Archaelogists are slowly being forced to confront the fact that between, during and before easily documented stone age and metal age cultures, there were 'invisible' wooden tool cultures of great significance .
One major origin of wood based cultures is southern Indonesia and Australia. ( Old Melanesia)
Lake George sediments in South Australia revealed at a drill depth of 72 metres meaning 120,000yrs ago a sudden increase in the amount of grass burning most likely caused by natives scaring game.
Just like north american indians created the US prairies by burning back the forests to encourage vast areas of grass to raise buffalo numbers. Silly white men thought they were a natural occurrence.
Supporting that ancient date is a human bone found in Central Australia 1987 150,000 yrs old by some new form of dating.
Animals and People.
Australia has the oldest most primitive animals in the world- all are marsupials. Unchanged for 65million years. All are obvious prototypes for the mammals of other landmasses.
Of some interest is that the modern day cute marsupials all had giant versions of themselves running around up till 15,000yrs ago. They vanished. 8 foot kangaroos , 6 foot koala bears etc
Now a surprise.
Australian aboriginal people seem to be prototypes for the four different races of the world !
Aboriginal skin colour varies from very dark to light brown facial features range from negroid to caucasian and sometimes mongoloid
Some dark skinned aboriginals have light green eyes and blondish hair.
Can I explain? There are only two colour types of eyes brown or blue. Green grey blue are all classified as blue.
Australian aboriginal mitochondrial DNA evidence says they have been around for 400,000 yrs !
This a serious scientific viewpoint referenced in the book.
And this was never considered possible by Eurocentric scientists because there are no apelike ancestors to evolve from, in this very large southern continent.
So the out-of-africa theory comes from the need of the Darwinian Evolutionary idea to have a nearby apelike ancestor for us. But then Darwin is a load of hogwash. We know that.
That Australian aborigines arrived by boats from Indonesia out of Africa is unlikely as they just don't make ocean going boats. It seems they started here, 400,000yrs ago. Reversing the Eurocentric view.
They have thrived through numerous ice ages.
Their culture seems radically different just from looking at their language structure.
European language demands all of our thoughts be expressed in past tense, present tense or future tense. So we have ingrained in us the idea of a clock in the background and time ticking away relentlessly from past to future.
None of the hundreds of aboriginal languages have a word for time nor any concept of time.
The only flow concept they have is from the subjective to the objective.
Meaning an aboriginal man imagines, 'sees' a flint inside a stone that requires work to chip away the excess stone revealing what he 'saw' all along.
The dog that jerks and growls while dreaming signals to the watching aborigine that this animal has dreamed of catching prey. This dog will be chosen as the hunting companion tomorrow.
In some tribes on awakening the first thing done is to wander alone into the bush create a song based on the nights dreams.The animals and birds, the native believes, hear the dream being sung and recognize that the singer is in touch with the inner world and assist him in daily hunting.
So UK psychic Chris Robinson with his future dreams is doing something like that but this society doesn't want to know, whereas it's the very essence of aboriginal belief that all things start in dreams, subjectively, to become objective, external to oneself. It's obvious to them.
The aboriginal creation myth acknowledges the intrinsic creative power of light. All living things are born in the womb of the great rainbow serpent.
Whether it be sunlight, gravity, rocks or trees every distinguishable energy, form, or substance has its own objective and subjective expression or as the aborigines put it 'Each has it's own dreaming'
But the western world denies an internal or subjective consciousness to all things except humans. The rest of nature has no dreaming we believe. And it's our language structure that cuts out much of the metaphysical part of our lives. Plus our ingrained 'scientific' tendency to ignore our dreams and internal thoughts and only believe in the 'objective'. Science has cut our world in half. No wonder our society is so lame.
Sleep is but one entrance into the Dreaming. The aborigine's education begins in developing awareness during sleep and during hypnotic state. Becoming increasingly lucid in sleep. - to the point of being able to act consciously in the dream world and to bring symbolic messages received while asleep into the awakened world -is the beginning of the intiation process for every tribal person. The aboriginal tradition maintains that the extraordinary reality of the Dreamtime can only be experienced through extraordinary states of consciousness.
Sounds like old fashioned gnosis practices to me. Every day of their life seems to be a gnostic retreat.
Paleopathologists who study skeletons of ancient hunter gatherers say they tend to be stronger and more robust and show fewer signs of degenerative diseases than those of later agriculturalists.
The very real necessities of agriculture- the tedious repetition and endless chores of crop cultivation; the necessity of labouring on and defending denuded exhausted plots of land from weather damage, insects and wildife; the bondage to one particular locality and one measured domicile- were responsible for the separation of human activity into the duality of work and play. In all hunting and gathering societies there was no real difference between the two. Thus physiologist Jared Diamond argues "Agriculture is the worst mistake in the history of the human race"
It was not a naive choice of the aborigines to abide by their Dreamtime Law and reject agriculture; archaeological evidence indicates that the Aborigines had all the proadaptions for initiating agriculture and domesticating animals. There is evidence they made contact with cultivators from New Guinea 8000 yrs ago but never adopted their methods. And at that time they were also exposed to the use of bows and arrows and earthenware vessels, they did not deviate from the purity of their technology and the Dreaming.
The Aborigines gathered the seeds from the wild grasses and trees and had a complex system for processing grains including winnowin and seed grinding that dates back 40,000 years. There appears to be no explanation for why these cereal gatherers did not become cereal cultivators other than deliberate choice. The choice was dictated by the plan of life laid down by the Ancestors.
This culture also refused to adopt clothing, even though they had an abundance of skins and used refined weaving techniques.They refused architecture even though they made complex structures for ritual purposes.They refused writing, even though though they were accomplished artists and sign makers, with an exquisite capacity for abstraction and symbolic representation. The Aborigines chose to transmit information from generation to generation through shared experience in stories, art, songs and ceremonies again in conformity with the ancient law.
Any custom, ritual, social behaviour, or form of technology, that was not mentioned in the Dreamtime was not included in the Aboriginal way of life.Written language, clothing, and domestic architecture are, like agricultural practices, nowhere to be found in the vast oral literature of the Dreamtime.
This indicates a total integration of their metaphysical and physical life.
The fully sensual lifestyle of the Aborigines, their deeply spirtual communication with the earth, and their unshakeable belief in their Ancestral Laws created an Aboriginal psychology that was disinterested in acquiring and possessing material things. Their lack of desire for anything outside their own simple tools continually baffled early explorers
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In botanising today on the other side of the river we accidentally discovered the greatest part of the gifts and clothes which we had given to the Aborigines left all in a heap together, doubtless as lumber not worth carriage."
Westerners assume that agriculture, writing, clothing and architecture ,comprise the very definition of civilisation and the unquestioned pinnacle of human progress. Yet all the evidence of environmental distruction, constant warfare, starvation and moral and social decline, is asking us to overturn our ingrained assumptions and view our so called technical advances as representative of a cycle of degeneration. Here is a summary of what a brief exposure to our civilisation has brought to archaic indigneous peoples all over the world ------
1 Wholesale enslavement, genocide displacement dispossession of peoples and near cultural
genocide
2 The destruction of abundant natural food sources that provided a balanced healthy diet and their replacement and their replacement by agriculture which drains fertility of the earth while insufficiently feeding large numbers of malnourished dependent populations.
3 The replacement of a society in which each individual was respected and cared for by a competitive unsupportive social system in which only the strong survive
4 The written word and forms of language that propagate deep misconceptions as to the nature of reality, allowing for falsification, illusion and empty abstractions, has replaced a rich oral tradition that promotes an expansion of memory and high levels of subtlety of expression and perception.
5 The displacement of a rich intensely spiritual metaphysical world view, which integrated the metaphysical and the physical and which imbued all stages and forms of life with the mystery and dignity of the original creation, by a code of hypocritical morals, arbritary symbols, and childish miracles, manipulated and twisted to hold the masses in a consensual delusion. Oh you mean mis and dis info !