The Genesis Site - The Stone Age

Genesis 11

The terrible disaster of Babel made its population flee to all directions. Some folks, like the Sumerians, stayed close to the original tower. Others wandered for years or sometimes centuries before they finally settled down. In fact it was for all a time of poorness. All they ever had was lost. Like the Maya said:

And there they broke apart. There were those who went eastward and many who came here, but they were all alike in dressing with hides. There were no clothes of the better kinds. They were in patches, they were adorned with mere animal hides. They were poor. They had nothing of their own.

Civilizations had to be build up from the very beginning. Actually most fled people of Babel were trapped in a Stone Age.

Many myths date back from this Stone Age. Often is dealt with the discovery of unknown food. All kind of plants had to be "discovered" like edible. For instance the Trio-tribes of Suriname and Brasil tell how their ancestors learned how to make bread from the yucca roots. At first they did not like this bread at all and spat it out. But after a while they got used to it.

Myths regularly deal with the "invention" of fire. Can you imagin how to live on the run without fire? Mankind had to hunt to catch food. But they couldn't warm it up. So we often meet myths in which people eat raw meat. Like in China, where people often got sick of eating raw meat. People lived in caves and in the woods, says the I Tjing. They ate their meat hide and hair.
On the island of Yap in Micronesia the people warmed their meat in the sun before they learned how to make fire. But this way of preparing food made them often sick.
The Kayapo-Gorotire-tribes of Brasil tell how they stole their first fire from another tribe and learned how to roast their meat.

But where did fire come from? As myths often say: it came from the gods. This isn't really strange. For the people believed their gods lived in the sky. And when thunder rolled and lightning struck and trees or woods were set on fire the people believed they received it from the gods. That is what myths tell. The fire had to be kept save and burning. Once a tribe had a burning fire they had to protect it against tribes who longed for fire too. And against bad weather. The Mayan Popol Vuh tells how the tribe got their fire from their god Tohil. The people realized however they were depending on Tohil:

... and there was no fire. Only those with Tohil had it: this was the tribe whose god was first to generate fire. How it was generated is not clear. Their fire was already burning when they first saw it:

"Alas! Fire has not yet become ours. We'll die from the could," they said. And then Tohil spoke:

"Do not grieve. You will have your own even when the fire you're talking about has been lost," Tohil told them.

After that a great downpour began, which cut short the fire of the tribes. And hail fell thickly on all the tribes, and their fires were put out by the hail. Their fires didn't start up again.

Again Tohil made fire and other tribes came to the Maya to ask for it: "Perhaps we wouldn't make ourselves ashamed in front of you if we asked to remove a little something from your fire?".

Sometimes it was by accident men discovered fire could be used not only for cooking. The Luyia tribe of Kenya has a myth in which children are looking to the "pots" of their mother. These women used pots made of wild growing calabashes. The children tried to imitate their mothers by making pots of clay with the shape of calabashes. Somehow a clay pot fell into the fire and they discovered that if the pot got hard the water would not leak out as it did when the pot was wet. This invention was taken over by the parents and bigger pots could be made.
 
Many civilizations had one striking activity in common. They all wanted to understand, to map and to predict the movements of the stars and the planets. Not only the famous civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, Babylonia, China or Yucatan were busy skywatching - the pyramids of Giza and those of Teotihuacan even seem to be built in a position related to star positions or star movements. But the unknown and lost civilizations were occupied by the stars too. Like the builders of Stonehenge and other stone circles. Even the huge drawings of Nazca, on the south coast of Peru, seem somehow to indicate astronomical significance. Like the famous hummingbird. In myths this bird is turbulent and beautiful. And it is associated with the sun.

Surely all tribes were concerned. Things had changed dramaticly in the solarsystem. The sun wasn't the same sun anymore. The planet Venus threatened Earth. New stars and new gods were born. And these gods had to be fathomed. And worshipped.

(More about weather conditions, continuing disasters, the mentality of the society and living in caves can be found on "The Days of Job", part 2 of "The Trilogy".)

---