World's oldest ritual discovered: Worshipped the python 70,000 years ago

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Public release date: 30-Nov-2006

Contact: Sheila Coulson
sheila.coulson@ ...
479-582-8080
The Research Council of Norway

World's oldest ritual discovered
Worshipped the python 70,000 years ago

A startling archaeological discovery this summer
changes our understanding of human history. While, up
until now, scholars have largely held that man's first
rituals were carried out over 40, 000 years ago in
Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both
the time and place.

Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the
University of Oslo, can now show that modern humans,
Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in
Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words,
discovered mankind's oldest known ritual.

The archaeologist made the surprising discovery while
she was studying the origin of the Sanpeople. A group
of the San live in the sparsely inhabited area of
north-western Botswana known as Ngamiland.

Coulson made the discovery while searching for
artifacts from the Middle Stone Age in the only hills
present for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.
This group of small peaks within the Kalahari Desert
is known as the Tsodilo Hills and is famous for having
the largest concentration of rock paintings in the
world.

The Tsodilo Hills are still a sacred place for the
San, who call them the "Mountains of the Gods" and the
"Rock that Whispers".

The python is one of the San's most important animals.
According to their creation myth, mankind descended
from the python and the ancient, arid streambeds
around the hills are said to have been created by the
python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search
for water.

Sheila Coulson's find shows that people from the area
had a specific ritual location associated with the
python. The ritual was held in a little cave on the
northern side of the Tsodilo Hills. The cave itself is
so secluded and access to it is so difficult that it
was not even discovered by archaeologists until the
1990s.

When Coulson entered the cave this summer with her
three master's students, it struck them that the
mysterious rock resembled the head of a huge python.
On the six meter long by two meter tall rock, they
found three-to-four hundred indentations that could
only have been man-made.

"You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It
looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over
the indentations gave them the appearance of snake
skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling
that the snake was actually moving".

They found no evidence that work had recently been
done on the rock. In fact, much of the rock's surface
was extensively eroded.

When they saw the many indentations in the rock, the
archaeologists wondered about more than when the work
had been done. They also began thinking about what the
cave had been used for and how long people had been
going there. With these questions in mind, they
decided to dig a test pit directly in front of the
python stone.

At the bottom of the pit, they found many stones that
had been used to make the indentations. Together with
these tools, some of which were more than 70,000 years
old, they found a piece of the wall that had fallen
off during the work.

In the course of their excavation, they found more
than 13,000 artifacts. All of the objects were
spearheads and articles that could be connected with
ritual use, as well as tools used in carving the
stone. They found nothing else.

As if that were not enough, the stones that the
spearheads were made from are not from the Tsodilo
region but must have been brought from hundreds of
kilometers away.

The spearheads are better crafted and more colourful
than other spearheads from the same time and area.
Surprisingly enough, it was only the red spearheads
that had been burned.

"Stone age people took these colourful spearheads,
brought them to the cave, and finished carving them
there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a
ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of
normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the
site. Our find means that humans were more organised
and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much
earlier point in history than we have previously
assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo
has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as
a very special place in the pre-historic landscape."
says Sheila Coulson.

Sheila Coulson also noticed a secret chamber behind
the python stone. Some areas of the entrance to this
small chamber were worn smooth, indicating that many
people had passed through it over the years.

"The shaman, who is still a very important person in
San culture, could have kept himself hidden in that
secret chamber. He would have had a good view of the
inside of the cave while remaining hidden himself.
When he spoke from his hiding place, it could have
seemed as if the voice came from the snake itself. The
shaman would have been able to control everything. It
was perfect." The shaman could also have "disappeared"
from the chamber by crawling out onto the hillside
through a small shaft.

While large cave and wall paintings are numerous
throughout the Tsodilo Hills, there are only two small
paintings in this cave: an elephant and a giraffe.
These images were rendered, surprisingly, exactly
where water runs down the wall.

Sheila Coulson thinks that an explanation for this
might come from San mythology.

In one San story, the python falls into a body of
water and cannot get out by itself. The python is
pulled from the water by a giraffe. The elephant, with
its long trunk, is often used as a metaphor for the
python.

"In the cave, we find only the San people's three most
important animals: the python, the elephant, and the
giraffe. That is unusual. This would appear to be a
very special place. They did not burn the spearheads
by chance. They brought them from hundreds of
kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many
pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to
represent a ritual." concludes Sheila Coulson.

It was a major archaeological find five years ago that
made it possible for Sheila Coulson to date the finds
in this little cave in Botswana. Up until the turn of
the century, archaeologists believed that human
civilisation developed in Europe after our ancestors
migrated from Africa. This theory was crushed by
Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood when he
published his find of traces from a Middle Stone Age
dwelling in the Blombos Cave in Southern Cape, South
Africa.

Forward Ever (by any means necessary)!
Karen C. Aboiralor

This is real stuff. This is the stuff that helps me establish a lot of things. It also helps put the Kemetic thing in perspective. And what I mean by that is that EVERYBODY wants to say that Kmt started everything we do. Everything we do and what Kmt DID came from another common source. Kmt did not start it as many of us now well know. Any similarities between Kmt and West Afrika are because of a COMMON SOURCE which is not Kmt or Yorubaland, or Asanteland, kwk.

E se pupo for this article my brother.

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