Gatherers
I’ve been an armchair archeologist/anthropologist for most of my life. I’ve always had a fascination with deep history. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to tease out the Story of Us not mediated through the words of the privileged few; and deep history, pre-history, is where you find the story before it was broken. Further, when you live in the desert, reading the petroglyphs in the morning walk and treading on potsherds from a thousand years ago, of course you are going to develop an interest in the people who left behind all this wonder and beauty. Then as a geologist, I did quite a bit of data gathering for actual archeologists and anthropologists in the radiogenic isotopes lab which introduced me to current ideas. So I suppose I know as much as any armchair enthusiast and maybe as much as many professionals.
I’ve talked about my irritation with Man the Hunter, but I haven’t much discussed the other quasi-mythical being from the nearly two hundred thousand years of human existence before the narrative was hijacked by those with an agenda. I haven’t talked about this person directly, that is. I’ve written around her. She is central to my thinking. I believe in her story — her-story, not his- — largely because she makes sense; she fits within stories that don’t have that privileged agenda. She is Woman the Seeker, Woman the Gatherer. She is the half of the hunter-gatherer society that might truly have fed humanity — because she still does so today all over the world.
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