According to this paper, the oldest symbolic monument, that is to say, one with no obvious practical use and probably responding to a belief, is this pile of stones piled up next to a spring at El Guettar (Southern Tunisia)...
This pile of stones formed a regular cone 0.75 meters high and 1.50 meters in diameter at the base. At the top were placed a few flint balls, all the others were limestone spheres...
None of these stones are natually found on site, which means that they were deliberately brought there and arranged in a pile by man. This pile of balls was riddled with Mousterian type chipped flint, which dates the pile to 160,000 to 40,000BP...
What is really really cool and interesting is that this pile of stones was topped with flint nodules. Most likely like these ones I have on my desk...
Flint is the thunder stone...Hitting one flint nodule with another one will produce a weak spark...which looks like lightning...and a smell of burning...like when lightning hits vegetation and ignites it making fire...
Fire which our ancestors had to catch before they learned how to make it...
How old are fairytales about "the hunt for the firebird"? Well they could predate the time when people learned how to make fire...Because before people knew how to make it, fire descended from the sky and had to be found and caught...I talked about this in my article "Fire bird"...
How was fire making invented? Most likely as a wood drilling accident...I talked about this in my article "Drill"...
And when was fire making invented? Can't be that long time ago, considering the worship of fire and fire makers that persisted until very recently...I talked about this in my articles about the fire creation worship and the invention of the fire drill and the tool for making fire: , "Holly fire drill", "Prometheus", "12 Olympians"...
Now if you replace one of the flint nodules with a pyrite nodule, a spherical or ovoid masses of pyrite, often found in sedimentary rocks together with flint nodules...
You can actually make big enough spark that will allow you to ignite dry bark or grass...and make fire...This process is explained in this video
And believe or not, based on the strike marks found on some flint and pyrite nodules from the same Mousterian period found in Southern France, archaeologists have proposed that Neanderthals used flint and pyrite nodules to make fire. You can read about it in this article...
Using human made lightning...Lightning which most often strikes mountain tops...
Lighting which announces the arrival of rain...Rain which is the source of drinking water...Water which comes out of springs like the one next to which the pile of stones we are talking about was made...
Were people who built this pile of stones topped with flint nodules aware of all this?
And does this mean that the myths and the worship of the fire makers could be over 40,000 years old? You might want to read my articles which talk about the age of (some of) our myths: "Mamaragan", "Dreamtime", "Yeti", "Yeti rivisited", "Third death", "The young one", "Sun mountain", "Partholon and the great flood", "How grain came to Sumer", "Fire bird"...
