Because you specified the knowledge system. Not the knowledge within. A library is the classic written knowledge system, but how would you go about transcribing the working library itself, as opposed to the books within it? To look at one of the simpler tasks, how would you go about transcribing the locations of the books? This is knowledge contained in the system that any regular user of the system would be well aware of. She could walk into the right stack for the topic she wanted without even thinking about it. But how do you transcribe this knowledge into written form? How do you transcribe all the tricks used to do a reference search?
This sort of thing is where a lot of people go astray. They conflate a knowledge system with the information it contains. They are two totally different things. No knowledge system can be transcribed because knowledge, by definition, can only exist within a living brain.
If all you are talking about is the facts within the system then it is no more difficult to dictate info from a verbal knowledge system than to transcribe from a written one.
"For southeast Cameroon’s 150,000 Baka pygmies … And the Baka, who know the forest better than anyone else, but are at the bottom of the economic ladder, were never consulted. Now they are the losers in every conceivable way.
For centuries they have gathered fruit, nuts and honey from the forest, caught fish, and killed and eaten indigenous species such as antelope, porcupine, monkey and duiker. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship with their environment, and stocks were replenished as part of the natural cycle.
The 19th century evangelising invasion had minimal impact on the Baka. But while Western missionaries failed to make inroads, their fellow Africans, the Bantu, did. They moved in from surrounding areas, slashed and burned forests and started farming. In no way can they be described as prosperous but, compared to the Baka, they live like kings."
an issue I haven’t seen mentioned yet in this thread and a possible reason for why agriculture developed in New Guinea but not Australia is the sheer size of Australia and the consequent low population density.
Spread that out over the expanse of Australia and the density is so low that there is no need to develop Agriculture, there is plenty of land for each hunter gatherers tribe to have a more than adequate territory.
As populations rose in places like New Guinea the more efficient use of land from farming would become necessary, but the population never reached that density in Australia.
I can start quoting my post-graduate qualifications in information technology if you like.
Are you familiar with any of the literature on primary orality? Starting with Walter Ong Orality and Literacy, and then hopefully moving on to Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality, and the other works on this topic. Most important, Carl Couch, Information Technologies and Social Orders, and Constructing Civilizations. Couch is my (posthumous) mentor, and the Couch Center is sponsoring me to present on this topic in Chicago in November.
If not, then I can’t argue the case. There’s just too much of a gap between the way we are approaching this topic.
Australia is the smallest inhabited continent not the largest…
1)This is begging the question. Australia had a low population densities because it never developed agriculture, not the other way around. Once Australia got agriculture population densities increased to the same as everywhere else in the world.
There isn’t plenty of land. Humans are just like any other animal, they reproduce until they reach carrying capacity. Far form every tribe having plenty of land, Australians were in a state of constant warfare over scarce resources.
But there is absolutely no evidence that population density in NG before agriculture was any higher than in Australia.
Your whole position seems to stem form the idea that every landmass got the same allocation of humans, and had to fit them in somehow. That’s not how it works, Population increase to the capacity of the land to hold them. In productive areas of Australia populations increased to the same as in productive areas of New Guinea. In less productive areas of both the populations weren’t as high. Since humans can’t survive in rainforest and NG has so much rainforest I doubt if, even on landmass scale, it ever had the population densities of coastal Australia.
Given that homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years and had spread all over the habitable globe in 190,000 years, why did it take 195,000 years to begin establishing cities/civilizations?
Britain itself got into the civilization business quite late, kicking and screaming at the hands of the Romans, and when the Romans left, the dark ages descended.
And less than two millenia later,1% of homo sapien history, the British conquered Australia and delivered civilization.
There has to be a need for a complex society. That either stems from overcrowding in agriculturally rich areas requiring a complex social structure and constraints or is adopted/ imposed as a means to service another civilization.
My point is that civilization is not the be-all for human existence.
There just was no need for it in pre-Janszoonian Australia.
I’m totally unimpressed by arguments from authority, most especially on anonymous message boards
No, but how about we discuss what you actually said, rather than trying to name drop?
“If I had to explain it… I couldn’t”. How quaint.
Personally I’ve always lived by “If you can’t explain it to a bright 12 year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
You seem to say this sort of thing a lot, and it always seems to be when your argument is going a certain way.
I’m not anonymous. My profile tells you exactly who I am.OK, you don’t know anything about primary orality. Fine. But I feel like we’re discussing relativity and you’ve never heard of Einstein.
Oh, and I have taught extremely bright 12 year olds. If that is your motto, then we’re even further apart. I won’t reply to your posts any more and you may interpret it any way you like. I am more interested in the discussion on the OP.
What is this supposed to address exactly? I think that both Colibri and I are well acquainted with these facts. However they don’t actually address the question.
It says that the Baka exploited the rainforest for centuries, not millenia as you claims. It says that they gathered nuts, meat and honey, as I claimed above. It nowhere says that they do not trade massive amounts of food with there neighbours and it nowhere says that they do not work as farmhands.
Wiki, Baka: “The Baka are among the oldest inhabitants of Cameroon and the neighbouring countries. Their semi-nomadic lifestyle has persisted largely unchanged for thousands of years, …”
Your article is the present. The present tense is different to the past tense.
Bzzt! There was a well-developed tribal system that was not hunter-gatherer well before the Romans. And Britain did not descend into a hunter-gatherer society once the Romans left.
Maybe, but it developed independently everywhere other than Australia. I think the points made about the climate and the lack of resources are rather more pertinent.
And even if it were acceptable, it only says the lifestyle has remained unchanged, not that it hasn’t always depended on agriculture.
That’s because what we know about them and other HGs comes from energetics studies on food finding in rainforest and on modern day studies. We can’t study the past directly. We can only extrapolate form past records and from present cases, and none of these indicate the baka ever survived in the rainforest without agricultural support.
"Most people who live in Old World rain forests and reportedly practice hunting and gathering are similar to the Mbuti pygmies of northeast Zaire. They do spend considerable time hunting and gathering forest resources, but they trade some proportion of those resources to horticulturalists or commercial traders for agricultural food. Others exploit resources outside the tropical forest, including marine shores, lakes, or rivers; many such people work for horticulturalists, pastoralists, or nearby plantations or commercial logging operations to gain part of their subsistence. In addition, many groups specialize in some sort of commercial production themselves, such as in the production of robes and baskets, or in the procurement of medicinal plants. R. G. Fox (1969) has referred to this lifestyle as that of the “professional primitive.” Headland has called it “commercial hunting and gathering,” and many see it as specialized hunting and gathering. Whatever its label, it is not independent hunting and gathering in tropical rain forest.
…
Hart and Hart (1986) found that for as much as five months of the year, none of the calorically important forest fruits and seeds are available to human foragers in the Ituri region. Furthermore, the most common prey animals of Mbuti have very low fat content, especially at the time of year when vegetable foods are scarce. Therefore, the Harts conclude that “it is unlikely that hunter- gatherers would have lived independently in the forest interior with its precarious resource base,” and that the Ituri was “essentially uninhabited until recently” (1986:29).
Today, all pygmy populations throughout central Africa rely on crop foods for a substantial proportion of their diet. Many garner horticultural products just as the Mbuti do—by hunting and gathering wild forest resources and trading them, along with their labor, to sedentary food producers. This mode of subsistence, called specialized hunting and gathering, is a common life way, practiced by many peoples living in tropical rain forests around the world.
…
It is possible that, prior to the introduction of agriculture, pygmies were not distributed throughout the Zaire Basin as they are today, but instead exploited the more productive and stable forest-savannah ecotone around the lip of the Basin. Within the forest itself, resources, particularly sources of carbohydrates and fats, may have been too sparsely distributed to support human foragers throughout the year. When shifting horticulturalists expanded into the Basin, they created concentrated sources of carbohydrates in the form of cultivated plants, and carved a patchwork of secondary and primary habitats that became more productive than the original rain forest. This process in effect extended the ecotone into the Zaire Basin and may well have facilitated a concomitant expansion of pygmy populations from the forest edges into the central portions of the Basin.
…
Thus, it is impossible at present to support the hypothesis that people lived in the tropical moist forest of Africa without the aid of cultivated foods. This may be due to the paucity of archeological evidence within the Zaire Basin. However, those few archeological sites that have been found within what is rain forest today seem to have been occupied when the climate was drier and the habitat was probably woodland or savannah. As central Africa becomes better known archcologically, preagricultural sites within true rain forest may be found."
Hunting and Gathering in Tropical Rain Forest: Is It Possible?
Robert C. Bailey; Genevieve Head; Mark Jcnilce; Bruce Owen; Robert Rechtman;
Elzbieta Zechenter
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 91, No. 1. (Mar., 1989), pp. 59-82.
Look, you have the evidence that they don’t live in the rainforest. You have the evidence that humans are incapable of finding sufficient food to live in African rainforests. At this stage you really need to provide a reputable reference to support your claim that the Baka ever did lived in the rainforest. Given that it contradicts the known facts and tha so much else that you’ve posted in this thread is provably wrong I’m not inclined to take your word for it any more than I am to accept and uncited Wikipedia claim.
I have learned a great deal, and thank you. I find your information very interesting, Blake. I did find most of your long post above told me that a mobile people were mobile - they moved between different environments over the year. I would have thought that was obvious. The debate over whether they lived in the rain forests at all before farmers came is interesting. I will check that with more recent references when I get the time.
In that case you have once again missed the clearly stated point, which is that it is and always has been impossible for people to live in the rainforest of Africa. They must either leave for most of the year to find food or else trade with nearby agriculturalists.
That was my original point,and the one that you disputed.
Although this an interesting topic and an enjoyable thread I must admit that I have only read about half a page so far so please slide me just a smidgen of forgiveness is this has already been mentioned.
The OP stated that:
But this is not true. Aboriginal Australians did eventually progress to an agricultural and (virtually at the same time) industrial mode. This happened when Australia was settled by Europeans (or perhaps slightly earlier by some other post-agricultural society. I am not up on my Australian history but it is not really important for the purposes of my post.)
I am not simply being cheeky by pointing out this rather obvious notion. In many (some?) other parts of the world “mankind changed from hunter-gatherer to farmer and empire” only once some other society that was either a trading partner or a conqueror brought the necessary techniques and plant/animal stock with them.
Perhaps there is a certain significance that aboriginal Australians were a lot later then the rest of the world to progress to agriculture and then industry, but I don’t really see it. To me their “evolution” is only differentiated from a lot of other societies’ by how late it happened that they were finally encountered by agricultural/industrial peoples. The way that they finally “evolved” is no different than many other groups.
And there were some groups of indigenous people who did not join the fun of the modern world until even later–long after the Australian aboriginals did. These other groups may have been located in isolated pockets of continents that were already industrialized and so did not represent an entire continent, but the reasons for those 20th century indigenous peoples’ late progression to agriculture and industry were largely the same as the native Australians–isolation.
Yeah, it is true. In Asia, North America, South America humans indisputably progressed to agriculture. Africa and Europe are a bit sketchy, but being the same landmass as Asia it doesn’t really invalidate the point. In Australia that progression never occurred. Some Aborigines eventually adopted agriculture as a result of prolonged and aggressive contact with agriculturlsts from other landmasses that had settled the continent, but they never made the progression themselves.
That’s wildly different from the other landmasses where either indigenous agriculture developed or else the locals adopted agriculture with only casual contact with agriculturalists.
I can not think of anywhere else in the world where people became agricultural only as a result of being conquered by agriculturalists. Can you name an example for me?
That’s the problem, Australians had been in constant prolonged contact with agriculturalists for 5, 00 years or more and never adopted agriculture. It required aggressive contact with agriculturalists living on the exact same land to prompt the change.
Again, I’d like you to name an example for me. A group of people who lived on arable land and practised no agriculture whatsoever into the 20th century.
Blake has already addressed this, but I’ll make the same point: none of this indicates that the Baka, or other pygmies, lived in tropical rainforest before the arrival of Bantu agriculturalists.
It might be mentioned that the African rainforest is perhaps even less conducive to hunter-gatherers than other rainforests. Large areas are occupied by relatively low diversity forests dominated by Gilbertiodendron dewevrei. I visited the field stations of John and Terese Hart, cited by Blake above, in the Ituri forest some years ago, where I was able to go out net hunting for duiker with 20 of their pygmy assistants. What was most impressive to me about the forest was its monotony compared to the more diverse forests in Latin America I am more familiar with.
It’s possible that some tropical forests can support low density hunter-gatherer populations, but these are not typical. In Panama, Clovis spear points have been found in areas that were probably forest 11,000 years ago. However, these forests may have been more open then than the present forests found in the area; and the paleoindians may have only been in the forest seasonally.