Childcare! I’m being serious - even in the wild, animals form creches. One or two mothers will watch over the young while the rest do stuff they have to do. One mom might have liked the kids more than the other, and decided to do it permanently. Profession!
It just seems to me that it would be the natural progression of things.
~Tasha
I always describe the second oldest profession as ‘footpaddery’ - mugging.
A politician 
:::snort::::
another keyboard ruined
It’s GATHERING. We place too much emphasis on “hunting” in hunter/gatherer societies. Most of the nutrition obtained and energy spent was in gathering. Digging plants and grubs and picking fruit is easier and more reliable.
Dialog from Barney Miller:
Dietrich: Well, begging is the world’s oldest profession.
Wojo: I thought it was prostitution.
Dietrich: Someone had to ask for it.
When Erma Bombeck was on a book tour for “Motherhood the Second Oldest Profession,” people actually were asking her what was the oldest profession.
I suspect rope-weaving.
Rope & cord could be used for bags, nets & snares.
Prostitutions doesn’t count, as it can be done by unskilled labor, & is therefore not a profession.
Obviously, “hunter-gatherer”. But one can say that was for yourself, so not a “profession”. Likely the first skilled trade supported by others was flint-knapper. It’s a rather skilled profession, that was likely the first, IMHO. I’d guess that it started with most hunters “rolling their own”, but some dudes got injured and couldn’t hunt and developed that skill, along with firemaking. That allowed then to sit around and not hunt for their own food.
Shaman was also early. Clothing (leather & hide tanning and working) and shoe making was also before agriculture. I’d hazard a guess that “prositute” came with civilization and agriculture, along with potter, basket maker, weaver.
I would argue that neither hunting nor gathering could be considered professions because in hunter-gatherer societies, these were not specialised skills – everyone had to learn them.
And, as has been stated, it couldn’t have been farming, because civilisations with skill specialisation developed long before settled agricultural societies.
You realise that agriculture is not necessary for literate civilisation? For a long time, there were literate, civilised, food-producing societies without settled agriculture – they were herders.
In fact, some herding societies still exist today. Herders are not hunter-gatherers because they don’t depend on nature to provide game and produce – they produce their own food through animal husbandry.
The last I looked, studies of (surviving) hunter-gatherer cultures and remains indicate that they were both better nourished and had more free time than farmers. The real difference is the population density supported. It wasn’t the handful of roaming hunter-gatherers per 100 square miles who were at the mercy of the weather; it was the farmer, tied in place by his farm and storage structures (try transporting a years worth of food, planting seed, tools, etc. per worker), dependent on the success of every single growing season to feed 100x as many people on the same land. Even today, it is the farmer who rises to the weather report and sleeps planning for next week’s weather. So long as plants/animals could still inhabit a region, a H-G had a reasonable chance, at a suitably low density.
And the leisure time of a H-G society leads to art (e.g. the highly decorated and finished batons of nomadic Neanderthals) but not of the large scale installation/construction types (murals, frescos, elaborate weavings vs hand knotting) that suits farmer thinking. Of course, it can happen, if a suitable place presents itself: IIRC, cave paintings at Lascaux, etc. don’t celebrate the gods of agriculture, such as wind or weather.
Neanderthals were far more sophisticated than most people give them credit for. They apeear to not only have culture, as we know it, but successive waves of cuture sweeping across continents. Following the links on Wikipedia gives a fair overview, though the last time I checked tehre wasn’t a good single overview.
So, to me, the question is specialization. The best flint-knapper in the tribe probably spent time in the haunting parties like everyone else, as long as he was able, and taught the others how to knap better as well – but they probably didn’t have the modern notion of “quality”: a tool that was better was likely to be attributed with superior mana, not superior workmanship (so the rate of improvement and spread of improvements was slow, we’ve found pockets of distinctly better tools, that took thousands of years to catch on and spread). A craftsman who stood head and shoulders above the others might be considered more like a shaman than a toolmaker.
So when we say “first profession”, I think we mean someone who earns all or most of his/her living through a single set of skills. A hunter who wouldn’t spot and gather berrries would likely be a poor hunter. Society makes “prostitutes” by limiting the availability of mates; it’s not as viable a long term lifestyle, because it relies onthere being a surplus of food and good. In hard times, or old age, the mates are more likely to eat.
A farmer is also a toolmaker, builder, etc., even today to some degree: Farmers can’t afford to hire contractors to put up fenses, fix the barn and keep the tractor going. t’s just not cost effective when things aren’t going well. A farmer is more likely to know their way around an arc-welder, a post hole digger, a hammer or a wrench than a hunter – or have a friend who will help them: farmers, being tied in one place in communities, rely as much on shared skills and social bonds as commerce.
So, though I didn’t think so at first, after some thought I think that the oldest profession may indeed have been shaman, because a person who had “a special relationship” with the unknown forces of the universe, and specialized in only one activity might well have been seen in a lght akin to the modern image of wizard/shaman than the modern craftsman. Most mythologies have craftsmen/wizard gods/demigods (often crippled and therefore unable to perform the normal activities of the other gods, which might be how they became so specialized) alongside the rest of the pantheon.
We think in terms of specialized jobs/careers. I think that colors our guesses. A hunter gather was much more a generalist, and any person who supported themselves primarily through a specialized skill rather than the “normal activites of daily living” (hunting and gathering being a normal task for even children in that lifestyle) would need a certain reputation to gain a clientele, especially in low population densities. One might well walk miles (walking being a normal HG activity, an ot a chore) and bring food to the flint-knapping wizard, when the hunt was going badly or a “magic” or “lucky” spear broke.
I’d make a distinction between roaming HGs (roaming widely as individuals, and moving as family-sized units when conditions required) and the intrinsically nomadic tribes (e.g. nomadic herdsmen constantly moving their heards to greener pastures).
Trade, likewise could have been specialized. There would have been incidental “contact trade” of course, but this requires either nomadic groups (supporting themselves as HGs or herdsman) or two adjacent communities with reliable suplies of distinctly differnt goods to trade. Few mineral deposits would have qualified, I doubt crops would have differed much either. I think that trade could not be viable as a profession except over larger distances until craftsmen were common. While salt and flint were among the first valuable trade goods, it is not clear that a population would mine (or produce, in the case of sea salt) or produce such materials on a large excess scale until there were ample supplies of goods they greatly desired, and sufficient local food supply to assure their survival year to year. Professional itinerant traders could have filled this niche – but I think the "home grown shaman/craftsman/wizard would have predated the professional trader
Very nice, KP. I’m cottoning on to the shaman theory as well.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to get at too.
Previous thread. My vote was/is for shaman as well. The head of my anthropology department in undergrad always referred to the shaman as “the first specialist.”
I agree, but like I said, I think that before “shaman” was crippled-ex-hunter, now FT Knapper. FT knapper could well have turned into Shaman, but I think its more likely that artist turned into shaman.
The thing was, I agree that the first few “professionals” were ex-hunters who could no longer do the HG thing, but still had a usefull skill, and thus others would feed him/her in exchange for their skilled work around the camp.
Flint-knapping cannot be a profession for a hunter-gatherer. That’s all he’s going to do? Sit around making points all day? How many points does one tribe need?
We put a big emphasis on stone tools because stone tools are preserved preferentially to other kinds of tools. Chip a stone point and not only does the point get preserved, but every flake you chip off gets dumped on the ground at the campsite. But the guy tanning leather at the next tent leaves no record 10,000 years later.
Anyway, artisan specialists require a certain population density. If you have 30 people in your band, and you’re the flint-knapper who makes stone tools in exchange for food, you make everyone a dozen points, you get a day’s worth of food, and a few weeks later you’re out of business.
In hunter-gatherer societies there is no such thing as craft specialization, except sometimes along gender lines. Everyone knows how to make every item of physical culture the group can make. You don’t have one guy who makes all the bows for all 30 people in the group, what would you do if that guy died? And if your group is only 30 people, you’re limited to 30 items of physical culture. The only way toolmaking traditions can get passed on in a small group is if everyone knows them. A skill confined to one or two guys is going to go extinct in a few generations.
Even in a farming village there are only a few specialists…like blacksmith, priest, landlord, or some such. You can’t have real specialization until you have cities. And prostitutes–as a profession–can’t exist until cities exist. Yes, women might exchange sex for food, but not on a professional level. Rather you’d be some big man’s fourth wife instead of a prostitute. While there might be some equivalance between concubine and prostitute they are really different things. A concubine doesn’t just exchange sex for goods…she is part of the household, she’s taking care of kids, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and all the other “women’s work”.
Elaborating on my above post a bit: my anthopology professor’s explanation of “shaman as first specialist” was that hunting, gathering, food preparation, flintknapping, making habitation, and so on were activties everyone in the group engaged in to some degree (subject to some gender-based divisions of labor, e.g. hunting and gathering). Some may have been better at one activity than others were, but they didn’t practice it to the exclusion of others. Shamanism, on the other hand, is an activity only certain individuals in the group were capable of performing and they performed it to the exclusion of all others. Depending on how you look at the question, I’d say it’s either shamanism or just plain being a hunter-gatherer.
Kudos to DrDeth. I read a while ago in some scientific journal that they are pretty sure the specialty of flintknapping has been practiced and supported by consumers of the flints since before humans were even very close to final form. I read more recently that some groups of bonobos (they’re like chimpanzees) maintain a professional flintknapper in the sense that the flintknapper makes flints for the others and they give him food and other considerations for them.
Apparently a tribe needs enough flints to keep a flintknapper busy, at least busy in the prevailing sense of the day.
You might find some anthropologists to agree with this statement, but very few. It may be true that some people did a lot of flintknapping while others did very little, but the guys who did a lot of flintknapping could only be professional flintknappers if a large majority of their needs were met through flintknapping. Let’s take a look at modern hunter-gatherer tribes. Do they have professional flintknappers? No, they don’t. Flintknapping is not a specialized skill, it is a skill practiced by all members of the community.
Bonobos do not knap flints or manufacture stone tools. This is completely false.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of tools that a flintknapper could make.
Knife blades, arrowhead points, scrapers for the leathermaker - the possibilities are pretty much endless. So yeah, the flintknapper could make 20 arrowheads and the tribe would be set for a few weeks (flint is very sharp but one of the reasons it’s so good for toolmaking is that it can come apart relatively easily) but then he would need to make knives, hand axes, scrapers, and other tools. It took someone with a lot of physical control and hand-eye coordination to make good flint tools, and just like in today’s society, some people are better at that kind of thing than others.
So when flintknapping began, yeah, it probably wasn’t a profession - any idiot can break a flint rock in half and use it to cut something. But to make a decent tool, that took skill that you could only develop by repeated practice and trying out new techniques; something someone who didn’t exclusively knap flint could do.
~Tasha (wannabe flintknapper)
Well, really, this isn’t a question that can be solidly answered in GQ. Shaman and Flint-knapper are both good answers, and I don’t think we’ll ever find out which was really first.
*Are * there still tribes that use flint tools exclusively? :dubious: The few HG tribes I heard of often use scrap metal hammered into tools or trade goods. I have heard of a few that still use a few flint tools for cerimonial or traditional usages, but none that still need flint to survive.
The Samburu are known for their metalworking, for example:
"Occupations: Herding, farming, fishing, metal working "
Chimps do use tools, and there is debate whether or not chimps make certain simple tools. I would not be shocked to hear of a chimp using a sharp piece of flint he had found. But a “professional bonobo flintknapper”? :dubious:
http://www.primates.com/bonobos/bonobosexsoc.html
"Whereas chimpanzees use a rich array of strategies to obtain foods–from cracking nuts with stone tools to fishing for ants and termites with sticks–tool use in wild bonobos seems undeveloped. (Captive bonobos use tools skillfully.)
"Kohler’s chimps were able to do more than use tools, he actually observed chimps building tools. For example, he observed chimps breaking off branches from a tree to make a “rake.” …Other chimps have been observed using a short stick to bring in a long stick, and then using the long stick to bring in a bunch of bananas…Wolfgang Kohler observed chimps creating and using tools in captivity. Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools “in the wilderness.” "
"Using infrared, motion-triggered video cameras, researchers have documented how chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle—a region within the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo—use a variety of tools to extract termites from their nests. The “tool kits” are among the most complex ever observed in wild chimp populations. "
This bears repeating: there is no stone technology culture recorded in modern times in which flintknapping is practiced by some members of the community to the exclusion of all the other members, or where someone who knaps flint is excused from subsistence activities. Everybody knaps flint, and everybody physically able engages in subsistence activities.
Pressure flaking usable tools is an acquired skill, but not one so elusive that only a few people out of any given population are capable of it. The archaeologist in our department was very skilled at it, and it was far from the only thing he did. A guy who thought he didn’t have to hunt with the rest of the men because he was so darn good at flint knapping would probably be told to get bent.