That’s like asking a layperson spent a week talking with a doctor and then expecting them to be proficient in medicine. People who grow up from infancy learning how to live off of the land are going to be much better at it than Les.
It seems like you are operating from several misconceptions.
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Humans didn’t evolve in caves. Even the “cavemen” who did the paintings like Lascaux didn’t actually live in the caves full time. Humans evolved on the grasslands of Africa and slowly spread from there, adapting to the local environment at each step.
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Humans evolved as social creatures, like chimpanzees and bonobos. They never had to survive as individuals on their own before they learned to form bands and tribes.
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Humans didn’t have to learn to survive on the land as adults. As soon as they were born, they started learning how to understand their surroundings, and build the skills and strength that would stave off the kind of exhaustion displayed by the TV host.
I think this is probably the only time the Mbuti have ever been held up as an example of “lanky”
Wouldn’t we expect groups which developed writing to exchange and accumulate cultural innovations/knowledge/technology faster than the others? Wasn’t writing developed on the basis of agricultural IOUs, especially regarding grain stores?
The memory skills of non-writing groups lynne mentions might be impressive in the same way that calculating Pi to the 50th decimal and bodybuilding are but they severely lack the quickness, scalability, flexibility and resilience of writing.
And people’s ideas of “extended family” change a lot from place to place, among people in developed societies; even between subcultures within what at first sight would be the same culture. It seems to me more likely that the notions of how wide “this is my people” was have been equally wide all throughout humanity’s lifetime than that it was uniform until we started building cities.
How is their relationship with the McFox, or with the Azeris?
The word clan has been used in or applied to many cultures; your proposal is valid for a specific group of cultures. In the Basque example (Azeri is Basque), “clan” applies to “anybody to whom you know you have a blood relationship” and back when we tracked tribes they were cross-tribe, but our concept of banda is a temporary group which has nothing to do with family.
I know native americans tended to live along rivers where their were always fish. Yes you can hunt deer and rabbits but you take even a small village of say 200 people and you will quickly go thru all the wild game in an area.
Now some tribes would move to an area and live there until they had consumed all the wild game, cut down all the usable wood, or made the area unlivable with their waste and then they moved on. I know some tribes in the Philippine jungles did this as well as the Australian aborigines.
Yes, but the first surviving examples of writing we have were on baked clay tablets stored in a desert area where they could survive for thousands of years.
Knotwork accounting isn’t likely to survive very long and wouldn’t be recognizable or understandable to other cultures.
There could have been a culture from 90,000 years ago, with little more than stone and wooden tools, that had a complex system of writing and we wouldn’t know it.
Hell, the Etruscans were conquered by the Romans and we have no clue how to decipher their writing.
We have several clues in fact. But, yes, it still remains mostly undeciphered. Not enough lengthy writings, apparently.
Leaving aside the question of 75,000 years ago, Jared Diamond has expressed his conviction that modern hunter-gatherers, at least, are smarter than us “civilized” folks for two reasons:
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Our population density supports epidemic diseases, many of which migrate from herd animals to humans due to animal husbandry. For many, many generations we have been selected principally for disease resistance, whereas hunter-gatherers have been selected for their ability to understand a complex environment using their brains. (That same pressure applies to us but is dwarfed by epidemic disease.)
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We have television.
It’s worth noting that Jared Diamond has a VERY poor reputation among professional anthropologists and other scientists.
Some critical articles by experts and professionals:
“… shallowness of the arguments … drives anthropologists to distraction”
“Despite claims that Diamond’s book demonstrates incredible erudition what we see … is a profound lack of thought about what it would mean to study human diversity and how to make sense of cultural phenomenon.”
https://savageminds.org/2013/01/08/how-can-we-explain-human-variation/
“academic porn”
Yes, but most of that is jealousy because Diamond had a best selling book and they didnt.
Crap. That’s a Trump-like argument. ‘They disagree with what I prefer to believe, so I’ll make personal attacks on them.’
Can you back up your assertion with facts? Have you even bothered to read and understand the criticisms? I guess not.
From your last cite:" *Halfway through teaching Guns Germs and Steel, I blurted out that it was academic porn. The costumes change, the props change, but in the end it’s the same repeated theme. I don’t think I am entirely crazy, even about the porn. After all, Diamond published two books in 1997. One was Guns Germs and Steel; the other was Why Is Sex Fun? It’s as if Diamond was going for a bestseller and put two books in the stores. It seems surprising Guns Germs and Steel became the bestseller, while Why is Sex Fun? barely left the shelves. Who knew? *"
Oh my Diamond can write books on a bunch of subjects and i can’t so let’s make fun of him and call his books porn! At least then my review will be read, even if no one wants my books!!! :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
His book, “Fast, Easy, and In Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy” is such a dog, that it hasnt even been reviewed once by a reader on Amazon. But it does appear he makes it a required textbook, so at least his students have to buy it.
*Jealousy. *
Great, now it would be nice if you could address some of the actual criticisms of Diamond’s works, instead of continuing to make irrelevant personal attacks. But perhaps that would require too much reading and thought? :dubious:
Wade Davis–the reviewer for the guardian–does have a best selling book. The Serpent and the Rainbow was even made into a movie.
Also “It’s popular so it must be true” is a crap argument. You get that right? You can address the criticisms if you’d like. Maybe the critics are wrong. Explain why, please. Because right now you seem to be arguing in bad faith.
I did, with a quote and everything.
I didnt make that argument.
And I was mostly attacking Jason Antrosio for that crappy “porn” comment. Which isnt good criticism or argument.
Davis’s critique is reasonable, most that Diamonds book is “pop anthropology” and rather shallow. Sure. But it’s just one book, written for the non-scientific reader, and it succeeded greatly in getting that reader into a interest in anthropology. Diamond is writing for a different audience.
I don’t believe that I said otherwise (unless you’re responding to someone else)? I mentioned round huts earlier in the thread.
I’ve never heard of such a thing among hunter gatherers and Google seems to agree that there was not such a thing (first two relevant results):
Minus a time machine, I’m pretty sure that all we will ever be able to do is speculate, using the records that have been left for us over the last several millenia and by doing research on the surviving groups of people who have mostly avoided modern influences.
While, yes, theoretically our current speculation could be wrong, it is nevertheless the current state of the art understanding to my knowledge and the evidence seems reasonable.
I would agree that if we did have a time machine and the ability to learn everything about every language and people throughout the world, that we would likely find just the sort of exceptions that nitpickers would love to bring up. It could well be that there was some tribe of 30 people in Tibet, 20,000 years ago that had 50 words for color because their culture strongly dependended on the identification of varieties of flower. But that wouldn’t change the general course of development that seems to be the case, nor would it change the argument that the Greeks of 200 BC were probably culturally closer to us than to hunter gatherer groups of 20,000 years ago. My argument did not rely solely on color. There were a number of factors that I compared on, and I could have listed still more. And while it may be the case that you could find one prehistoric group that is an exception for each one criteria, it would be farcical to take from that the idea that the Ancient Greeks weren’t ahead of them culturally.
I think it’s fair to say that if there’s one thing we can trust humans to do, given all the knowledge we have from observing them through archaeology, it’s that they will scratch graffiti onto anything they can get their hands on. Using clay for pots, dishes, and other purposes is both a very ancient technology and one which does a really good job of preserving the sorts of things that humans would scratch onto stuff.
I’d be willing to accept that maybe some cultures would decide against writing things on pottery, but to suggest that none of them would is pretty unsupportable. If we don’t find evidence of writing before the evidence of writing, but do find loads of pottery shards or any other flat surface that can be scratched with nothing on it but pictures, I think it’s safe to assume that the culture had not developed writing.
I know this was said fairly lightheartedly, so this isn’t a criticism. I would question the idea that markings in archaeological contexts are graffiti. There is stacks of evidence from non-literate cultures around the world that markings, particularly abstract symbols, are mnemonics for pragmatic knowledge (often integrated with spiritual). This is particularly so for decorated ‘non-utilitarian’ objects found in restricted, non-domestic contexts. Contemporary examples include (among many) African lukasa, Australian tjuringa, Ojibwa birchbark scrolls …
You can end up in the semantics of ‘what is writing’. Using the definition that writing needs to be able to represent the spoken words, then mnemonic sequences are not true writing. But they are stores of information.