The use of color words in different languages and cultures is a highly interesting and complex topic.
I don’t think we can say that fewer color words means ‘more primitive minds’ at all. This is highly dubious and debatable.
Some of the differences in number of color words may simply be due to the availability of bright dyes and paints, which make more color words necessary. But it goes a lot further than that. Different cultures and languages (both modern and ancient) think of colors differently and categorize them differently.
Experts in ancient Greek have been debating for centuries exactly what Homer meant by οἶνοψ πόντος (oinops pontos) - usually translated in English as ‘wine-dark sea’. The short answer is that nobody knows. The only other time Homer uses the term οἶνοψ, he applies it cattle. One theory
Even the idea that our ancestors lived in small tribes of hunter-gathers, and the importance of the ‘agricultural revolution’ seems less and less true in the light of the latest research.
Here’s a highly interesting article about the latest insights into human societies in prehistory.
Nitpick: I think the word ‘tribe’ is used in this thread where ‘band’ would be the correct term.
All three words are ambiguous and apply differently in different cultures, but very roughly, a clan might be a plurality of bands connected by close kinship; a tribe a collection of clans connected by more distant kinship.
(Details can get weird: Members of the Fox Clan of the Chickasaw tribe had a certain affinity with the Fox Clan of the Choctaw tribe.)
Hm, I find the article intellectually dishonest in the way they put forth this great conspiracy by archeologists and historians to conceal the fact that humans are naturally unequal (e.g., I have read a few books about Paleolithic societies, and the evidence of hierarchies is not minimized or reduced to footnotes as they suggest). And they are not very subtle in their disparaging of anyone who does want social equity.
I think the claims of what our great ancestors could see or do are somewhat specious. We know of settlements going back 14,000 years. Doggerland slipped under the waves 7,000 years ago, but there is clear evidence of villages, burials and so forth.
The idea that hunter-gatherers didn’t have permanent settlements is bunk. The idea that they didn’t have schools is mere speculation and very likely false. And not knowing what their languages even were, it is silly to speculate that they must have only had a single word for the blue-green spectrum, for one example.
All of that is mere speculation, not known truth.
We don’t know if any ancient culture developed a system of writing. Certainly none has survived, but since the only evidence of ancient humans is found in their tools, cave paintings and the occasional skeletal remains, we are missing far too much information to make fact based conjectures on what their cultures were like.
You obviously haven’t read it, because it’s actually saying the exact opposite of what you guessed. Do you make a habit of jumping to wild conclusions?
It’s a long article, and you can really skip to Part 4, which is the scientific research, and the essence of it. The first parts trace the historiography of how our ideas about the emergence of civilization developed.
It’s most certainly not alleging a conspiracy. It’s explaining new facts and perspectives which have emerged from research over the past couple of decades, which have not yet filtered through to general knowledge. It shows that recent popular books like Against the Grain by James C. Scott are wrong in their facts and conclusions.
Having read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Harari’s Sapiens, these are my impressions—
Pre-agricultural foraging/hunting people learned about their environment from the day they were born. They were in peak physical condition from constant walking and other exercise. They knew every rock, every plant, and every animal.
They spent about half the time we do working acquiring sufficient food and spent the rest of their time studying the world around them and socializing (gossiping, having sex, storytelling, playing, etc.).
They were taller and stronger than the agriculturalists that followed them. They were healthier—having a highly diversified diet, having developed more immunities, and not having acquired livestock-origin diseases like cholera and smallpox. They might even have had bigger brains.
They were experts at survival. The average lifespan was low, but if you discount child mortality, they lived into their 60s and some would live into their 80s.
They might have been more brutal than us, depending on how brutal you decide we are, freely murdering “defective” children, social outcastes, weak or old members of the band, and members of other bands.
Nitpick (well maybe more than a nitpick): a 70 foot perimeter structure is 3x the linear dimension of a 24 foot structure, and therefore has 9 times the surface area. Assuming the structures are the same shape and are largely self-supporting shells, the larger one contains 9x the material of the smaller. There’s no benefit to larger structures until you actually start using the 3-dimensional space – that is, you start adding multiple stories. Multiple story buildings were a fairly late architectural innovation in terms of human history.
I think you’re making the exact error I tried to correct for earlier. You’re deciding that because our very distant forbears lacked the arts we do they must therefore have been less intelligent than we are.
Your argument about writing systems, for example, in which you appear to posit that having such makes the Greeks more intelligent than earlier hunter-gatherer groups is clearly an example of this. If writing hadn’t been invented yet, it is improper to hold that against the earlier man in terms of intelligence. The Greeks had it because someone - probably in Mesopotamia for them but writing appears elsewhere for others - came up with it. The Greeks didn’t, they inherited the concept. Using that reasoning, someone much further back was much smarter than any of the Greeks because that person(s) had to have the idea first.
And that’s the real point. Those hunter-gatherers - again, back to a certain point - were just as intelligent - capable of learning, developing new concepts and executing them - as we are today. To hold the fact that they didn’t have iPhones and such against them is to show a real sense of ‘nowcentrism’ (whatever the word may be) that ignores a lot of evidence.
As for your argument about brain size? Also completely unsupported. There’s very good evidence that modern man and earlier homo sapiens have brains of equivalent size. In fact, h sapiens brains appear to be smaller on average - even when larger average body size is accounted for - than our early rivals H. Neanderthalensis. Neanderthal brains averaged about 50% larger per body weight than our direct ancestors (discounting the apparent crossing of Cro Magnon and Neanderthal lines making both our direct ancestors). It was also about 10% larger by volume.
One last thing about brain size and intelligence of modern man. It’s also pretty clear that domestication of animals leads to reduction in brain sizeand possibly in some forms of intelligence. Should that be the case, and should the theory that modern humans are a domesticated version of our forebears be true, then wouldn’t it follow that, despite our adaptations and learning, we are less intelligent on average than early man?
Fascinating article. Perhaps there was no “agricultural revolution” as such. However, it doesn’t seem to have any affect on the idea that “primitive” humans from any time period are conditioned to be very good at surviving, both physically and through acquired and transmitted knowledge about the world around them.
We can see from the pre-technological people that scientists have studied—such as in New Guinea and the Amazon—that “primitive” tribes are quite good at surviving in their locales.
Basic evolution is simply that they survived. Evolution is the result of successful survival, it’s not the “why” that the OP asks. “Conditioning” isn’t evolution. Conditioning refers to the fact that from birth, those people are developing the skills to survive, through experience and through the transfer of knowledge from their parents’ own experience.
For example, their bare feet, their legs, their lungs, and all their other parts made them good at walking all the time on all kinds of terrain, because they were, as individuals, conditioned by constant walking.
I wasn’t responding to the OP. I was responding to your post. Perhaps I misread your meaning, but when you used the phrase “conditioned to be very good at surviving physically” I took that to mean endowed with physical attributes that aid survival. That’s what evolution by natural selection does. If I misread your post, perhaps you could elaborate.
I’ve explained it twice so I’m not sure what different words I can use.
“Conditioning” is not “they had the genes.” Conditioning is experience, practice, training, education, etc.
I said this conditioning started “from birth.” That’s not endowment in the sense of genetic inheritance. That’s lifestyle.
People who live in that way today, as I note above, still have that level of skill and knowledge to survive in the wilderness. That’s because they spend every minute of their lives developing those skills and they are guided by adults who also have that knowledge.
We have basically the same genes they do, so our inability to survive in that situation is not because of genetic differences. The difference between us and them is not natural selection. It’s conditioning.
My research is on the knowledge systems of non-literate cultures including hunter-gatherers. Many of our Australian Aboriginal cultures are primarily hunter-gatherer, but they have very complex knowledge systems. They weren’t nomadic (wandering) but mobile - moving between semi-permanent settlements depending on resources. So no-one gets dumped in the bush and be expected to survive. That’s so artificial it teaches us almost nothing other than about reality TV shows.
The discussion above is about eating and shelter and so on. All important stuff, but then the Greeks were represented by Socrates and Plato. Why not compare like with like? Why not compare the knowledge of the knowledge experts of the hunter-gatherer cultures? We have evidence from Australia of knowledge of landscape changes which date back over 7,000 years and have been reliably retained in oral tradition. To hand on information, memory to memory that accurately for so long is amazing.
They mightn’t have had writing but they had an alternative to literacy which is orality. They used the most extraordinary memory systems. This is my area of academic research - the mechanisms by which they can memorise so much stuff so accurately, and how we can learn those methods from them. A fully initiated Aboriginal (hunter gatherer) elder would have knowledge of hundreds of plants, hundreds of animal species (including invertebrates), navigation of hundreds of kilometres, complex genealogies, land management, legal system, astronomy … the list goes on and on. And they memorise the lot through schooling. I can give citations on any of this.
Writing gave us all sorts of advantages, but at the expense of other intellectual skills, in particular the use of memory.
Tribes evolved before Homo Sapiens. They evolved intemperate, habitable climates which were less challenging than the ones he chooses.
Then, as they learned and grew, some more adventurous groups split off and went out searching for new land. Some were probably also kicked out for various infractions and forced to start a new group. Either way, they had mad survival knowledge long before they left the temperate zone.
