Making Progress

I remember reading that when archaeologists were investigating the sites where the bluestone monoliths at Stonehenge were quarried, and where they were first erected - over 200km away in Pembrokeshire, West Wales - a small pile of scorched hazlenut shells was discovered - evidence of a mason's snack from over 4,000 years ago, and an endearing human connection

I'm now reading The Dawn of Everything, by Graeber & Wengrow, a radical view of pre-history that challenges the neat stories that we have absorbed about our early social development. In particular they assail the idea that humans first existed as small egalitarian 'bands' of hunter-gatherers, which then 'progressed' into settled agriculture, at which point complex social and political organisation and hierarchies were 'necessary', and further 'evolution' ultimately led to the modern state

They cite many examples from the world over of evidence that pre-agricultural societies were often large-scale, complex, and highly variable from one to another. Vast monuments such as Stonehenge (and many much larger structures elsewhere) attest to the organisation of vast numbers of people over long periods. The henge-builders of Salisbury plain caught the authors' attention particularly because they were people who had adopted the cereal-growing practices learned from continental Europe, but then gave it up, and built a society based on livestock-herding and "the collection of hazlenuts as their staple source of plant food"

My half-sister's younger son has settled in the Irish Republic. When we visited him and his family in 2018 he gave each of us one of these walking staffs that he had made. Hazelnuts, and hazel coppices feature as firmly in Irish history, myth and legend as they do in Britain. Today it has been my salvation. For no obvious reason, I suffered a severe back-spasm early this morning (while doing washing up, which I have sworn to never touch again!) and have been immobile all day, taking a selection of painkillers. At one point, I had a hospital bag packed, ready for a trip to A&E, though I hope I'm now on track to recovery. A stout staff has got me to and from the bathroom, which has been the limit of my journeys. Were I a Neolithic hunter-gatherer, I would not have collected many hazelnuts