Books – Page 141 – artdiamondblog.com

Experts Ridiculed Amateur Who Died Before His Vindication

(p. 236) The Altamira cave, near Santander, near the Biscay coast, is 961 feet (263 meters) long, a cavern of chambers and passages, ending in a narrow defile known as the Horse’s Tail. A local landowner, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, noticed some black marks at the back of the cave in 1876, but thought nothing of them until his eight-year-old daughter Maria, bored with his excavations, wandered with a candle into a side chamber. “Toros! Toros!” she cried, in one classic, and seemingly authentic, tale of archaeological discovery. Father and daughter gazed in amazement at the colorful bison on the ceiling of the low chamber.

Sautuola noticed close similarities between the art and pictures of animals he had seen on antler and bone fragments from French rock shelters at an exhibition in Paris. He claimed that the Altamira bison were the work of Stone Age artists but was ridiculed by scholars for his pains. The unfortunate landowner was vindicated after his death by paintings and engravings discovered at La Mouthe and Les Combarelles caves in 1895 and 1901.

Source:
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Cultures that Excel at the Practical Often Also Excel at the Sublime

According to the reasoning of the following passages, the same Cro-Magnons who created the wonderful cave paintings at Lascaux, were also the ones who created the highly effective laurel leaf projectile points.
It is often believed that the practical is in conflict with the sublime. The Solutreans may be one more example, in addition to that of entrepreneurial capitalism, that cultures that excel at the practical also excel at the sublime.
[The passages I quote are somewhat disjointed, so let me sketch how they fit together. The first sentence asserts that the Lascaux cave paintings are the prehistoric equal of the Sistine Chapel. The second passage describes the Salutreans’ highly practical laurel leaf projectile points. The final sentence asserts that the same Salutrean culture that invented the practical points, also painted the sublime cave at Lascaux.]

(p. 219) Lascaux had been sealed since the late Ice Age, so what the Abbe Henri Breuil soon called “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory” was intact.
. . .
(p. 221) . . . The seasonal killing at Solutre resumed, but now the prey was reindeer rather than horses. This time, too, the hunters used not only bone-pointed spears hut also weapons bearing what French archaeologists rather elegantly call feuilles de laurier, “laurel leaves” . . . . These beautifully made stone projectile points do indeed look like idealized laurel leaves and stand out as exotic in otherwise unchanging tool kits of bone artifacts, burins, and scrapers. Those skilled enough to fabricate them had mastered a new (p. 222) stoneworking technology, which involved using an antler billet to squeeze off shallow flakes by applying sharp pressure along the edges of a blade. This technique–pressure flaking–produced thin, beautifully shaped yet functional spear points that were both lethal and lovely to look upon. Sometimes, the stoneworkers made what one might call rudimentary versions of the points using pressure flaking on but one side of the tool. On occasion, too, they made spearheads with a shoulder that served as the mount for the shaft. But the ultimate was the classic laurel leaf, flaked on both sides, beautifully regular and thin. Feuilles de laurier were never common, and indeed, some researchers wonder if they were, in fact, ceremonial tools and never used in the field. This seems unlikely, for they would have made tough, effective weapons for killing prey like reindeer.
. . .
If the Lascaux chronology is to be believed–and remember that the radiocarbon dates come from artifacts in the cave, not actual paintings–then Solutreans were the artists who painted there, . . .

Source:
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)

Neanderthal “Innovation Was Rare”

(p. 42) Judging from slowly changing styles of stone axes, innovation was rare and technological change almost imperceptible. The rhythm of daily life varied little from one generation to the next, just as the lives of animals followed predictable and familiar paths of migration and dispersal, life and death. Humans were collaborative predators among predators, both hunters and the hunted, effective at survival thanks to their expertise with wooden spears, their stalking ability, and their painfully acquired knowledge of animals and plants. And, over two hundred millennia, they gradually evolved into the Neanderthals, the primordial Europeans encountered by the Cro-Magnons.

Source:
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Harry Frankfurt’s Critique of Postmodernist “Bullshit”

“Harry G. Frankfurt.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 29) Q: Your new book, “On Truth,” is a sequel to “On Bull–,” a slim philosophical tract published by Princeton University Press that became an accidental best seller last year.
What do you mean by accidental? People didn’t know they were buying it?
. . .

In your new book, you are especially critical of academics and their theories of postmodernism, which treat all truth as an artificial construction as opposed to an independent reality.
I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. I originally wrote the bull– essay at Yale, and a physics professor told me that it was appropriate that this essay should have been written at Yale, because, after all, he said, Yale is the bull– capital of the world.
But there is probably far more bull– in politics and entertainment than in academia.
I hope so!
What about in philosophy, which you still teach?
I think there is a certain amount of bull– in philosophy — people pretending to have important ideas when they don’t and obscuring the fact by using a lot of impenetrable language.

For the full interview, see:
DEBORAH SOLOMON. “Questions for Harry G. Frankfurt; Fighting Bull .” The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., October 22, 2006): 29.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original print version, to indicate questions by Deborah Solomon.)

The reference to the first book is:
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

The reference to the sequel is:
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Truth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Source of book image on left: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_T_py15A4TNY/SI9o5-lJ-3I/AAAAAAAAABc/ui9BmdO4Dns/s400/On+Bullshit.jpg

Source of book image on right: http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestsellers-2006/509-1.jpg

Compared to the Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnons Had “an Ongoing Culture of Innovation”

In an earlier entry Fagan discusses the eyed needle as key technological advantage of the Cro-Magnons over the Neanderthals. In the passage quoted below, he discusses some other key differences between the two human species.

(p. 14) We know from their art that they looked at their world with more than practical eyes, through a lens of the intangible that changed constantly over the generations. It was this symbolism, these beliefs, as much as their technological innovations and layered clothing, that gave them the decisive advantage over their neighbors in the seesawlike climatic world of the late Ice Age. There were more of them living in larger groups than there were Neanderthals, too, so there were more intense social interactions, much greater food gathering activity from an early age, and an ongoing culture of innovation that came (p. 15) from a growing sophistication of language, advances in technology, and a greater life expectancy. In a world where all knowledge passed orally from one generation to the next, this enhanced cultural buffer between the moderns and the harsh climate provided an extra, albeit sometimes fragile, layer of protection during the intense cold of the so-called Last Glacial Maximum, from 21,500 to 18,000 years ago.

Source:
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Charles II Took a Gamble on Toleration

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A19) Early in “A Gambling Man,” a detailed and thoroughly engrossing examination of the Restoration’s first decade, Jenny Uglow notes that Charles Stuart, upon his ascension, “wanted passionately to be seen as the healer of his people’s woes and the glory of his nation.” Cromwell’s regime had featured constant war and constant taxes. The population was bitterly divided among Anglicans, Catholics and dissenting Protestants–Presbyterians, Puritans, Quakers, Baptists. A huge standing army had burdened the people financially and frightened them; such an army, it was not unreasonably thought, could be used to impose a tyranny.
. . .
As a result of such divisions, Charles became a “gambler,” as Ms. Uglow puts it–not at cards or gaming tables but at affairs of state. His biggest gamble was on something he fervently wanted to achieve: religious toleration for all sects and the freedom for Englishmen to follow their own “tender consciences” in individual worship. He forwarded this policy in Parliament only to receive his first major defeat with the passage of the Corporation Act, a law that took the power of corporations (governing towns and businesses) away from Nonconformists and handed it back to the Church of England. Charles had gambled on “the force of reasonable argument,” Ms. Uglow says, but was ultimately defeated “by the entrenched interests of the [Anglican] Church” and “the deep-held suspicions” of Parliament, which believed that England’s dissenting sects posed a persistent threat. That Charles was willing to go head-to-head with Parliament for such a cause, even in failure, was especially audacious, considering his father’s fate.
. . .
In his desire to be a monarch of the people, Charles was determined to make himself accessible–in the early days of his reign he threw open the palace of Whitehall to all comers. He gambled, with some success, that (in Ms. Uglow’s words) “easy access would make people of all views feel they might reach him, preventing conspiracies.” During the 1666 Great Fire of London he and his brother, James, duke of York, went out into the streets and put themselves alongside soldiers and workmen. They could be seen “filthy, smoke-blackened and tired,” frantically creating a firebreak as the blaze consumed London like a monstrous beast.

For the full review, see:
NED CRABB. “BOOKSHELF; Risky Business; A bitterly divided nation, a monarchy splendiferously restored..” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., NOVEMBER 27, 2009): A19.
(Note: ellipses added; bracketed word in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated NOVEMBER 26, 2009.)

Book being reviewed:
Uglow, Jenny. A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Brit Papers Survived Due to “the Gratifying Defeat of the Luddite Unions by Rupert Murdoch”

“Evans says: “Ultimately, Mrs Thatcher was the reason I was fired, because I attacked her so much.” Source of caption and photo: online version of The Independent on Sunday article quoted and cited below.

(p. 12) As a condition of acquiring both The Times and The Sunday Times in early 1981, Murdoch promised that the independence of each would be protected by a board of directors, and made other solemn guarantees.

“On this basis,” Evans wrote in Good Times, Bad Times, “I accepted Rupert Murdoch’s invitation to edit The Times on February 17 1981. My ambition,” he admitted, “got the better of my judgement.” Every assurance regarding editorial independence, he added, was blithely disregarded.
On 9 March 1982, the day after he’d come back from burying his father at Bluebell Wood cemetery in Prestatyn, Harold Evans was sacked.
“Ultimately,” he says, “Mrs Thatcher was the reason I was fired. Because I was attacking her so much. When she started to dismantle the British economy, the most cogent critic of that policy which led, OK, to… a lot of things… was The Sunday Times. I wrote 70 per cent of that criticism myself. When I became editor of The Times, I continued to criticise monetarism. But I could still see some of the good things about her.”
“Just remind us?”
“I’m thinking – and you probably won’t agree with this because I sense that you’re a firm supporter of the NUJ [National Union of Journalists] – mainly of her dealings with the unions.”
“How do you feel about her now?”
“I think she is a very brave woman.”
“Hitler was brave.”
“Yes, but… she was right about terrorism. She was right about the IRA.”
“Do you think Britain would be a better place if she’d never existed?”
“No. I think Britain benefited from her having been there. Britain was becoming so arthritic with labour restrictions.”
“Good Times, Bad Times is an unforgiving portrait of Rupert Murdoch.”
. . .
(p. 13) [Evans] has called Rupert Murdoch elitist, anti-democratic, and asserted that the Australian cares nothing about the opinion of others, so long as his business expands. This is the same man who refers to “the gratifying defeat of the Luddite unions by Rupert Murdoch”.
. . .
“So how do you feel about the Murdoch empire now?”
Evans pauses. “I’m not that familiar with the British… OK. Let’s take an alternative scenario. Murdoch never arrives. I manage to take control of The Sunday Times with the management buyout. Then I get defeated by the unions. The Independent wouldn’t be here. Rival papers survived because they got the technology. Thanks to Murdoch.”

For the full interview, see:
Robert Chalmers, Interviewer. “Harold Evans: ‘All I tried to do was shed a little light’.” The Independent on Sunday (Sun., June 13, 2010): 8 & 10-13.
(Note: free-standing ellipsis, between paragraphs, added; internal ellipses in original; italics in original; bracketed name added in place of “he.”)

The Crucial Invention that Cro-Magnon’s Had and Neanderthals Lacked: the Eyed Needle

(p. 13) Both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons coped effortlessly with abrupt climatic changes from near-temperate to extremely frigid conditions. How well, however, the Neanderthals were able to deal with deep snow cover and long months of subzero temperatures is a matter of ongoing debate. They lacked what was, perhaps, one of the most revolutionary inventions in history, and an inconspicuous one at that: the eyed needle, fashioned from a sliver of antler, bone, or ivory. If their expertise with antler is any guide, the Cro-Magnons must have been adept woodworkers in the more temperate environments of southwestern Asia. When they moved north, they settled oil a continent where antler and hone were potential replacements for wood, and where mammoth and other large animal hones had to be used as fuel in more treeless environments. With brilliant opportunism, they used small stone chisels to remove fine splinters from antler and bone, which they then ground and polished into slender needles. Carefully fashioned stone awls served as drills to make the holes for the thongs that served as thread, substitutes for the vegetable fibers used with wooden needles in their ancestral homes.

Every Cro-Magnon, man, woman, and child, must have been aware that protection from clothing came in layers, that warmth escaped from the head and extremities. As we will see, an indirect source of information on the garments they wore is the traditional clothing used by Eskimo and lntuit in very cold environments–the argument being that there are only a limited number of ways in which layered, cold-weather clothing can be fashioned from hides and skins. The needle allowed women to tailor garments from the fur and skin of different animals, such as wolves, reindeer, and arctic foxes, taking full advantage of each hide or pelt’s unique qualities to reduce the dangers of frostbite and hypothermia in environments of rapidly changing extremes.

Source:
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

By at Least 50,000 Years Ago Homo Sapiens “Developed the Full Battery of Cognitive Skills that We Ourselves Possess”

Before the passage quoted below, Fagan briefly discusses the two probable waves of humans spreading out from Africa, the first of which is believed to have occurred about 100,000 years ago.

(p. 10) A second, even less well-documented push seems to have taken place later, around fifty thousand years ago. This time, moderns settled throughout Near East Asia and stayed there, apparently living alongside a sparse Neanderthal population. This widely accepted theory assumes that by this rime the newcomers had all the intellectual capabilities of Homo sapiens. Just when and how they acquired them remains a major unsolved problem. All we can say is that at some point between one hundred thousand and fifty thousand years (p. 11) ago, at a seminal yet still little known moment in history Homo sapiens developed the full battery of cognitive skills that we ourselves possess.

Source:
Fagan, Brian. Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

Jeff Bezos’ Goal: “Earth’s Biggest Selection”

Jeff Bezos. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 18) You’re a longtime science buff who studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton. Why did you want to be a bookseller in the first place?
You have to go back in time to 1994, and there’s something very unusual about the book category. There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other product category. One of the things it was obvious you could do with an online store is have a much more complete selection.

Initially, Amazon sold books exclusively, but it has since expanded into a retail omnivore that sells basketballs and vacuum cleaners and hamster food and everything under the sun. What is your goal, exactly?
We want to have earth’s biggest selection. Earth’s biggest river, earth’s biggest selection.

For the full interview, see:
DEBORAH SOLOMON. “QUESTIONS FOR Jeffrey P. Bezos; Book Learning.” The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., December 6, 2009): 18.

(Note: bold in original, to indicate questions by Deborah Solomon.)
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated December 2, 2009.)

Environmentalist Blue Planet Prize Winner Lovelock Endorsed Nuclear Power

“The scientist James E. Lovelock during an interview at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D2) Few scientists have elicited such equivalent heaps of praise and criticism as James E. Lovelock, the British chemist, inventor and planetary diagnostician who has long foreseen a clash between humans and their planet.

His work underpins much of modern environmentalism. The electron capture detector he invented in the 1950’s produced initial measurements of dispersed traces of pesticides and ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, providing a foundation for the work of Rachel Carson and for studies revealing risks to the atmosphere’s protective ozone layer.
His conception in 1972 of the planet’s chemistry, climate and veneer of life as a self-sustaining entity, soon given the name Gaia, was embraced by the Earth Day generation and was ridiculed, but eventually accepted (with big qualifications), by many biologists.
Dr. Lovelock, honored in 1997 with the Blue Planet Prize, which is widely considered the environmental equivalent of a Nobel award, has now come under attack from some environmentalists for his support of nuclear power as a way to avoid runaway “global heating” — his preferred alternative to “global warming.”
In his latest book, “The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity” (Perseus, 2006), Dr. Lovelock says that any risks posed by nuclear power are small when compared with the “fever” of heat-trapping carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

For the full interview, see:
ANDREW C. REVKIN. “A Conversation With James E. Lovelock; Updating Prescriptions for Avoiding Worldwide Catastrophe.” The New York Times, Science Times Section (Tues., September 12, 2006): D2.