The Blackberry Walk

Anthropologists studying man of the past say that coexisting with ancient man were two more species of human: the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Modern man having been born in Africa, Neanderthals were thought to have populated Europe, whilst Denisovans the East. However, this orthodox conception of modern anthopology is held up by a single pinky bone found in a Siberian cave. Besides finding alleged alleles for the Denisovans sifted from the genomes of modern men, the only hard archaeological evidence of Denisovan man is this single pinky bone. We can only know the past through the morsels of information preserved; and the longer the period of time, the fewer the morsels left for us with which to nurture ourselves. The existence of Churchill or Napoleon seems reliable enough, but looking further back into history the great oil-painting-like vision we have of the past gets sketchier and sketchier until it becomes a single cave painting from which we infer a civilisation. Whilst Napoleon can be believed, what of Caesar or Alexander - Arthur or Brutus - Achilles or Gilgamesh: are these historical fact or fiction? Where is this blurry line to be drawn? When so many widely believed "historical truths" are held up by single sources - mere pinky bones of evidence - how can we truly trust our knowledge of the past? When it comes to history, Western man is truly exceptional. We believe our inheritance to be from the classical historians of Herodotus and Tacitus; but for the Greeks, it's worth mentioning that the mere of existence of Democritus, the enemy of Plato and father of atoms, as a historical figure was doubted a mere 100 years after his death. And the Greeks had the best history of any civilisation! The only other civilisation coming close to that level of historical consciousness is the Chinese, whose annals were believed to be destroyed and edited with each successive dynasty. The West's powerful conception of history as something objective, absolute, existing outside of culture is truly a gargantuan leap beyond the mental paradigm of the rest of the world. All of our histories however are based upon sources. Sources which can and have been forged across time. In the West, the Catholic church was notorious for having forged some of its raison d'etres for The Great Schism, such as the Donation of Constantine; whilst Renaissance Humanists were known to have written documents under the names of Classical authors attempting to pass off their ideas as ideas much older. A similar phenomenon was seen in Mediaeval times with the prevalence of pseudopigrapha - works written under a famous historical figure's name. To the modern scholar who writes history from sources, what is he to make of this? A history based on sources, dates, and names can't accommodate works written later than they actually were. Some get found out as "hoaxes" (although I'd argue this is an anachronism), whilst other papyrus fragments are sewn into the great tapestry of history. These papyri are mere Denisovan pinky bones - single clues from which we can extrapolate a race of men - evidence not from science, but from sources of debatable roots. The realisation that our conception of the past is held up by pinky bones is at once terrifying and liberating. For myself at least, the story of the past is what roots me in this world; it's what grounds my historical place and orients me. To lose this directionality of the past through realising how weak a mere 'source' can be, is rather scary. In a sense it's a crisis of faith in the past. But history, and the worship of time and civilisations, is just another idol: there is nothing solid and known about it. The liberation is in knowing that the past is a mystery. Herodotus might point to Cheops as the owner of Giza through his discussions with an Egyptian hierophant - seemingly the only pointer orthodox history has to pyramid's provenance - but once you doubt these off hand comments as the truth, and merely as a suggestion, the mystery of the pyramids comes back to life. Similarly for other great sites from around the world, the context manages to dry out and extract the juice of the site, leaving a prune. What must the discoverers of Tikal or Angkor Wat have thought when they found these stone structures nestled in jungle? All of a sudden, the historian must cook up a civilisation to accompany the site with the evidence they've discovered from the carrion. The doctrine of Original Sin must always be born in mind. The creations of man will always be imperfect and, if we don't exercise the necessary hygiene, will become fixed idols. The world has a far greater mystery than we think, however hard established the orthodoxy attempts to flatten time's depth. Whilst history is held up by pinky bones, pinky bones are often all we have; the rest is crack filling. It takes a certain humility to say "we don't know", and a certain bravery to doubt established narratives of history, although when witnessing modern revisionism with respect to empire, every new historical narrative begets a new iron fist. But you and I can change the past; for the past is created by pen and sword.