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Hugh Brody – The Other Side of Eden - The false theory of migration 03
Identifier
021737
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Now let us look at another good reason for not moving. Vegetation.
At the time that hunter gatherers were living on the planet, most of Europe, for example, was thickly forested, there may have been areas of meadowlands, and marsh cleared by the herbivores. In the interior there were also large areas of arid treeless desert with little ground cover. There were also a large number of predators – wolves, bears, wolverines and even the larger cats. The forests were dangerous places. Even a cursory glance at the position of ancient dwelling sites in the UK shows they were all on the top of hills, because trees filled the valleys.
There were no paths or roads and no maps and the only clear ground was above the tree line. The reason shamanic flight was so important was that travel in the forest, unless for an extremely good reason such as the presence of game or other food, was pointless. The shaman was able to pinpoint the game, direct the path of the hunters and gatherers and tell them of predators. Travel for travel's sake was simply silly.
In effect you did not travel without good reason because travel was extremely risky.
As such, there is every reason to believe that the beliefs of the shamans and indigenous peoples is correct. That humans were implemented as an increment worldwide. Each region obtained its own variant – Europeans of one type Africans of another, North and South Americans another – each adapted to the climate and environment they would encounter, but all effectively homo sapiens.
We need to bear in mind that people now live in every part of the world – the Arctic, the Tropics, on islands in the middle of the Pacific, inland in cold dry tundra regions, in deserts, in jungle, on grasslands, in mountains. In searing heat, in freezing cold. We were designed to be able to do this. One package of homo sapiens software, but multiple form versions to cope with the climate. It was from set homo sapien 'version' bases that man then spread.
And they did not spread and multiply as hunter gatherers, they spread when they became farmers.
In historic record, it is the farmers who have been nomadic, not hunter gatherers. Farming only became an established way of living in about 6,000BC in Greece, for example, or 8,000 BC in Mesapotamia. Farmers are the true nomads, going in search of land to farm, and we can trace the movement of farmers in the 10,000 or so years in which farming has spread via language. Many existing hunter gatherer communities in the Amazon, Australia, Indonesia, Siberia, Scandinavia and North America, have not in all this time, moved at all.
Furthermore it is evident in the languages they use, which not only tend to be unique to each continent, but unique to each tribal group. If a single people had populated the world, one would have expected there to be a common root within all languages much as there is within the languages which arise when farmers migrated. There is none, no common root at all between any of the languages spoken by any of the remaining hunter gatherer communities.
Simply put, the logic of mass migration to populate the world via one presumably freak mutation [although there would have to have been a few more than just one to have bred successfully], simply is not logical.
It has presumably been concocted by those unwilling to admit that there could be a plan or a design or a Creator or any spiritual alternative. Which makes it a religious belief not a belief based on observation.
Quite frankly it is unscientific.
A description of the experience
The Neanderthal's Necklace – Juan Luis Arsuaga
… Europe was almost completely covered by temperate deciduous forest or Mediterranean evergreen forest....It was almost completely covered with trees until humans utilised fire and axe to clear enormous areas for cultivation and pasture and to harvest wood products. This attack on the forest to make the land available for farming began in the Neolithic and has continued increasing in pace ever since, especially during he twentieth century . Before the process began, the various human species had hardly modified the vegetation or the landscape where they lived. They lived in small and dispersed groups, hunting for meat and gathering vegetable foods.............
Strabon, a Greek writer and a contemporary of Jesus, is usually credited with the description of the Iberian peninsula as so completely covered with forest that a squirrel could cross it in its entirety by jumping from tree to tree.
Hugh Brody – Maps and Dreams
Various theories of human history … refer to pressures in Asia which drove marginal groups onto and then beyond the land bridge that became the Bering Strait [as such] pre-historians are now convinced that the American Indians came from …. central or north eastern Asia .. Until recently, the 'experts' gave the date as up to 10,000 years ago, but new evidence in the form of bone implements suggests hunting peoples have been in north-west Canada for as many as 40,000 years. At least one archaeologist now puts this at 100,000 years
Many Canadian Indians resent the white man's self styled expertise in these matters – some British Columbian groups insist that the Indians have been in particular locations since human beings first emerged on the Earth. This insistence is backed by ancient stories and deeply held tradition …. The Shushwap of Central BC say that they began as human beings in the Fraser Valley, where they have lived ever since......
The Neanderthal's Necklace – Juan Luis Arsuaga
We are so accustomed to the fact that humans live in every part of the globe that it seems no more than trivial. We are a ubiquitous species, able to survive in the most varied climates and landscapes of every continent. But the zoological group we belong to, the primates or the apes, evolved in very specific environments and has never included an environmentally flexible species other than ours............
Hugh Brody – The Other Side of Eden
Ten thousand years ago, the world's hunter gatherers would have displayed an immense range of languages and cultural forms. Hints of this diversity come from the hunter gatherer populations we know. The indigenous peoples of the Americas speak hundreds of different languages. In the forests and tundra of the North American Subarctic and Arctic … hunter gatherer societies speak a large number of mutually unintelligible dialects that are separable into four language families, families as distinct from one another as the Romance languages of western Europe are from the Bantu language of Southern Africa. In California alone, linguists estimate that aboriginal populations spoke some 80 different languages