Prehistory Quotes

“Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered.
But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“The pre-frontal region of the Peking man resembles that found in some parts of the Middle West.”
― Will Cuppy

“The oils we used on our torches and in our lamps have kept the darkness of night and predators at bay in our corporate and singular lives. Residual oil was even found in our ancestors’ campfires that were most likely from a meal shared in common around said fire. Oil was in one sense a residual and sign of community and social and cooperative sharing.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, The Liturgical Sacramentary of Bealtaine

“The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these.”
― Mary Renault, The King Must Die

“the migration patterns were the migration patterns solely of people of colour until 7000 years ago or later, when the first Caucasians appeared on earth, and the pigmentation of “white” skin only appeared 1000 years later.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, The Bifrost and The Ark: Examining the Cult and Religion of New Atheism

“Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.”
― Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

“My parents had lived in California, long ago, when they were twenty and twenty-two, also newly married. This distant knowledge romanced me like a whiff of honey, the sweet and mythic prehistory of my existence.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“Sticks and Stones

I dreamt a fossil came to life
and told a tale of his former wife
Did she beat him? Where?
She broke his fingers on the stairs
And tore out lumps of his orange hair
How could she?
Then she gave him pride of place
At an archaeological feast in his honour
A prehistoric horse was the main course!

© Stewart Stafford, 2020. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The idea of a supernatural being creating and governing this earth is a phantom born in the mind of the savage. If it had not been born in the early stages of man's mental development, it surely would not come into existence now. History proves that as the mind of man expands, it does not discover new gods, but that it discards them. It is not strange, therefore, that there has not been advanced a new major religious belief in the last 1300 years. All modern religious conceptions, no matter how disguised, find their origin in the fear-stricken ignorance of the primitive savage.”
― David Marshall Brooks, The Necessity Of Atheism

“When the first faint glow of dawn crept into the cave Moon-Watcher saw that his father had died in the night. He did not know the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Supposedly several years ago Egyptologist Mark Lehner spent five hours in the Aswan quarry with a dolerite hammer stone pounding against the granite bedrock (copper is too soft to cut granite). He was trying to prove that the ancient tools could do the job. He managed to excavate a one-foot square hole one-inch deep for his efforts. And yet, the video that is played in a hall at the Aswan quarry site still portrays that the hewing of the stone for the unfinished and all other obelisks was done this way [...]. The experiments of Dr. Lehner reveal, there is no way that simple stone pounders could possibly have been the main tool to quarry and shape the granite obelisks.”
― Brien Foerster, Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History

“Why the two [gigantic obelisks left unfinished at the Aswan quarry] were never finished is unknown. It appears that the workers simply stopped and never came back. The same possibly was the case at the Serapeum at Saqqara, where most of the 100 ton boxes were never finished. If these are pre-dynastic works as expected, then the great cataclysm of 12,000 years ago could have been the culprit - massive earthquakes and possibly solar blasts devastating all life in these and other areas. There is a massive horizontal crack in the bottom of the right channel of the great obelisk that also may have been the reason [...]. On another note, the left and right channels of the great obelisk would have been too narrow for workers to be shaping them with dolerite stone pounders. A lot of force would be required to remove any material at all, and having a foot or two of clearance would result in very little if any stone removal.”
― Brien Foerster, Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History

“The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together.”
― Brien Foerster, Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History

“The commonalities that we find at all of the above locations include: 1) works in stone beyond the scale and technical prowess of the historically presumed builders, such as the Inca; 2) signs of construction interruptions and/or cataclysmic damage; and 3) oral traditions speaking of much earlier civilizations with advanced technological capabilities.”
― Brien Foerster, Aftershock: The Ancient Cataclysm That Erased Human History

“It was not until 2014, more than two decades after the mastodon's discovery [a mastodon scavenged by humans in the Americas], that the tide decisively turned. Built on improved understanding of processes that incorporate natural uranium and its decay products in fossil bone, a newly enhanced technique, known as 230 Th/U radiometric dating, was now available that could settle the age of the Cerutti deposit once and for all. Deméré therefore sent several of the mastodon bones to the US Geological Survey in Colorado, where geologist Jim Paces, using the updated and refined technique, established beyond reasonable doubt that the bones were buried 130,000 years ago.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Grima explained that the primary tool in establishing Malta's prehistoric chronology had been radiocarbon-dating (based on the rate of decay of C-14 stored in all formerly living matter). My views about C-14 are on the record. I think it should be only one amongst several tools and techniques brought to bear on the dating of megalithic or rock-hewn sites. It is a truism, but worth repeating nevertheless, that C-14 cannot date stone -- only such organic materials as are found around or in association with stone ruins. It is an assumption (more or less safe depending on the stratigraphy and general circumstances of the site but still, at the end of the day, an assumption) that organic materials found close to megalith B or trilithon A or dolmen C, etc., do in fact date from the same period as the quarrying and erection of the megaliths concerned.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -- especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the kind used by Guzarate to chart Vasco da Gama's course from Malindi to Calicut in 1498 -- are quite another matter. If maps have indeed come down to us containing recognizable representations of Ice Age topography -- as arguably may be the case with the depictions of India and of the long-submerged Sundaland peninsula by Cantino and Reinal and with the depiction of the 'Golden Chersonese' by Ptolemy -- then prehistory cannot be as it has hitherto been presented to us.
If they are what they seem, such maps mean a lost civilization. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
― Graham Hancock, Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

“Contrary to popular belief, history does not repeat itself. The story of our planet was not predetermined, there was no air of inevitability to it, and the story of life does not speak to us of a linear progression from primitive to sophisticate. Instead, its shape has been carved out by the accumulation and loss of information, genetic and cultural, creating the illusion of relentless progress.”
― Clive Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived

“The water vapor accumulated in the upper atmosphere for so long that when the surface finally cooled enough for the rains to touch down, they poured in catastrophic torrents for thousands of years.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Leroi-Gourhan écrit que, dans l'art des cavernes, signe féminin et blessure sont interchangeables : pour signifier la même idée, l'artiste, le penseur, l'écrivain paléolithique pouvait indifféremment figurer une vulve, une vache transpercée, le sang qui dégoutte d'une flèche. La vulve, le dol, la bête sous le merlin, le sang, sont synonymes ("Corps du roi", 40).”
― Andreï Makine

“Semua buku prasejarah adalah data sekunder bagiku.
Aku butuh data primer, yang kuperoleh dengan cara bertualang dan memburu jejak prasejarah.

~

All prehistoric books are secondary data to me. I need primary data, which I obtained by adventuring and hunting prehistoric traces.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Does Ebui dream of a private grave? People in fancy dress eulogizing, laying down their offerings. Or does she dream past the frontier, a quicksilver cavern to adorn forever?”
― Johnny Firic, The Oldest Word

“Genuine chronicles of prehistory are not concealed by anyone; rather, they are merely overlooked by people preoccupied with other things that command their attention.”
― Toba Beta

“Prehistory is about the present day; it always has been.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“The novelist Evelyn Waugh noticed at the time that Evans and his collaborators blended contemporary styles into antique ones: they had “tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“By comparison, the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous populations—which the Society, for one, consistently linked to slavery—was largely ignored by the public. For the most part, Britain and the US treated Indigenous peoples as belonging to the past, as active threats to modernity. Above all, they described Natives as “perishing,” as “disappearing.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“In Brussels between 1909 and 1914, Louis Mascré sculpted away for Belgium’s Royal Academy of Science, creating a plaster cranium, a mother and child, the upper body of an elder. At a time when Belgium was brutalizing the Congo, the country’s Royal Academy compared Africans to apes and also depicted Neanderthals as simian rather than caveman-like.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“When did Europeans come to believe that they actually descended from savages? The answer would seem to be during World War I.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“We are violent because of what we do now, not because of what those hominids back then might have done.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

“Sadly, there's no natural balance between war and peace. It takes two tribes to make peace, but it only takes one to start a war.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2 - The Pillars of Civilization