4 ms·
One criticism I have of Sapiens is that he regards the hunter-gather lifestyle as ideal, a sort of Garden of Eden from which we descended when we invented agric
by RachelF 10y ago
One criticism I have of Sapiens is that he regards the hunter-gather lifestyle as ideal, a sort of Garden of Eden from which we descended when we invented agriculture.
The few Amazon, New Guinea and Kalahari hunter-gather tribes anthropologists have discovered live in what most modern humans would regard as terrible poverty and fear of violence.
- dunkelheit 10y agoThere is definitely some of that (but then he spends some time discussing why modern hunter-gatherers can be a poor representation for prehistoric ones). May be an overreaction to the old sentiment about "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives of prehistoric humans. Also, there is little surprise that different value systems provide different value judgments. According to hunter-gatherers our lifestyle would surely be described as terribly sedentary and full of anxiety about tomorrow. As for me, I find evidence that human brain could actually decrease in size throughout history a good reason not to be so smug about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans.
- Noseshine 10y ago> about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans I agree. The reason we achieve so much more is the network of human cooperation in space and in time (with the ancestors who pass down to us knowledge, methods, culture, technologies, items, infrastructure). I have not ever seen any substantiated claims individuals got better apart from better software gotten through soft programming, the stuff I mentioned as passed from ancestors. With "better" I mean this: Would a baby created today and immediately given to hunter-gatherers (now or 10,000 years ago by "magic") do better then their babies? I doubt it.