Seeing things that aren't there

http://mbabramgalleries.com/collections/south-east-other-asia/products/shaman-s-apron-nepal

This is from Nepal?

But it looks like what the Kukeri wear in Sardinia.

Here are a bunch more from all over Europe:

Wilder Mann article

There's a great deal of information about Kukeri/Wild Men in the book, The Dancing Goddesses by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.  I notice that Barber, my new favorite author, is not a lumper.  Ok, that means she does not lump together related ideas, instead she carefully splits all the related information into separate little parcels.  She writes about different countries where they had the tradition of Wild Men, and Carnival, but she does not lump them all together.  She writes about differences in these traditions that might have to do with how far north people lived, or how the traditions interacted with Christianity.

So I am about to lump together things that may not belong together.  It would really be amazing if they do belong together.  The Riverside Project links together ideas from a culture in Madagascar with Stonehenge...  I know, they are not saying that the people of Madagascar walked all the way north to Stonehenge.  Nor that the builders of Stonehenge might have walked all the way south to Madagascar.  But I'm starting to wonder if they did walk all that way...?

Here's what I have to lump together:  the incredibly ancient archaeological site of Gobekli Tepe and the monks in Nepal.  I found a picture of Buddhist monks feeding vultures, possibly to keep the birds around as part of traditional funeral rituals.  I visited Gobekli Tepe as a tourist two years ago, and I kept wondering, 'Why are there vultures carved in the stones?'  Could it be that the Gobekli Tepe people used sky burial for their dead?  I am not very interested in funerals- how awful!  But wouldn't it be amazing to find the same culture spread from Turkey to Nepal, or even further, say Sardinia to Nepal?

We know about a time in the Middle Ages when most people did not ever travel further than the edge of their own village, right?  What if it was something like today: some people stay home and some go explore the ends of the earth.  And what if there might have been a lot more traveling about in the time of Stonehenge or Gobekli Tepe?  What if you could lump together all the traces of the most ancient humans?  Maybe there was a logic that made unrelated groups of people develop similar traditions.  But I think these traditions are linked- European shamen were doing things quite similar to Himalayan shamen.  I think in all the time that modern humans have been on Earth, there has been plenty of time to meet the neighbors even if they lived thousands of miles away, and plenty of time to do an enormous amount of stone carving by hand.  Whatever were they doing for the first 200,000 years?