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“For our prehistoric ancestors all learning was probably environmental and success was measured by survival.”1
This book highlights individuals and social movements that down the ages, whether for reasons of morality, aesthetics or survival, have sought to remind us of our connections to the natural world. This begs the question of when it was first felt necessary to provide such reminders, which in turn prompts us to consider when it was that we apparently stopped being “natural” ourselves.
This is more than simply humans changing the environment; we can observe many creatures doing that, if mostly unconsciously. The shifting grazing patterns of wildebeest in East Africa supress woody plants thus ensuring that the Serengeti is ideal for, well, grass. Perhaps we can point to our hunter-gatherer ancestors as examples of humans living harmoniously as part of nature. Yet even this is questionable, for as the historian Yuval Harari points out, Homo sapiens may have been responsible for wiping out other human species such as Homo neanderthalensis (Harari 2011), although this “replacement” was not wholesale as recent studies show significant genetic traces in modern humans that suggests some interbreeding took place (Bae, Douka & Petraglia 2017).
Our ability to make fire may be seen as an early “unnatural” breakthrough that no other animal has achieved. Again, archaeological evidence suggests that even our primitive ancestor Homo erectus was making use of fire and thus probably cooking food over a million years ago (Berna et al. 2012). But it would be stretching a point to suggest that these early humans had become as detached from the natural world as we are.
Perhaps it is our very human nature that distinguishes us from the rest of nature. No less an authority than Charles Darwin suggests that it is our moral sense, our ability to care for others whom we do not know, even those from other species,
that “ affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals” (Darwin 1879:151). But even here we encounter higher-order mammals behaving altruistically, witness dolphins helping beleaguered swimmers to safety. Yet Darwin was on to something: human intelligence, with its capacity for self-awareness and abstract thought, sets us apart from other animals. It is likely that humans are unique in the way in which we are able to live in a dual reality – that is the objective reality of our physical world and a constructed reality based on our imaginations and our interpretations of the world.
Harari argues that it is our ability to both (a) behave flexibly and (b) do so in large numbers that has enabled us to become so dominant, and that this was only made possible by our ability to go beyond basic communication and to tell stories. This unique combination of abilities is a product of our thinking processes and also the way in which we communicate these. In the early 1930s the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky highlighted the role of language as an essential tool in human development. It is this that allows us to convey ideas across time and space so that each new generation can start from where its predecessors left off. While many creatures can communicate with what we might recognise as a basic language, as far as we can tell no other species has a language with such versatility that it can convey abstract thought. For as long as humans have had language, we have been learning cumulatively, not just from our own experiences but from each other’ s, including from those whom we could never have met. For humans, therefore, it seems that there is no going back to some pre-aware, more natural state.
As our opening quotation states, for our prehistoric ancestors all learning was probably environmental and success was measured by survival. More recent accounts of learning among indigenous peoples show that many essential skills were acquired through play, and that work and play were not distinct categories (Gray 2013). Social bonds were reinforced through ritual storytelling, no doubt deeply rooted in local environments and providing an interconnected view of the world that included humans in the cycles of life. This may be as close to natural as we will ever get because any possibility of aligning human interactions with the environment alongside those of other intelligent animals came to an end with the advent of agriculture. Occurring some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, agriculture and the domestication of livestock was perhaps the most signi ficant step ever taken by humans in terms of modifying the global landscape. In a timeline of momentous developments that might include language – fire – agriculture – writing – gunpowder – printing – the Industrial Revolution – the atomic bomb – digitisation, it could be argued that agriculture stands apart as the most momentous of all in that it changed our direction rather than simply accelerating an existing process. If humans changed nature through agriculture, then the next most signi ficant leap may be the development of artificial intelligence if that is allowed to change human nature. We return to this in our closing chapter.
The cultivation of crops, first in evidence in the Middle East but occurring independently across Asia and later in South America, allowed societies to establish more complex social structures. While these complex settlements and social
structures develop in fixed locations, the anthropologist Hugh Brody (2000) argues that agricultural societies are in fact more mobile and nomadic than huntergatherers (who tend to stay grounded in one area) because of the continuous migration to new land driven by population increase among agricultural communities. Maintaining such complexity requires more than verbal communication and so systems of writing emerged based on earlier hieroglyphic forms, again in the Middle East, with writing found in Sinai dating from between 1850 BCE and 1550 BCE, and similarly dated cuneiform script in Mesopotamia. The Phoenician alphabet from around 1100 BCE is the oldest veri fied alphabet to date and was followed by independent developments of scripts in the Indus Valley and within the Zhou dynasty of China. The signi ficance of writing is that it demands literacy, which calls for some form of structured education, albeit for an elite class of scribes. Henceforth it became a matter of record that learning no longer focused primarily on the objective, bio-physical realities of our environment but on the means by which we convey our interpretations of the world including the myriad human concerns that we deem important at any given time. Indeed, we might frame this book as a history of attempts by people to convey stories to the rest of us that cut through our constructed worlds in order to remind us of the signi ficance of our objective reality.
Note
1 John Smyth. (1995). Environment and Education: a view from a changing scene. Environmental Education Research, 1 (1), 1–20.
Further reading
Bae, C.J., Douka, K. & Petraglia, M.D. (2017). On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives. Science, 358 (6368). Web link: tinyurl.com/w3qjfpm Berna, F., Goldberg, P., Horwitz, L.K., Brink, J., Holt, S., Bamford, M. & Chazan, M. (2012). Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (20). Web link: tinyurl.com/qp8tq3p Brody, H. (2000). The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World London: Faber & Faber. Darwin, C. (1879). The Descent of Man 2nd edition. London: John Murray. Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life New York: Basic Books. Harari, Y.N. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind London: Penguin.
2 PLAYING AND LEARNING IN THE MESOLITHIC
“As knowledge was cumulative, specialised and could be stored, even maintenance of the status quo required its transmission between generations.”1
For our prehistoric ancestors all learning was essentially environmental and success was measured by survival, and Gough (2017) argues that education in some form or other (i.e. structured learning) became both possible and necessary because of this. Wilson (2019) makes much the same point. She examined a methodological framework for identifying how young people in the Mesolithic Period (c. 10,000 BCE) spent their time in post-glacial Northern Europe.
As Wilson noted, young people were obviously present in these groups and she asked: how can we shed light on what they got up to? Wilson argued that children must have spent at least some of the time learning (if only informally), as the need for learning is implicit if family groups and societies are to endure. She said that much of this learning must have been about the environment, thus preparing them for their economic and social roles in later life: acquiring skills and competences, as we might put it today. Wilson was speculating, of course, as the archaeological record does not speak volumes about the youth of pre-history, but she set out a plausible case that there must have been a formalisation of learning to some degree, as the induction of the young into the evolving skills necessary to stay alive and thrive needed to happen. She suggested that there might have been a sort of monitorial system where those children who knew more instructed the others,2 and that there might have been learning through play. This is plausible and Högberg (2008) has examined the potential for identifying play and children’ s imitation in the archaeological record including a case study of a flint knapping area for Neolithic axe production in southern Sweden that identifies a child’ s activity area. Högberg writes about theoretical and methodological assumptions behind play, imitation and its identification. See also Lillehammer (2015), who examined the
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percentage on the gross receipts was suggested, and brought in a great deal more money to our exchequer than the modest weekly salary would have given us. The public came in goodly numbers to see the new optical wonder, and all went well as long as the author remained in London and could devote his time and energies to the daily exhibition; but the time was now drawing rapidly near when, according to contract, he must leave for Australia.
Professor Pepper has invariably told his numerous patrons that, although obliged to keep secret for a reasonable time all optical illusions that he produced, he would ultimately tell the public all about it.
The metempsychosic era at the Polytechnic in 1879 was marked by the production of various stories, which were nicely edited and corrected by a lady of well-balanced, tasteful, and poetic mind—viz., by Miss Walker, the sister of the author’s very able coadjutor.
The entertainment opened with a vacant stage, disclosing a sort of inner apartment about twelve feet square, tastefully upholstered, and closed by a curtain which could be lowered at pleasure, without interfering with the great roller and white curtain upon which Dissolving Views were shown. The author’s adopted son, for he never had any children of his own, was now seen walking through the inner apartment to the foot-lights, where he bowed and, addressing the audience, had hardly got as far as the words, “Ladies and Gentlemen,—I am sorry to inform you that something has detained Professor Pepper—” when my voice was heard crying out: “Stop, stop; I am here!” and, appearing out of nothing and without the aid of trap doors or descent by the help of the copper wires, the author stood in the midst, and bowed his acknowledgments for the hearty greeting kindly given him by his audience. The entertainment now proceeded, and, after apologising for the gloom he was about to cast upon the meeting by the harassing story he was about to relate, finally stated that his subject would be those “fearful bags of mystery” called “sausages,” remarking incidentally that though, thanks to Government analysts, many persons had heard of the examination and analyses of this dietetic refresher of the inner man, no one probably had ever seen sausages put together again, as it
were, and formed into the very animal from which they were originally educed. A large white dish of sausages was now produced. They were placed in a wire basket, such as pot-plants are suspended in from windows and verandahs, and hung up in the inner chamber. About one minute elapsed; the sausages were gone, and out of the basket came the author’s dear little sagacious white poodle, with his blue ribbon and little bells, wagging his tail, barking at the audience, and coming down to lick the hand of his master. The poor little creature was accidentally poisoned by eating bits of meat the rats had dropped whilst scuttling to their holes to die of the too rapid poison prepared by the author for those pests of domesticated people.
Then the metamorphoses proceeded. Oranges were changed into pots of marmalade, and given away to the boys, and a chest of tea was converted into a tray carrying a steaming teapot, sugar, milk, cups of tea, and handed by the attendants to the ladies in the reserved seats only—such is the blighting influence of cash, which caused the one-shilling people to be neglected and the eighteenpenny-reserved-seat folks to have their teas. The ghost of Banquo in “Macbeth,” and the ditto in “Hamlet” followed, with the curious change of a deserted piano into one at which played and sang a living member of the fair sex, attended by a gentleman in faultless black coat and white tie, who turned over her music; and this Part. I wound up with the change of a gentleman into a lady, who walked down to the foot-lights, sang a song, and then vanished into “thin air.”
But all these changes could only happen in the smaller inner apartment, the actors might walk anywhere else at pleasure, and out of the charmed circle Walker could not change to Pepper, or the latter refer to the living beings when they faded out of sight as regular “Walkers.”
So much for what was done, and now the anxious reader is getting impatient, and if a lady is doubtless curious (the poor men never are so) to know how it was all done, and as the illusion has apparently left the domain of optical science and is now relegated to the conjuring profession, the author has no hesitation in fulfilling his
long-ago promise made to the public to let, as Mr Cremer, jun., says in his most amusing book on “Conjuring,” the cat out of the bag.
Before the illusion can please the eyes, the proper apparatus for producing it must be constructed; and the key to the result consists in the use, not of clear plate glass employed in the ghost illusion, but of engraved silvered glass.
Ordinary looking-glass, such as is used for common mirrors or looking-glasses, is usually made by attaching an amalgam of tin-foil and quicksilver to one side of a clean sheet of plate or other glass.
Glass prepared in this way cannot be successfully engraved, and when the chisel or other tool is drawn with pressure across it, is liable to chip; and instead of clear, sharp engraved lines being obtained, they are ragged, and, in most cases, large patches of the amalgam are torn off.
This is not the case when glass really silvered by successful chemical processes is used, and when pure metallic silver is precipitated on to the surface of the best and flattest plate glass. When Mr. Walker and myself commenced our experiments in March, 1879, the so-called “Patent Silvered Glass” was expensive and confined to moderate-sized pieces of plate glass. Our first care, therefore, was to construct a table that could be brought by screws to a perfect level, and one that would carry a plate of glass at least twelve feet six long by six feet eight wide. Such a plate being most carefully cleaned, and quite free from grease, was placed upon the table, and levelled by means of spirit levels, just as a plate of glass used for the old collodion process would be levelled, in order that the fluid should not run off at one edge, leaving the other comparatively dry; and now came the knotty point—Which was the best silvering process to use? On consulting the best records of this art, we found valuable information in the English Mechanic, Vol. xxi., No. 542.
The reader will find the following process very successful if minutely carried out in all its technical details—
T S G .
Prepare two solutions.
1. Argentic nitrate is dissolved in distilled water, and ammonia added to the solution till the precipitate first thrown down is almost entirely re-dissolved. The solution is filtered and diluted, so that 100 cc. contain one gramme of argentic nitrate.
N.B.—100 cc. are equal to rather more than 3½ fluid ounces.
2. Two grammes of argentic nitrate are dissolved in a little distilled water, and poured into a litre of boiling distilled water. 1·66 gramme of Rochelle salt is added, and the mixture boiled for a short time, till the precipitate contained in it becomes grey; it is then filtered hot.
The glass, having been thoroughly cleaned with (1) nitric acid, (2) water, (3) caustic potash, (4) water, (5) alcohol, and lastly distilled water, is to be placed in a clean glass or porcelain vessel, the side to be silvered being placed uppermost. Equal quantities of the two solutions are then to be mixed and poured in, so as to cover the glass. This should be done while the glass is still wet with distilled water.
In about an hour the silvering will be completed. Then pour off the exhausted liquid, carefully remove glass, wash in clean water, rub off silver where deposited where not required, allow to dry, and varnish silvered side with any thin varnish which does not contract much in drying.
The time required for the operation depends on temperature.
If the solutions be warmed to about 30°C., the silver is deposited in a few minutes; but it is safer to use them cold.
The inside of test tubes, bulbs, &c., are silvered by putting the solutions into them, no second vessel being then required.
Throughout the whole operation the most scrupulous cleanliness is the grand essential.
100 cc. are equal to rather more than 3½ fluid ounces.
1 gramme = 15·432 grains.
1 litre = 35¼ fluid ounces.
The plate of glass being thus carefully silvered is allowed to dry thoroughly, and is finally varnished with a good thick varnish, containing plenty of red lead, so that the back surface of the silver mirror has a smooth and red appearance, while the varnish protects the delicate film of metallic silver.
An ordinary photographic picture on glass is really represented by precipitated metallic silver, but the metal in this case is in minute particles, which do not shine or reflect light.
The silvered plate glass is now engraved in the following simple manner. Being placed in a support or rack against the wall, and quite upright, a chisel—or rather, a series of chisels—are drawn across the surface in straight lines, and perpendicular, by the use of a large T-square. Every time the chisel is drawn with pressure across the varnished back of the glass a portion of the silver is removed, leaving a straight line quite clear or transparent, and, in fact, laying bare the surface of the plate glass.
The lines were ruled in three degrees of comparison: thick, thicker, thickest; and considerable skill and experience—which no description can teach—were required to get these correctly engraved.