Is history getting distorted?

by Daya Dissanayake

“Most things do not happen as they should, and some things do not happen at all: it is the business of the conscientious historian to correct these defects”. This quote is attributed to Mark Twain. We are reminded of this when we read Mark Twains autobiography, which he insisted should be published 100 years after his death, and we begin to wonder if he too had corrected such defects in his life story.

Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists have been ‘correcting our history’ the way they believed that things should have happened. They had the freedom to do it, in what they called the pre-historic period. Pre-history has been defined as the period of time before written records. Thus the recorded history is from the time that written records are available.

Mark Twain

The time has come for us to rethink about this term pre-history, because the archaeological evidence that is discovered every day is giving us more accurate records of the earliest life of mankind. Such records are more accurate than most of the written records available, because the archaeological records are not intentionally made, have not been changed, modified, distorted, and in Mark Twain's words ‘not corrected'.

Yet such evidence could be interpreted in different ways. J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer and Jake Page, published ‘the Invisible Sex, uncovering the true role of Women in Prehistory (Smithsonian, 2007), where they say, “Most paleoanthropologists make the assumption that men, particularly, are the known representatives of hominid evolution.” In this book we find mention of the famous footprints discovered by Mary Leaky in Tanzania. One set of prints were larger than the other and the immediate conclusion was that it was a man and a woman.

Based on these footprints from 3.6 million years ago, the American Museum of Natural History in New York created a diorama showing “the couple walking through the desolate landscape volcanic ash, the volcano still smoking on the horizon...the female head is turned: she looks slightly alarmed....the male is looking forward, resolute, his arm resting (positively or affectionately or both) across her shoulders”.

Romantic scene

A most romantic scene. The height of imagination, but unfortunately a male dominated imagination. Adrienne Zihlman of the university of California at Santa Cruze has questioned the large-male small-female hypothesis, and suggested that the footprints could have been of a parent and offspring.

The footprints could have been those of a mother leaving the volcano threatened zone with her daughter. The man may have already escaped, leaving the females behind, or did not have the foresight to see the threat from the volcano.

This is just one example of an attempt to create history the way man wants it to have happened. We start with an assumption, and then build further assumptions on top of the first one.

“'Judging from the social habits of man as he now exists’ is anything but a reliable method for understanding prehistory (though admittedly, Darwin had little else to go on).

The search for clues to the distant past among the overwhelming detail of the immediate present tends to generate narratives closer to self-justifying myth than to science.” wrote Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, in ‘Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality'.

Stone Age

They used the term Flintstonization, “because the Flintstones are the so-called modern Stone Age family.

It is a nuclear, suburban existence, but in prehistory.”

When we look at some of the observations and theories put forward by even 21st century anthropologists, it is easy to understand why the Flintstones are so popular. Over the past three centuries we have been trying to study and understand how the early humans and their ancestors would have lived, what they ate, where they lived, who they slept with.

We have been trying to imagine life of early humans by studying the so-called ‘primitive tribes’ in remote ‘undeveloped’ parts of the world.

We try to study the evolution of the human from pre-hominids by studying the present-day apes and gorillas and other creatures.

We ignore the fact that these animals too had evolved over the past several million years, and would not be the same as those who lived then. It is the same with the present tribals, because they too would have evolved over several thousand years.

The present day animals and tribes also have been heavily influenced by the invading ‘civilised’ people, and their environment.

Their food sources, their environment, health conditions, exposure to infections and development of immunity, have all been drastically changed as their habitats encroached by the invaders from ‘more civilised’ societies.

Since most of the early anthropologists saw the tribals and the animals through their European-Abrahamic religious mindset, they tried to understand and explain the religious beliefs and practices as ‘primitive’ and ‘pagan'. Because almost all the scientists grew up and lived in a culture where flesh of other animals were the most essential item in the human diet, and man developed his brains, his ‘intelligence’ and his creative talents, all because of the high protein content received from meat products, which led to their conclusion that man was a hunter-gatherer.

Hunter-gatherer is one of the biggest myths promoted by western scholars.