So why are there still primitive societies?

Factual Questions
21

My personal experience with the Piaroa (Caroni river in Venezuela, where I worked as an interpreter) is that they are very isolated (accessible only by boat) and specialized to their environment.

What little has trickled to them has been adapted in ways completely different from the intended. Toothbrushes in particular seem to find every unreal use you could give to a very resistent, somewhat flexible non-rotting stick. Kids use tshirts for the novelty factor but they soon find other uses also.

A few innovations have managed to stick (spiral latrines) but overall, what they do they have done for centuries and they really have got the hang of it more than what a foreigner could believe would make an improvement. They welcome dental care and vaccinations but not a whole lot else.

They are very curious. They will ask questions to no end and want to touch and see every item you have. It is just that they are answers to needs they don’t have.

22

The thing about agriculture is that the amount of work you have to do is seasonal, and starvation is a much more real possibility – put two and two together and you start bending over backwards in your time off trying to invent a better plow.

We, with all of our advanced technology probably cannot improve upon the hunter/gatherer lifestyle the OP describes. How are you going to incorporate modern medicine into such a lifestyle? Yes, probably a person who went to European medical school might be a better doctor than the shaman, but he would make a pretty crappy shaman. The hunting they do is probably as good as it’s going to get, guns won’t make it all that better, people already tend to be at the top of the food chain. Basically, I guess what I’m trying to say is what modern technology do we have that a culture could adopt, understand and maintain that does not require fixed developed settlements made of rigidly constructed buildings on flat terrain? The only thing that comes to mind is glassblowing.

23

Robert Anton Wilson wrote about gorillas who kept it a secret that they were as intelligent as humans and could speak human language. One of them says, “If it got out that we can talk, the conservatives would exterminate most of us and make the rest pay rent to live on our own land; and the liberals would try to train us to be engine-lathe operators.”

24

They’ve worked out a society that will most likely sustain them until industrialized nations destroy the world. Why the hell would they want to be anything other than primitive?

IANAAnthropologist, but I would imagine the trade off is just not work it. From everything I’ve read, the hunting and gathering lifestyle provides for a lot more leisure time than, say, my daily lifestyle. From this essay (I am currently at my parents house, but when I return to school in a few days, I will be able to find you a better cite, if you wish.):

Life for primitive people only involves a couple of hours of work a day. They know enough about the plants that grow around them that they are able to treat common ailments and ward off infections. What else do they need? Would things like steam power, electricity, and knowledge of magnetism bring them happiness? They sing and dance and play and tell stories for most of their day! They can do all of that without industrialization.

I think that a better question would be why did the rest of the world develop as it did? From my basic knowledge of human history, it seems that the agricultural revolution started as a reaction to food shortages. People realized that they could grow excess food supplies and store it for when times were rough. If times weren’t rough, would they have started growing their own food rather than just picking it off of the trees and bushes that already provided so plentifully? For whatever reason, primitive people didn’t have a need to change their societies like peoples in other parts of the world did, so they didn’t.

Possibly. Of course, I may have just been brainwashed by my liberal geography and anthropology professors. An interesting book that discusses this topic in more depth is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It’s a quick read once you get into it.

In my googling for a good answer, I also came across a piece entitled Why Only Some Became Farmers. It is, most likely, more the sort of answer you were looking for.

What team do you say rah rah for? It sounds like you root for the home team, but I’m sure that’s not just because it’s the first one you went to any games for…

25

So they don’t have to constantly kill there children and old folk just to maintain a population that won’t starve.

No, no, no. Obtaining food involved only a couple of hours work a day. That is it. Everyone overstates this trope when it is repeated. Once you add in tool manufacture, food preparation and travel HG life involves at least 8 hours a day, and frequently 16 hour days when ties are tough.

I’d love to see your evidence that any HG group can effectively treat 25% of common ailments or ward off more than 1 specific infection.

HGs have almost no ability to treat common ailments and even less technology to assist in fighting off infections. For example HGs have no ability to set broken bones, no ability to repair tooth decay (and no, bashing out teeth is not a “treatment” unless you can produce dentures, it’s amputation), no ability to treat heart disease or myopia or any of the most common human ailments.

Medicine. A cultural memory that is longer than living memory and more accurate than rumour. A system that allows people the luxury of not having to kill their own children and grandparents to avoid starvation.

Little things like that.

Reminds me of that other rhetorical question “Would money bring you happiness”. And the response: It can make your misery much more comfortable.

Not really, no. Food storage developed many thousands of years after people had already adopted agriculture. Indeed there were and still are many agricultural people who store no food. Most wet tropical agriculturists for example don’t store any significant amounts of food, and even many native American farmers never stored food, instead reverting to hunting and gathering in winter.

So the idea that the agricultural revolution started because people realised they could store food is putting the cart before the horse. People realised they could store food because they were skilled agriculturalist.

You seem to have a penchant for romanticising the HG lifestyle. Nowhere on the planter Earth have “trees and bushes… provided so plentifully” for humans. HGs had to work damn hard to stay alive. There’s a good reason you never see tribes of fat HGs. Worse yet they had to practice routine infanticide to keep their populations within sustainable limits. Every mother and father had to kill at least 4 or 5 of their own children in their lifetime. If HGs didn’t practice “population control” the land would never have been able to support them.

People switched to agriculture in large part because it made such population control unnecessary. Every additional child is an additional field hand to an agricultural family, and is seen as a blessing more than a curse. As a result agricultural populations expanded to many times that of HGs displaced them. That is why people took up agriculture. It is needed to be able to compete with other agriculturists. As others have noted, only in lands where agriculturists couldn’t establish did HG societies manage not to be displaced.

The evidence says exactly the opposite. The only places where agriculture could be supported people either switched to agriculture or were displaced. IOW it wasn’t a case of not needing to switch to agriculture. It was simply that in some places people were unable.

While I wouldn’t go that far I will say that you have a very rosy view of the HG lifestyle. HGs do not spend all day singing and dancing as you suggest. They do not have much at all in the ability to treat even simple ailments. They work damn hard for there food and are able to survive at all by enforcing rigorous population control methods which invariably includes extremely high rates of infanticide.

26

Hey, only because they haven’t invented the ox, doesn’t mean they don’t know about splints! That’s not exactly modern medicine.

Some of us may have too-rosy views, but your post sounds like every single HG society shares the worst traits and constrains of any given HG society… “all” HG commit post-birth abortion? or “some”?

27

Allow me to rephrase: “No ability to effectively set broken bones”. A splint is useless for a broken collarbone for example, and of extremely limited use in setting the long bones of the leg or arm in case of a serious fracture. Really a splint is only useful for minor fractures to prevent pain form overextension.

Just the facts.

“Post birth abortion”? What a wonderful euphemism for infanticide.

And to the extent that nobody has found a HG society that does not or did not practice infanticide as standard population control, we can safely say “all”. Of course some groups vanished or were corrupted before such detailed studies could be made so it may not have been universal, but as far as we can tell it was. Moreover the fact that HG adult populations didn’t fluctuate radically proves that some method of population control was in play. Unless we wish to postulate some unknown method of contraception with a phenomenally high success rate we’re left at one conclusion.

Of course this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Infanticide has been routine in most non-Christian societies as far as we can tell. And even in Christian societies it was still widely practiced before the advent of effective birth control, it just wasn’t sanctioned. I don;t see why we should be surprised that HGs also practiced infanticide.

The difference being that HGs practiced infanticide because they were compelled to in order to survive at all. In contrast most infanticide in agricultural societies was an is a choice predicated on economic and social positioning. As a result infanticide was mandated in HG societies, but an option in agricultural societies.

28

I think people are missing the point that there are still primitive societies around the world. They are there because we have not taken over their land and colonized, as we have within european countries. At one time before what we call europe there were primitive people, they have been deposed and no longer exist, so we think the European has developed from the primitive people before. So the answer is Primitive people did not develop into a higher society we call Europe (as an example), like America they were deposed. Which probably means the human being as we are now has developed from a system of intense greed and desire to create weath. These people are the human beings who prevail with the primitive people almost eradicated, that is if there are any at all now. The people we call Primitive are most likely human beings who decided to go back to a nature way of living. Of course this is my theory, feel free to argue and import your ideas.

29

Could we perhaps not say primitive, i don’t think it is an honest reflection of what they are.

Think about it, from their point of view what is so great about a large part of said technology? It’s overly complicated, not self sustaining, and too hectic.

As far as medicine goes, true some aspects are good, but they have medicines too
we actually learn useful modern things from their medicines.

Ever seen a “Primitive” witch doctor open a living human skull?
He like his forefathers has been doing it for 1000’s of years, and all things considered not a bad survival rate.
No idea how the knowledge was acquired when even attempting it is recent for the civilized world.

Why would they need to?
Has nothing to do with poverty etc.
Trade Africa for North America so we can ditch the poverty thing.
The Plains tribes were happily doing what they had done for 1000’s of years.
Even if the Spanish did’t turn lose horses, they would have been happily doing what they did pre-horse.

They invented what they needed, they had a different way of looking at things.
You did not subject the earth to your use, you learned to live with the earth and not leave permanent marks on it.

Of course they had geniuses, you do not have to develop a nuclear bomb to have a genius, they would not think to make a rapid fire arrow launcher.
Something like that would only have one use, killing many people.
And most of your so called “primitive” peoples have a different view of killing.
They don’t see it as a good thing, even if they are fighting someone it still is not viewed as a good thing to have to do.
Not choosing to invent things you do not need is no sign of lack of intelligence.

Many Native Americans even now would love to be able to go back to that life, and they have been rolled into modern civilization.

Think about it for a minute.
These “Primitive” civilizations did not cause deadly global events
they did not cause global destruction of the environment
they didn’t cause wide spread death or destruction
They tended to live with nature, not against it
Where is their a downside to this?

If all man kind never moved from that life style, tell me the actual real disadvantages

30

Vaccines.

31

The Toulambi tribe of New Guinea and Sentinelese Islanders of the Andaman archipelago are, of course, major contributors to the organized field of asteroid impact avoidance.

32

This thread is 10 years old. Just so you know. I guess it can’t be considered a primitive society though …

33

As to why they haven’t developed steam engines, well, most people don’t develop steam engines. Only a very small handful of people anywhere ever develop any invention at all, and then they share them so everyone ends up with them. And of course, inventions build upon each other: You can’t make a practical steam engine until you have good, strong steel that you can work into various shapes, which means mines and smelting and metallurgy and something that burns very, very hot and so on, each of which requires a number of other technologies in turn. So of course an isolated society is going to be missing the vast majority of inventions.

34

They were overrun by the zombie hoardes.

35

The fact that they did not go extinct by this point in time kind of says they do not necessarily “need” them.
They might be nice if they are exposed to the rest of us who carry around stuff from the 4 corners of the earth, but they survived with out them.

It’s more of a question of do THEY feel they need, not what WE think they need.

36

My contribution would be to say - “What do you expect them to do?”

People live as they always lived, their society operates as it always had, until something comes along that makes it change.

In northern Canada, for example, the government specifically collected Inuit people in small “towns”, set up hospitals and local administrations and schools, made an effort to provide them with modern housing, and so on… Some still go out on the land and hunt, set up summer camps, hunt with snowmobiles more often than sled dogs (since the government arranges to ship gasoline north). They kill caribou and bring the meat back to town, put it in the freezer in their modern house. With education, some participate in the services, others collect welfare paid by the central government.

On a tour of the Isle of Lewis and Harris, for example, a local told me that many of the locals lived in rock and thatch cottages with dirt floors, half for them, half for the livestock - until just after WWII when the Labour government made a determined effort to drag them into the 20th century by building real houses.

In “primitive” societies, the country’s government had either no money, no the firepower, or no urgency to force this transformation onto the locals. They may have managed to enforce some basics - i.e. Diamond mentions that the New Guinea government enforces the “no tribal warefare” rules, even if they can’t do a lot more for everyone.

The problem is, as I said “what do you expect”? If the locals want to start driving tractors or cars - they need the money to buy these, they need the money for maintenance and gasoline, they need trained mechanics, they need roads that will support these vehicles. If they want to move out of mud huts, they need money to buy lumber or bricks, and the infrastructure to create and deliver these. If they want education, someone has to arrange for and pay teachers within walking distance of each village, etc. If they are going heavily into agriculture, the land has to support that sort of lifestyle. Most “mainly hunter” societies live in places where arable land is too scare to support agriculture (which is also why they have not been agricultural for the last millennia).

What actually happens is that pieces of the modern world make their way into the most remote places, bit by bit. Goat herders in Afghanistan use cellphones to talk to family members on the way to market (and apparently made their displeasure known when the Taliban started blowing up cell towers, so they stopped). Bicycles, low maintenance and fast simple transportation, are all over the third world. Tarps and corrugated metal replace thatch. Commercially produced cloth replaces homemade stuff. And so on… but to have money to buy this stuff, they need to produce a cash crop of some sort…

37

Yeah, I’m sure the ones who get sick from vaccine-preventable diseases would agree with you.

Americans and Europeans didn’t go extinct from not having a polio vaccine. Should we not have invented it? Was inventing the polio vaccine a bad thing for us to have done?

38

But we do - at least, in a lot of cases, it’s because the agriculturalists were actively oppressing or otherwise socially negative to the H-Gs. Just as an example - the name “San” (touted as a more enlightened term than “Bushman”) is an pastoralist insult. They didn’t get to adopt the pastoralist lifestyle of their Khoe-khoen neighbours because the Khoe-khoen weren’t just going to hand over starter stock to what they considered social pariahs.

ETA: sorry, didn’t see this was a zombie

39

The bow and arrow is a good example of a technology that reached a high degree of perfection in quite a lot of different primitive societies who had no contact with each other. The technical and scientific principles of the bow and arrow are pretty awesome. You can’t kill much game using just any old straightish stick with a point delivered by a release of another twanging stick. The technology evolved through trial and error, same as most other advanced developments.

But, as all primitive men had to eat and evasive meat was ready at hand, there was a strong motivation to keep trying. Philipp Meyer’s “The Son” has a wonderful description of the technical complexity of Comanche bows and arrows as discovered (often unhappily) by Texas settlers. Refinements were even made in just a few generations to accommodate the newly-emerging horse-mounted Comanche.

40

The problem with Native Americans was no herd immunity. Everybody was susceptible. The entire village came down with the disease at once. In a subsistence society, that leaves nobody to hunt, fetch food, water etc. for the sick who lay there feverish for days. They almost all die of exposure and thirst during the fever. Studies with smallpox epidemics in the Pacific north-Northwest, BC and Alaska, in the late 1800’s showed that with an immune person (from travelling among the white men, or a missionary) cut the death rate significantly. Where there were enough people able to care for others, the death rate was no worse that for Europeans, about 10%. Without that, whole villages died at once.

not exactly. The agricultural land was “agriculted”. Hunter-gatherers lived on land not suited to agriculture - too hilly, rocky, dry, wet, cold, etc. (or overrun by herds of bison dozens of miles large) The land beside them that may have been suitable was already occupied. They may have been forced off the good land long ago by a new group that already had full-blown agricultural experience.

Based on how fast the horse spread in North America, if a useful herding animal is available, it will be “apprehended” by local hunter tribes. Their environment just does not allow it. So current hunter-gatherer societies are mainly eking out existence on marginal land. Most “primitive” societies are already doing some agriculture or herding.