Talk:Prehistoric religion/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Tim riley (talk · contribs) 17:44, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Initial comments

There is good stuff in this article, but the prose needs attention. At a first skim through I noticed

• alleigance
• archaelogical (twice)
• beared
• centered
• enroachment
• ferility
• hetereogeneous
• moreso
• oft
• perspectie
• skepticism

Please read through carefully and correct these and any other spelling errors, after which I'll review the article for content etc rather than spelling. Tim riley talk 17:44, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Good morning in my obscure timezone -- I woke up to find most of those were fixed for me :) Thank you for picking up this review, and so quickly! "Oft" is the one of those I'd quibble with; it's a valid spelling which I've varied with "often" where it improves the text flow (e.g. preceeding a longer word). Otherwise, I've gone through and fixed the remainder of these, as well as a few other issues I combed out of the rough-draft prose -- thank you again! Vaticidalprophet 01:42, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Up to you, though "oft" seems to me so obsolete a word as to be quaintly comic when used here, but I certainly don't press the point. Now, turning to a review of the content, it's a long article and I'll need to take it in two or three goes. Here is my first lot of comments. I must emphasise at the outset that in general these are merely suggestions and will not affect the decision whether to promote to GA or not, and at the moment it looks to me extremely probable that I'll be able to promote the piece. All the same, it's as well to make the prose as good as possible.

Review

• Background

• stymied the early attribution – rather a slangy verb for formal prose (besides being decades out of date – the stymie was abolished about seventy years ago); the OED gives "impede, obstruct, frustrate, thwart" as less colloquial synonyms.
• likely drew from shamanism – unexpected AmE usage in an apparently BrE article, where "probably" would be the idiomatic form.
• practiced – "practised" when a verb.
  • All here has been addressed. Vaticidalprophet 10:53, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

• Human evolution

• neither the archaeological record nor the current understanding … suggest – plural verb where singular is wanted.
• These assumptions were later disproven – an unusual verb where a plain "disproved" would be normal.
• ritual in H. erectus "should not be understood as the full flowering of religious capacity", it marked … – quote could do with attribution in line.
• disputed by other authors such as Chris Stringer – "other" – but no authors are mentioned for him to be other than.
• In 2018, cultural anthropologist Margaret Boone Rappaport published … – A pity in such a well-written BrE article to introduce a clunky false title in the Americanese/tabloidese style. The addition of a definite article will put it to rights.
  • All fixed, although false titles 'feel' normal to whatever odd engvar I use ("BrE with a lot more AmE than usual", perhaps), which is not quite a Wikipedia-accepted engvar... Vaticidalprophet 10:53, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

• Lower Paleolithic

• archaeologist Gregory J. Wightman – another false title. (I can't stop you using them if you want them, of course, but I draw them to your attention). Durham University professor of archaeology Paul Pettitt, later, can be turned into good English by a simple inversion: Paul Pettitt, Durham University professor of archaeology. A later victim of a false title is archaeologist Kit W. Wesler.
• different levels of skepticism – the OED favours "scepticism".

• Upper Paleolithic

• do not share their nature to outsider anthropologists – unexpected preposition: does one share things to, rather than with, others?
• and ward off said illnesses – "said" is so quaint a usage that some of your readers won't understand it. It can be removed without affecting the sense.
• the body was found covered in must… – I had to read this twice to get the sense. Switching it round to "in which the body was found covered must…" would make all plain at once.
  • All reworded; I rendered "said illnesses" as "those illnesses" as I thought it better to at least mark out in the text that they were charms to ward off illnesses that already existed in the patients or the community, rather than abstract potential sicknesses. Vaticidalprophet 02:49, 25 June 2021 (UTC)

• Beliefs and practices

• It is difficult, due to the nature of the sources – "due to" is accepted in AmE as a compound preposition on a par with "owing to", but in BrE it is not universally so regarded. "Owing to" or, better, a plain "because of" is safer.
• practiced at many times – the verb is "practised".
• controversial, indeed – we could do without the editorial "indeed".
• a hard-wired function of the human brain – this is the third time "hard-wired" has been used and it has rather worn out its welcome by now. The OED, by the way, has "hardwired" as a single, unhyphenated word.
• However, the idea was debunked as early as the 1970s as a simple artifact of sedimentary deposits changing over thousands of years – three points here:

• first, this is the fourth of five sentences in the piece opening "However, …". It is usually a good idea to remove "howevers" when practicable: the word seldom adds to the sense, and usually weakens the prose;
• secondly, "artefact" is the preferred OED spelling (here and at 13 other places throughout);
• thirdly, and most importantly, the unequivocal word "debunked" here doesn't square with the impression left by the sixth paragraph of the "Human evolution" section earlier that the Hayden and Lunn interpretations are both to be taken seriously. There's no suggestion there that the bear theory has been debunked. Unlike the stylistic points elsewhere in this review, I think this point really must be addressed.
  • On account of this being a content point, I've put it as first triage before getting to the other prose points here. I've given a quick explanation in "Human evolution" about the ahistoricism of the bear cult; there are a couple different things going on here (while both the Neanderthal bear cult and the H. s. sapiens bear cult are unlikely, the earlier discussion deals with the former and the later with the latter), which is how I forgot to reconcile those two. The current explanation is a bit clunky, so I might work on presenting it more smoothly, but it's there now. Vaticidalprophet 10:53, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

• evinced from – unexpected preposition: wouldn't "evinced by" be the normal form?
  • Prose notes here have been addressed (will need to look at artifact/artefact). I've omitted 'however's prior to adding them, for the most part; the remaining ones were mostly the ones I could make a good argument to myself for keeping. The one there is removed for now. The addition under "Human evolution" about bear worship is also reworded in a smoother direction, while we're keeping track of that. Vaticidalprophet 07:25, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

• Mesolithic

• relatively well-reconstructed – not sure you want the hyphen here.

More anon. You may want to consider those points in the interim. Tim riley talk 10:22, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Second and concluding batch of comments.

I shan't single out every "practice" (for "practise (verb)), "likely" (for "probable") or "artifact" (for "artefact"). There are, respectively, five, four and six of them in the Neolithic and later sections. It is entirely up to you whether to change them or not, though of course I recommend it.

• Neolithic

• "those societies which transitioned" – unexpected "which": "that" would seem more natural here.
  • Tweaked. Vaticidalprophet 11:13, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

• Art, sculpture, and monuments

• "holds some purview" – could we have that in English?
  • An odd wording, on reflection; will come back to that and see how to rewrite it. Vaticidalprophet 11:13, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

• Burial and funerary rites

• "power over a more legible sedentary society" – legible?
• "some dead were buried close to their houses, while others were buried in dedicated funerary monuments" – I'd be careful with "while": it's borderline here, but using "while" when you mean "and" or "but" can lead to temporal nonsense such as "Miss Jones sang Mozart while Mr Smith played Beethoven". I'd replace the comma and "while" with a semicolon. Up to you, of course.
• "due to the difficulty …" – as above
  • Latter two are handled (I replaced 'while' with 'but' rather than the suggested rephrasing, on account of trying not to overuse semicolons -- which I do if I don't keep an eye on it). "Legible" is a bit term-of-art. There's a strain of thought in the study of Neolithic/Bronze Age societies, and the early states emerging from them, that says the primary drive of agriculture, etc. wasn't because it made the average person's life better but because it made people's lives more easily organised and understood by rulers (it's easier to extract taxes, for example, from a farmer who lives on the same farmland all his life and produces a semi-consistent quantity of grain than from a hunter-gatherer travelling huge areas with very different food stocks). This is often expressed as something along the lines of "making people more legible to states". There's likely a better way to put it than I have, although it's escaping me at the moment. Vaticidalprophet 11:13, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

• Ritual and theology

• "strike out on their own means" – "means" is an unexpected word. Not sure what "means" means here, and the sentence would work perfectly well ending in "own"
• "goddess worship due to figurines" – "because of" would be better BrE
• "sociologist Ayfer Bartu Candan" – false title
• "bona fide Neolithic religious practice" – not convinced by "bona fide" here. It isn't a synonym of "actual", but means "in good faith" – not deceitful
• "traditionally interpreted as 'goddesses'" – double quotes wanted (MoS)
  • All tweaked accordingly. Vaticidalprophet 11:13, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

• Proto-Indo-Europeans

• "a watery … maelstrom" – as a maelstrom is a whirlpool isn't "watery" taken for granted?
• "skeptical about the Proto-Indo-European - sceptical

• Bronze and Iron Ages

• "buried with the decedents" – decedents was new to me. The OED says "One who retires from an office (obsolete), deceases, or dies; a deceased person. U.S., chiefly in Law. Not sure you want an Americanese legal term here.
• "cremains" is new to me. An American expression, the OED tells me. A link to Wiktionary would be helpful for non-Americans.
• "Some authors also proclaim the practice" – proclaim? "To declare publicly; to make known aloud or openly"?
• "Contra the pop-culture interpretation" – does this mean what in English would be "contrary to the pop-culture interpretation"?
• "Traits such as the importance of bodies of …. unrecorded by the Romans.[194]" – that's a lot of text for one citation. Does ref 194 adequately cover both sentences?
  • Words have been modified or Wiktionary-linked Joy p. 416, glancing back over it, covers both sentences adequately; it's her summary/conclusion and so has a fair amount packed into it -- and she's quite insistent on the specific "Iron Age European religion is heterogeneous and talking about it as a single cross-continent faith is wrong" point. (Intentional deposition [of objects into water] dominates the archaeological record but this was rarely recorded in contemporary Greek and Roman accounts and Practices varied across time and space and there is no evidence for a single Iron Age religion. Instead the evidence points to local patterns of belief and behaviour, but with some common conceptions such as the importance of water, for some exact quotes.) Vaticidalprophet 02:31, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

• In modern culture

• "Pagan positions on prehistoric religion proper come apart" – I had to read this twice to get the meaning: "come apart" so strongly suggests disintegration that redrawing the sentence might be advisable, perhaps on the lines of "As well as mainstream authors, others have written about pagan positions on religion…"
• "Author Marisol Charbonneau" – seems odd to tell us that someone who has written something is an author.
• "claims European pagan reconstructionism" – I'd be cautious about "claims": it carries overtones of doubt about the veracity.
• "the Cave People viewpoint characters" – not easy to guess what a Cave People viewpoint character is.
  • Wording for the first three of these have all been modified. "Cave People viewpoint characters" is a bit difficult; the book was written in the early 20th century before our current understanding of human evolution, so we only have the terms the characters are called by to define them (as opposed to, say, "the Cave People, who are H. erectus" or something). I changed the wording around a bit to "the Cave People, who the book is told from the perspective of". It technically shades into OR a bit to call them by any more specific name, as published sources tend to shy away from ascribing any species to them. Vaticidalprophet 05:12, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Over to you. Tim riley talk 07:24, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

Comments by Dunkleosteus77

• Why do you have an image of Australopithecus sediba?   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  21:59, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• "extraordinarily long period (from the emergence of Homo until 50,000 years before the present) of apparent cultural stability" cultural stability is a characteristic of the Acheulean (and I guess we'll put the Oldowan there too for simplicity) so that'd be from the beginning of Homo to the Middle Stone Age which pops up 300,000 years ago. Certainly by 200–150,000 years ago we move to the stage of innovation, most famously seen at Blombos Cave. I think it's because your source (from 2003) is a bit dated   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• I'm surprised you didn't mention the Makapansgat pebble (however unsupported it may be)   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:19, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• "and a sense of moral responsibility" if this is related to caring for the sick and injured, this study gives a good overview of the entire hominin medical record ostensibly extending to australopithecines   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• It's debated if cannibalism was practiced at the Trinil (Java Man) or Zhoukoudian (Peking Man) sites, and has generally been phased out in favor of general carnivore activity or normal taphonomic circumstances   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• "The lineage leading to anatomically modern humans originated around 500,000 years before the present day" if you're talking about the human/Neanderthal split, the dates vary widely; I've seen over a million years ago as well   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• The entire discussion on H. sapiens subspecies seems unnecessary and is also an unresolvable "debate" if you can call it that, since it really depends on your own personal definitions of "species" and "subspecies", and is more or less universally acknowledged as arbitrary and unimportant. Also, I've only ever seen the name H. s. idaltu used by the people who invented it. I'd recommend scrapping that paragraph altogether and refer to modern humans as simple modern humans or H. sapiens (as I see you refer to H. heidelbergensis and not H. s. heidelbergensis)   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• "The first undisputed burials, approximately 150,000 years ago, were performed by Neanderthals" the oldest undisputed I'm aware of is the Skhul and Qafzeh hominins which were modern humans   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• "and the first dispersal of humanity from Africa to southwestern Eurasia" they went a lot farther than that, like far East Asia, Britain, Java, etc.   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
• Since H. naledi is contemporaenous with the African Middle Stone Age, you should probably move that discussion there   User:Dunkleosteus77 |push to talk  23:17, 29 June 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the additional comments, Dunkleosteus. For a number of these (specific example Australopithecus species, full scope of evolution of moral responsibility, Makapansgat pebble) the answer is because this is a broad overview article, and has to take a relatively sparse view of the topic. I'm planning to start work on Paleolithic religion eventually, which also needs improvement (not quite as direly as this did before I started with it, but still needs a rework), and there's room for a lot more detail in that article than there is here. There's some simplification in this article you point at that I don't think is ideal either, but I'd rather simplify the topic a bit in an article that's only partially about human evolution than get too deep in the details. As for some other points, like early geographic dispersal, H. naledi timing, and when exactly the first burials were, those are good points and I'll tweak. Vaticidalprophet 02:08, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Concluding review

Above points should be addressed if you're going to take the article to FA, but for the purposes of this review I am satisfied that the various GA criteria have been met. GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   Well referenced.

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   Well referenced.

   C. No original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   B. Focused:

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

   Well illustrated.

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

   Well illustrated.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

Congratulations. I am impressed by what you have packed into this overview article. 11,000 words is on the long side, but I don't think you'll get any complaints at FAC on that score, and for a subject of which I know nothing I found it an interesting and understandable read throughout. Tim riley talk 06:53, 1 July 2021 (UTC)