Episode 95

The third episode in a series with Gyrus which sprawls across a variety of topics in anthropology, cosmology, cognitive science and recent political developments. We continue to discuss hunter-gatherer cultures. Gyrus talks about anthropologists such as Eliade who have sought to reconstruct paleolithic belief systems by tracing back "ancient" (actually quite recent) Greek and Mesopotamian myths to account for the sudden complexification of hunter-gatherer societies 30-20,000 years ago. He brings up the example of the (pre-agricutural) Natufian people before we briefly tangent off into discussing the origins of agriculture and the seemingly related 12,000-year-old temple complex at Göbekli Tepe (in modern Turkey). Gyrus then begins to outline the evolution of his ideas about the axis mundi and "polar cosmology" as it affected early human political structures.

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• Mbuti pygmies
• hunter-gatherers
• Mircea Eliade
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• cave paintings
• T. Mckenna, The Food of the Gods (Bantam, 1992)
• Natufian culture
• infanticide
• Göbekli Tepe
• Gyrus, North: The rise & fall of the polar cosmology (Strange Attractor Press, 2014)
• axis mundi
• Polaris (north star)
• bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus)