Ah. No, I don’t want to defend either a “more advanced” label (probably not helpful in GQ anyhow) nor a hypothesis of “primitive advanced societies”; my visa for Atlantis expired some time ago…
The point I’m more interested in (and the second line I quoted suggests that you may agree) is that present-day “primitive” societies are probably not a transparent window into the past. Too much has changed, for a variety of causes.
On the other hand (and I welcome correction) I do think there are examples of societies which once had broad skill sets which have since been lost. One instance would be Australia; colonized thousands of years ago by sea, and inhabited at the time of European discovery by societies that didn’t build boats. Another (more recent and more tragic) would be the experience of several of the cultures of the Americas upon exposure to European diseases; massive and rapid die-offs disrupted the transmission of cultural data, in ways from which some cultures did not recover. For example, it’s my understanding that prior to smallpox the Anishinabe (or Ojibway) used pottery; after smallpox, that skill set had been lost.
We may be arguing past one another. However, just to clarify.
The context of the discussion was current “primitive” societies and their cultural norms. Not their skillsets. Whether aboriginal cultures have lost boatbuilding skills after millennia of not needing them says nothing about whether their basic social structure has changed. It may have, true. Social structure tends to be much more stable than skillsets, however. And social structures often leave traces behind in oral traditions.
I think you’re bringing up an issue that is both different than and irrelevant to this current discussion. Unless you can show that the same external pressures that caused the Ojibwa to lose the ability to do pottery (assuming there’s any truth to that) also caused them to change from a matriarchal culture to a patriarchal one it doesn’t really matter. Any good anthropological evaluation of the social structure of a culture will certainly take it into account if the numbers of the tribe are so reduced or so overwhelmed by western cultures that its earlier social structure is impossible to maintain.
I see your point; and I’ve really no data on the relative stability of social structures and skill sets. The most I’d be prepared to say is that major changes in even “primitive” societies seem to happen, under enough pressure; and that over ten thousand years or so, I’d be prepared to argue there’ve been lots of pressures. So I’m not too sanguine about reconstructing ancient social structures from observing present-day “primitive” societies; if we had evidence from those ancient societies, yes, that would be interesting. Beyond that, I’d agree we’d pretty much be arguing past each other.
You do raise a question I’d be interested in; do you happen to know if we have any surviving oral traditions which might actually point as far back as ten thousand years? I’m not aware of any; going further, where we have literary remains from (say) Sumer, or ancient Egypt, both of which are closer to us in time, actual oral tradition from those societies seems to be scanty. But if candidates for such oral traditions exist, that would be very interesting indeed.
“Have there been cultures which men did NOT dominate?”
No. For thirty-five years I have challenged professional anthropologists to specify an ethnography of a single society that lacked patriarchy and male dominance.
None have been able to do this .
Steven Goldberg
You mean you abandoned Lemurian studies!
With me, it was Erich Von Daniken, W. Raymond Drake, and Brad Steiger. Hell, I’ll even own up to reading George Adamski!
I still like Brad Steiger’s stuff.