I don’t think HGs were smoking a pack a day of unfiltered Camels. People who toked on the pipe at the occasional celebration may not have had any noticeable negative side effects. I understand this is about modern people, but it’s the same sort of thing. It’s only recently that many people had the heavy smoking habit. A cigarette or two a day wouldn’t necessarily alarm people. But I recall that starting at the time that Europeans were introduced to tobacco some people considered it unhealthy. But that wouldn’t lead people to find a strong correlation between smoking and lung cancer. Sometimes the truth is somewhere between the extremes.
There’s two ways to approach this:
Observation:
For the phenomena you describe (grass & buffalo reproduction) one would require a lot of observation – a longitudinal study over at least a year. But then you’re talking about hunter/gatherer societies, which in most cases is a migratory collection of people. The two tend to be mutually exclusive, because hunting tribes are moving frequently throughout the year. The popular notion is that they “followed the herd” but it’s probably more accurate to say they were driven by the seasons, moving to the mountains in the summer and to the desert in winter; moving to the coast in summer and sheltering farther inland during the winter; moving closer or farther from lakes or rivers [perhaps as the herds were driven by the seasons…] Chances are they weren’t in close enough proximity to observe buffalo mating and birthing to be able to associate the two, and they didn’t stick around long enough to observe (in isolation) the germination and growth of grass seeds. Furthermore, the time and energy to sit around watching grass grow, buffalo reproduce, and thunder clouds flow across the landscape is a luxury no Hunter or Gatherer can afford. There’s just too much work to be done to either prepare for lean times, survive the lean times, or recover from the lean times.
Knowledge:
Even when we can safely assume the transition has been made to an agricultural/stationary society, there’s a lot of differences in explanations for the observations.
For instance, on a table-top world with uneven landscape, it’s easier to see a longer distance if you can get up a hill or mountain – provided there’s no trees, other hills or mountains, fog, or clouds obstructing the view. For instance, in a village where all the buyers talk openly to each other and have access to every seller, there’s no need to worry about someone cheating in the village market – provided all the buyers are always communicating truthfully and without any bias.
We know, however, from study of ancient Greek* and Roman artifacts, that there were some ancient societies who had an idea that the world was spherical, based on multiple observations (throughout the year) of the shadow cast on the moon when the earth was between the sun and the moon. [It may be worth noting, however, that those societies had moved far beyond Hunter/Gather subsistence.]
Speaking of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the great philosophers of the time spoke of the ‘nature’ of elements – a stone’s nature was ‘of the earth’ and tended to fall when released; smoke was of the ‘nature’ of air and thus floated when released. Perhaps there was a mystical ether which, though extremely thin, was like an obscuring fog that hid things from view when there was enough distance between observer and object. That, combined with real fog, could explain the vision-and-distance problem quite easily and, until something came along to disprove the idea, it was sufficient to let it stand and worry about staying alive.
Meanwhile, there persisted several beliefs in deities who divided the universe into physical and emotional aspects, or even a single deity who was in charge of everything. All these belief systems included varying cosmologies and world views. James Burke wrapped up a show called “The Day the Universe Changed” by showing viewers that there are societies that retain views of an un-changing world, a world where new technologies based on new science (i.e. knowledge) are worked into the ancient world view. Just as monotheists adhere to a view of the world as a fatherly figure’s creation, Buddhists adhere to a view of the world as nothing more than an illusion. The innovation of the secular/scientific tradition is that it is willing to repeatedly test its own premises and, when they fail, adjust the gospel to fit the data – rather than the other way around. Newtonian physics worked fine, until Einstein showed that it didn’t. We didn’t throw out Newton, we just understand that his views were limited and apply Einstein when dealing with things beyond Newton’s limits.
And Knowledge, even when correct, takes a long time to become universally accepted. Even though people in the 1400’s knew (perhaps having studied Greek materials) that the earth was spherical, there were still people in the 18th and 19th century who insisted it was flat. And the Vatican didn’t come around to the heliocentric view of the world until the late 1900’s (and, even then, they didn’t admit to being wrong, per se). There are societies which still practice slavery; there are ‘societies’ which still believe crystallized rock formations can impart special attributes or healing; there are people that still believe in entities who impart good or bad luck to gamblers or those with disease.
So it’s not that they didn’t know. They knew as surely as you and I know . . .
- that humans are the most intelligent animals on this planet
- that weather patterns affect the life forms on this planet, not the other way around
- that the flora and fauna of this world do not (without artificial help in the laboratory) share cells between plants and animals, or higher mammals and bacteria. We have observed that the body tries to reject the introduction of bacteria into complex animals – that’s what infection and disease are. . .
- that digging holes in the planet and sucking out its usable resources is perfectly safe even on a massive scale
- that faster-than-light travel is impossible
–G!
I can’t explain
The time it takes
To Make you Understand
. --Robin Zander (Cheap Trick)
. Never Had a Lot to Lose
. Lap of Luxury
[1] The Greek observation is especially relevant, as their early observations and definitions of constellations are still in popular use today.
That was the part that raised my eyebrows the highest, but even then I’m not actively dismissing it; rather, I’m asking for the evidence that supports such claims. Anthropology is a notoriously inaccurate science (it’s not all bad, but the difficulties of peer review and reproducible results make the introduction of error very easy), and these claims seem extraordinary to me; I’ll want to see some very strong evidence of their veracity before I go about trying to explain how they could come about.
I am just talking about people in the 1940’s and 50’s when smoking was promoted as a health aid in ads. The human capacity for self-delusion is a bottomless chasm as evidenced by overweight and out of shape people today but the advisement lines of the time said that smoking was actually good for you. I don’t think anyone could rationally conclude that on their own.
It is obvious unlike the earth being round. A round earth sounds like an extremely specious claim until you understand the the science behind it and can see pictures of it yourself from space. All you need to know about smoking can be learned by hanging out with a bunch of 40+ year old smokers who show it in obvious ways.
Certainly anybody who was a heavy smoker or knew heavy smokers would realize that smoking was bad for you. The way modern Americans smoke would certainly require self-delusion to believe it was good for you, and I can’t see anyone drawing that conclusion. But ignorance can be as powerful a force as knowledge. Some farm boy in the 40s, suddenly finding himself in a foxhole in a war, who had his nerves calmed by smoking a cigarette, might think it had some short term benefit, and not realize that he could become addicted, eventually smoke thousands and thousands of cigarettes, and that it could lead to serious disease. He might extol the virtues of smoking to his fellow soldiers, who equally ignorant would believe him. I think that’s what this thread is about if you follow the link at the beginning to the thread about HGs. With ignorance, and only rumor and superstition as a source of information, people can be readily fooled.
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This post has been Blueberried by the Blueberrier?
The term “coffin nails” dates from before we knew about lung cancer being caused by them. Of course, no one knew exactly how bad they really were.
My primary hobby is known as primitive archery. I make bows and arrows from natural materials just as they did 15,000 years ago. Their is actualy quite a bit of physics that goes into a proper design in order to harness the power efficiently. nearly every culture had developed a very advanced version of the bow and arrow depending on what and how they hunted and what they had to work with. Even the art of knapping arrow heads and tools from stone which is very complex was well understould. I think they tended to concentrate their intelligence on things directly related to survival.
And I was comparing falling to falling 
And the whole point is, it’s not logical. I was illustrating why the leap of logic you’re using, when applied to other situations clearly doesn’t work.
All I can say is that the OP’s comments are very naïve. Yes, sometimes claims of how ignorant a particular society or people is might well be exaggerated, but usually this is not the case. What the OP fails to notice is that he knows these things precisely because he has a background of Western civilization which relies on thousands of years of progress in knowledge that is written and published for anyone to study, and a culture that encourages critical and innovative thinking and questioning of established truths and former knowledge (well, at least that’s the ideal). A hunter-gatherer society doesn’t have this advantage. How could they know?
Many posters have already explained what the problem with this approach is, but just to drive the point home, consider a few things. Have you ever read the actual history of how the flat earth worldview was changed to the spherical earth? If you did, you would notice that the model of round Earth was a huge shift which took couple of centuries and happened just once in a very sophisticated and scientifically advanced society of ancient Greece. The knowledge that the Earth is round spread to areas influenced by hellenistic culture - Europe, Middle East and India - but no further. Everywhere else the flat Earth apparently prevailed, even in societies with sea travel or long history of precise astronomical measurements, such as the Maya or most importantly China. If a huge technologically advanced civilization with a history 3000 years of written documents and precise astronomy doesn’t come up with a model - at least not a commonly accepted one - that the Earth is actually spherical instead of flat (or slightly curved like a frisbee or a low hill), how can a tribe of hunter-gatherers do that?
The common sense says the Earth is flat, or if you climb on a mountain you might say the Earth is a bowl instead, watching tall ships from a port might convince you of a dome- or frisbee-like Earth… but a sphere? No way! As Cecil explains here, the ancient Greeks needed at least three types of indications - the apparent curvature of the Earth from seeing ships in the horizon, the shape of Earth’s shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses and the fact that the positions of stars on the sky move when travelling between North and South and can be calculated according to latitude - and a lot of philosophical and mathematical work to conclude that a round Earth makes more sense than a flat one. It wasn’t obvious, as can be seen when we compare this to the Chinese who also could observe all these indications but still kept the flat Earth model.
If you’ve been taught by your tribe that the Earth is flat and your common sense says so too, you’re not going to be convinced otherwise by climbing a mountain. The accepted authority already told you all you need to know about the shape of the world. Indeed, if we consider the medieval European scholars who accepted the round Earth, we might question if they really “knew” it, or, did they just follow what they had been told. What the learned Europeans in the Middle Ages generally did was to accept the writings of Aristotle as the truth, and since the Great Philosopher had written that the Earth is round, then so it was. Similarly, since it was written that this round Earth was the immovable center of the universe, then that was also the truth. Or Aristotle’s laws of motion, which correspond to the common sense and which among other things stated that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. These laws stood unchallenged for about 1900 years until Galileo changed this part of physics with something that didn’t follow the common sense but could actually be theoretically and empirically proven. So we can see how the teachings of some authority and the common sense can sometimes be right and sometimes wrong.
It would be good to consider your own knowledge and beliefs and realize where they come from. You as a child knew that seed=plant in a city because someone told you so, and that’s presumably also the primary reason why you know that the Earth is round. Realizing this, you should understand why it’s perfectly normal for a hunter-gatherer to totally lack the knowledge of these things.
Not all things are forgotten - and I stick to that thought - but as my friends would say ‘Typical Taurus’ - Oh yes they are so much more observan t than HG’s…
Because the type of thinking that is required to make those inferences is itself something you were taught. They had to discover that type of thinking the hard way. The idea that all present events are caused by past events isn’t even a given–babies don’t understand it.