The Platform of Human Nature

"There is no evidence of transformative technical change on the scale of domestic animals, no permanent or fortified residences, no sophisticated watercraft...yet our reconstruction of that period suggests fully human lives, with associated intellectual and artistic capacity and much else we associate with modern people. Why is it that for 30,000 years we see no agriculture, urban life, written language, pottery,...any other of the dynamic panoply of innovations that shaped the lives of most of our Holocene ancestors?" (405, Part II, The Nature of Paleolithic Art)

One aspect of this course that is becomming more and more interesting to me is how inter-related this class is with my other two classes: cultural anthropology and comparative politics. (And I'm not just saying that because Professor Smith said it may be a good idea to bring in concepts from other classes). How we define culture and what entails a 'civilization' varies broadly accross different nations of the world. Guthrie's statement of 'what we associate with modern people' is noted through the lens of how westerns would view modern people. It may be interesting to investigate how Americans' opinions of the paleolithic art are shaped by their inherited culture, while a !Kung Bushman in the Kalahari would gaze upon the cave drawings and see something very different.
We students at Lawrence University, for the most part, have never had to rely solely on our own skill and the land for survival. We are analyzing paleolithic art from the perspective of our worldview, but the insights we may obtain may drastically differ if our worldview was more closely linked to what the art depicts. For example, if we were living in the Kalahari, and did not have modern weapons, we would be killing our food in a very similar fashion to the artists we are studying. If we then were asked to analyze the cave drawings, we would probably just say that the stags are stags, the bison are bison, and the dead man is a man who was not quick enough to get out of the way. We would not be searching for symbolism or hidden meanings, and we would find nothing unusual or overly facinating about the drawings: they are merely images- admitably very old images- of our everyday life, a life that clearly has not altered very much.
Everyone, even Guthrie, has a bias, and it is interesting to examine how the derived information may alter- even if slightly- if that bias changes.