Response to Alavi Karim on Paleolithic Art pt.2

I began to ponder some of the similarities that humans have with animals after reading her post. The comment by Guthrie that she used was, “sharing creates obligations that can be, and usually are, called on later.” (pg 414). I thought of this and realized that obligations are what our entire society is about. Money first of all was designed and based of this idea because the only use for money is to “call up on a obligation”; it could be an obligation to the credit card company or your employers obligation for the work you did for them. Money is only a piece of paper saying that someone owes you something and when you want to “call on it later” you just give whoever you need something from the money that someone gave you for a service. As we all know money is what our lives are based on, so paying up for past obligations is and has to be part of our every day life. The famous saying “It’s not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” just exemplifies the idea of owing something to someone including your country is so present in our culture. I think this is just a complex extension of the same sorts of things that families of the Holocene Eurasians might have done to repay some obligation. Some obligations such as a male would bring back food to eat, so his brother or children collected wood and would have the fire started. I believe religious aspects of the Holocene’s were just as basic and similar to obligations. They had a basic idea of religion and of a supernatural essence, and maybe a higher power. The only difference is that, just as in the idea of obligations, we have a much more sophisticated set of beliefs and ideas that are linked to complicated religions such as Christens, Muslims, and Jews. A separate point that I wanted to mention about Alavi’s blog was that I don’t believe her point “human behavioral pattern may resemble to that of certain animals, can be disturbing to some because according to Genesis mankind was created as superior to all other beings. Is it or is it not derogatory that there are similarities between human and animal behavior can be a debatable topic.” I think this might be true but I don’t think that other animals having similarities to human’s means that we might not be superior to them; we still have symbolic thought and are much more complex then even the most similar animals.