Читать книгу The Science of Religion - Howard Barry Schatz - Страница 7

With the end of the last Ice Age, circa 10,500 BCE, the EMH were no longer captives of cave life. They domesticated sheep and goats and wandered the perimeter of the Tigris-Euphrates and Indus River Valleys. It seems likely that their greater size and strength was the genetic result of tens of thousands of years of excursions into the perpetual winter as hunter-gatherers. When they finally left the safety of their caves, they also left behind the constraints of cave life — the original impetus for assuming a meditative posture as a way of life. Over the course of the next several thousand years, it is also logical to assume that meditation was no longer practiced by the entire community. At some point in time the benefits of a “sitting practice” would have been limited to, and preserved by, spiritual leaders, priests, shamans, and the like.

The end of cave life also accounts for the relatively quick disappearance of EMH distinguishing physical traits. My thesis suggests that man began to devolve from their evolutionary peak attained at the end of the Ice Age, and slowly lost their meditation-derived traits and skills. Today’s more frontal lobe oriented humans have smaller brains and skulls, and a less robust physical stature. After the extinction of Neanderthal Man (ca. 29,000 BCE), and without the brutality of Ice Age weather, we can also speculate about a time when highly evolved EMH would have experienced a pastoral golden age, wandering the mountain foothills as wise and spiritual shepherds. These tribes became the protagonists of history’s great religious allegories.

From this scenario, we might conclude that whatever it is that we now call civilization, did not really begin in the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley’s Fertile Crescent, as most academics would have us believe. It appears to have begun in the unbroken mountainous perimeter of Iraq (Figure 3), where these Aryan “shepherd-gods” came to inhabit the Taurus and Nur Mountains of Turkey, the southern Caucasus in the Armenian Highlands, the Elburz, Kurdistan, and Zagros Mountains of Iran, as well as Pakistan’s Central Makran Range, bordering the Indus Valley.

Melting glaciers overflowed the Black Sea and flooded the river valley between roughly 14,000 - 7,000 BCE. The Bible’s timeline for the Great Flood (ca. 2348 BCE) does not match the geological record, although there is said to have been some local flooding around that time. The Genesis allegories, especially the Biblical flood myth, shares many common elements with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis. If we were to closely compare these stories with one another, we could observe what is essentially the same flood myth being told from different cultural perspectives. Bible stories, in fact, may be one of our best modern guides to prehistoric times. From this perspective, we might consider the Biblical allegory of Noah and his family emerging from the Ark on Mount Ararat as metaphor for the EMH emerging from their mountain caves around Lake Van and Mount Ararat, circa 10,500 BCE.

When EMH came out of their caves, they would have avoided the flooding by herding sheep and goats in the foothills of the mountains. They eventually settled the land, growing wheat and barley, to begin the Neolithic Revolution circa 9000 BCE. The earliest farming settlements included: Jericho, Jarmo, Susa, Çatal Höyük, and Mehrgarh. The earliest EMH settlement appears to have been the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) site of Tell es-Sultan (Sultan’s Hill), a couple of kilometers from the current city of Jericho. It is a 40,000 square meter settlement surrounded by a stone wall, with a stone tower built into the wall. Jericho is considered the oldest continuously inhabited settlement, and its stone architecture was built by the Natufian civilization (circa 12,500 - 9500 BCE). EMH were probably accustomed to living within the protective shell of their caves, and their need to build a settlement surrounded by a stone wall at Tell es-Sultan was a practical solution to the problems of keeping out any flood waters or unwanted intruders. Over the next few thousand years, the EMH migrated across the seven mountain chains already mentioned, which framed the perimeter of the Fertile Crescent.

Figure 3 - The Mountain Ranges Framing Iraq

EMH survived the Ice Age in the shelter of Middle Eastern caves for anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 years. Meditation probably began as a natural coping mechanism for tribes and families who survived during that period. Meditation significantly strengthened the practitioner’s limbic system, and provided unprecedented access to the brain’s untapped potential. My hypothesis suggests that this “cave practice” was a widely established and cherished practice that came to define the sacred priestly tradition. I believe it to be the missing evolutionary link between caveman and the sophistication of pre-Sumerians “who were culturally far more advanced than were the Sumerians...”29 Samuel Noah Kramer, a renowned scholar on ancient Sumer, discovered a vastly superior pre-Sumerian culture that emerged from the Iranian mountains. This aligns well with my own theory about Aryan “shepherd-gods on the mountain.”