By Right of the First

By right of the first. When political regimes justify their claims to some territory by length of tenure, one can always object that somebody other than them was there first. And somebody other than those first ones. And than them, too. If one is so inclined, one may go all the way back to the fish that once decided to crawl out of the water.

Or, for example, one may recall how some 780,000 years ago, on the shore of the ancient Lake Hula, at the site of Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in the upper Jordan valley, there lived hominins, presumably people of the species Homo erectus. As you will appreciate, these full-fledged and genuinely ancient masters of the land have no bearing on present-day states and peoples.

I came across a new study that examines where these hominins got their stone. It turned out that it was not simply whatever lay to hand. By geochemical fingerprints of the basalt, the tools could be tied to particular flows of solidified lava. Different sources of stone were chosen for different stages of the work. So we are dealing with communities that not only had a differentiated production of tools, but also a peculiar geological map of the local rocks and, into the bargain, a technological scheme, handed down from generation to generation, for matching different rocks to different purposes of the tools.

The subject is the Acheulean culture, an era of the Early Palaeolithic whose emblems are the hand axe and the cleaver, large chopping tools. They are made by passing from a big basalt slab to a compact blank, the core; large flakes are struck off it, and the flakes are then brought to the required tool. And so, eight hundred thousand years ago, a local craftsman set off for the right kind of stone to a particular outcrop, paying no heed to those nearer by, and seeking out precisely those that were required. Is he not the grandfather of the planned economy?