Gjantija Temples in Gozo, Malta, 3600-2500 BC, by Bone A and used as the feature image for Wikipedia “Stone Age” under license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

(6) GOLDEN STONE AGE

Paleo paradise!

Or Neolithic mommy utopia?

“Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains!”

It’s the Golden Stone Age – that recurring rosy-eyed view of the Stone Age or at least our primal past as Garden of Eden, from which it’s all been downhill for humanity afterwards.

No, seriously – I may be caricaturing it somewhat but there has indeed been recurring claims or theories of the Stone Age as ideal or idealized state of humanity, although they differ widely in detail and intellectual rigor (or elements of truth).

There’s probably enough for their own top ten but perhaps the most famous is the French philosopher Rousseau’s state of nature, itself preceded by the longstanding European concept of the noble savage.

Throw in notions of a peaceful prehistory, environmental harmony, Neolithic matriarchy, Marxist primitive communism, Marshall Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics or Original Affluent Society, anarcho-primitivism or so on and you’ve got yourself a heady if eclectic brew.

However, one thing such claims of the Golden Stone Age have in common, consistent with the Stone Age as Garden of Eden, is a fall – although where that fall, well, falls differs on the details where they place the Garden.

A commonly argued one is the horizon between the Paleolithic and Neolithic – with the advent of agriculture, and even more so the state as it moved into the Bronze Age. Personally, I like to see the fall argued in the other direction, with the fall of homo sapiens from Neanderthal paradise or a hominin Garden of Eden. Or to borrow from the words of Grant Morrison writing for the Animal Man comic – “We should never have come down from the trees. We’ve fallen so far and there’s still no bottom”.

(7) DARK STONE AGE

“The life of man…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

Bellum omnium contra omnes – “the war of all against all” or Hobbesian state of nature.

It’s the Dark Stone Age, the competing contention to the Golden Stone Age – although I am inclined to believe that the real Stone Age had elements of both.

Claims or theories of the Dark Stone Age are perhaps not quite as varied as those of the Golden Stone Age, with a focus on violence. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously proposed that the original “state of nature” of humanity was inherently violent – the war of all against all in which “the life of man” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

That proposal of violent prehistory continues – it essentially boils down to those who argue for prehistoric war and violence, potentially at even higher rates than those in recorded history (at least as supported by evidence of violent deaths), against those who argue for more peaceful prehistory. I tend towards the former, influenced by books such as Azar Gat’s War and Human Civilization.