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THAT
CAVEMAN
KNEW ABOUT QUARKS
In the stone age when they still didn't know how to read and write
they already knew about a lot of things.
When we think of mankind during the era of wooden clubs and stone
knives, we imagine them as being some kind of post-monkeys.
In reality, however, these people had a very sophisticated culture.
To survive in the savage state is extremely difficult; in order
to be able to do it you have to know about a lot of things: to know
about hundreds of plants, how to obtain food, what dangers you might
face, the behaviour of animals, the rhythm of the seasons. Very
early on, primitive man began to try and organize his knowledge
in a rational way.
The moon that appears in the sky, now round, now cut in half, is
an extremely remarkable phenomenon. The regularity of the lunar
cycle, always about 28 days, provided primitive man with a simple
instrument with which to recognize and codify the passage of time.
A
French researcher, Marchac, discovered that the little decorative
dots on an ancient bone, arranged in the form of a serpent, displayed
a certain regularity. They formed a sequence of four groups of dots
of different sizes, and each group was composed of seven equal dots.
The entire sequence of 28 dots was repeated three times. From these
observations, Marchac deduced that the bone, engraved more than
30,000 years ago, was nothing less than a rudimentary lunar calendar
with which primitive hunters were able to count the days and calculate
how much longer the season would last.
This invention demonstrates that man already recognized the existence
of time; phenomenon that permeates all of human reality. This attempt
to describe time by way of a diagram is a certain indication of
the first effort to understand reality in an objective way.
You can well imagine just how useful it was, in those days, to know
when winter would come, but this invention also has another great
value.
That bone engraved with 3 series of 28 dots is a first successful
attempt to represent with signs (the dots) external reality. It
is a first attempt to develop a map, a summary in images, a diagram
that can be used in daily life to obtain information. Thus man knows
not only the phases of the moon but also the possibility of representing,
and thus of recording and communicating "in writing" the information
that he has in his possession.
Moreover, the use of the two dots, the use of symbols that express
aspects of reality, introduces the use of abstract reasoning. That
bone engraved with primitive tools is an ingenious creation, it
derives from the most precise observations and analysis, and it
is astonishing to think that Stonehenge people already divided time
into weeks and would have been able to understand a statement like
"I'll see you next week".
Index
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