In Dawn of Society, Dance Was Center Stage

No one will ever know when someone first raised arms into the air, pivoted and took a few light steps this way and that - and danced.

The birds and bees, those exhibitionists, were doing it their way long before. Some mammals were already courting through an unspoken poetry of motion. Humans may have been newcomers, but dancing as self-expression probably developed early in their cultural evolution, perhaps as early as speech and language and almost certainly by the time people were painting on cave walls, making clay figurines and decorating their bodies with ornaments.

Archaeologists are at a loss to know the origins of dancing in prehistory because they lack direct evidence, nothing comparable to the art of Altamira or Lascaux. The best they have been able to do is extrapolate back from the ritual dances practiced by hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into modern times.

An Israeli archaeologist now thinks he has pieced together a significant body of evidence for dancing, if not at its beginning, at least at a decisive and poorly understood transitional stage of human culture.

Examining more than 400 examples of carved stone and painted scenes on pottery from 140 sites in the Balkans and the Middle East, Dr. Yosef Garfinkel of Hebrew University in Jerusalem has established what he says is an illustrated record of dancing from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago. This record, apparently the earliest of its kind, coincides with the place and time hunters of wild game and gatherers of wild plant food first settled into villages and became pastoralists and farmers.

It may take imagination to see in these depictions the choreographic ancestry of Astaire and Rogers or the Bolshoi. Some show only stick figures with triangular heads, and some headless, in highly schematic scenes that appear to be dances. Others include figures in a dynamic posture, usually with bent arms and legs. Several scenes depict people in a line or completely circling an illustrated vessel, their hands linked. There is some resemblance here to current folk dancing or even a Broadway chorus line.

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The prevalence of what appear to be dancing scenes in the earliest art from the ancient Middle East, Dr. Garfinkel said in a recent interview, suggests the importance of the dance in these preliterate agricultural communities.

"Dancing was a means of social communication in prestate societies," he said. "It was part of the ritual for coordinating a community's activities. `Hey, it's time to plant the wheat or harvest it.' So everyone would gather and dance, and the next day they would go to work."

Then with the emergence of states ruled by kings and bureaucracies and the ...

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