0001 The citation for this article is: Cuttler, R. (2013). Considering marine transgression as a mechanism for enforced migration and the littoral Gulf ʿUbaid phenomenon. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 24(1), 37–43.

I obtained my copy from Wiley online.  Thank you.

0002 In the early 2010s, Dr. Richard Cuttler smells a very interesting intellectual aroma, but is unable to sense where the trail leads.  What is the link between the infilling of the Persian Gulf and the appearance of the Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia?

0003 The titular “consider” is one way of saying, “Imagine the possibility.”

If the marine transgression into the Arabian… or is it Persian?.. Gulf enforces a migration of the people who originally settled the fresh water marshes of the Ur Shatt (that’s “Ur Schatt” for Germans) waterway, then does that account for the Ubaid appearing in both Mesopotamia and on the shoreline of central Arabia?

0004 Why would an archaeologist consider such an if-then scenario?

During the glacial period, the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers flowed together into a waterway, the Ur-Shatt, that fed a corridor of lakes and marshes (now underwater “basins”) into the sea.  Such a concourse would be a favorable place for Epipaleolithic enthnoses to settle, taking advantage of diverse natural resources.

0005 Little did they realize that the Ur-Shatt waterway, a veritable oasis during the glacial period, would slowly be covered with around 70 meters of sea-water.  By “slowly”, I mean thousands of years.  At the same time, the rise in sea-level has a horizontal dimension.  After filling the basins, sea-water spreads into a shallow geological bowl.

0006 Here is a picture of the scenario once the low-lying basins are full.

The indigenous settlements are represented by red and purple dots.

The sea-rise will force these people to migrate.

0007 Here is a picture once the Gulf is filled to the brim (as far as the sea-rise would go, which is several meters above the present sea-level).

The Ubaid settlements are represented by magenta dots.  Plus, the background color has taken on a magenta hue, denoting two spheres of interaction, the central Arabian Gulf and southern Mesopotamia.  This is my rendition of Figure 1 of the article.

0008 How does anyone know that there are two spheres of Ubaid settlements?

Originally, the term, “Ubaid”, labels a type of pottery found in excavations throughout southern Mesopotamia.  Why did archaeologists not also look at the central Arabian Gulf region?

The author is perhaps too embarrassed to say that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century archaeologists focused on this region because… well… that is where the Garden of Eden is supposed to be.  That is where Noah’s flood took place.  That is where Judah was taken into exile in ancient times.  So, of course, Protestant Christians are going to pay for exorbitant excavations in order to reveal… you know… something about justification by faith alone, scripture alone, and grace alone.

0009 Okay, I am just guessing on that one.

0010 Then, in 1968, G. Burkholder discovers Ubaid pottery in the western Gulf littoral.

0011 What a surprise.

The Ubaid is the lowest level excavated in southern Mesopotamia, which means that it has the deepest time horizon.  Now, the Ubaid shows up near Bahrain.  Doesn’t that smell like a great research project?   To an archaeologist, it sure smells good… but, how does one follow the scent when the trail goes under the waters of the Gulf?

Professor Richard Cuttler, who I am sure has some good stories to tell, seeks funding for seismic reflection maps of the Gulf’s underwater landscape, in order to obtain better placed sediment cores of the sea-floor.  He wants to investigate, but he does not know that there is another component to the puzzle.  Also, big funding is hard to come by.

0012 If the project is funded, what will he find?

Among other points, the sediment cores would provide pollen-based clues to the changing climate of the time.

0013 At the start of the current interglacial, the Inter-Tropical Conversion Zone (ITCZ) shifts north, then back, then north again, in a most fickle manner.  For the time under consideration, the ITCZ moves north, but not as far north as the gulf-to-be.

Here is a picture.

0014 The two dotted gray lines indicate the furthest extend of the ITCZ currently, and between 9.5 and 6.3 thousands of years ago (kyr).  South of the line, the monsoons deliver plenty of rain water.  North of the line, the westerlies lose all their water before arriving in Arabia.

0015 Curiously, all the Ubaid sites develop north of the early Holocene ITCZ line, suggesting that water was not a crucial issue.  That makes no sense.  Southern Mesopotamia obviously has lots of fresh water because of the Euphrates and Tigris and other rivers.  What provides water to the pre-Ubaid sites in the central western Gulf?

0016 Take a look again at the above figure.  The gray brushstrokes and the red line denote a massive aquifer that is tilted.  It is high in the west and low in the east.  The Dammam label is a concatenation of the saying, “That’s a damn aquifer, ma’am.”  Am I kidding?  This aquifer relies on a huge tilted fault-riddled plate of non-porous rock supporting porous layers that allow rain water, falling south of the northernmost ITCZ line, to flow underground and come to surface in springs that stand outside the low-lying basins.

0017 Here is my version of the article’s Figure 2.

Note how water flows downhill in the Dammam aquifer then comes up in springs further inland from the sea-water filled basins.

0018 Why is this so important for this examination?

This examiner wants to show that… in the land surrounding the freshwater marshes and salt-water depths of the basins at 10,000 BP… there are two cultures: a Mesolithic culture that lives right along the water and uses fresh and salt water resources and a Neolithic culture that exploits the water from Dammum-fed springs to engage in rudimentary agriculture and stockbreeding.

0019 The question is, “Why would I want to establish two disparate cultures in the same region?”

Wouldn’t that just complicate the story of an enforced migration?

0020 Here, I review.

0021 First, the sea level starts to rise, if there is not a paleolithic culture already on the fresh-lakes of the Ur-Shatt waterway, then a Mesolithic culture displaced from living on the continental shelf could enter into the environs.  Such a culture would simply follow the water into the eastern, central and western basins, since they already know how to exploit fresh-water and marine resources.

0022 Second, there is a shift from dry to wet climactic conditions, as the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) shifts north.  Does it shift north enough to provide water directly to lands around the infilling Gulf?  The author establishes that even if it does not, the ITCZ shifts north enough to feed the Dammum aquifer which would provide fresh water to a Neolithic agricultural and stockbreeding culture that migrates in from the north and settles in the dry-lands just beyond the marshes.

0023 Then the sea-level rises more, overfilling the basins and entering into the flat-bowl terrain of the surrounding landscape.  Now, both the Mesolithic and Neolithic culture are forced to migrate in response to the rising seas.

0024 Here is where I introduce an idea that Dr. Cuttler did not think of and may have never heard about until this moment.

The economies of the Mesolithic and the Neolithic culture are different.  They do not depend on the same resources.  Practical reason predicts that these cultures should mingle with one another and eventually become one.

However, each culture practices its own hand-speech talking language.  That means that they have a serious impediment to talking with one another.  Both practice a dual-mode style of language.  How are they going to get around that?

0025 Let me step back and say that the evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language.  Almost every book available on human evolution discusses the evolution of language as a facet of hominin communication.  Only Razie Mah’s books discuss the evolution of talk as a semiotic adaptation.

0026 Here is a brief overview.

0027 The first period ranges from the separation of the chimpanzee and human lineages (around 7 Myr) to the start of bipedalism (around 3.5 Myr).  The hominin lineage communicates in two small and one larger social circles.  The small social circles are family (5) and friends (5).  The larger social circle is the band (50).

0028 The second period ranges from the start of bipedalism to the domestication of fire (around 0.6 Myr).  Michael Tomasello says that this period is dominated by “obligatory collaborative foraging”.  That means that the social circle under the most intense selection pressure is the team (15).  Hominins forage in teams.  Pre-linguistic hand-talk is an adaptation to team work.  Pre-linguistic hand-talk relies on sensible construction.  Sensible construction relies on content and situation.

0029 The third period ranges from the domestication of fire to the first singularity (around 9kyr).  The social circle under the most intense selection pressure is the community (150), the team of teams.  This period is dominated by, what Razie Mah calls, “obligatory social-circle harmonizing”.  Hand-talk becomes fully linguistic as an adaptation to the semiotic dynamics of social construction.  Social construction involves content, situation and perspective.

0030 Prior to the evolution of Homo sapiens, the voice comes under voluntary neural control for singing.  Why sing?  There are two social circles larger than the community, the seasonally gathering mega-band (500) and the occasionally gathering tribe (1500).  Their episodic gatherings require rapid synchronization.  The voice was recruited to do precisely this.  Singing identifies each participant within these larger social circles as belonging to the group.  Plus, singing synchronizes all participants to the tasks at hand.

Sexual selection does the rest.

0031 With the evolution of Homo sapiens, the voice is systematically adapted for use as an adornment to hand-talk.  In liminal lighting, communal hand-talk is difficult to instantly recognize.  The voice is added as an adornment.  Sound-word adorns gestural-word.  The semiotics of the union remains grounded in hand-talk.  However, the semiotic qualities of the sound-word (speech) are unique.  So, cultural evolution produces two independent channels of talk, hand and speech talk, that are highly socially regulated.

In short, the transition from the voice as an adornment to hand-talk to fully elaborated hand-speech talk occurs over hundreds of thousands of years during the Paleolithic.  My guess is that archaeological evidence of adornment parallels the development of this cultural adaptation.

0032 The fourth period begins when two hand-speech talking cultures, one Mesolithic and one Neolithic, are forced into the same migration.  These cultures have different economies, so they do not fight over resources.  Rather, they trade and get along.  They intermarry.  They engage in interactions familiar to anthropology.  They start with a pidgin.  Then, later generations establish a creole.  That creole is the proto-Sumerian language.  Sumerian is unrelated to any large family of languages.

0033 Plus, that creole is the first speech-alone talk on Earth.

The semiotic properties of hand- (and hand-speech) talk and speech-alone talk are significantly different.  The following figure presents dyads (characteristic of the Charles Peirce’s category of secondness) that may be read as Aristotle’s dyad of {matter [substance] form}.

0034 Hand- (and hand-speech) talk requires only one hylomorphe.  A referent as matter substantiates, by way of icon and index, a manual-brachial word-gesture as form.  The fact that word-gestures become routinized, and thereby instantly recognized, does not detract from this semiotic grounding.  The referent precedes the hand-talk word.

0035 Speech-alone talk requires two hylomorphes, one on the content and one on the situation level.  In terms of content, Ferdinand de Saussure (1859-1913) defined spoken language as “two arbitrarily related” systems of differences.  What I think is arbitrarily related to what I say.  So, where does the referent come in?

The referent comes on the situation-level, because each content-level word-utterance_2af must be validated_2bm (as situation-level matter) by the form of an artifact_2bf.  The spoken word precedes its referent.

0036 While this explanation sounds like gibberish to any newcomer to the field of semiotics, including many anthropologists and archaeologists in 2026, there is clearly method to the madness.

0037 Here is a list of Razie Mah’s e-works that are pertinent to this topic.

0038 The bottom line?

Hand- and hand-speech talk constrain social complexity.

Speech-alone talk facilitates unconstrained social complexity.

0039 This is precisely the theory that Dr. Cuttler needs in order to bring his research proposals to the next level.

0040 The origin of the Ubaid is the first step in a huge research project that is intrinsic to The First Singularity and Its Fairy Tale Trace.

0041 Cuttler’s analysis concerns the material arrangements that set in motion a dramatic shift in semiotic reality.

0042 Our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

The image on the left represents two hand-speech talking cultures that belong to the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

The image on the right represents one speech-alone talking culture that initiates our current Lebenswelt.

0043 I suspect that the Ubaid narod knows that they are different.  They are surrounded by ethnoses that are poor and disorganized, in comparison to the wealth and the power that comes from (even a little) labor and social specialization.

The Ubaid does not know why it is special, it only knows that the surrounding hand-speech talking cultures talk with their hands.  The hand-speech talking culture cannot help but notice the inverse.  The Ubaid emissaries do not talk with their hands.  However, they have the best dried fish.  Plus, they want to give us their pottery, but it seems that they expect something in return.

Soon enough, the Ubaid strains at maintaining communality, or whatever it was that they had before their creation.  Meanwhile, their way of talking encourages them to create artifacts that validate their spoken words, condemning them to further social complexity.

0044 It is hard to imagine what it was like, when every youth is ready to move past the tired artifacts that validate their grand-parent’s words.

Or, maybe it is not hard to imagine.

0045 Nor is it hard to imagine Abdullah Hassan Masry’s 1974 “sphere of interaction” hypothesis. Each Ubaid site belongs to a sphere of interaction, where it takes on its own “specialties”, its own gods, and its own ways of accommodating its labor and social specializations.

Doesn’t that sound like the contemporary term, “multipolar world”?

0046 Here is a picture.

0047 What is the second research project demanded by the hypothesis of the first singularity?

From the spheres pictured above, speech-alone talk spreads to the four corners of the world.

Imagine the research project needed to establish whether that claim is plausible!

0048 Dr. Richard Cuttler, the door is open.  Follow your nose. Thank you for publishing your considerations.