Dear friends of knowledge and wisdom: - About 40.000 years ago homo sapiens knew about the ovulation of women and 20.000 years ago they had a calendar for the whole period of pregnancy.
(Paleolithic Preventive Medicine: the Prenatal Recording Schedule of Mal´ta. In: J Altern Complement Integr Med, 8: 306, 2022, DOI:10.24966/ACIM-7562/100306.)
(Paleolithic Family Planning – From Mal´ta in Siberia to Iberia. In: J Altern Complement Integr Med, 9: 318, 2023, DOI:10.24966/ACIM-7562/100318.)
In addition two caves in France have been newly investigated where they could find Neanderthal art dating 60.000 years back.
What impact does this mean to you, your research and your view of the world of today?
"They were not more intelligent or more skillful, they had different skill sets. Neither Aristotle nor Sun Tzu would have been able to drive my car or operate the computer I’m using to type this now. They wouldn’t be able to do the simplest modern office job.
Our ancestors were impressive, but they were neither better nor worse than us. They just lived in their own times, and developed the skills they needed to survive in those times..."
https://www.quora.com/Were-people-in-pre-history-generally-more-intelligent-despite-lesser-knowledge-or-at-least-more-skillful-than-the-average-modern-person-Why-or-why-not
As an archaeologist and ethnographer, I of course agree that traditional folks and human and hominid ancestors are/were probably much more savvy than most anthropologists are willing to give them credit for in their understanding of many aspects of natural science. Menstruation and it's signals about reproductive cycling are not obscure to many living ethnographic groups. My caveat is that interpretation of parietal "art" from visual resemblance is not a secure method, although it is unfortunately often the only technique employed by many researchers interested in Paleolithic imagery. The inferences in the Heise 2022 article are based on 2 artifacts and a range of assumptions about markings and the alleged meaning of the number of those marks. Ethnographic mathematical systems employ all kinds of conventions that may bear little resemblance to our interpretations of what particular numeric values might mean. Additionally, most recent and modern hunter-gatherer counting systems are base 4 systems (anchored to the number of fingers/toes on each limb). Large numbers are hardly precise among most foragers, and often simply imply "lots of" x things. The Heise 2023 article incorporates a diversity of highly controversial alleged inferences about several so-called "Venus" figures and their implications to bolster the interpretation of the Mal' Ta artifacts. These "data" do not accrue greater explanatory power by increasing the number of ambiguous assertions about each one to support the inferences about the Mal' Ta plaques and further use them to prop up those debatable arguments about ancient human female figures. Demonstrating the possibility that potentially decorative marks might imply sophisticated understanding of reproductive cycling is not an independent measure of the likelihood of these interpretations. This is an unresolved and very complicated archaeological issue. What methods does social psychology or these medical interpretations bring that does more than simply assert a possible explanation for the markings on these artifacts?
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