Savage Stone Age

Even if it cannot be seen on this blog (yet), I do have more nerdy favourites than Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. My second largest is the British sketch show Horrible Histories. It is mainly aimed towards children, but it has a huge adult fan base as well, which is not really surprising. It is based on books by Terry Deary and to a Swedish audience it is probably best described as similar in its setup to the Swedish children's show Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter. Both consist of educational sketches and songs and both also use humour to teach children about certain themes. Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter teaches them to read and count and therefore has a somewhat younger audience than Horrible Histories, whichs main theme is history. And not just history taught in school which mainly involves years, wars and rulers. The show uses fun, weird and sometimes quite gruesome facts about time period, people or weird thing that happened.

The humour of the show is what I like the most. It is not like in so many other shows aimed both towards children and adults today, it usually trusts its audience to be smart enough to get the jokes and messages that it want to get across. For short: it treats even children like they have a brain and they can think for themselves. The jokes are seldom straight forward and often want to evoke a reflection process in the audience, which it also seem to manage. It encourages children to do their own research and also be quite source critical. I can go on and on in my praises of the show, but I also have some minor criticism about it. Mainly when it comes to how the Stone Age and the Neanderthals are portrayed. These themes are often quite stereotypically depicted and the extremely problematic term "cavemen" is used often during the shows Stone Age sketches. It also portrays people who barely can speak, especially when it comes to Neanderthals. The subject of Neanderthals speech abilities has been discussed among scholars a lot in recent years and we have not heard the last about it. However, there are great sketches about the Stone Age as well in the show. Sketches that really problematize the concept and the general picture of the Stone Age human. The best I think is the one illustrated by the pictures below.

Normally I prefer later time periods like the Iron Age and Middle Ages, but after participating in a huge archaeological excavation in Motala in Sweden a couple of years ago, I see myself as tiptoeing around in the Stone Age as well.
First of all, the Stone Age is, like every other historical time period, is a construction of later times mainly made by academics to sort through the mess that historical facts can be. Just the Stone Age is part of the so called Three-age System that the Danish antiquarian  Christian Jürgensen Thomsen put together for the archaeological collection at the National Museum of Copenhagen in the 1820's. Therefore it fits best for the Scandinavian prehistory and might be less convenient for other geographical areas. It is not all the time good and handy and can be very unwieldy. However, I still is the most practical way to handle it.

The Stone Age can be divided into three smaller chunks: The Paleolithic, (the older Stone Age), The Mesolithic, (the Middle Stone Age) and the Neolithic (the New Stone Age). These divisions is based mainly on livelihood, but also somewhat on climate changes. I think the Paleolithic in some cases can be stretched as far back as we can get, even long before our own speices, Homo Sapiens, did evolve. The Mesolithic is mainly used for Northern Europe which was covered by the ice during the Ice Age. During both of these periodes, humans were nomadic hunter gatherers. During the Neolithic on the other hand, people started settling down with agriculture and pets. Even though, dogs seems to have been domesticated already during the Mesolithic.

But enough about the period itself! What I want to talk about in this entry is the depiction of the time period in popular culture. What does the Stone Age generally mean to someone who is not an archaeologist and why is it depicted as it is?

Stone Age is probably the one period that brings out the contemporary evolutionistic biases of the Western world the most. The period was mainly created through Western colonial contact with other types of societies and analogies were used to make parallels between the distant past and the distant present.

Archaeology as a science has its roots in the antiquarian tradition of the 17th and 18th century, but was not really founded as a dicipline until the second half of the 19th century. Charles Darwin's theories of (biological) evolution played a huge part in the development of the dicipline and cultural evolution was seen as an extention of it. The process was unilinear and everything was seen as striving to evolve. This lead (Western) scholars to place different cultures into hiearchies based on the level of evolution. Of course the Western one was the ultimate goal as to which every other society would become. Hunter-gatherer groups of (especially America, and Australia) were placed at the bottom of the hiearchies. They were seen as the last remains of Paleolthic hunter gatherer groups and had not the means to evolve by themselves. Neither the Stone Age nor the contemporary hunter-gatherer groups were viewed as societies and cultures that were supposed to be studied in their own rights and contexts, but as a mean to exaggerate how evolved the Western world had become and also to legitimize Western imperialism since contemporary hunter-gatherer groups were not able to evolve without the influence of the Western society.

Unfortunately this colonially biased view of the Stone Age has remained in Western popular culture and can be seen in many of the Savage Stone Age sketches of Horrible Histories, but I really enjoyed the one shown by the pictures above. This because it problematized our view of the Stone Age and also showed that white men still carry prejudice towards other culture. The joke works because, on the contrary to much humour of today, it is not bullying on the people already lying on the ground. It is the white man, considering higher up in the hiearchy that is suffering for his prejudices instead. That is humour at its best!