What i think these photos offer, (beyond a look at a fascinating culture little changed by modernization), is a view of preserved elements of a symbolic lexicon which reaches back to ancient times . I believe this is important to understanding the British Neolithic & Bronze Ages because i see enough parallels between them and African traditional culture, (it isn't just Omo Valley lip plates), that i believe Ancient Britons/Irish were expressing a symbolic lexicon which was developed outside their Isles ... most likely in Africa and quite possibly by the original human culture, which i call the 'Urkultur' . I believe that a symbology would have accompanied the original human language, and traveled with the diaspora* into Eurasia and beyond . From it, different groups would inevitably have selected different, (but sometimes overlapping), sets of elements to express and to hold as important ~ these becoming part of their identity .
*It is worth noting in this context that the diaspora was a sequence of waves complicated by the Ice Ages' periodic compression of the Eurasian population into Iberia(?), southern Russia, the Trans-Caucasus area, Middle East, et cetera ~ providing opportunity for symbolism carried by different groups to remix . There is the possibility that people at times migrated back into Africa ; but i think it's clear that the overall movement was outward from the continent . There is also the very (very) remote possibility that people were traveling back and forth between the Neolithic and Bronze Age British Isles and the Omo Valley, but such direct contact is not necessary to explain the similarities, and not what i mean to suggest.
Though people might have added symbols along the way, and these might coincidentally resemble eachother, i feel the stronger explanation assumes that tribes largely conserved their chosen parts of the inheritance into the Iron Age . In particular, think the lexicon's emphasized and widely distributed elements are those least likely to have been improvised coincidentally by different groups in scattered places . Thus i take the appearance on these plates of U-shapes, (present in the Irish, British and Pazyryk archaeological record), paired rings, (present in the British archaeological record), and disks with center-holes, (those of Britain and China), as indication of probable common origin ... though because of the greater distance involved, i must allow that the probability Chinese holed disks were a local improvisation would be increased .
This is in part because i believe early societies were relatively level, (sociologically), meritocratic, and very interested in the continuity of the group and its traditions . I believe they saw their inherited symbology as part of that continuity . This is also in part because i feel that the primary drivers for the change of a such a lexicon would be changing technologies and ways of life ~ and that there would be a lag time involved, particularly if these changes were perceived as being good by the people, or if they empowered the religious leaders . I feel that the millennia preceding the transition to (in many places transient) agriculture and pastoralism was accompanied by little change in symbolism, (because it was accompanied by little change in way of life) ; and that the transition itself, since it came in the context of a rising standard of living, but not yet to severe expression of the ills of despoiled lands and internally divided societies, would have been seen as an affirmation of the value of the old symbology ... which would have been expressed within and upon monuments, artifacts, et cetera . For a time .
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