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Prehistory Quotes

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Prehistory Quotes

“Grima explained that the primary tool in establishing Malta's prehistoric chronology had been radiocarbon-dating (based on the rate of decay of C-14 stored in all formerly living matter). My views about C-14 are on the record. I think it should be only one amongst several tools and techniques brought to bear on the dating of megalithic or rock-hewn sites. It is a truism, but worth repeating nevertheless, that C-14 cannot date stone -- only such organic materials as are found around or in association with stone ruins. It is an assumption (more or less safe depending on the stratigraphy and general circumstances of the site but still, at the end of the day, an assumption) that organic materials found close to megalith B or trilithon A or dolmen C, etc., do in fact date from the same period as the quarrying and erection of the megaliths concerned.”

DatingArchaeologyPrehistoryMegaliths
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild. But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age.”

ChildhoodNostalgia19th CenturyGolden AgeInfantileFreudPrehistoryVictoriansHesiodSilver Age
Book:The Children's Book
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“In the Timaeus dialogues, these being a record of discussions between the Greek Statesman Solon and an Egyptian priest, Plato reports the following: 'You Greeks are all children... you have no belief rooted in the old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, and lesser one by countless other means... You remember only one deluge, though there have been many.”

TraditionEgyptPlatoGreeceDeep Human HistoryCataclysmDelugePrehistoryGreeks
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“Sticks and Stones I dreamt a fossil came to life and told a tale of his former wife Did she beat him? Where? She broke his fingers on the stairs And tore out lumps of his orange hair How could she? Then she gave him pride of place At an archaeological feast in his honour A prehistoric horse was the main course! © Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.”

Domestic ViolenceFossilsDomestic AbuseArchaeologyFeastPrehistoricSticks And StonesPrehistoryFossilPrehistoric Fantasy
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -- especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama's course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 -- are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography -- as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the 'Golden Chersonese' by Ptolemy -- then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us. If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

HeritageEstablishmentAcademiaTraditionsPrehistoryCartographyLost CivilizationsIce Age Civilizations
Book:Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization
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“Prehistory isn't like a 'veil' or a 'curtain' that 'lifts’ to reveal the pre-set 'stage' of history. Rather, prehistory is an absence of something: an absence of writing. So a better image of the ‘dawn of history’ might be an AM radio in the pre-dawn hours: you recognize wisps of words or music across the dial, inter blending, and noise obscures even the few clear-channel stations. The first ones we find, when we switch on the radio of history about 3200B.C.E., come from Mesopotamia, and those from Egypt soon emerge. Eventually the neighbouring lands produce records, with the effect that the ancient Near East is probably the best documented civilization before the invention of printing.” (Daniels and Bright, page 19)”

WritingRadioEgyptPrehistoryAncient Civilization
Book:The World's Writing Systems
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“In Brussels between 1909 and 1914, Louis Mascré sculpted away for Belgium’s Royal Academy of Science, creating a plaster cranium, a mother and child, the upper body of an elder. At a time when Belgium was brutalizing the Congo, the country’s Royal Academy compared Africans to apes and also depicted Neanderthals as simian rather than caveman-like.”

BelgiumBrusselsPrehistoryBelgium CongoLouis MascréRoyal Academy Of Science
Book:The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
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“There has always been the wind. Since our planet began to turn, there has been the wind. This ball of dirt and fire and water started to spin. The air stirred. And Earth's time began. But the beginnings of the wind are lost in the mists of time. The wind blew before the Appian Way wended through Rome. It blew before the Parthenon crowned Athens. Before pyramids sprang up in Egypt. Before the Mayans. Before the Incas. Before Man.”

MysteryIce AgeStone AgePrehistoryNeanderthal
Book:Death in the Time of Ice
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“Why the two [gigantic obelisks left unfinished at the Aswan quarry] were never finished is unknown. It appears that the workers simply stopped and never came back. The same possibly was the case at the Serapeum at Saqqara, where most of the 100 ton boxes were never finished. If these are pre-dynastic works as expected, then the great cataclysm of 12,000 years ago could have been the culprit - massive earthquakes and possibly solar blasts devastating all life in these and other areas. There is a massive horizontal crack in the bottom of the right channel of the great obelisk that also may have been the reason [...]. On another note, the left and right channels of the great obelisk would have been too narrow for workers to be shaping them with dolerite stone pounders. A lot of force would be required to remove any material at all, and having a foot or two of clearance would result in very little if any stone removal.”

CatastropheUnfinishedIce AgeDeep Human HistoryCataclysmPrehistory
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.”

StoriesWomenTextilesPrehistorySocial HistoryEconomic HistoryWomen S Work
Book:Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
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“The precision of many of the flat surfaces [at Puma Punku] is astonishing. In some cases, they are almost as flat as laser perfection, and the idea that a Bronze Age culture like the Tiwanaku were responsible for this work is clearly impossible. What is also curious is that much of the stone has been partially or fully excavated from the red clay mud of the area, which infers either extreme age, or that a cataclysmic event occurred here, partially burying the site [...]. Further, there are blocks which appear to have been snapped in half - not by the invading Aymara, colonial Spanish, or more recently, but at a time in the distant past. The logic behind this statement is that there are no apparent tool marks or other evidence of attempts to break the stone.”

EvidenceCatastropheMasonryDeep Human HistoryCataclysmPrehistoryDistant Past
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“As we look around the world, especially in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, the west coast of Italy, Peru, and Bolivia, there are stone structures and the remains of others which don't easily fit into the standard picture of history. The pyramids of Giza in Egypt, Puma Punku in Bolivia, and the great megalithic wall of Sachsayhuaman in Peru are but three examples of astonishingly well-made stone works which modern engineers, stone masons, and other experts puzzle over. Conventional academics in general date these structures well within the standard timeline of so-called civilization. The generally prescribed creation date of the three pyramids of Giza is about 2500 BC, Puma Punku is alleged to have been constructed around 600 AD, and Sachsayhuaman approximately 1200 to 1400 AD. However, what intrigues engineers, architects, stone masons, and other professionals is the extreme precision of the work, often in very hard stone, which many archaeologists insist was usually achieved using bronze and or copper chisels, wooden measuring devices, and stone hammers.”

HistoryEngineeringMasonryDeep Human HistoryPrehistoryMegalithic StructuresMegalithic
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“One also finds, even to this day, some amazing works such as the aforementioned Sachsayhuaman and the Coricancha in Cusco, where no mortar of any kind was used. It was stone-on-stone, with astonishing accuracy of fit. In the Inca toolkit, as found in the archaeological record, only copper and bronze chisels have been found, along with wooden measuring instruments and stone pounders or hammers. Conventional archaeologists contend that such tools were responsible for the refined workmanship seen in Cusco and other 'Inca' areas. However, the stone used - granite, andesite, and basalt - are harder than the majority of the tools used, and thus could not have been responsible for the work. The same is true of Tiwanaku and the connected site of Puma Punku. Massive megalithic blocks with sculpted surfaces are found at these locations, made of local sandstone, which would be difficult to shape with bronze chisels and stone hammers. However, the real enigmas are the even harder andesite and basalt stones, cut and shaped with such precision that modern engineers, stone masons, and other professionals question how such work could have been achieved without at least 20th century technology.”

EngineeringArchaeologyMasonryDeep Human HistoryPrehistory
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“Inside the museum [of Egyptian antiquities] itself, on the main floor and in a corner alcove is a box that was never completed [...]. Someone was attempting to cut off a large slab from the bottom in order to likely make the lid. The saws that were being used went off course, causing half of the slab to snap off, and the project was then apparently abandoned [...]. Two circular saws were at work, one from the top and another from the bottom. They were not perfectly aligned but were cutting through the granite stone very efficiently. The only saws we have in modern times that can do such work have diamond abrasives imbedded in either high carbon or cobalt steel blades, powered by very strong electric or petroleum powered engines. As the dynastic Egyptians for most of their history had at best bronze tools, and there is no evidence of them having circular saws, they could not have done this work.”

EgyptMasonryDeep Human HistoryPrehistoryMuseum
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together.”

MasonryDeep Human HistoryPrehistoryMegalithic MonumentsMegalithic Structures
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“The commonalities that we find at all of the above locations include: 1) works in stone beyond the scale and technical prowess of the historically presumed builders, such as the Inca; 2) signs of construction interruptions and/or cataclysmic damage; and 3) oral traditions speaking of much earlier civilizations with advanced technological capabilities.”

CatastropheMasonryDeep Human HistoryCataclysmPrehistory
Book:Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History
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“It was not until 2014, more than two decades after the mastodon's discovery [a mastodon scavenged by humans in the Americas], that the tide decisively turned. Built on improved understanding of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil bone, a newly enhanced technique, known as 230 Th/U radiometric dating, was now available that could settle the age of the Cerutti deposit once and for all. Deméré therefore sent several of the mastodon bones to the US Geological Survey in Colorado, where geologist Jim Paces, using the updated and refined technique, established beyond reasonable doubt that the bones were buried 130,000 years ago.”

HumanityCivilizationIce AgeDeep Human HistoryPrehistory
Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The Christian church, the Christian form of worship, was not invented by the fathers of the church. It was all taken in a ready-made form from Egypt, only not from the Egypt that we know but from one which we do not know. This Egypt was in the same place as the other but it existed much earlier. Only small bits of it survived in historical times, and these bits have been preserved in secret and so well that we do not even know where they have been preserved. It will seem strange to many people when I say that this prehistoric Egypt was Christian many thousands of years before the birth of Christ, that is to say, that its religion was composed of the same principles and ideas that constitute true Christianity. Special schools existed in this prehistoric Egypt which were called 'schools of repetition.' In these schools a public repetition was given on definite days, and in some schools perhaps even every day, of the entire course in a condensed form of the sciences that could be learned at these schools. Sometimes this repetition lasted a week or a month. Thanks to these repetitions people who had passed through this course did not lose their connection with the school and retained in their memory all they had learned. Sometimes they came from very far away simply in order to listen to the repetition and went away feeling their connection with the school. There were special days of the year when the repetitions were particularly complete, when they were carried out with particular solemnity—and these days themselves possessed a symbolical meaning. These 'schools of repetition' were taken as a model for Christian churches—the form of worship in Christian churches almost entirely represents the course of repetition of the science dealing with the universe and man. Individual prayers, hymns, responses, all had their own meaning in this repetition as well as holidays and all religious symbols, though their meaning has been forgotten long ago.”

ChristianityHistoryEgyptArchaeologyPrehistoryLost Civilizations
Book:In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching
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“Contrary to popular belief, history does not repeat itself. The story of our planet was not predetermined, there was no air of inevitability to it, and the story of life does not speak to us of a linear progression from primitive to sophisticate. Instead, its shape has been carved out by the accumulation and loss of information, genetic and cultural, creating the illusion of relentless progress.”

EcologyHistory Of MankindPrehistoryNeanderthals
Book:The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived
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“The oils we used on our torches and in our lamps have kept the darkness of night and predators at bay in our corporate and singular lives. Residual oil was even found in our ancestors’ campfires that were most likely from a meal shared in common around said fire. Oil was in one sense a residual and sign of community and social and cooperative sharing.”

LightCommunityOilSharingAnthropologyAncestorsPrehistoryCaveman
Book:The Liturgical Sacramentary of Bealtaine
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“I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts.”

ThinkingGivingFeelsHeartMayMotherOrderChallengesBreakRiskTeachingBirthMessagesLosingDaughterConvincedDestroyedChainsWho We AreGrandmotherFierceOnly LoveBittersweetMother And DaughterTeaching And LearningLove And TrustIndelibleGreat GrandmotherPrehistory
Author:Alice Walker
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“Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.”

KnowsHumansChildrenMadeIdeasMatterTodayReligionOrderNaturalPeriodsDemandSpeciesEducatedMy ChildrenAtomsFearfulSmallestFoundersInfancyNatural OrderGod Is Not GreatPrehistorySubtle AtheistInfancy Is
Book:Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume
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“These are the experiences I wish to record in this book, which should really be called The Diary of a Palaeontologist. But in committing them to paper I found it advisable to alter and add a good deal, to enable the reader without specialized training to follow me along the winding paths of palaeontology and prehistory.”

ShouldBookFoundWishDealsPathRecordsEvolutionReaderPaperTrainingAddDiariesFollow MeAdvisablePrehistory
Author:Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald
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“All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

KnowsWorldSaidUniverseBornEffortMistakeAchieveSimplicityEnormousMoleculesPrehistory
Author:Clarice Lispector
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“The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man.”

MenHumansStoriesObjectsStudentsLessonsExcitingPlantCarefulWidePursueRangeWillingnessDedicatedQuestsEcologyDetectivesScholarshipFolkloreHolisticLinguisticsPhysiologyDetective StoriesArcheologyPrehistoryPhilology
Author:Weston La Barre
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“The earliest religious texts in the West ascribe to humankind both a prehistory and a destiny among the gods. M. David Litwa presents a striking survey of the varieties the latter of these beliefs has had, both within and outside the Christian tradition. Becoming Divine reconstructs an accessible and fascinating mosaic of this too-long neglected idea, utilizing figures as disparate as Orphic cultists, Augustine, and Nietzsche.”

LongIdeasChristianBeliefReligiousDestinyFiguresDivineBecomingTraditionWestVarietyLatterFascinatingHumankindNeglectedSurveysMosaicsAugustinePrehistoryUtilizingReligious Texts
Author:Terryl L. Givens
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“Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.”

WayChildrenPersonsLongSituationFantasyChildhoodDiseaseStrikesDesperateHopelessSadismPrehistoryInfectious DiseasesHopeless Situations
Book:For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
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