7 Florence Road
Harrington Park, NJ 07640.
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
10 August 2003.
Re: Query for Our Ancestors Touch Us: The Writing of Early Humans
Dear
A recent article in the journal Science describes sticks of ochre 77,000
years old marked with lines made by early Homo
sapiens and left in a South African cave. From further back than this until
relatively recently, people scored lines onto bones and stones, and drew them
with fingers onto soft cave walls.
Finger markings dating to the Paleolithic occur in both Europe
and Australasia. Humans marked walls of caves with their
fingers, not to represent animals or to create symbols or abstract geometric
patterns, but just to draw lines across the soft surfaces. The lines, called
severines, constitute one of the earliest forms of deliberate, humanly made
marks, and, as such, represent perhaps the earliest human graphical behavior.
Why did they do this? Can we know what the lines mean? Is this a very early
form of writing?
Nearly 80
percent of cave art in Europe are severines. Representational
cave art has been studied since the late 19th
Century, but little formal work has been devoted to the analysis of severines. My
research changes that. Cave art specialists such as Breuil,
Leroi-Gourhan, and Clottes call the lines enigmatic,
macaroni, ancestors to the animal paintings, or the intestines of the
underworld. They neglect to notice that the lines can tell us more about their
makers than can paintings of horses and bulls. For over 30 years, I have studied severines in Europe
and Australia and
my discoveries shed light on the people who made them and what they believed. Children,
adults some
engaged in dancing, others in deliberate acts of line marking and communication
all were
involved.
Though archaeology engages me avidly, I have another area of
interest as well, namely the nexus of science and spirituality. I have
published three books (Sleuthing the Divine: The Nexus of Science and Spirit;
David Bohms World: New Science and New Religion; and
From Science to an Adequate Mythology), have edited several more, and
written many articles and academic papers. In the 1980s and 1990s,
I founded, published, and edited the magazine, Science & Spirit. I began then, and continue to edit the book
series, Theology and the Sciences, for Fortress Press. Five other books await publishers: Love and Happiness, Dreaming
Time, In the Spirit of Happiness,
Science of God, and Natural
Morality.
I am a professor in the Graduate College of Union Institute
and University, Cincinnati (a
non-traditional learning-at-a-distance program, where I supervise and advise
doctoral students), am a member of Harris
Manchester College,
Oxford University,
and co-direct the Oxford Institute for Science and Spirit. My academic
background includes doctorates in mathematics and in religious studies. I
frequently speak at academic conferences in
science and religion.
I have enclosed a SASE. However, as I travel frequently, it
is best to contact me through email. A full proposal and sample chapter are
available for you should you request them. Thank you for your time and
interest, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Kevin Sharpe.