Season's Greetings
This will be the last post for 2019. The next post will be on the 11th of January, 2020.
No matter what your religion or what your belief system, I hope you have a very enjoyable festive season.
Marie-Therese
Introduction
There are so many ideas that have been invented and then realized by human beings that it is hard to weigh which has had the most impact on our existence and on our on-going development. Let us begin by noting a few of them.
Marie-Therese Wisniowski's ArtCloth Work Titled - Entropy (Detailed View).
Techniques: Multiple discharge processes, silkscreened, stencilled and mono printed employing gels, transparent, opaque and metallic paints on rayon.
Size: 110 cm (width) x 320 cm (length).
Human beings were neither the largest animal nor the fastest, and at one stage in the beginning of human time, not the most numerous. They needed significant shelter, in the form of clothing and housing, since the average internal temperature of a human being is 37oC (98.6oF). There are very few areas on the Earth with a similar daily outside temperature.
For example, Sydney enjoys a sunny, Mediterranean-style climate all year round with more than 340 sunny days per year. Summers are warm to hot and winters are mild, with rainfall spread fairly evenly throughout the year. In summer (December - February) the average maximum temperatures are around 26°C. It can also be humid at this point in time with an average humidity of 65%. Average maximum temperatures in the winter months (June-August) are around 16°C. Sydney’s rainfall is the highest between March and June. Hence, it is not near our body temperature for most days of the year.
The table below shows that females are in particular vulnerable during their gestation period and so need to be protected. In fact, of all the mammals listed below, human beings have the equal sixth longest pregnancy, with the African elephant having the longest.
Gestation periods of some mammals.
As with some mammals, human gestation does not end with birth, as is suggested by the table above. The nurturing process after birth, although it is genetically and biologically continuous with the process before birth, is unfortunately not automatic. In human beings the mother can choose, and/or be influenced by others within her culture, to discontinue being a part of this process. It is likely that in our human beginnings, mothers were governed much more by hormonal, instinctive and reflexive processes in their response to their newborns than they later came to be. But as we developed our modern brain, the care of infants and young children became a conscious activity, and as consciousness became more and more determined by culture, the care of infants and children became a cultural process, greatly influenced by the socio-economic organization of a society. For example, it is not now unusual for some women to become surrogate mothers.
A 54-year-old grandmother gives birth to her own granddaughter after her daughter struggled with fertility issues.
It is clear that human beings needed to be co-operative and live in groups in order to survive.
Structures for Survival
In order to co-operate in the hunter/gatherer phase, mobs or moieties needed to be developed. Moiety simply means halve, but it is usually restricted by anthropologist's to mean a division that is exogamous: that is, where a person must marry into the opposite moiety and not into their own. The Australian Aboriginals called such a small clan unit - the mob. While caves and animal clothes did provide shelter and protection from the weather, the development of language was key in creating co-operation and organization. Human beings were not alone in the animal kingdom in language creation or in co-operative hunting.
Group of warriors from the tribes west of Hermannsburg, Central Australia.
Photographs of Australian Aborigines, Aborigine's Friends' Association, Adelaide 1936.
Courtesy of Ivan Copely.
Language
The origin of spoken language dates as far back as the 26th dynasty in Egypt, with the first recorded language experiment conducted by a Pharaoh named Psammetichus I. A recent study by Quentin D. Atkinson (a biologist at the University of Auckland) gave two assertions which were consistent with his data: (i) oral language originated only at one place; (ii) it did so in southwestern Africa.
Southwest Africa
His conclusions were based on his study of phonemes. A phoneme is any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another. For example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad and bat. Many Oceania peoples (e.g. Australian Aborigines, Maori’s etc.) have only 13 phonemes, whilst modern English has approximately 45, suggesting that the more primitive language structures of Oceania were indicative of African population dispersal to Asia and Europe over 60,000 years ago (which is consistent with Aboriginal arrival in Australia at that point in time).
The migration of Homo sapiens from 150,000 to 40,000 years.
Courtesy of Wikimedi.
It is generally agreed that true writing of language (not only numbers) was invented independently in at least two places: Mesopotamia (specifically, ancient Sumer) around 3200 BC and Mesoamerica around 600 BC. Several Mesoamerican scripts are known, the oldest being from the Olmec or Zapotec of Mexico.
Mesoamerican glyphs are more like paintings than Western alphabetic scripts. In fact, often the line between writing and visual art blurs. Glyphs or glyphic elements would appear, for example, inside the headdress of a ruler's portrait to denote his name or conversely the name of the ruler would be written by artistic representations of words that make up his name.
Written language is a very important organizing principle associated with the rise of the city-states and therefore the move away from a hunter/gatherer era into the agrarian society. Cities provided further protection to a greater population, but needed to source food and raw materials from the surrounding countryside.
The Acropolis played an integral role in Athenian life. This hilltop not only housed the famous Parthenon, but it also included temples, theaters, and other public buildings that enhanced Athenian culture.
While oral and written language was a great invention, it was needs based and so it suited our sociology, psychology and physiology. It was not a unique disposition, although it matured into being a unique and on-going human endeavour.
Utilization of Animals and Plants
The clearest evidence of early use of the horse as a means of transport is from chariot burials dated ca. 2000 BC. However, an increasing amount of evidence supports the hypothesis that horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes approximately 3500 BC.
The 3,000-year-old remains of five chariots and 12 horses uncovered in the Chinese city of Luoyang.
Mobility is vital in all hunter/gatherer's societies since so much of human being's source of protein is from herded animals that are faster and stronger than human beings. Being highly mobile allows the hunter to keep pace and moreover, isolate individual animals for slaughter. It also enabled protection for moieties and larger units with respect to inter- and intra warfare.
Indians hunting bison, engraving (19th Century).
In the agrarian age, animals were domesticated, penned, slaughtered and sold. Only in the past 1,000 years have human beings used horses in great numbers for tilling the soil. Horse breeds have changed too, specializing certain animals for particular jobs.
The primitive plough made an open shallow furrow by pushing the soil away to either side, rather than inverting as we know today.
The utilization of animals to do work and to provide food was more important as the human population soared. Both needs have remained unabated albeit we have moved into the mechanical/digital age with respect to movement and processing of food. Vehicles, boats, planes, and spaceships as well as breeding experiments are a continuing expression of the need to utilize other animals and plants for our needs. Once again, it was not a unique endeavour, since flies, ticks and fleas etc not only use other animals for mobility but also for feed. However, as with language, it developed into a unique on-going human endeavor.
Illustration of the humble house fly.
Scientific Endeavors
Counting is an important tool in the armory of hunter/gatherer societies. For example, the Australian Aboriginals had one of the simplest counting systems – one to fifteen in the Wotjoballuk counting system and one to thirty in more complicated systems.
In Egypt, from about 3000 BC, records survive in which 1 is represented by a vertical line and 10 is shown as ^. The Egyptians wrote from right to left, so the number 23 becomes lll^^. The Babylonians, Romans and Arabs all contributed to the growth of our numbering system, which even today keeps growing (binary system etc). Of course from arithmetic, mathematics emerged – algebra, geometry, calculus and trigonometry etc.
Leonardo da Vinci's Geometric Sketches - Dodecahedron.
Chemistry had its spiritual birth in alchemy, even though the extraction of metals from ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, rendering fats into soaps, making glass and alloys like bronze - were well known in prehistoric times.
Kimiya-yi sa'ādat (The Alchemy of Happiness) – a text on Islamic philosophy and spiritual alchemy by Al-Ghazālī (1058–1111).
The history of physics developed out of philosophy and astrology, with modern physics being described as the study of matter and energy and the relationship between them.
Einstein.
These are the three enabling sciences – Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics - that underpin all other logical endeavors such as geology, biology, medicine, engineering, economics, IT and computer science – just to name a few!
Economics - another area enabled by the basic sciences.
All of these studies end destinations are aimed to increase the supply of material and/or human welfare needs. Even studies that appear removed from material outcomes, such as the origin of the universe can be utilized for material needs. For example, physicist Subir Sachdev borrowed tools from string theory to understand the puzzling behavior of superconductors.
String theory began in esoteric areas of physics. It now has applications in more materialistic areas.
Perhaps the last bastion of material-free endeavors is philosophy and in particular Western Philosophy, which posed questions about religion, science, mathematics and politics. Indeed, in ancient times the word philosophy was used to mean all intellectual endeavors and as late as the 17th Century, the natural sciences (e.g. physics, astronomy, biology) were still referred to as branches of natural philosophy. Nevertheless, starting with a set of weird axioms one can logically and effectively reach equally absurd conclusions. It was the rise and the development of the enabling sciences – mathematics, chemistry and physics – that some axioms could be actually tested. As a result, philosophy is fast becoming obsolete even in areas such as ethics, since it cannot objectively distinguish between relativism and universality.
The truth about relativism.
Scientific endeavours are activities driven from material and/or welfare needs. Like language and utilization of animals and plants it has morphed into unique human endeavors.
The Mystery of Human Existence
There is no other animal, except human beings, that have associated their existence to a supernatural being and event. The earliest evidence that this surfaced was between 223,000 – 100,000 BC, where Hominids (such as Neanderthals) deliberately disposed the bodies of individuals that were deceased in funerary caches. The graves located throughout Eurasia are believed to represent the beginnings of ceremonial rites. There is still some debate whether this was a rite in a religious sense or just a practice in a grieving sense.
Homo naledi hands
Notwithstanding this debate, there is no debate that in later timelines religion was critical to human clan's co-operation and on the dark-side, to human warfare. Here we define religion as a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe and life, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
Some of the rock art found in Wollemi National Park, NSW, is believed to represent paths associated with Dreamtime beings, such as the eagle ancestor.
Image courtesy of Paul Taçon.
Within the mystery of human existence, there needed to be a mode of expression to educate, visualize and pay homage to a supernatural undercurrent that went beyond human existence. Once we became aware of our mortal self, we needed to overcome a lifelong debilitating straitjacket of depression and worry. That mode of expression was art, since by creating symbolism, which displayed events beyond mortal existence, it gave weight to life not being limited within a specified timeline, but rather of being an infinite manifestation in a supernatural world.
They are said to be dated 47,000 years old, which puts them in the time span of the Neanderthal man, predating Homo-sapiens. These Australian rock paintings seem to suggest early encounters with spiritual beings in Dreamtime.
Whilst monkeys can paint without purpose or need, art in its most early manifestations would take the viewer beyond conscious and sub-conscious immediate needs, into an infinite realm devoid of needs. Unlike language or the utilization of animals and plants and scientific endeavours and the latest re-inventions of these categories, art fixes a primordial need that separates human beings from all other animals since it sates this need for an eternal existence.
Modern abstract fractal art by Jack Haas.
As we have become less religious and more materialistic, art has moved with our most current modes. In flights of fantasy that was not too dissimilar as with the birth of the supernatural, art moves us into a new dimension after a new dimension, as our conscious and sub-conscious brain evolves. Unlike language, it is not self-constrained (e.g. dictionary, grammar etc.) or slow evolving or developing. Unlike the utilization of animals and plants, its fountain is limitless, as limitless as our individuality and more importantly, as our imagination. Unlike science endeavours, it not just limited to our material and/or welfare needs. Art is our greatest invention since it caters for our existential needs and is totally aesthetic in terms of our act of engagement when seeing it. It was so at the beginning of our existence, and it will be so when our existence in the universe comes to an end. Art is our greatest invention, since it is not even attached to our psychological need, but rather, art is attached to a human desire!
This will be the last post for 2019. The next post will be on the 11th of January, 2020.
Marie-Therese
Introduction
There are so many ideas that have been invented and then realized by human beings that it is hard to weigh which has had the most impact on our existence and on our on-going development. Let us begin by noting a few of them.
Techniques: Multiple discharge processes, silkscreened, stencilled and mono printed employing gels, transparent, opaque and metallic paints on rayon.
Size: 110 cm (width) x 320 cm (length).
Human beings were neither the largest animal nor the fastest, and at one stage in the beginning of human time, not the most numerous. They needed significant shelter, in the form of clothing and housing, since the average internal temperature of a human being is 37oC (98.6oF). There are very few areas on the Earth with a similar daily outside temperature.
The table below shows that females are in particular vulnerable during their gestation period and so need to be protected. In fact, of all the mammals listed below, human beings have the equal sixth longest pregnancy, with the African elephant having the longest.
As with some mammals, human gestation does not end with birth, as is suggested by the table above. The nurturing process after birth, although it is genetically and biologically continuous with the process before birth, is unfortunately not automatic. In human beings the mother can choose, and/or be influenced by others within her culture, to discontinue being a part of this process. It is likely that in our human beginnings, mothers were governed much more by hormonal, instinctive and reflexive processes in their response to their newborns than they later came to be. But as we developed our modern brain, the care of infants and young children became a conscious activity, and as consciousness became more and more determined by culture, the care of infants and children became a cultural process, greatly influenced by the socio-economic organization of a society. For example, it is not now unusual for some women to become surrogate mothers.
It is clear that human beings needed to be co-operative and live in groups in order to survive.
Structures for Survival
In order to co-operate in the hunter/gatherer phase, mobs or moieties needed to be developed. Moiety simply means halve, but it is usually restricted by anthropologist's to mean a division that is exogamous: that is, where a person must marry into the opposite moiety and not into their own. The Australian Aboriginals called such a small clan unit - the mob. While caves and animal clothes did provide shelter and protection from the weather, the development of language was key in creating co-operation and organization. Human beings were not alone in the animal kingdom in language creation or in co-operative hunting.
Photographs of Australian Aborigines, Aborigine's Friends' Association, Adelaide 1936.
Courtesy of Ivan Copely.
Language
The origin of spoken language dates as far back as the 26th dynasty in Egypt, with the first recorded language experiment conducted by a Pharaoh named Psammetichus I. A recent study by Quentin D. Atkinson (a biologist at the University of Auckland) gave two assertions which were consistent with his data: (i) oral language originated only at one place; (ii) it did so in southwestern Africa.
His conclusions were based on his study of phonemes. A phoneme is any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another. For example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad and bat. Many Oceania peoples (e.g. Australian Aborigines, Maori’s etc.) have only 13 phonemes, whilst modern English has approximately 45, suggesting that the more primitive language structures of Oceania were indicative of African population dispersal to Asia and Europe over 60,000 years ago (which is consistent with Aboriginal arrival in Australia at that point in time).
Courtesy of Wikimedi.
It is generally agreed that true writing of language (not only numbers) was invented independently in at least two places: Mesopotamia (specifically, ancient Sumer) around 3200 BC and Mesoamerica around 600 BC. Several Mesoamerican scripts are known, the oldest being from the Olmec or Zapotec of Mexico.
Written language is a very important organizing principle associated with the rise of the city-states and therefore the move away from a hunter/gatherer era into the agrarian society. Cities provided further protection to a greater population, but needed to source food and raw materials from the surrounding countryside.
While oral and written language was a great invention, it was needs based and so it suited our sociology, psychology and physiology. It was not a unique disposition, although it matured into being a unique and on-going human endeavour.
Utilization of Animals and Plants
The clearest evidence of early use of the horse as a means of transport is from chariot burials dated ca. 2000 BC. However, an increasing amount of evidence supports the hypothesis that horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes approximately 3500 BC.
Mobility is vital in all hunter/gatherer's societies since so much of human being's source of protein is from herded animals that are faster and stronger than human beings. Being highly mobile allows the hunter to keep pace and moreover, isolate individual animals for slaughter. It also enabled protection for moieties and larger units with respect to inter- and intra warfare.
In the agrarian age, animals were domesticated, penned, slaughtered and sold. Only in the past 1,000 years have human beings used horses in great numbers for tilling the soil. Horse breeds have changed too, specializing certain animals for particular jobs.
The utilization of animals to do work and to provide food was more important as the human population soared. Both needs have remained unabated albeit we have moved into the mechanical/digital age with respect to movement and processing of food. Vehicles, boats, planes, and spaceships as well as breeding experiments are a continuing expression of the need to utilize other animals and plants for our needs. Once again, it was not a unique endeavour, since flies, ticks and fleas etc not only use other animals for mobility but also for feed. However, as with language, it developed into a unique on-going human endeavor.
Scientific Endeavors
Counting is an important tool in the armory of hunter/gatherer societies. For example, the Australian Aboriginals had one of the simplest counting systems – one to fifteen in the Wotjoballuk counting system and one to thirty in more complicated systems.
In Egypt, from about 3000 BC, records survive in which 1 is represented by a vertical line and 10 is shown as ^. The Egyptians wrote from right to left, so the number 23 becomes lll^^. The Babylonians, Romans and Arabs all contributed to the growth of our numbering system, which even today keeps growing (binary system etc). Of course from arithmetic, mathematics emerged – algebra, geometry, calculus and trigonometry etc.
Chemistry had its spiritual birth in alchemy, even though the extraction of metals from ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, rendering fats into soaps, making glass and alloys like bronze - were well known in prehistoric times.
The history of physics developed out of philosophy and astrology, with modern physics being described as the study of matter and energy and the relationship between them.
These are the three enabling sciences – Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics - that underpin all other logical endeavors such as geology, biology, medicine, engineering, economics, IT and computer science – just to name a few!
All of these studies end destinations are aimed to increase the supply of material and/or human welfare needs. Even studies that appear removed from material outcomes, such as the origin of the universe can be utilized for material needs. For example, physicist Subir Sachdev borrowed tools from string theory to understand the puzzling behavior of superconductors.
Perhaps the last bastion of material-free endeavors is philosophy and in particular Western Philosophy, which posed questions about religion, science, mathematics and politics. Indeed, in ancient times the word philosophy was used to mean all intellectual endeavors and as late as the 17th Century, the natural sciences (e.g. physics, astronomy, biology) were still referred to as branches of natural philosophy. Nevertheless, starting with a set of weird axioms one can logically and effectively reach equally absurd conclusions. It was the rise and the development of the enabling sciences – mathematics, chemistry and physics – that some axioms could be actually tested. As a result, philosophy is fast becoming obsolete even in areas such as ethics, since it cannot objectively distinguish between relativism and universality.
Scientific endeavours are activities driven from material and/or welfare needs. Like language and utilization of animals and plants it has morphed into unique human endeavors.
The Mystery of Human Existence
There is no other animal, except human beings, that have associated their existence to a supernatural being and event. The earliest evidence that this surfaced was between 223,000 – 100,000 BC, where Hominids (such as Neanderthals) deliberately disposed the bodies of individuals that were deceased in funerary caches. The graves located throughout Eurasia are believed to represent the beginnings of ceremonial rites. There is still some debate whether this was a rite in a religious sense or just a practice in a grieving sense.
Notwithstanding this debate, there is no debate that in later timelines religion was critical to human clan's co-operation and on the dark-side, to human warfare. Here we define religion as a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe and life, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
Image courtesy of Paul Taçon.
Within the mystery of human existence, there needed to be a mode of expression to educate, visualize and pay homage to a supernatural undercurrent that went beyond human existence. Once we became aware of our mortal self, we needed to overcome a lifelong debilitating straitjacket of depression and worry. That mode of expression was art, since by creating symbolism, which displayed events beyond mortal existence, it gave weight to life not being limited within a specified timeline, but rather of being an infinite manifestation in a supernatural world.
Whilst monkeys can paint without purpose or need, art in its most early manifestations would take the viewer beyond conscious and sub-conscious immediate needs, into an infinite realm devoid of needs. Unlike language or the utilization of animals and plants and scientific endeavours and the latest re-inventions of these categories, art fixes a primordial need that separates human beings from all other animals since it sates this need for an eternal existence.
As we have become less religious and more materialistic, art has moved with our most current modes. In flights of fantasy that was not too dissimilar as with the birth of the supernatural, art moves us into a new dimension after a new dimension, as our conscious and sub-conscious brain evolves. Unlike language, it is not self-constrained (e.g. dictionary, grammar etc.) or slow evolving or developing. Unlike the utilization of animals and plants, its fountain is limitless, as limitless as our individuality and more importantly, as our imagination. Unlike science endeavours, it not just limited to our material and/or welfare needs. Art is our greatest invention since it caters for our existential needs and is totally aesthetic in terms of our act of engagement when seeing it. It was so at the beginning of our existence, and it will be so when our existence in the universe comes to an end. Art is our greatest invention, since it is not even attached to our psychological need, but rather, art is attached to a human desire!
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