So you, as usual, are going to make me put my data where my mouth is. :-)
At 09:22 AM 11/20/97 -0800, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
>But, Glenn. Since stone artifacts don't decay the burial places should be
>identifiable anyway.
First off, not all ancient burials are associated with stone tools. Many
are, many aren't. We don't know why and some suggest that those without
tools are not intentional burials.
Also something is wrong with your logic on burial,
>since all these people are dying (to get in the graves) and they are not to
>my knowledge being buried in the same places. At least in this country we
>preserve the burying places of Native Americans as sacred 1000 years after
>they left the scene. In Dallas we reroute freeways because the chosen
>route came near an ancient Indian burial ground. Where are all the people
>buried anyway? I know there are a few places where people are buried in
>the same places, but this is not general practice. Decay doesn't enter
>into this problem. Burial grounds are considered sacred by nearly all
>cultures (maybe this is part of what identifies culture). Even dogs have
>room for burial in ancient Palestine. I think you can bury roughly one
>person per two square meters (maximum density) which means you can bury
>500,000 people per square km. This would require only 400 square km (just
>over .1% of land area) to allow each person in Italy since Christ adequate
>burial room. And if you have ever visited a site of an inquisition, such
>as the Catholic Inquisition in Peru, you will know that not everyone got
>their 2 square meters (bones are sorted and neatly stacked by category in
>cisterns many meters deep, but all still well preserved).
You raise a good point here. Here is why I don't think that there are a lot
of skeletons to find in our closets. First, there is the matter of decay.
Acidic soils literally disovlve the bones away. Schick and Toth write:
"Our joint ancestors may have been adapted primarily to lush, tropical forest
environments in Africa, where bones do not always seem to survive well.
Tropical forests tend to be wet and humid with acidic soils that soon destroy
organic remains, including the bones of dead animals. Thus far, absolutely no
fossil record has been uncovered in Africa that would indicate the immediate
ancestors of our nearest lving relatives, the chimpanzees and the gorillas. In
fact, the oldest known examples are only a few hundred years old."~Kathy D.
Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak, (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1993), p. 38.
Carlton Coon writes:
"In tropical rain forests insects and animals make
short work of bodies, and if they are buried or covered with earth, the
lateritic soil is so acid that bones may disintigrate in less than a year. In
1965, I excavated a cave in a diamond-mining concession in Sierra Leone and
found no bones at all, although the soil was full of stone implements and
chips. A schoolteacher stationed there told me that she had once buried a dead
dog to get its skeleton for use in her zoology class, and when she dug it up a
year later even the bones had rotted away."
Cavalli-Sforza et al write:
"Because of the lack of fossils in the acid African soils-which dissolve
the main bone component, calcium phosphate-it is impossible to specify exactly
the geographic distribution of Pygmies at earlier times. There is practically
no Pygmy fossil record from dry areas where bones would have been preserved,
confirming the belief that Pygmies represent a long-term adaptation to the
tropical forest."~L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paoli Menozzi and Alberto Piazzi,
The History and Geography of Human Genes, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), p. 180
You don't have to be in the tropics to have acidic soil. Not a single
carved statue made by Cro-mognon man has been found on acidic soils. It
would seem that the artists of the Upper Paleolithic had a Ph kit with them
and knew where to live!!! :-) Many parts of central Europe, where the art is
much much rarer have acidic soils. (see Robert G. Bednarik,"Who're We Gonna
Call?
The Bias Busters!" in Michel Lorblanchet and Paul G. Bahn, Rock Art Studies:
The Post-Stylistic Era or Where do we go from here? (Oxbow Monograph 35,
1993), pp.207-211, p. 208-209) for a discussion of this)
Secondly, lots of cultures today do not bury their dead. Aborigines burn and
smash the bones
"How she died we do not know, but careful analysis of the
surface and fractures of the bones tells us that the corpse was
first cremated, then the burnt skeleton was thoroughly smashed,
and finally the ash and smashed bones were gathered together and
deposited in a small depression beneath or adjacent to the cooled
funeral pyre. This method of disposal of the dead was still in
use among Australian Aborigines in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in some parts of eastern Australia and Tasmania."Josephine Flood, "The
Archeology of the Dreamtime, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989), p. 45
Parsee's expose the corpses to the vultures in their Towers of Silence.
Carlton Coon notes:
"Returning to the disposal of the body, hunters regard this as a means
of isolating the dead person's spirit, but it may be isolated for either of two
reason, to get rid of it entirely or to limit its activities so that it may be
used. The concept stated above greately widens the range of disposal
techniques. The easiest way is simply to abandon the body at the place of
death, and to avoid returning to that spot until the disturbance is over,
ususally after several years, when the dead person's spirit has had time to go
away. The Mbuti Pygmies used to abandon it before they were taught by the
Negro villagers to bury their dead. The Veddas of Ceylon, who lived in rock
shelters during the rainy season, did the same. They had so many shelters
available that they could afford to leave some of them unoccupied until the
remains had disappeared. In tropical rain forests insects and animals make
short work of bodies, and if they are buried or covered with earth, the
lateritic soil is so acid that bones may disintigrate in less than a year. In
1965, I excavated a cave in a diamond-mining concession in Sierra Leone and
found no bones at all, although the soil was full of stone implements and
chips. A schoolteacher stationed there told me that she had once buried a dead
dog to get its skeleton for use in her zoology class, and when she dug it up a
year later even the bones had rotted away.
"In other climates people who camp in the same places at least once a
year could hardly follow this practice, nor could those who live in permanent
or semipermanent villages. Where there are plenty of caves and rock crannies,
or hollow trees, these apertures are natural depositories, and frquently used.
Where firewood is abundant, cremation is a quick and dramatic solution,
particularly if the ground is frozen in winter and burial at that time is out
of the question. Another easy method is to secure the body high up in a tree.
"But however hunting and gathering peoples dispose of bodies they
usually do so individually in separate places, for graveyards are an artifact
of sedentary life. The Maidu of California had special burning grounds, and
the Nootka deposited some of their dead on mortuary islets, towing the bodies
out to them in unmanned canoes. The Eskimo of Nunivak Island buried their dead
in shallow graves, about a quarter of a mile away from their villages. In
these burial places skulls and long bones could be seen lying about where they
had been disinterred to make room for new bodies. These Eskimo have no fear of
corpses or old bones, once the proper rituals have been performed, and, in
fact, they formerly made use of parts of bodies as amulets to help them in
hunting."~Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples, (Boston: Little, Brown and
Co., 1971), p. 331-332
So there is decay, and there are non-burial forms of corpse disposal among
modern people. The argument made by the young-earther is not a good one
until he can quantify how many of the ancient primitive cultures buried
their dead. Modern primitives often don't.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm