How so? Have you ever tried to grind corn by hand? That is hard work.
As an aside, It is proposed that the European light skin develloped with the arrival of the farmers. That due to the lack of vitamin D in the bread diet it became more important to absorb it through sunlight.
What’s your proposed solution?
It seems to me we’re here, at this level of civilization. To me, moving forward as best we can seems better than wondering if things might have been different if things were different.
What about the psychology of early hunter gatherers though? What about going beyond the physical practicalities.
This is an excerpt from the above link:
" There is an explicit link between vertical, authority-driven civilization, in particular the phenomenon of unitive trance, and the bond between mother and infant (Erikson 1968). Erikson argues that there are connections between phenomena as distant as human infancy and man’s institutions, and that ritual behavior “seems to be grounded in the preverbal experience of infants,” in particular in the mutual recognition that gets reenacted over and over between mother and infant. This first, dimmest affirmative experience is one of a “hallowed presence,” which contributes to man’s ritual-making which seeks to restore or reacquire the “Numinous.” Erikson explains that it is this first dyadic, numinous experience that the individual will try, later in life, to capture repeatedly, through fusion experiences such as romantic love, immersion in a leader’s charisma, or religious practice. The result is a sense of “separateness transcended.” It is thus in infancy that our spiritual destiny is set, and our relationship to God largely determined. In the hg societies we have been describing, romantic love, religion, war, vertical spiritual experience and charisma seem to be absent, aberrant or muted – in such societies infants are not the object of such exclusive (and, one may add, narcissistic) intensity. In the vertical, Neolithic societies, however, the natural spiritual life gives way to shamanism, ecstasy, myth, ritual, charisma and in general, vertical religious experience. Along with this comes a marked fear of death and altered, degraded child-rearing practices which simply reinforce the whole system and make transcendent solutions and explanations increasingly attractive. While agriculturalists seek transformation, hgs are interested in balance."
My first reaction?
I wouldn’t trust a book from 1968. Not on this subject at least.
Why does the date matter? What if nothing new was discovered since then?
Also there seems to be a growing consensus that the warlike nature of them wasn’t the entire truth: How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways | Psychology Today
By growing they mean almost agreed
Tell you what- let’s play along with the OP and admit civilization was a grave mistake.
What does he want us to do about it now?
It’s not that, it’s also the psychology that I listed as well. Isn’t the shift as a result of the negative effects of civilization.
So much crap and so little interest in engaging when the responses are pretty much just ignored.
First off I see no link to a page with any bibliography. A link to a page which discusses the “Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness” and the “noosphere” (which per Wiki “emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.”) … I will leave it with that the value of citations is not in their volume.
Erikson’s stage of development was very important for its time and still has value in understanding childhood development. He was a giant and in particular is still important when one studies adolescent development. His speculations (if he actually made them) about how ritual behaviors in society are based on preverbal infant experiences? Never got traction.
The claim that in HG societies “romantic love, religion, war, vertical spiritual experience and charisma seem to be absent, aberrant or muted” is without much basis. The claim that civilization per se means “exclusive (and, one may add, narcissistic) intensity” to infants, and that civilization as a whole consists of “degraded child-rearing practices” is just dumb.
Yes, so?
As this paper which is mostly about one example of well documented peaceful HG-farmer co-existence notes, through most of Europe farmer men were, bad teeth and all, apparently more appealing to HG females than their own.
(Alternatively the women could have been taken against their will.) Yes that Y-haplotype more common in HGs faded, outcompeted at several levels.
No question that when agriculture migrated in it was associated with a tremendous population explosion of those who practiced it. And that this exploding population had regular contact with the relatively lower density and relatively over time fewer numbers of HGs in the area, including some levels of genetic admixture of the much larger population with the much smaller one. One article that might be of interest from just a quick search:
Point is that the evidence shows more than only that " the farmers spread at the expense of the H-G" … it shows some pretty varied and complex interactions along the way, not exclusively avoidance of contact, and not all conflictual.
My apologies, this is the Bibliography: http://bibliography.huntergatherers.org/
But as you said, my first reaction to reading the psychological page was mixed at best. It seemed like a bunch of wild guesses with little evidence to support them in the end. The whole connection to nature or primal connection smacks of something Freudian which is not a good thing. In all the whole thing at first glance seemed like nonsense to me.
But then I checked out the people he cited and for some reason the doubt went away, even though I doubt the reason was logical. But mostly why I am afraid of the conclusions is the threat that I might have been brainwashed inadvertently as a result of civilization and that happiness will be out of my reach as a result and that I am broken for growing up in modernity.
So’s processing mongongo nuts…
and yes, I have.
I’ve already given a cite which points to the role personal charisma can play in sharing-based societies, and the earlier cite about murder for romantic reasons also gives the lie to the idea HGs don’t have that, so yeah, “not much basis” is putting it mildly.
Given your mental and physical conditions, it’s extremely unlikely you’d have survived early childhood were it not for modernity and your extreme good fortune for having been born now and not 100, let alone thousands of years ago.
If you’re going to obsessively idealize a period of civilization, the here & now is the one to be most nostalgic about.
Again, what do you propose to do about it now?
You haven’t convinced anyone yet, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief. If civilization WAS a mistake, how do you suggest we fix it? Specifics, please.
Civilization was not a mistake…but it does have features that need fixing.
We’ve been working on that; look how far ahead we are of where we were in, say, A.D. 1300
Every historical step forward solves ten old problems, and introduces nine new ones. The OP is focusing solely on the new problems, without giving proper weight to the ten old problems we don’t have any more.
(How many people do you know who have been killed by animal predators, or killed by prey-animals during a hunt? That problem is almost wholly solved.)
One might as well argue against this whole “paleolithic” thing and object to knapping stone for tools, because it changes our entire society from how we naturally evolved, using our bare hands and nothing else. Kids today! They have a stone hand-axe and they start disrespecting their elders! And their music, pfah! Nothing but noise…
So tell me what impresses you about that bibliography?
The impression I immediately get is that there are so few sources listed that are not older than I think you are. Nothing wrong with old research but the understanding of HG societies and the transition from it is an area of much active research over the past several decades. It is not an area in which “nothing new was discovered since then”. Of the, 108 if I counted right, listed sources, there are a total of two that are less than 15 years old (and one of those an autobiography written by a “holistic physicist”), twice as many that are from the '50s or before, and most date to the '60s to '80s.
The theme of many of your threads is how you are broken … by exposure to philosophy, by having been born into an era of modern civilization, so on … and that therefore happiness is outside your reach.
I don’t know if happiness is outside your reach or not. Unhappiness is certainly within your reach. I think some people have a basic unhappy base state. Happiness though is certainly possible in the modern world (including to those who study philosophy).
Perhaps if you are concerned about your happiness you should focus your inquiry less on why it may be impossible and more on how those who are happy achieve it (other than it being their basic inherent temperament assuming basic needs are securely met)?
This book says that the gifts given by civilization is the result of such things. Reading brought down eyesight, shoes increased the issues with skeletal systems. It says we evolved to travel long distances and run while gathering. Even our diet isn’t what we evolved for as it stands.
Reading does not harm eyesight, and shoes do not harm feet.
(Both can be done wrongly, in which case there can be harm.)
People in earliest times “evolved” to fast and binge, which we know, today, are very harmful to human health.
If modern civilization is so harmful to us, why are there seven billion of us, whereas there were only a few hundred thousand alive during the era before civilization?
(Speaking of reading, I did mention eyeglasses. Millions of people would be unable to read entirely if it were not for modern civilization.)
You keep talking about evolution, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that dying horribly is evolution’s enforcement mechanism. 6.9999 billion people would have to die for a “state of nature” to exist. That isn’t the kind of evolution we want to take part in.
Of course it is complex and ‘not only’ avoidance. We are talking about a long period over a large area. There are bound to be exeptions and variations.
But your quotes do not deny but only confirm that the HG were indeed pushed out of existence by the early farmers. Otherwise, if it were the case that the HG intermixed more and even picked up the ‘more superior’ way of life, you would see much much more surviving HG genes in the male dna.
Around the 1970’s a lot of emphasis was placed on theories that ancient people weren’t as violent as we have been in our recent history. That mostly people had been peaceful and coexisting. Observed changes in the archeological record was not due to violent take-overs but through trade and cultural exchange.
I remember being taught how peaceful the Mayans were and that the Cretans didn’t know war.
These rosy ideas of humanity still linger in a lot of academic writings.
Likewise it was also assumed that the indo-european culture was spread through cultural exchange, not through violent conquest of course.
Modern dna studies also reveal that those early farmers were, in turn, also pushed out.
Their G2 haplogroup survives in mountainous and other areas that weren’t attractive to the pastoral indo-europeans. The rest of europe is predominantly haplogroup R1b. In north western europe almost exclusively so.
I’m sad to say that peaceful coexistance is not the way of the human species.
The way of the human is to slay the men and take their women.
Again, not everywhere and everytime but on the whole, yes.
It is certainly one very positive aspect of our modern civilisation, that it has softened this tendancy.
It’s possible the European experience was not universal, of course - the Khoi and San halves of the Khoi-San “ethnicity” (for accuracy, I’m highlighting that that word in this context is problematic, though I usually don’t) co-existed in a form of mutualism for almost two millennia. Also, Bantu South Africans carry significant amounts of Khoi-San DNA, for instance, and based on folklore it’s not all from the herding half.