sitting in on a rather decent and well-paced lecture.
Brilliantly practical, objective, scientifically and historically informative and just straightforawrd and honest and proves that endless cultural and historical dividing of, with and around labels to define followers, leaders, losers or winners very often with (unconscious) bias of contemporary thought gets in the way of actually truly discovering and better understanding, appreciating and behaving constructively towards our (prehistoric) ancestors.
[William] Buckland saw evidence of a benevolent God in the way that the earth appeared to be ‘designed’ with the support of humans specifically in mind. (There are plenty of cosmologists who make a similar argument today, extending it to the origin of the universe itself and the laws of physics, which seem so finely tuned – to have enabled Homo sapiens to evolve and flourish. I find it an odd argument. Just because we’re lucky enough to be here doesn’t mean that it was meant to be. It could quite easily have turned out differently. And then we wouldn’t be here to comment on it, would we?)
As the author explains in regards to some archaeological finds and wider biological happenings many things in life happen just by chance and as difficult as that might be to comprehend in the telling of the Homo sapiens story, inferring too much meaning from those events, culturally, nationally or politically to help bolster often self-perpetuating myths, narratives and attitudes, does not help society clearly see nor truly appreciate, life, the universe and everything.
It may sound weird, and not at all neat, but what we need to do is embrace and preserve ambiguity – not to swap it for a simple answer, a quick fix, an all-too-satisfying but overly simplistic certainty. We oversimplify ourselves if we try too hard to oversimplify our ancestors.
Anyway, if that doesn’t get you, the last half of the last chapter and the postscript should, as they are observant, relevant and brilliant.
A good passage
[...] Even if we don’t know what past people were thinking when they performed funerary rights, the practices themselves speak of some sort of symbolic thinking – some sort of appreciation of the difference between being alive and being dead, the meaning of loss, the importance of ritual.
Symbolic thinking goes to the heart (or brain) of what we believe is unique about us humans. We can hold abstract ideas in our heads in a way we think other animals cannot – at least not to the same degree. Abstract ideas and symbolic thinking also underpin our language – which is far more complex than that of any other animal. Language and ideas don’t fossilise. It’s not until people invent writing, around 5,000 years ago, that we can read the thoughts of our ancestors. (Even then, we can only read the thoughts they cared to submit to clay, papyrus or stone. And most of those are – somewhat tediously – records of who owes what to whom. Yes, you can blame accountants for the invention of the most transformative technology in human history.)
A second good passage
[...] However we do it, marking death with ritual that transform the body takes us beyond just mourning. Elephants and chimpanzees mourn. Humans seem to translate mourning into a physical demonstration of loss and transformation with mortuary rituals: burial, cremation, excarnation.
Archaeologists used to speak of the ‘five Bs’ of modern human behaviour: blades, bone (tool making), beads, beauty and burial. And the greatest of these – it could perhaps be argued – is ritualised burial. Funerary rituals seem to represent something about the way we think about the world, and our place in it – that we believe is uniquely human.
We know that, once, we were not in the world – and then we were born. We know that one day, we will leave this world – that we will die. We understand that each of us, as individuals, had a beginning, and that we will not endure for ever. It’s unavoidable. And I suspect that all of religion is, at its roots, concerned with providing us with solace in the face of this frankly unimaginable – but at the same time, incontestable and unavoidable – fact. The idea of an afterlife is so appealing that many people believe in it even today, when there is of course no reliable evidence for any meaningful existence after death. Even when that goes against everything we understand about physics, biology and consciousness.
A third good passage
[...] Removing the corpse from sight may be hygienic, but may also remove the clashing stimuli that creates emotional turmoil.
This happens every time we try to draw a hard fast line between us and other animals, or between Homo sapiens and other, now extinct human species. Layers of culture have built up over the years, centuries, millennia – until we feel ourselves quite separate from the rest of nature. But we are natural beings, and even the most ritualised behaviour has its roots in much simpler acts that are better understood when we cast around and look at what other animals do. The act of burial itself may be an human manifestation of a much more general tendency among social animals to clear the dead away from living spaces. But then we start to ascribe more meaning to it. You could argue that it is that extra layer of meaning, rather than the act itself, that makes us human.