Comments by CB:
We have a problem with our respective time budgets, and I always try never to post without first following the principle, no investigation, no right to speak.
But to go to core quesions..
I have a different concept of ideology to that summed up in your description. See the discussion in the encyclopedia of the Marxists Internt Archive
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/frame.htm
Your key point at the end:-
The question Sitchin tackles is this: what accounts for the evolutionary leap in man to modern man? Sitchin answers in a manner that is less absurd than the creationist.
Yes in that there is a whole genre of speculative writing about the fascinating area of prehistory, looking for one point of origin of civilisation, eg the ideas that the Ancient Egyptians must have got to South America, or the Atlantis stories, updated. The most plausible of these seems to me those that argue that with the rise of sea levels at the end of the last ice age very roughly 10,000 years ago, large coastal areas would have been flooded in key parts of the world, like the Indus valley, and these could have contained towns or even cities. Also that the oral tradition of the Vedas could just possibly go back 10,000 years and not just 3,000 years. The area around Malta could also have been an important aggregation point before the neolithic period, which permitted a semi-civilisation to emerge during the winter months.
It is true that even assuming a second out of Africa wave of homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon Man) 100,000 years ago, give or take 50 thousand years, we still need to explain the qualitative explosion, the cultural revolution, of around 30,000 years ago, with presumably the same genetic material as before. This is discussed in "The Prehistory of Mind" by Steven Mithen. The explanation is of a linking of mental and social potentialities to create a new culture in which religions and cults provided a socially transmissable way of carrying forward much more information than before in semi-symbolic form, even before writing.
The problem is indeed to explain a historical leap. Leaps are normal in dialectics, abnormal and strange in metaphysics. But the idea of puncuated evolution has gathered ground thanks to the late Stephen J Gould.
I agree that reading ancient texts can be emotionally very satisfying, to have contact with emotionally rich intelligent humans such as ourselves, who saw things differently but also similarly, if you enter the metaphor. But we do not need to project onto an external Deus ex machina, where that creative brilliance came from. Our species has always been a cooperative species. When the means of production change quantitatively to a certain point especially to permit even greater cooperation, a qualitative change is likely to occur.
This was broadly true 30,000 years ago, as it is in the 21st century. Provided it is interpreted probabilistically and we do not privilege one historical line of development only, historical materialism should be alive and well, as a robust and flexible approach to understanding human development.
And materialism needs dialectics. We do not need visitors from outer space to explain human history. We should look to its evolving internal contradictions.
I would suggest.
Chris Burford
London
