Late Ice Age Hunter-Gatherers
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The period of the late Ice Age hunter-gatherers rides the tag-end of the Paleolithic development of humankind. It is a period that, given the nuances of scientific interpretation and the influences of geography upon the Paleolithic peoples themselves, ended as long ago as 12,000 B. C. (Guilaine, 1991, P. 64) or as recently as 8,000 B. C. (Hawkes, 1976, p. 16), after which agricultural cultures took root in the prehistoric society, leading almost immediately (in relative terms compared with the millennia of slow development that had come before) to dramatic advances in technology, communication and the general raising of living standards for humankind. It was an interesting choice for late Paleolithic man to make - this switching from hunter-gatherer to farmer - for game was plentiful in the late Ice Age: "wandering" in the nomadic terms that we have come to associate with contemporary hunter-gatherer societies of the 19th Century was not such a far-flung endeavor; "leisure" time was relatively plentiful. Primitive agriculture, on the other hand, required a comparatively difficult, if stable, application of effort. But, the hunter-gatherers did need to follow their prey to a certain extent. Roots in one locale were impossible to establish for an extended period of time. Food supply was always at the whim of the luck of the hunt. Paleolithic man, as he developed intellectually, began to desire the rooted existence and stability that his mode of living did not embrace.
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" the inhabitants of the dwelling would be gone long before the drawing disappeared; they would change, age, possibly die before returning (if ever) to this specific locale - the drawing would not.
The implications of this are clear: in order to rouse a being to a state of activity above the animal/subsistence level, there must be the intellectual awareness of something greater than the immediate. In the human chronology of development, that awareness was of Time. Paleolithic man understood that his existence was as a member of a larger entity; his life and activities were but short parts of a longer span of Time. But how, exactly, did he conceive of his place in that entity?
We are not yet, necessarily, talking about the origins of Religion at this point. Practically speaking, for all the written evidence we have, Paleolithic humans may have been the first great atheistic Existentialists, believing the "larger universe" they were members of to be only a bigger hunting ground than they could traverse with their human legs. Indeed, early investigators of the cave drawings - bisons, horses, bulls contrive the bulk of surviving examples - did not place Paleolithic man's cognizance of his surroundings in much larger context
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Approximate Word count = 1714
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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