The Weight of Proximity: On Presence, Flesh, and Vanishing

This piece stands as the third in a quiet unfolding—a sequence of essays sparked by our recent gathering in the New Ross Library, where voices met to trace the long memory of the bow. The first emerged from our reflections on the remarkable women archers of 19th-century Ireland, those figures who carried both grace and defiance across lawn and target. The second turned toward an older enigma: the strange vanishing of archery from the Irish landscape, a disappearance wrapped in silence, with traces only reintroduced by Viking hands upon their arrival. Now, I return once more, drawn further back—to the part of our lecture that stirred a deeper wonder. This time, I follow the earliest beginnings, where the arc had yet to lift from the earth, and Neanderthals moved through a world shaped by stone and sinew alone. Rather than revise, I lean into that quiet, seeking to touch it more deeply, to feel again the gesture before the flight.

To live without the arc is to accept a world of immense risk… of undeniable, terrifying, and beautiful immediacy.

Let us consider the arc of the arrow—a line that cuts through the very architecture of human consciousness. It draws a geometry of distance, a prophecy of abstraction, a technology that gathers time within the tension of bent wood and sends it hurtling toward an awaiting moment of arrival. For hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthal life flowed within a shape the bow never touched. We often describe this as an absence, a missed evolution, a silence that foreshadowed their end. Yet the truer story offers a world formed by nearness, where gesture joined with consequence and presence anchored itself in the deep, immediate flesh of the Pleistocene. This inquiry follows the trace of that presence. It becomes an archaeology of full embodiment: a life-world so saturated with form and contact that the arrow’s flight signaled departure from its core, a release from a soul forged in closeness.

This reflection may wear the shape of an essay on tools—on flint, on spear, on the ache held in ancestral hands—yet beneath the surface it unfolds into a meditation on memory, on ecology’s quiet interweaving with breath and motion, on the hushed poetry of a world that brimmed with such unrelenting presence, its intensity outpaced continuity. To place oneself in a valley shaped by ice’s patience, with wind breathing tales of older suns and skies etched in deeper hues, is to feel time gather tightly around the body—intimate, insistent, weighty as bone. In the curve of your palm rests a flint point—more than a tool, it carries thought suspended in matter, a question made sharp beneath ancient weather, seeking light with the same raw wonder. Its form speaks clearly. Edges keen, weight certain, it answers a gesture felt across eras. One may trace the grip, the pull of muscle, the drive forward. This movement resolves in impact, a pulse of will from stone through sinew into flesh. The force speaks directly. The act joins body to body. Within this contact lies the whole relation—unmediated, indivisible.

Here, the arc yields to a silence that swells with meaning. The Neanderthal world shapes itself through this charged hush—an intention formed by craft, intelligence, and awareness. To live beyond the arrow’s path is to inhabit the very center of direction, to reside fully within the world’s immediate invitation. It is to experience presence without deferral, in the manner of Husserl’s life-world, where all things emerge in their fullness before interpretation settles in.¹ The flint rests within this clarity—a fragment, as Bachelard might say, that dreams through matter.² Its reverie speaks of density, of tension within muscle and opposition within bone. The hand that formed it and the hand that held it responded to a world of substance and shape, a reality drawn close through every act. From this orientation emerges a worldview held in coherence—its strength rooted in presence, its fragility borne by intensity. The arc, still unborn, stands outside it entirely. In its place rises a fullness—a vision of being that pressed into the world directly, force answering form, breath answering weight, time made whole in each moment of encounter.

The Neanderthal was a close-range animal, a creature whose entire existence testified to the primacy of proximity. Theirs was a world understood through the senses at arm’s length, a reality defined by the hot breath of the herd and the tremor of the earth underfoot. This was a totalizing mode of life, a perfect synthesis of anatomy, technology, and ecology that converged on a single, unifying principle: nearness. The evidence for this intimate predation is etched into the bones of their prey and embedded in the very design of their tools. At Neumark-Nord in Germany, the 120,000-year-old skeletons of fallow deer tell a story of a hunt as a direct and brutal confrontation. The wounds etched into these bones bear the marks of low-velocity, high-impact trauma—the kind delivered by a heavy spear driven upward into the beast’s body from close below.³ This encounter unfolded not as a distant strike, but as a deliberate, collective ambush amid dense forest. It required resolve, shared intent, and a nearness to danger that tested the nerve The hunters stepped forward, breath held, eyes locked with the creature’s vast and living gaze. With the full weight of their bodies and the quiet fire of intention, they drove their spears deep. That moment rose from a lineage written in bone and shadow, carried through countless hunts and whispered from one generation to the other. In their hands, the spears—like those birthed at Schöningen some 300,000 years ago—carried⁴ the print of ancestors who shaped wood with sure fingers and a feel that spoke through grain and weight. These stood far from the idea of distant tools—they breathed like companions, trusted in the hush of the hunt, made for a world where hunter and prey moved close enough to taste each other’s breath, where courage walked into the chest and found its way through muscle and moment, in a space alive with the tremble of everything still choosing to live.

The stone tools corroborate this narrative of contact. The points of the Mousterian industry, the Neanderthal’s signature toolkit, reveal their true purpose when we look at them on their own terms. Studies of their morphology, particularly their Tip Cross-Sectional Area (TCSA), show they were overwhelmingly too large and robust to have functioned as arrowheads or even light darts.⁵,⁶ Their dimensions are consistent with one function: to arm the tips of heavy thrusting spears, built to withstand the immense stress of a direct, bodily engagement with a large, struggling animal. The Neanderthal toolkit was an extension of the Neanderthal body—strong, resilient, and built for power, not projection. This commitment to close-quarter hunting shaped their entire social and ecological reality. As John Speth’s work illuminates, focusing on large game is an inherently high-risk, high-reward strategy.⁷ The daily risk of failure was immense, and its consequences severe. This constant precarity forged an absolute reliance on cooperative tactics and deep social bonds. A successful hunt was an act of precise teamwork, demanding shared knowledge, trust, and a collective presence of mind.⁸ Their world was also intensely local. Their stone tools consistently show a strong preference for raw materials sourced from within a few kilometers of their sites, a testament to a life lived in deep familiarity with a particular landscape.⁹ They dwelled deeply within their territories. This synthesis of being and doing is the hallmark of the Neanderthal world. Their powerful physiques were a perfect adaptation for their chosen way of life. Their tools were exquisitely designed for the specific task of close-range killing. Their social structures were complexly organized around the demands of cooperative, high-stakes encounters. There is a powerful, holistic integrity to this system. It is a complete worldhood, a way of being that had no internal pressure, no conceptual space, for the abstraction of distance that the bow would later represent. They were what they did, and what they did was predicated on the unyielding reality of touch.

The invention of the bow and arrow marks one of the great ruptures in the history of consciousness. It was a technological leap that did more than just change the practice of hunting; it reconfigured the human mind’s relationship with time, space, and causality. The earliest definitive evidence for this revolution emerges not in the icy landscapes of Eurasia, but under the warm skies of southern Africa. At Sibudu Cave, archaeologists have uncovered a suite of evidence dating to around 64,000 years ago that points unequivocally to the use of the bow.¹⁰,¹¹ The clues are subtle but convergent: small, exquisitely crafted stone segments bearing the tell-tale fractures of high-velocity impact; microscopic residues revealing complex, heat-treated adhesives used to haft these points; and, most remarkably, a delicate bone point, its form and wear consistent with known arrowheads.¹² The finds at Sibudu represent more than just a new tool. They represent a new cognitive system. The bow is not a simple object; it is an assemblage of concepts. It requires the understanding and masterful combination of disparate materials—the tensile strength of a particular wood, the elasticity of animal sinew, the aerodynamic properties of fletching, the lethal geometry of the tip, the binding power of resin and ochre.¹³ Crucially, it demands a grasp of a principle that is entirely abstract: the storage and sudden release of energy outside the body.¹⁴ This is a profound cognitive step, a key component of what scholars term “behavioural modernity,” that package of traits including symbolic thought and complex language that seems to explode across the human world after about 100,000 years ago.¹⁵,¹⁶ The bow is a physical manifestation of this new, abstracting mind. Here, we must turn to philosophy to grasp the full measure of the change. In the world of the Neanderthal, the gesture of the hunt was unified. As the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty might describe it, the meaning of the act was “intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture.”¹⁷ The thrust of the spear is an extension of the body’s own “intentional arc,” a direct line of force connecting the hunter to the world.¹⁸ The bow severs this unity. The physical act of the archer—drawing the string, a quiet exertion of tension—is radically disconnected from its violent result. The gesture is small, contained, almost silent. The death it causes happens far away, delayed by the flight of the arrow. The intentionality of the act is no longer carried in the sweep of the arm but is held in the mind as a calculated plan, a projection of will across a void. This separation of cause from effect, this introduction of a temporal and spatial gap into the heart of an action, prefigures the very structure of abstract thought. Friedrich Nietzsche argued that language itself is a kind of falsification, a system of signs that distances us from the raw flux of sensation.¹⁹ The bow is the technological analogue of this process. It is an object that, like a metaphor, divides the action from its effect. The hunter’s intention becomes a conscious, deliberated thought, a plan held in the mind, entirely separate from the minimal physical gesture required to set it in motion.²⁰ The true innovation of the bow, then, is temporal as much as it is spatial. A thrusting spear is an event in the present tense. The moment of muscular effort is the moment of impact. The bow, however, creates a narrative: nock, draw, aim, release, flight, impact. It fragments a single, violent event into a process that unfolds over time. This requires a mind capable of operating across that timeline, of holding a future consequence in thought while executing a present action. The bow is thus a temporal artifact. It teaches the mind to think in sequences, to plan for a deferred future, to understand the world not as a field of immediate encounters, but as a chain of abstract causality. This was the cognitive world that the Neanderthals never entered, the arc they never drew.

The advent of the bow transformed not only the mechanics of the hunt but the very ethics of the kill. By introducing range, it introduced a new moral calculus, one founded on the profound psychological effects of distance. The world of the Neanderthal hunter was one of shared risk. In their confrontational hunts, the animal was not a passive target but an active and dangerous adversary. The encounter was a drama of co-participation, a struggle in which the hunter’s own life was staked alongside that of the prey. Injury records from Neanderthal skeletons, showing high rates of trauma comparable to modern rodeo riders, attest to this life of perilous proximity. The archer, by contrast, steps out of this shared arena. The bow grants a measure of safety, transforming the hunter from a participant in a struggle into an observer, a manager of violence from a position of relative security. This shift can be understood through the philosophical lens of Martin Heidegger and his concept of “worldhood.”²¹ For the Neanderthal, the prey animal was encountered within the immediate, lived environment. It was “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden), part of the fabric of practical dealings that constituted their world.²² The animal was a presence to be reckoned with. The bow, by creating distance, allows the hunter to frame the prey within their field of vision, to hold it still as a target. The animal becomes an object in space, something “present-at-hand” (vorhanden), a problem to be solved through the technical application of force.²³ This is a fundamental change in the structure of the hunter’s world, a move from relational encounter to objective calculation. This new distance is more than just physical; it is psychological. It allows for a detachment from the visceral reality of taking a life. The archer does not feel the warmth of the animal’s body, hear its final breaths, or meet its gaze in the final moments. The kill becomes a technical achievement, its moral and emotional weight lessened by the empty space that separates the actor from the act. This ancient shift toward deferred violence and psychological detachment finds its distant, chilling echo in the technologies of modern warfare. The drone operator, seated thousands of miles away, viewing the world through the detached objectivity of a screen, is the ultimate inheritor of the archer’s legacy. The arc of the arrow, once a bold transformation in human gesture, stretched itself across continents, refining the distance between action and its echo, turning violence into clean geometry—marks upon a map. From the instant a hunter drew back the bowstring and regarded the world not as a home to inhabit, but as a field for intention and reach, a new kind of vision emerged. That gaze—measured, objective, precise—opened the path toward science and engineering, toward tools that shape and understand Within that new gaze stirred the rise of another force—a cruelty born from distance, able to act without the anchoring pull of shared risk, released in the absence of another’s eyes holding yours. To ponder the passing of the Neanderthals is to stand at the edge of a vanished world, a silence where once there had been breath, gesture, memory—a way of being that walked beside ours and now lingers only in the bones and the earth’s quiet remembering.

The conventional narrative, one of competition and replacement by a technologically superior Homo sapiens, is too simple. It treats their disappearance as a failure, a problem to be solved with demographic models and climate data. A more profound inquiry asks not why they vanished, but what it means to vanish from a state of such deep, un-distanced presence. Their extinction was more than a biological event; it was a phenomenological one, the closing of a unique window onto what it means to be human. The anthropologist Tim Ingold provides a powerful framework for this. He distinguishes between two fundamental modes of inhabiting the world: “wayfaring” and “transport.”²⁴ Think of the wayfarer, who moves through the world as a participant, their path a thread woven into the landscape’s very texture in a process of continuous, attentive dwelling. The logic of transport, its opposite, sees the world as a mere surface, an abstraction—a network of points to be connected by the most efficient lines. In this, the Neanderthals were the ultimate wayfarers. Their lives were inscribed within the grain of their home places, their movements a dance with the seasons and the herds, their entire existence a form of deep, unwavering presence.²⁵ Homo sapiens, armed with projectile technology and the expansive social networks it facilitated, began to operate on a logic of transport, connecting resources, people, and ideas across an increasingly abstract and conquered space. The Neanderthal extinction can thus be seen as the quiet overwriting of a world of intimate dwelling by a world of efficient networking. The poignant enigma of the Châtelperronian culture offers a glimpse into the final moments of this transition. Found in France and Spain between roughly 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, these sites contain a curious mix of typical Neanderthal tools alongside novel items like personal ornaments—ivory rings and perforated animal teeth—that seem to echo the symbolic behaviors of arriving modern humans.²⁶,²⁷ For decades, these artifacts were hailed as proof of the Neanderthals’ independent symbolic capacity. More recent dating, however, suggests a complex reality of stratigraphic mixing, leaving open the haunting possibility that these objects were intrusive, or perhaps products of imitation or trade at the very frontier of contact.²⁸ The uncertainty is more powerful than any definitive answer. The Châtelperronian represents a moment of profound ambiguity, a fleeting question mark at the end of a 350,000-year-long story. Did they, in their final millennia, reach for the symbolic world of the newcomers, adopting the grammar of abstraction just as their own language of presence was fading into silence? Or were they simply overwhelmed, their world of embodied memory and situational knowledge unable to compete with the accumulating, transmissible “cognitive capital” of modern humans, for whom knowledge was becoming an object to be stored and passed on?²⁹,³⁰ Theirs was a memory likely held in the body, passed down through shared action and intimate demonstration, a memory without the external scaffolding of metaphor and symbol that the arc of the bow helped to build. To vanish without that arc was to vanish without the tools of deferral, without the comfort of abstraction. It was a silence born, perhaps, of too much presence, of a world too real to be translated.

The flint blade rests in the palm, its cold weight a conduit to a lost world. The valley is quiet now, save for the wind. The question that arose at the beginning returns, now laden with the full weight of the intervening millennia. What gesture did this stone answer? It answered the gesture of a body closing a gap, not opening one. It answered a will to be with, not to act upon. To live without the arc is to accept a world of immense risk, but also of undeniable, terrifying, and beautiful immediacy. It is to live in a world where the self and the other, the hunter and the hunted, are bound together in a shared space of consequence. The Neanderthal stands as kin not to the archer, the engineer, or the strategist, but to the poet before the invention of the simile. They are the human who could only name what is, in its full and unmediated reality, without the comforting, distancing trick of saying it is like something else. The world was not like a challenge; it was the challenge. The bison was not like a god; it was the god. This refusal of the metaphor, this commitment to the literal flesh of the world, is their great, silent legacy. The arc they never drew was a line of thought they never followed, a path of abstraction they never walked. Their extinction was the price of that fidelity to the present. In the silence they left behind, we can still hear the echo of an alternate human possibility, a testament to the worlds we contain, and the worlds we have irrevocably lost.

Footnotes:

1. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
2. Bachelard, G. (1983). Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter.
3. Villa, P., & Roebroeks, W. (2014). Neandertal demise: An archaeological analysis of the modern human superiority complex.
4. Villa, P., & Roebroeks, W. (2014).
5. Shea, J. J. (2006). The origins of lithic projectile point technology: Evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe.
6. Sisk, M. L., & Shea, J. J. (2009). The African origin of complex projectile technology: An analysis using tip cross-sectional area and perimeter.
7. Speth, J. D. (2010). The Paleoanthropology of Hunting.
8. Villa, P., & Roebroeks, W. (2014).
9. Villa, P., & Roebroeks, W. (2014).
10. Lombard, M., & Phillipson, L. (2010). Indications of bow and stone-tipped arrow use 64 000 years ago in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
11. Lombard, M., & Phillipson, L. (2010).
12. Lombard, M., & Phillipson, L. (2010).
13. Lombard, M., & Phillipson, L. (2010).
14. Marean, C. W., et al. (2007). Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene.
15. Sterelny, K. (2011). From hominins to humans: How sapiens became behaviourally modern.
16. Sterelny, K. (2011).
17. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception.
18. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012).
19. Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science.
20. Nietzsche, F. (1974).
21. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time.
22. Heidegger, M. (1962).
23. Heidegger, M. (1962).
24. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A Brief History.
25. Ingold, T. (2011). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description.
26. Higham, T., et al. (2010). Chronology of the Grotte du Renne (France) and implications for the context of ornaments and human remains within the Châtelperronian.
27. Zilhão, J., et al. (2006). Analysis of Aurignacian interstratification at the Châtelperronian-type site and implications for the behavioral modernity of Neandertals.
28. Higham, T., et al. (2010).
29. Sterelny, K. (2011).
30. Sterelny, K. (2011).

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