This object isn’t particularly different than Wednesday's ax (it’s a little smaller, probably bound to the end of a stick and used in the hunt instead of your main tool for life, as was the case with those other objects). But it was found in the US, and thus tells the story of the spread of humans out of Africa and to all parts of everywhere. The theory is that the tool, and all it makes possible--clothing, shelter, a variety of sources of nutrition beyond what you can get with your claws and teeth alone--was our ticket out of wherever we evolved. During the Ice Age, huge amounts of what’s now ocean water were frozen, so land connected Russia to Alaska, and people (probably chasing yummy animals) spread to every corner of the giant supercontinent: Clovis is a location in New Mexico, where this little spear was first described, but similar items have been found from Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego. MacGregor’s special guest in this program is a scholar who works for the Smithsonian, at NYC’s National Museum of the American Indian (nice museum down by the Battery, I’ve been there), who points out that native American creation myths never remember this crossing-from-Asia business, and many native Americans feel funny about it--as if they only legitimate way for humans to inhabit a place is for the gods to put them there. “So what?” I wanna say. Before the whites got here, many of these native tribes were pretty good stewards of the land, and that’s what counts. I once read a theory--I think it was in Joseph Campbell--about Polynesians getting to Easter Island, and thence to Peru, and spreading that way. But that theory seems to be completely discredited in this day and age.
In this podcast I was a bit more interested by what special guest Michael Palin had to say, about wanderlust being a primal human characteristic. It goes back to the battle between religions which are about the here-and-now, and religions which are about the ‘better place;’ you only move because you fantasize that there may be a better place. Even if there’s nothing really objectionable about where you are, maybe it’s just dull, you move in the hopes of something better (ie more interesting). Now there’s the most fascinating question I know: boredom, as a mental state, isn't exactly an emotion, more a dull grey void/absence of emotion; but its opposite, curiosity, is, I believe, as powerful an emotion, in terms of motivating human behavior, as fear or anger. And much more productive, for our race. How do we inspire that curiosity, and keep it going?
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