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I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to se

I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature. Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being dragged away from dinner by a panther. Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or operate an elevator. Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the future researchers.

PuffinBlue 7y ago
This comment really took a turn at the end there.
- jacobush 7y ago
  It’s on to something. I think I am the target audience. I didn’t plan to confess this, but it happened more than once, that I upvoted a comment I didn’t read till the end. Alea dictur est
fredsir 7y ago
They lived in harmony with nature in every realistic meaning of the term. Being dragged away as somethings dinner, sleeping with one eye open, sometimes going to bed hungry, and so on, is part of natures harmony. That's how it works everywhere in nature for all living things. Sometimes you are the hunter, and sometimes you are the hunted. And that's okay, or no one could survive. It's only when we change the game, like with our modern way of society, that we also have to change the rules. Like it's not okay anymore to go about killing others willy nilly if it's not necessary. Or should I say, one could hope the rules would reflect the change of the game, but not in all aspects has it yet at least.
- jjcc 7y ago
  Was the war, i.e. tribes fighting each other so fittest tribes survive, part of evolution process? Is aggression a nature of human being because of collective evolution?
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    > War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were violent and frequently engaged in warfare. ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization > How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth > The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict? > Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture. http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-greatest-cooperators/ http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-...
    - mc32 7y ago
      I guess implicit in this is that strife and warfare (in addition to new pasture/hunting grounds) led to expansion and exploration in pre history just as if did on later times. Some of it was just seeking avoidance.
    - abathur 7y ago
      I haven't read this book, but regardless of its ultimate correctness, it's worth recognizing that it too is interpretative mythmaking (about who we are based on a very small historical slice of our existence). It probably generalizes well enough to who we've been since the last glacial maximum, but I think there's enough evidence to be skeptical of interpreting any human group since the LGM as untouched by the processes driving what we call civilization. "Civilization" is a relative measure, not an absolute one. It's shaped by what we're accustomed to, and vulnerable to unknown biases. (Is raising and slaughtering your own pig more or less civilized than modern factory farming? Is solitary confinement more or less civilized than exile?) Claiming to discuss war "before" civilization draws an arbitrary line separating very gradual change driven by many competing/interacting processes. What standard do we measure whether some group of people in some place and time were civilized against? If you measure against the great apes, when did the relationships between hominid groups and their environments cross a rubicon? What technological and social markers count? Tool use? Language? Trade? Making objects and carrying them around with us over great distances? Art? Stories? Clothing? Religion? Cooking? Baking? Early agriculture? AFAIK there's evidence for most of these back well into the stone age (and in some cases among pre-homo-sapiens hominids). We're also mostly limited to studying sites above modern sea levels and have vastly less access to evidence of hominid activity that may exist in areas now under water (including glacial refugia such as the potential "Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis" ).
gus_massa 7y ago
> From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature. Also, remember that pre-modern people probably killed the most of the megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_extinctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_exti...
mocha_nate 7y ago
Was it the country of Colombia? Do you know where i can watch that?
glaugh 7y ago
Not really disagreeing with the main thrust of your comment, but there’s also some selection bias at work. Uncontacted tribes will tend to live in the least productive spaces, since more productive spaces would have already been colonized by modern society. I think this insight comes from Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, but I’m forgetting.
apo 7y ago
For some thought-provoking insights into the scale of the changes ancient American civilizations brought on the landscape, see the book 1491 by Charles Mann. Maybe the most intriguing idea in the entire book is that the Americas were ten times more populated at the time of European contact than they ended up becoming in the 1500's (when most eye-witness accounts were written). The "noble savages" we think of were remnants of a disease holocaust that wiped out 90% of the population. It's almost as if we're trying to understand European civilization by observing concentration camp survivors. The recurring pattern: small group of Europeans makes contact with a native group. They report a land teeming with people and trade. A hundred years go by, and almost nobody is left. Those remaining live in small bands eeking out a subsistence living. The culprit: smallpox and a host of other diseases that jumped species in Europe due to co-habitation with animals. The lack of such practices (or animal domestication in general) in the Americas meant that the disease transfer was destined to be one-way. This dynamic may explain why there's only one genus of Homo left alive today. Whenever two groups contacted each other, one inevitably succumbs to the diseases carried by the other.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental. The Europeans had as little clue as the Americans what happened, 300 years before germ theory. I imagine both sides saw it as acts of God(s). I count it as the biggest "random" event in all of world history. Had the immunology lottery turned out otherwise, the world would be a completely different place.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    >The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental. Why is that crazy? I've never thought myself, or heard anyone imply, that the "disease holocaust" was intentional. As neither nation had the knowledge/science to understand diseases/germs at that time it seems straightforward to assume it was accidental
    - eloff 7y ago
BurningFrog 7y ago
Being eaten by a panther occasionally is living in harmony with nature! Something I read in my formative years that's stuck with me is "Typhoid is natural. Penicillin is artificial." I very consciously and happily avoid being "natural" for its own sake.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Well it's a nice line, but Penicillin was discovered not invented. It's as natural as typhoid or panthers.
  - eloff 7y ago
    Penicillin the substance existed in nature, penicillin the medicine is a human invention. Is stretching to call it natural. It's like calling high-fructose corn syrup natural. It comes from nature, but it's hardly naturally occurring.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      I don't see how - the whole of the world's early mass production was simply naturally growing the mould in tanks. That was a huge part of the challenge of producing enough volume, and how to accelerate that fermentation and extraction. It was very much a natural product that was effectively farmed, and not much different to producing beer. That we have now found chemical means of production, and identified active ingredients doesn't change that history. You might not legally be able to label penicillin or opiates as a natural remedy any more, but in prescription medicine the production method is rarely or never labelled.
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        Panthers and typhoid aren't domesticated, fungus vats are.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Yeah, I've thought of that too. I think the vast engineering, scientific and industrial undertaking it took to cure the first patient in 1942, 14 years after the discovery qualifies it as an invention, but I can see the other side of the argument. Either way, I enjoyed looking up the history of those 14 years: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/flemingpenicillin.html https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry...
NelsonMinar 7y ago
Are you making some equivalence between the Amazonian tribespeople and Homo Luzonensis? You understand Amazonians are Homo Sapiens, right?
csomar 7y ago
You shouldn't be surprised. People all around the world are moving to the cities for a reason.

PuffinBlue 7y ago

This comment really took a turn at the end there.

jacobush 7y ago
It’s on to something. I think I am the target audience. I didn’t plan to confess this, but it happened more than once, that I upvoted a comment I didn’t read till the end. Alea dictur est

fredsir 7y ago

They lived in harmony with nature in every realistic meaning of the term. Being dragged away as somethings dinner, sleeping with one eye open, sometimes going to bed hungry, and so on, is part of natures harmony. That's how it works everywhere in nature for all living things. Sometimes you are the hunter, and sometimes you are the hunted. And that's okay, or no one could survive. It's only when we change the game, like with our modern way of society, that we also have to change the rules. Like it's not okay anymore to go about killing others willy nilly if it's not necessary. Or should I say, one could hope the rules would reflect the change of the game, but not in all aspects has it yet at least.

jjcc 7y ago
Was the war, i.e. tribes fighting each other so fittest tribes survive, part of evolution process? Is aggression a nature of human being because of collective evolution?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were violent and frequently engaged in warfare. ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization > How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth > The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict? > Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture. http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-greatest-cooperators/ http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-...
  - mc32 7y ago
    I guess implicit in this is that strife and warfare (in addition to new pasture/hunting grounds) led to expansion and exploration in pre history just as if did on later times. Some of it was just seeking avoidance.
  - abathur 7y ago
    I haven't read this book, but regardless of its ultimate correctness, it's worth recognizing that it too is interpretative mythmaking (about who we are based on a very small historical slice of our existence). It probably generalizes well enough to who we've been since the last glacial maximum, but I think there's enough evidence to be skeptical of interpreting any human group since the LGM as untouched by the processes driving what we call civilization. "Civilization" is a relative measure, not an absolute one. It's shaped by what we're accustomed to, and vulnerable to unknown biases. (Is raising and slaughtering your own pig more or less civilized than modern factory farming? Is solitary confinement more or less civilized than exile?) Claiming to discuss war "before" civilization draws an arbitrary line separating very gradual change driven by many competing/interacting processes. What standard do we measure whether some group of people in some place and time were civilized against? If you measure against the great apes, when did the relationships between hominid groups and their environments cross a rubicon? What technological and social markers count? Tool use? Language? Trade? Making objects and carrying them around with us over great distances? Art? Stories? Clothing? Religion? Cooking? Baking? Early agriculture? AFAIK there's evidence for most of these back well into the stone age (and in some cases among pre-homo-sapiens hominids). We're also mostly limited to studying sites above modern sea levels and have vastly less access to evidence of hominid activity that may exist in areas now under water (including glacial refugia such as the potential "Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis" ).

gus_massa 7y ago

> From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature. Also, remember that pre-modern people probably killed the most of the megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_extinctions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_exti...

mocha_nate 7y ago

Was it the country of Colombia? Do you know where i can watch that?

glaugh 7y ago

Not really disagreeing with the main thrust of your comment, but there’s also some selection bias at work. Uncontacted tribes will tend to live in the least productive spaces, since more productive spaces would have already been colonized by modern society. I think this insight comes from Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, but I’m forgetting.

apo 7y ago

For some thought-provoking insights into the scale of the changes ancient American civilizations brought on the landscape, see the book 1491 by Charles Mann. Maybe the most intriguing idea in the entire book is that the Americas were ten times more populated at the time of European contact than they ended up becoming in the 1500's (when most eye-witness accounts were written). The "noble savages" we think of were remnants of a disease holocaust that wiped out 90% of the population. It's almost as if we're trying to understand European civilization by observing concentration camp survivors. The recurring pattern: small group of Europeans makes contact with a native group. They report a land teeming with people and trade. A hundred years go by, and almost nobody is left. Those remaining live in small bands eeking out a subsistence living. The culprit: smallpox and a host of other diseases that jumped species in Europe due to co-habitation with animals. The lack of such practices (or animal domestication in general) in the Americas meant that the disease transfer was destined to be one-way. This dynamic may explain why there's only one genus of Homo left alive today. Whenever two groups contacted each other, one inevitably succumbs to the diseases carried by the other.

BurningFrog 7y ago
The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental. The Europeans had as little clue as the Americans what happened, 300 years before germ theory. I imagine both sides saw it as acts of God(s). I count it as the biggest "random" event in all of world history. Had the immunology lottery turned out otherwise, the world would be a completely different place.
- okmokmz 7y ago
  >The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental. Why is that crazy? I've never thought myself, or heard anyone imply, that the "disease holocaust" was intentional. As neither nation had the knowledge/science to understand diseases/germs at that time it seems straightforward to assume it was accidental
  - eloff 7y ago

BurningFrog 7y ago

Being eaten by a panther occasionally is living in harmony with nature! Something I read in my formative years that's stuck with me is "Typhoid is natural. Penicillin is artificial." I very consciously and happily avoid being "natural" for its own sake.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Well it's a nice line, but Penicillin was discovered not invented. It's as natural as typhoid or panthers.
- eloff 7y ago
  Penicillin the substance existed in nature, penicillin the medicine is a human invention. Is stretching to call it natural. It's like calling high-fructose corn syrup natural. It comes from nature, but it's hardly naturally occurring.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    I don't see how - the whole of the world's early mass production was simply naturally growing the mould in tanks. That was a huge part of the challenge of producing enough volume, and how to accelerate that fermentation and extraction. It was very much a natural product that was effectively farmed, and not much different to producing beer. That we have now found chemical means of production, and identified active ingredients doesn't change that history. You might not legally be able to label penicillin or opiates as a natural remedy any more, but in prescription medicine the production method is rarely or never labelled.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      Panthers and typhoid aren't domesticated, fungus vats are.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Yeah, I've thought of that too. I think the vast engineering, scientific and industrial undertaking it took to cure the first patient in 1942, 14 years after the discovery qualifies it as an invention, but I can see the other side of the argument. Either way, I enjoyed looking up the history of those 14 years: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/flemingpenicillin.html https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry...

NelsonMinar 7y ago

Are you making some equivalence between the Amazonian tribespeople and Homo Luzonensis? You understand Amazonians are Homo Sapiens, right?

csomar 7y ago

You shouldn't be surprised. People all around the world are moving to the cities for a reason.