On the question of how much flint a tribe could use, is it possible that the first specialist was a more versatile “toolmaker”, who might, in addition to knapping flint, wind sinew, or carve sticks or antlers into useful shapes, or other toolmaking tasks? I don’t imagine that a tribe would have to be too big before “making stuff” could be a full-time job, provided we count enough different types of “stuff”.
I have already stated that there is no evidence for either, or in fact for any FT “profession” to exist in those times and societies. Certainly modern day pro flintknappers have shown it is a rather difficult skill almost approaching an art (Google “professional flintknapper” for dozens of sites). And some archeaologists have speculated that the first “professionals” were members of the tribe that for some reason (age, crippling injuries) could no longer hunt, and thus “sold” their skills for food to those who could still hunt. Skeletal remains have been found of pre-civilized and pre-agriculture tribe members whose remains show that they could NOT have been an effective hunter for years, and yet they still got their food somehow. Thus, it appears strongly that the “tribe” fed them. It could have been for altruistic reasons of course. :dubious:
However, it seems much more like human nature that other members of the tribe would only support those who could be useful. Flintknapper is one of the first “skills” (other than hunter of course!) so it stands to reason that a crippled hunter who was especially good at flintknapping could “make a living” by making weapons for healthier hunters. Of course, perhaps it was “cook”, "nightwatchman/lookout ", “firemaker/tender” , leatherworker or any of a number of other jobs. I concede cheerfully that we’ll likely never know.*
I think we can all agree that “prostitute” likely wasn’t one of them, however. 
*barring some skeletal evidence that shows some crippled dude was a flintknapper or something. (We do have skeletal evidence of archers and horsemen, so I suppose it’s possible)
I will concede this as even more likely.
Not at all. I’ve never personally seen a a unicorn either, nor read of such a thing. Since I take a more than passing interest in zoology that leads me to conclude that such a beast doesn’t exist. But I would be willing to concede it exists of someone could provide a reputable reference for same.
The same applies to the suggestion that professional flint nappers exist in HG societies. I take more than a passing interest in this subject and since I’ve never seen any suggestion that such a thing exists the total absence of evidence is fair evidence for absence.
This is GQ, not IMHO. As such it would be nice if Dr. Deth could provide at least some sort of evidence that a professional flint napper has ever existed in any HG group anywhere on the planet. If he does so I will be very interested and naturally concede they exist. Until then the fact that no anthropolgist has mentioned such a thiong in countless artciles and books I have read on HGs leads me to conclude they don’t exist.
Iif you have any evidence that such a situation is possible in societies without centralised government, formalised trade and taxation then I would love to see it. The fact that I have never seen any suggestion that it has ever existed forces me to conclude that it isn’t possible. To accept therwise would be a clear argument from ignorance.
That might be possible in theory, but there’s no evidence it ever happened and I see no plausible way that it could happen. Its kind of like writing and metalwork in that regard. All these things could be extremely useful to a HG group, yet no HG group ever managed to achieve them. The reason seems to be twofold.
Firstly without any standard of trade or real government such sustained futures trade appears to be impossible. It’s easy for me to hand over a handful of drugs and you to give me a handful of ochre. We both know what we are getting and if either of us disagree on the deal we don’t have to exchange.
In contrast if I devote even a few days exclusively to making tools I need to be fed for those days. IOW you need to feed in expectation of future returns. That seems simple to us but in HG societies that’s very hard to manage because there are no civil courts to enforce the contract. What do you do if you feed me for two days and I renege on the deal, or provide substandard equipment? The only way we can settle the dispute is some form of trial by combat. It’s just not worth the risk when everyone is physically capable of manufacturing thier own equipment.
Only with the advent of argricultural towns, chiefdoms and so forth did the ability to settle civil disputes evolve and only then was futures trading possible.
The second obstacle to such a system is that while HG tribes were normally around 200 people the functional unit was the band of 3-10 people. Tribes commonly only met 4 times a year and the rest of the time they existed as scattered bands. That simply doesn’t permit a professional toolmaker to exists. If your spear or net breaks tomorrow you can’t wait 3 months to trade another one, and I as toolmaker can’t wait 3 months to get food in payment for another one. As such every member og a HG society needs to possess those skills and for most of the time they will be forced to make their own equipment whether they like it or not.
Jjust to keep things clear perhaps we should define what we mean by profession. To me a profession requires two things:
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The task is done for profit or reward capable of sustaining life. Hence payment of food, gold or labour qualifies. Payment of a special tatoo or extra nookie doesn’t qulaify.
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The task is specialised. If all or most members of a group do it it doesn’t qualify as a profession. Hence an Eskimo doesn’t qualify as a professional by making a harpoon, a bushman doesn’t qualify by mixing poison.
Look, in hunter-gatherer societies there is no such thing as a full time “leader”, as in, someone who sits home all day while everyone else hunts and gathers, then gives orders for the next day.
Yes, there are/were leaders, such as eskimo whaleboat captains. These are people who have enormous respect. But they don’t exchange their leadership for goods and services, rather, they get together a bunch of people to build an umiak, they get a crew together, then go out and harpoon a whale. Then they divide up the kill occording to custom…the captain gets this part, the harpoonist gets this part, etc. But that guy isn’t a full time “leader”, he’s out there hunting with everyone else. And when whaling season is over he’s out there picking berries and catching salmon and hunting caribou and waterfowl with everyone else. And he has no authority other than his personal charisma and his record of bringing back whale meat without getting his crew killed. Anybody can call themselves a captain, but nobody has to join your crew or help you build a boat.
Same thing with a “healer”. Sure, Grandmother is recognized as a healer, she knows everything about it, and when you get an evil spirit you go straight to Grandmother for a healing ceremony. But Grandmother still sews her own clothes, cooks dinner, cleans the grandbaby’s butt, gathers berries, dries fish, and chews leather with everyone else.
And if someone is unfit to hunt, that doesn’t mean they’re useless. They can gather berries, watch the kids, tell stories, clean the camp, mend, build, etc. But is this a “profession”? I don’t think so.
A hunter-gatherer band is really just an extended family, related by blood, marriage, adoption and friendship. Yeah, lazy people get looked down on, but nobody has a job like they might in an agricultural society. Just like your lazy brother-in-law who’s been on unemployment for the last two years and claims he’s disabled. If the big man/leader kills a deer, everyone eats, even the lazy people, because that deer won’t keep. But when times are tough and the people are starving and the big man kills a mouse, he’s going to eat it himself and the lazy people will have to look out for themselves. But I believe lazy people are much more likely to be shared with in HG societies than agricultural societies.
So what? They were an extant stone age culture, and the fact that they had advanced from hunting and gathering to swidden agriculture only strengthens the argument. Divisions of labor increase as societies become more technologically advanced, not the other way around.
The Dani of the Balim Valley do trade for stone - with other Dani. The Western Dani trade stone with the Balim Valley Dani who have no easy access to the quarries in the west. The stone is often already worked, but not always. Both groups are are fully capable of working stone themselves, and have to do so in order to keep them sharp.
The point bing that they don’t live in stone houses and don’t wear stone underwear. The wear fiber clothing and live in wood houses. How do you think they split the wood? Stone axes. How did they get the trees down in the first place? Stone adzes, which they also use to clear cut the trees they need to burn for swidden agriculture. They are, or were, a modern example of a Neolithic culture, and they had no professional stone tool makers. If you can find one that did, I’d love to see it.
So this whole thing is an argument from ignorance. You accept it simply because it hasn’t been disproved. Even though thousands of people have studied hundreds of HG groups and found no evidence for such a thing you still accept it because it has not and never can be disproved?
The same is true of cave painting, stalking animals, tracking, detoxifying plant food, identifying which hollow tree contains a sleeping marmoset and a zillion other skills that every single memeber of a HG band has. See the point here? Practically everything a HG does is rather difficult and approaches an artform. That isn’t evidence that only some individuals mastered those skills. On the contrary.
Can you provide a reference for this claim? Or at least name one of these archaeologists and give a précis of how she came to that conclusion?
Does it? Can you please provide evidence that human nature ever produces a situation where close relatives are left to die when they can be kept alive without endgangering anyone else’s life? I can certainly provide countless references where people have gone to great lengths to keep ‘useless’ relatives alive with no obvious benefit.
It seems to me that if you can’t we can conclude that “human nature” would lead us to reject your supposition, not support it.
Cite! Please provide evidence that flint napper is an ‘earlier’ skill than painter, tracker, food detoxifier, shaft straightener, child carer, tree feller, botanist or the plethora of other skills held by all HGs?
No, it doesn’t stand to reason at all. Even if we accept your claim that people had to earn their keep, then for this idea to stand to reason you need to show that the effort is justified. The bare minimum you need to show before this stands to reason is that flint napping occupied a substantial portion of the typical HGs time. If the typical HG actually spent less than 200 hours a year napping flint (which I suspect is reasonable) that is not enough to justify feeding someone for >6000 hours a year.
You need to provide some actual evidence and figures before you can start claiming that your speculation stands to reason. Until then it’s baseless speculation that runs counter to the known facts.
But we do know. It’s not a case of “we’ll never know”. This is an argument form ignorance. We do know, and what we know is that there is no such thing as a HG profession. Despite all the research on HGs done in the past 200 years nobody has ever observed anything remotely like a HG profession as far as anyone here can establish
What I would prefer you to concede is that in all the literature on the subject there is no evidence whatsoever that any of those professions existed in any HG society anywhere at any time. IOW I would like you to concede that the notion of HGs having professions is simply fantasy.
No, this is an argument form ignorance. It’s nothing more than Sagan’s dragon in the garage. If we have looked everywhere for evidence of a HG professional and found no such evidence, but found scads of evidence for all HGs being generalists then we can conclude that there are no HG professionals.
No, can you show any of them are earlier?
What known facts?
We do know? Cite? Perhaps no one has shown there to be an ancient HG society with professions, but that hardly means there wasn’t one. There’s plenty of evidence of flintknapping being done. Someone did it. Now, you might claim it was always done “to each their own”, but can you prove that? How do you know that “Og the crippled ex-hunter” wasn’t the very first “professional”?
Let us say you can prove (which I like to see a cite on, since how can we know? Although I have already agreed that most “professions” didn’t start until later) that there was “no such thing as a HG profession”- there still has to be a FIRST profession. Somewhere, sometime, someone had to be the first.That’s the question posed by the OP and thet one I am attempting to answer- and which you aren’t attempting to answer, just hanging around and trying to bust my chops . Not very useful in answering the OP’s question, is that? What’s your answer and can you back it up?
Now, no one knows what the first profession really was. Thus, this question can only be answered by speculation.
But let us say that the first “profession” waited until towns and agriculture. So? Still, that was thousands of years before metal, and flint was THE material. Thus, flintknappers. Can you tell me that "flintknapper’ was never a profession? :dubious: During the late stone age cities- who made the tools & weapons ten, if many other things were made by “professionals”?
You are asking for me to prove that HG societies had “professions”, which would be nice, but I never claimed they did. I made an assertion that flintknapper was the first. I even provided a cite from a dude with an advanced degree in history. Sure,it’s not a great cite, but it’s better than anyone elses. Better than any of yours (since you have exactly 0 cites backing *your *assertions up.)
Yeah, I know this is GQ, but the question is unanswerable in GQ format. There simply is no known “right” answer. The Mods have chosen to leave it here rather than move it to GD or IMHO, and so that’s fine with me. Report it if you like, maybe they’ll move it. I don’t care- it’s still an interesting question- one that can only be answered by speculation.
If one goes by the biblical reference for the first inhabitants of the planet, then the first profession would be “liar” given the snake’s deception of Eve, Eve’s deception of Adam, and Adam’s lie to God’s inquiry.
What a confusing post Dr Deth has made.
Any what? You give no hint as to what you are referring to.
Indeed, what known facts? Again you give no clue as to what you are referring.
What do we know, or don’t know?
WRT what? I repeat, I will happily provide references but you need to be more specific.
This is an argument from ignorance and nothing more. We know that there is no evidence of any recent HG society having professionals despite extensive searching. We have no evidence whatsoever that ancient HG societies were radically different in this regard and no reason to believe they could have or would have been.
Yet you want us to believe they were different because no one has shown they weren’t. This is a classic argument from ignorance.
Because despite over 200 years of documented ethnologies of HG societies no such individual has ever been known to exist. And because there is no reason to suspect that ancient HG societies were radically different in this regard.
When an exhaustive search has been done and no evidence for something has been found, as in this case, we are bound to conclude that it doesn’t exist pending contradictory evidence. You OTOH are engaging in an argument from ignorance by saying that we should believe it despite the lack of evidence because it can never be disproved.
Classic argument from ignorance and nothing more.
We can know it because over 200 years of documented ethnologies of HG societies no such individual has ever been known to exist. And because there is no reason to suspect that ancient HG societies were radically different in this regard.
IOW we can know it in the same way that we can know that unicorns don’t exist. Your position would have us believe that unicorns existed "since how can we know that there was ‘no such thing as a unicorn’.
Such a position is a classic argument form ignorance and crippling to any attempt to fight ignorance or provide a factual answer.
As for a “cite”, how would you like me to show a total absence of evidence for 200 years of publications? If you give me a request that I can practically fill I will happily do so. For example I will happily provide literature on any HG society that you believe has professionals to debunk the claim. I I might provide references on 20 random HG groups showing no professionals.
Rest assured I have no lack of evidence here, but how would you have me post an absence of evidence?
No I, and many others, are pointing out when you make statements that run counter to the facts and that promote ignorance. Nothing to do with busting your chops. Everything to do with fighting ignorance.
You are free to speculate in GQ if the Mods want to allow baseless speculation on the forum for factual answers.
What you are not free to do is post ignorant and erroneous material. When you do that there will be plenty of us willing to call you on it, as we have done here.
Sigh. An argument form ignorance again.
Can you tell me there isn’t a dragon in your garage?
Of course you bloody can.
:rolleyes: Now you are just being blatantly disingenuous. You stated that flint napper was the first profession. You did that in the middle of a post, indeed a string of posts, concerning HGs. You even referred to invalid HGs earning their keep by working stone. Your intent was quite clear to me and to many others judging by their posts
I have just about had enough of this from you.
Wrong. It’s a worthless appeal to authority. It’s not better than nothing. It is worth exactly nothing.
You do understand what an appeal to authority is, right? And why it is worthless?
I will repeat for the third time: tell me what assertions of my you wish to see references for and they will be forthcoming.
Continued nebulous requests for “cites” on something undefined won’t help anyone and won’t score you points.
So you admit you have no contribution to make that is appropriate to the forum. That’s good enough for me.
Speculation need not entail promoting ignorance and engaging blatant logical fallacies.
Excellent answer, KP. I would agree with shaman being the oldest–and still being practiced, in various broader senses like the priesthood, as well as actual shamanism. Just one tweak I would add to your theory–in the Paleolithic, she was more likely to be a shamaness, based in part on the fieldwork of M. A. Czaplicka; see Aboriginal Siberia, Chapter 12, Shamanism and Sex. The Paleo-Siberians that Czaplicka interviewed said that the profession of shamanism developed out of shamanistic household practices. The oldest shamanic practices were attributed to women. Male shamans dressed as women, as if in imitation of the original model. MTF transgender women were shamans too, and Czaplicka distinguished them from cross-dressing men: “change of sex” vs. “change of dress”.
In the Siberian/Altaic cultural area where shamanism flourished, one word was shared across many different languages, even different language families: udagan, which means ‘woman shaman’. Various Paleo-Siberian* as well as Neo-Siberian** languages had many different words for male shamans, but shared this one etymon, with its phonetic variants like utagan, utakan, udgan, etc. for female shamans. Compare Mongolian Itügen, name of the shamanist Earth Goddess mainly worshiped by women. I came across theories that the widespread word for female shamans originated with this Mongolian goddess.
*Chukchi, Kamchadal, Ket, Kott, Nivkh, Yukagir, representing 4 different language families or isolates
**Actually, this term, no longer used, refers to Altaic and Uralic, e.g.: Buryat, Evenki, Khakas, Mongolian, Sakha, Tatar, Tuvan, Khanty, Mansi, Nganasan, etc.
Because, as has been said, everything in the ethnographic record indicates that hunter gatherer societeies were generalists, and remained largely so even as their societies became technologically advanced and they made the move to agriculturalism or pastoralism, i.e. everybody did pretty much everything as needed. Divisions of labor into professions as we think of them today didn’t occur until long, long after the hunter gatherer stage of societal evolution. No modern stone age culture has exhibited the sort of behavior you describe, and it wouldn’t be logical if they did. Hunter gatherers in particular had much more leisure time than we do; they didn’t need to keep someone on the payroll specifically to make arrowheads and hide scrapers.
A society of generalists doesn’t mean everyone dabbles in a little shamanism in their spare time. Shamanism requires a specific skill set, and only a minority of individuals in any given population I’ve ever heard of will have the aptitude for it. Traditional accounts of how a person gets to be a shaman (“initiation”) relate passing through severe crises of illness on the way to developing shamanistic abilities. It is clearly not for everyone. If we grant that the term “profession” implies a more complex economic structure than HG can attain, then anyway HG shamanism can be described as a “specialized function in society.”
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Blake “Please provide evidence that flint napper is an ‘earlier’ skill than painter, tracker, food detoxifier, shaft straightener, child carer, tree feller, botanist or the plethora of other skills held by all HGs?” DrDeth “No, can you show any of them are earlier?” “Any of them” refers to your list, as you can see by my quote.
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**Blake **:“Until then it’s baseless speculation that runs counter to the known facts.” DrDeth: “What known facts?”
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**Blake **: “But we do know. It’s not a case of “we’ll never know”. This is an argument form ignorance. We do know, and what we know is that there is no such thing as a HG profession.” DrDeth: “We do know?”
Over and over you make the claim : …“over 200 years of documented ethnologies of HG societies no such individual has ever been known to exist”- and I’d like to see a cite that backs that up. So far, it just you making an unsupported claim. Note that pravnik came up with a good solid cite. As a matter of fact, pravnik’s cite even shows that his stone age tribe does have specialist, and those specialist are along the lines of shamans “What specialization there is comes in the form of the ritual and curing of the Dani. There are specialists who perform certain rituals, such as the incest purifying ceremony. There are also specialists in curing certain diseases.” Of course, the Dani are not 100% a HG tribe as I pointed out. But they are a stone age tribe.
However, the article “New Traces of an Inland Neolithic Culture in the Chukotsk (Chukchi) Peninsula” by A. P. Okladnikov, I. A. Nekrasov in
American Antiquity, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Oct., 1959) claims that that HG tribe (arond 400 years ago) did have “specialists” in the making of tools.
We are into speculation. We are into speculation as the terms here are so open to definition. What is a “profession”? Does a “craft” count? I’d say so, but others might not. I’d define "profession"here as a specialist that does not directly support themselves by food gathering (includes hunting, etc).
Then, what is “First”? Sure, neolithic HG societies/tribes certainly did not support a cadre of “professionals”. But does that mean that no HG tribe ever, in the entire history, ever have just one single dedicated “professional”? No one can say that. You can claim that generally they don’t. But you can’t claim that one single tribe never ever did so even once. That would be an argument from ignorance. Or do we want to say that “the first professional was one that was commonly supported…”- then we’d argue over what “commonly” meant, and by the time tribes “commonly” supported professionals, we are really into villages and early civilization,and there are a host of “professions” that could have been the first- of which your list of possibles “painter, tracker, food detoxifier, shaft straightener, child carer, tree feller, botanist” might well be the first- or so could flintknapper or shaman.
So again- Blake- dude- rather than be obstructionistic, what is *your *answer? If there is an answer, certainly you must know, and if so,why not share it with us? 
In other words, rather than just say my answer is wrong- how about an answer of your own?
As to what the Mods will and won’t allow- there’s that little “report this post” button. Feel free to hit it. I will occasionally hit the button, but rarely do I think to tell the Mods what their business is, and what they should or should not be doing.
Umm, no dude- that’s a “cite” as in “facts”. Which is exactly what we are supposed to do here in GQ. You misuse the term “appeal to authority” which is a term that applies to logical arguments and debates (like what we do in GD). Not facts. If someone asks here “what is the capital of California”, and I give a cite from the Governor or this States website answering “Sacramento”, that’s not an “appeal to authority”. :rolleyes: An “appeal to authority” is exactly what we are supposed to do here, not just make unsupported “my post is my cite” claims. GQ is not about “logical debates” it’s about facts. (OTOH, ad hominen attacks are pretty much outre in both GD and GQ.) Of course, again, the actual question posed by the OP is unknowable as phrased, and thus, even though this is GQ, clearly speculation is in order.
Actually, Unicorns do exist. Willy Ley in “Exotic Zoology” shows that the Unicorn 1st came from the Seventy’s translation from the Hebrew of the word “Re’em”, which was doubtless the urus. Thus, since the Wild Ox certainly did exist, Unicorns also did so. Of course, the legend of the Unicorn got mixed in with the monokeros,which is, as we all should know- the rhino. Thus, the monokeros still exists, of course. Then again, the Kaffirs, the Dinkas and several other tribes knew of a method to (by a simple graft surgery) make a two horned domestic animal into a single horned beast. Pliny even told how to do it. So, not only does the Unicorn exist, but there are three varieties. (Ley, Bonanza books, 1987,pp 13-27) (see, Blake, that’s what we like to call a “cite” here in GQ and Willy Ley is a well known “authority”. These “cite” things- they generally add credence to unsupported statements. But feel free to call it an “appeal to authority” )
Johanna- excellent post and cite. 
Thank you for your positive contribution to this interesting question. I have to concede you have tipped the scales towards Shaman.
I’ve seen this argument before on the 'Dope, and as I see it, it’s all down to how we define “profession.”
The original assertion that “prostitution is the world’s oldest profession” suggests that anything men did in exchange for sex was so valueless, or so selfish, that it didn’t count as a profession; that a man risking his life trying to hunt and kill dangerous animals was making no worthwhile “professional” contribution because he would have been hunting dangerous animals anyway. By that logic — that a “profession” is something you wouldn’t do voluntarily without compensation — sex doesn’t count either.
What if we define a profession based on your value to the tribe? A “profession” is something you do because you’re too valuable doing what you do to risk your being injured or killed in the hunt? That seems to tip the “first profession” in the direction of an irreplaceable skill or knowledge set, like shawomanism or medicine or craft, or to irreplaceable sexually dimorphic biology, such as wetnursing.
What if we define a profession based on your food/time value over baseline? A “profession” is therefore something you do because you can provide more doing what you do, in less time, than the average person could provide with a basket and a berry bush? That seems to suggest that “hunter” is the first profession; the hunter hunts for less time, and provides more food, therefore exchanging his kill for additional leisure time.
I dunno — profession is a tricky thing to define.
If you’re referring to my post directly above yours, I’m already in agreement with you that shamanism was the first specialization even in hunter gatherer societies, and a likely candidate for first compensated “profession” in more technologically advanced cultures, depending on how you define the term.
Speaking of early prostitution and HG societies, I’m reminded of an excellent film, The Emerald Forest. It’s fiction, and I’m not using it to advance an argument, but it had a memorable image that this question reminds me of.
A large dam is being built in the Amazon rainforest, and huge areas of the environment are being destroyed in the process. A stone age HG tribe lives nearby. One day thugs from the construction camp invade the tribe’s village, kill the men and old women, and kidnap the young women, who are enslaved as prostitutes back at the work camp. The tribe had been living naked, but the captured women are forced to wear clothes like halter tops and miniskirts in order to look like prostitutes. When the surviving members of the tribe raid the camp and free the women, there’s an awesome scene of them running back into the forest, tearing off their prostitute clothes as they go, returning to their traditional nudity–a powerful image of liberation from the Man. It points up how incongruous prostitution seems in a stone age HG setting, and anyway I doubt there was prostitution that early.
AFAIK in real life prostitution was the invention of Babylonian religion, therefore originating with the civilization. Sacred prostitutes raised money for the temples where they worked. If sex was considered sacred, then prostitution in the temple was an act of worship (as well as raising revenue, win-win all around). The practice spread to the rest of the Fertile Crescent and beyond: sacred prostitutes were called qedeshah in Hebrew and hierodoule in Greek, both terms referring to the sacred. Now the sacredness has all gone out of it, once Christianity took over the Middle East and Greece. Prostitution continued but was made profane.
All of which corroborates William Blake’s statement: “Prisons are built with bricks of stone, brothels are built with bricks of religion.” Funny thing, William Blake is right either way, whether it’s sacred Babylonian brothels or profane Christian brothels.
I know this ‘Oldest Profession’ thingy can be a bit of a sticky proposition, and everybody seems to have a favorite, some with some substantial evidence, reasoning, cites, etc.
I’d like to nominate one profession which has not been mentioned (unless I missed it in there someplace …) that I believe, just through deductive logic, must be the oldest.
Before one can be a shaman, leader, healer, politician, agriculturalist, healer, or any of the other “professions” mentioned above (including prostitute), one must convince others that you have something that they want, need, or even simply can’t live without, or that you can provide a service or supply some type of knowledge that can fulfill a need.
In short, you must sell them something. Ergo, I place in nomination the profession of Sales Person.
Think about it. No matter which way you go, it fits. It isn’t even a matter of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
You want food, shelter, a mate, or anything else, you have to trade something you have to get it. Before you can, though, you have to sell someone else on the idea that what you have will fulfill a need of theirs, and in order to get that, they’ll have to give you something. Even something as simple as “I want to learn how to hunt” must logically be followed by selling the super hunter guy (gal?) on the idea the you’ll be a good student … or worship the ground they walk on … or whatever …
Since it’s gonna be a couple of months before somebody works out the charge card thing, you have to sell them on the idea that they can trade the meat and/or veggies they are holding for the skill, knowledge, (or body), that you have to fulfill their ‘need’. You may even have to help them discover a need that you can fulfill. You may even (as may be the case with spiritual stuff) have to ‘create’ a need.
This ‘process’ is called selling, and everybody does it - even today!
Think you don’t sell? The evidence is right in front of you. I’m doing it right now. You were doing it the last time you posted. You do it every time you go to work - you have to sell the boss on the idea that you are the best person to do the job. (Hell, you had to do that just to get the job … and if you can’t sell them on that same idea - every day - you’ll find yourself in the position of trying sell your talents, abilities, and knowledge to another employer.)
Like a sales manager I once had in the forever ago days of my ill-spent youth, “If you don’t sell, you don’t eat … If ya wanna eat tonight, ya gotta get out there and sell today!”
Elegantly Simple. (Whatcha think … ?)
Lucy.
In the context you’ve mentioned it, I’d classify sales as a skill. In order for it to be a profession, you’d need to be selling goods and services offered by others in order to benefit yourself. If you’re just selling yourself, well, here we are right back to prostitution…
I’m pretty sure that the Babylonians weren’t even the first to practice cultic prostitution in the Middle East…that the Sumerians and Assyrians did it before them.