Quotes About Paleolithic

That is normal human behavior. We tend to go with strong hunches. System 1 follows a primitive psycho-logic: if it feels true, it is. In the Paleolithic world in which our brains evolved, that's not a bad way of making decisions. Gathering

Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in small-scale communities—an extended family sharing a shelter. Their sense of solidarity was engendered first and foremost by birth and blood, not by symbols and rituals.

The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.

In modern industrialized countries, networks grew to a complexity that has proved bewildering to the Paleolithic mind we inherited. Our instincts still desire the tiny, united band-networks that prevailed during the hundreds of millennia preceding the dawn of history. Our instincts remain unprepared for civilization.

If you look at Paleolithic cave paintings, you see how people were depicted inside nature, not outside it. It was a kind of dream time. That's what I'm exploring.

Couples in the Paleolithic world would never have fantasized about running off by themselves to their own little retreats in the forest. No Stone Age lovers would have imagined in their wildest dreams that they could or should be "everything" to each other. That way lay death.

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

In other terms: that God and the father never existed (or if they did, it was so long ago, perhaps during the Paleolithic). All they did was kill a dead man, from time immemorial.

In western Europe they are distinctly poorer than the grandiose creations of the Upper Paleolithic. By contrast, in Southwest Asia, and especially in Palestine, the Mesolithic constitutes an axial period: it is the time of the domestication of the first animals and the beginnings of agriculture.

This behavior, of course, is adaptive. In Paleolithic times, it was important that you carefully managed your social standing with other members of your tribe because your survival depended on it. In the twenty-first century, however, new technologies have hijacked this deep drive to create profitable behavioral addictions.

This cave within a cave, this paleolithic pussy, this decent into the deepest dark of fuck.

The stone technology of the Tasmanians, when first encountered by European explorers in A.D. 1642, was simpler than that prevalent in parts of Upper Paleolithic Europe tens of thousands of years earlier.

he started to talk about the Paleolithic, about cave art, about the way in which the term art is itself an anachronism since those who created these images could not have been doing so with any understanding of the concept of art as we know it.

Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.

He finally understood...the thing that the people during the Paleolitic Age, freaking 20,000 to 8,000 B.C., were after when they came up with mythologies to do with flight—a desire for the magic of the sky, for something bigger than their feet treading the earth.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales, from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster...