The previous post highlighted the tension between archeologists and what I call ancient aliens researchers. The latter camp argues similarities between far-flung cultures imply a lost global civilization seeded by aliens or Atlanteans. There are numerous skirmishes between these groups, mostly talking past one another1. The alien crowd generally has low standards for evidence, shallow knowledge of the material, and relies more on vibes than logic. Scientists, in general, have their own set of problems, including intellectual fads and a fixation on getting grants. This creates a dynamic where archeologists don’t have to be completely honest in their gatekeeping because their competition isn’t very good at debating.
Archeologists vs Ancient Aliens is about such an episode. Independent researcher Bruce Fenton noticed that designs on Australian Aboriginal bullroarers contain symbols also found at Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years earlier and suggested Australians built Gobekli Tepe. One of the archeologists at the site debunked the connection in a short blog post.
Fenton should have shown up and said, “Bullroarers are used in similar contexts all around the globe. Dozens of anthropologists and archeologists have written that they, along with associated male initiation rituals, diffused from a common source. Just this year, you published a paper on a bullroarer you unearthed at Gobekli Tepe, which cited a book by Otto Zerries that argued for the diffusionist position at length. Here are a dozen quotes from celebrated anthropologists arguing the same…”
But Fenton believes bullroarers are models of alien probes that were left here to monitor humanity and modify our consciousness. As such, he doesn’t mention any of this. He shows up in the comments, but they devolve into whether or not the Smithsonian is hiding a race of Paleolithic giants.
The post A vs AA is essentially the italics above, though I also build up similarities besides bullroarers. Go read it if you haven’t. I bother returning to the topic because of a diffusionist book I just read, Prehistoric and Primitive Man: Landmarks of the World’s Art (1966) by Andreas Lommel. It just so happens to argue that another piece of Fenton’s case also diffused, the squatting figure. This post summarizes that research and reflects on the strange (and perhaps implausible) places cultural diffusion takes us.
The squatting figure
To jog your memory, these are the two figures that Fenton identified as related. The first is a carving of a woman (goddess?) at Gobekli Tepe. This is thought to be graffiti, given its dissimilarity to anything else at the site. (Even as graffiti, it is still at least 9,600 years old.)
The second is rock art in Northern Australia, painted in an “X-ray” style that first appeared in Australia 6,000-9,000 years ago. The figures can be identified in current Australian mythology as spirits (Mimi or the Djanggawul sisters) that brought civilization and rituals practiced from time immemorial until recently. Separate from the figure, the X-ray style is commonly thought to have spread from Eurasia in the Holocene.
These are prime examples of what Lommel called the “squatting figure” motif, pictured below.
As you can see, Lommel is more of a lumper than a splitter. These examples are from Bronze Age China and 20th-century Polynesia, separated by thousands of years and as many miles. Figures can only be drawn in so many stances, and a squat must be in the top 20. If you made figures independently, surely these sorts of coincidences would occur. However, Lommel argues that it’s not just the stance; the figure functions similarly as a spirit ancestor across cultures. Here is the putative range:
Note that the diffusion zone includes North Australia, so I’m confident that Lommel would classify the rock art above as a squatting figure2. He includes many examples in his book, one of which is this Australian-looking bark painting from the Gulf of Papua New Guinea (captions are verbatim from Prehistoric and Primitive Man):
Those are much less “squatty” than Fenton’s figures. The judicious reader will also note that this gulf also produced many of the “squatting figure” engraved bullroarers from the last post. Lommel also finds squatters in Taiwan (the origin of the Austronesian expansion, which spread their culture from Madagascar to Easter Island):
Long live the “snake of heaven!” Here is another of Lommel’s figures:
Okay, I’m not going to reproduce Lommel’s entire book (though it’s not available online, so it’s good some of this is available digitally). From his many examples, here is one last one, from Peru.
That appears to be a gator-vagina. Or, more properly, a vagina dentata—a real trope found in North and South America, Japan, India, New Zealand, and Iran. I suppose Lommel would say it also diffused (the horror film based on the premise prefers a feminist Jungian explanation). This brings us to the crux of the issue: we rely on Lommel’s expertise when he says these squatting figures fill the same cultural function wherever they are found and, thus, are essentially the same character that has spread across half the globe. Fenton’s claims, for what it’s worth, are easier to follow for a non-expert, as they are solely visual: “We recognize similar posture, the same positioning of the legs and breasts, cartoonish exaggeration of the female genitalia, and clearly inhuman heads.”
Most current anthropologists disagree with Lommel that the squatting figure diffused. Litigating the case is beyond the scope of this article3. What interests me is that Fenton happened on so many of the diffusionist school's greatest hits: x-ray style art, the squatting figure, shamanism, and the bullroarer. This appears to be independent of the traditional diffusionists, as he doesn’t point to them when being debunked.
Javanese Mayans?
Finally, there is the concern that diffusionists easily get carried away with their pattern-matching. Are we to believe the squatting figure made it from Bronze Age China (or Neolithic Anatolia) to what is now Cuba and Vancouver? Does any sufficiently good story or technology spread across large swaths of the globe? Lommel also thinks something as simple as the “spiral motif” diffused (and, like Fenton, finds evidence in the symbols found on tjuringa stones—a close relative of the bullroarer4). Joseph Campbell, another diffusionist, noted the many ways the New World’s high civilizations mirrored the Old, particularly India and Java5. Is there then a slippery slope where we start by accepting global bullroarers and end up with circum-pacific (but none-to-specific) squatting figures and the pyramids in Mexico being derivative of those in Egypt and China? Not necessarily; strong cases of diffusion also include a viable path and notable intermediate examples. The Olmec civilization, for example, was much earlier than the Polynesian expansion. Meso-American high culture cannot result from an influx of Old World ideas from the Polynesians (as Campbell thought). The pyramids are safe (for now).
Conversely, bullroarers are found in archeological sites in Eurasia dating back as far as 40 kya in Europe. The oldest undisputed specimen was produced 20 kya ago in Ukraine. From then on, the archeological record includes a steady stream of bullroarers found in ritual settings up to the present, worldwide. There are abundant intermediate examples between Ukraine and any other location where the bullroarer is used. So, no, accepting a connection between shamanism in Eurasia and Australia doesn’t naturally lead to the diffusion of “high culture” pyramids.
Conclusion
The last post ended with a poll, where most thought there was at least a 10% chance of a connection between Gobekli Tepe and Australia. The squatter should raise the odds a notch.
For example, the recent 4.5-hour debate between Flint Dibble and Graham Hancock hosted by Joe Rogan. Certainly a skirmish, though a rare example of productive disagreement.
This would move the emergence of the motif back five thousand years, and extend it into Anatolia.
My guess is the motif would be accepted in the Austronesian language family / cultural zone because diffusion is expected. Adding examples from China, India, Australia, and the Americas would be thornier because that crosses cultural zones. Including Fenton’s examples doubles the motif's age and would meet even more skepticism without also identifying many other intermediate examples.
Another item beyond the scope is adding more squatting figures, but if you are curious, Joseph Campbell discusses the diffusion of the Gorgon with ritual masks and notes the similar pose and function in Greece and New Zealand. For the Snake Cult enthusiasts, Medussa (a Gorgon) is identified with the Great Goddess and appears in Herakle’s trip to the underworld. Further, masks have been found at Gobekli Tepe, Marcus Aurelius had a Gorgon carved on the chest of his bust outside the temple at Eleusis, and masked rituals themselves are argued to have diffused worldwide in the 2006 book Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations. The Snake Cult posits that the squatting figure spread on the back of the cosmic serpent—like Demeter, spreading her mysteries.
Campbell’s caption: Relief made from beaten bronze, originally used as a chariot covering. Length about 11½ inches. Greek Archaic Period, sixth century B.C. Now in the museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich. The relief shows the Mistress of the Lions, a Gorgon, squatting with her legs widespread, her arms extended at shoulder height. In her hands she holds two lions, as if throttling them; the lions stand upright with their right hind paws on her knees. A bird and a seahorse are on her left, suggesting her dominion over air and sea.
Labyrinthine lintel, carved wood, Maori, New Zealand, showing a Gorgon-like female threshold-guardian with extended tongue, in squat position, four secondary masks at knees and shoulders, another at the vulva, a sixth, inverted, lower right (below the base line), matched symmetrically by a seventh, lower left (which has been removed), four birdlike figures attacking (apparently) convolutions of the serpentine, and everywhere a balanced organization of spirals, left side matching right, as though the perfectly matched wing-panels had swung open of the portal to a forbidden precinct, thus manifesting its guardian.
Campbell introduces his chapter “The Great West-to-East Dispersal” with X-ray art. The next section is “Myths of the Australian ‘Dream Time,’” which argues the mother goddess pictured above came from Eurasia via Indonesia and then New Guinea. The creation myths and rituals are treated as part of a complex that started in Eurasia.
In his 1983 book The Way of Animal Powers, Campbell offers other examples. Note the possible elongated labia:
The book Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations by Pernet Henry also argues for the diffusion of a bullroarer-and-masked-gorgon cult originally developed by women: “Speiser 1937:355; cf. Leach 1954; Nicklin 1974:14-15; Underwood 1948:13. The case of the Gorgo is interesting: it is merely by analogy with Antiquity that Speiser called a type of Melanesian mask “Gorgo." However, some art historians believe the presence of these "Gorgos" in Oceania could very probably be explained by diffusion. See Fraser 1966:51 and above, note 23, chap. 1” Page 107
Lommel also discussed the “spiral motif” demonstrated in the lintel above and the bullroarer in the footnote below. For female characters related to these squatting figures, see Sheila na gig, Potnia Theron, and ancient depictions of childbirth (ctrl-f “snake” for a figure squatting in an ouroborus).
(Apologies that this footnote ballooned; I just keep finding examples of squatters in the literature, and this is where I’ve put them.)
From the section on spirals, which Lommel argues diffused with dragons and serpent-worship:
The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1960, p. 212).
“Further, when the patterns of the higher civilizations of the great Maya-Aztec and Peruvian late periods are compared with their counterparts in Egypt and Mesopotamia, India and China, we find, among a multitude of other analogies: a basic neolithic complex, comprising agriculture and stock-breeding (in America, the llama, alpaca, and turkey), matting, basketry, painted pottery, both coarse and fine, loom weaving with elegant patterns, using both wool and an Asiatic cotton, metallurgy in gold, silver, tin, platinum, and smelted copper, with alloys of copper-tin, copper-lead, copper- arsenic, copper-silver, and gold-silver, employing the cire-perdue method for the casting of sculptured figures, and fashioning, among other products, golden bells; a highly developed calendric system yielding a pattern of interlocking large and smaller cycles, an assignment of deities to the various heavenly spheres and a notion of the horoscope, the idea of cycles of creation and dissolution, the mythological figure of the Cosmic Tree with an eagle at its summit and a serpent at its root; the guardian gods and four colors of the four directions, the four elements (fire, air, earth, and water), heavens stratified above and hells below, a weaving goddess of the moon, and a god who dies and is resurrected. Furthermore, on the sociological side we find: four social classes — with insignia of kingship almost precisely duplicating those of the ancient world: fan bearers, scepters, canopies, palanquins, and the blown conch as royal trumpet; the idea of the city as capital of an empire, approached by causeways and embellished by ornamented temples and palaces, the temples atop pyramids, almost precisely as in Mesopotamia, and the architecture including colonnades, spiral staircases, sculptured doorways, lintels, pillars, etc.; arts including mosaics, high and low relief, carved jade, murals in fresco, memorial monuments, and the writing of book.
…
[M]any motifs of the Mayan “historic horizon” suggest specifically contemporary India, Java, and Cambodia; e.g., the trefoil arch, tiger throne, lotus staff and lotus throne, conch shell associated with plants, cross and sacred tree (often with a monster mask in the center and bird in the upper branches), serpent columns and balustrades, seated lions and tigers, copper bells….And are we still to suppose that America remained inviolate?”
circum-Pacific (but none too specific)
I bow in awe
Hey ya Andrew good work have a Google of this one you missed out…. Russell DRYSDALE
No title (Female figure, Aboriginal Rock Art, Gallery Hill, Western Australia, Friday 17th October 1958)