The Moon doesn’t appear in the sky alone. A complex relationship exists between the motion of it and the Sun, which, over immense periods of prehistoric time, becomes apparent to those European human beings who observe the skies. In due course, those peoples begin to make tallies of the motion of the two bodies, which, with other images and markings, indicate the arrival of the earliest forms of human Artificial Memory Systems. (In due course, such early systems will become writing.) Although interpretation of such markings is fraught with difficulty, there is enough evidence to suggest that on the balance of probability - not definitely! - there is a connection between such markings and actual human observations.
North-west Europe is a wild landscape full of animals. On endless steppes eastward the megafauna remaining from the Ice Age continue to eat grass: mastodons, herds of woolly mammoths, aurochs and bison. Cliff shelters are full of peril: cave lions, and cave bears so huge they can kill a hunter with one blow.
As the climate warms, however, new animals strike out into novel territory. Meltwater helps aquatic birds flourish, on rivers, on ponds, and across the glittering surfaces of lakes. A rich food source is becoming available for the people of this land, which they exploit when they can. But as they do they also notice the docile manner of various herd animals – mouflon, ibex, and even some species of wild pig. For some of them even the awesome aurochs have possibilities when it comes to domestication.
But these people mostly hunt aurochs, and one day one of them salvages a rib bone, which she breaks into a flattened section not much longer than her middle finger – she intends this to be a portable artifact. Over the next six months she scratches a large number of markings on the bone using various types of flint burin. These markings have certain numerical properties: they’re arranged in clusters, exhibiting periodicity and organised placement. They are a complex tally.
The side of the plaque with most markings shows seven scratched lines running parallel to the longer edge. That the sequence runs boustrophedon is evinced in one corner by a connecting line, so that the tally can be read as a single line filling the front side. Incised perpendicular to the main line – above and below, and across it – are many shorter lines grouped into sets of length up to that of a typical little finger bone. The reverse side contains one more line also crossed by shorter strokes, with an additional line also visible. Six broader strokes perpendicular to the horizontal direction complete these markings.
The vertical scratches are grouped in a way which makes their purpose as a lunar calendar obvious. There is by now a long tradition of such astronomical observations of me being incised into bone, and even on occasion into stone. This plaque however is different from previous tallies in that it includes a solar element too. There’s a clear break in the scratches at the six month mark, indicating either a concept of solar duration from solstice to solstice or from equinox to equinox. The maker’s mental model of the celestial realm has become sophisticated, moving on from a simple record of me to one of me and other bodies. The carver understands now that the sky, both night and day, is interconnected, with all bodies in motion characterised in her mind by regular periods: me, the Sun, and the five planets. She passes this knowledge on to her family and kin, which is then embedded into myth by the community.
Such myths aren’t simple facts or records, they’re metaphors of the community’s beliefs set into narrative. Even with an artificial memory system like the Taï plaque, remembering complicated astronomical concepts and characteristics isn’t easy without proper writing; these observations take place over years, not mere months. The community therefore creates stories about my motion and that of the Sun, so that the vital knowledge they need is available to all, across the generations and into the future.
Myth embeds community knowledge in all prehistoric oral cultures. It is vocal remembering. In societies where factual knowledge about the world is limited to certain forms – natural history, the technical use of stone and wood – the notion that the Sun will return after the winter solstice needs to be acknowledged. That return is not immediately obvious, not when life in cold and darkness is so uncomfortable. They need hope. Telling stories about the motion of the Sun and myself both records community learning in oral form, and gives hope, not least to the younger generation, born into a world that at first is too complex to assimilate.
