On 06.02.2022 the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung announced a supposed sensation. In the Stone Age "equality" had prevailed. The reason for this finding is the excavation of a child's grave from the early Middle Stone Age in Liguria, Italy.
The female infant found in 2017 was accompanied by rich grave goods. These included at least 66 worked shells of plain Columbellidae snails (Columbella rustica) and some shells with which these early humans decorated their clothing. Other infant graves in Austria and Alaska furnished with grave goods support the thesis "that the child came from a community that recognized even babies as persons and did not discriminate against girls."
remainings in grave and reconstruction
What the flagship of German conservatism claims here as a new insight, however, Engels already knew 150 years ago. Building on the work of U.S. anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, Engels defined the relations of production and exchange at the lowest stage of human development as primitive-communist in his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State:
"The production of all earlier stages of society was essentially a common one, just as consumption proceeded under direct distribution of the products within larger or smaller communist commonwealths." (own translation of Marx-Engels-Werke 21, p. 168f.)
Only the development of the productive forces and the accompanying division of labor replaced the egalitarianism of the Stone Age clan with private property and the patriarchal nuclear family:
"It is one of the most absurd ideas, inherited from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, that woman was the slave of man in the beginning of society. Among all savages and barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to some extent still of the upper stages, woman has a position not only free but highly respected." (own translation of Marx-Engels-Werke 21, p. 53)
These recent findings are further proof of the correctness of historical materialism and a slap in the face to those who still wish to dismiss communism with the simple-minded theory of alleged human nature.
peak fashion in stone age: columbellidae snails
