Today's new word is atlatl

A week or so ago, when I read the term creative work in a title that included the word Africa, I was reminded of Hartmann and Blass's suggestion in chapter 2, "Physical Anthropology", that human art "dates back some 30,000 years" to a European origin (2007, p. 65). A claim which the mounting evidence suggests is false.

Pinnacle Point research site
on the coast of South Africa

John Noble Wilford, writing in "Stone Tools Point to Creative Work by Early Humans in Africa", reports that although there remains controversy about the evidence and what it supports, the consensus amongst anthropologists is that recently discovered stone tools at African sites show that distinctively modern human beings evolved both physically and mentally in Africa before moving to Europe about 50,000 years ago, where both their physical and mental endowments helped them against the more primitive Neanderthal groups already there, as well as giving birth to "the cave art and fine tools of Upper Paleolithic Europe" (2012).

So much for the main idea. What also caught my attention reading Wilford's article was the word atlatl paragraph 3, which he sensibly then defines in the immediately following noun phrase. It was that descriptive noun phrase that helped my get a much clearer image of the lifestyle of our African ancestors 71,000 or so years ago. The Australian Aborigines used very similar technology, except that they called it a woomera (in one major Aboriginal language), and I had learnt it in English as spear thrower. I was not at all surprised when I checked to find that the excellent Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary very sensibly does not have an entry for atlatl: nor was it surprising to find the massive Oxford English Dictionary [OED] does have an entry for this rather rare but wonderful sounding word. According to the OED, atlatl was first used in English by one E. B. Tylor in 1871, and comes from an Aztecan language of Mesoamerica, whose native people's also created and used such a tool ("atlatl, n", 2012).

Apart from the attraction of the word, I wanted to blog this article because it again shows how essential is argument to the advance of knowledge, why we must value controversy, and actively seek out contradictory opinions. If some evil law had made it illegal to question a European origin of uniquely human culture, it would be impossible to have learnt that that belief was apparently false, and even if the belief were accidentally true, a law or social taboo against saying and arguing for other views would necessarily have made the opinion worthless. We can only have knowledge and a worthwhile opinion on any topic when it is possible, legally and socially, to state opposing, and often shocking, ideas on that topic. Where contradictory opinions cannot be stated, every acceptable opinion, however sincere and often repeated, must be worthless.

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Reference

atlatl, n. (2012, September). OED Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved November 21, 2012 from http://oed.com/view/Entry/12540

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007).

Wilford, J. N. (2012, November 12). Stone Tools Point to Creative Work by Early Humans in Africa. The New York Times Science. Retrieved November 21, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/science/evidence-of-persistent-modern-human-behavior-in-africa.html