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> The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to a

> The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Side point: this article is primarily aimed at promoting a (long) book, so readers are expected to enjoying reading for reading, and will appreciate the author's effort to lead them through a syrupous long ride, I guess. This reminded me I don't belong to that camp.

jrochkind1 5y ago
What I see (and am glad for) as the narraritive being challend is not just the simplistic "our ancestors were dumb", which some people may have, but this other one, that's so widespread that it's often considered "common sense" and seems more "objective": ALL hunter-gatherer societies/culture are fundamentally the same, because the main components are somehow a necessary consequence of being a hunter-gatherer (which is a stable category, which applies to a variety of human cultures throughout history, that can all be summed up as being more or less the same), and therefore we can tell how ancient "hunter-gatherers" lived by looking at contemporary people we call "hunter-gatherers". No, no, no, no, and no. And, in fact, human culture always has and still is various, diverse, and with many possibilities. From the review: > Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity. > “How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”?
throwawaylinux 5y ago
> I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Other than the "our dumb ancestors dumbly believed their ancestors were dumb" narrative, I don't think I have ever seen this among people who who have actually seriously thought about it. And if you're referring to dumb cavemen hitting everything with clubs "narrative" that's seen in comedy and other entertainment, I don't see why you think this article indicates we're moving away from that. Or really what the problem with it is at all, or why we would want to move away from it. Larson et al. rigorously proved it to be hilarious.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Archaeologists' insistence on defining anything they don't immediately understand as "for ritual purposes" - implying our ancestors were prone to superstition, instead of admitting the archaeologists' own ignorance. Every time we say "civilisation started with X" and then discover a city from before that time. We still don't understand how the Australian Aborigines got to Australia 50K years ago. You can't get to Australia without good boats. Yet there's a blank refusal to admit that this means that early humans had sophisticated boats. It's really common to write off early humans as less sophisticated.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Are these all things you're just making up? It's a common theory that first people reached Australia with the help of boats (and lower sea levels), for example. Who claims they can not possibly have used boats?
  - bigodbiel 5y ago
    I always considered rituals to be a form of proof of intelligence.
- yongjik 5y ago
  Well, FWIW, there was this weird guy who claimed our ancestors weren't dumb, they weren't even conscious. And by "our ancestors" he didn't mean Homo erectus, he meant ancient Greeks. (The so-called "bicameral mind" theory.) I think that's completely bonkers but apparently some people like the theory. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316
jablongo 5y ago
I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective, and that various indigenous communities made conscious philosophical choices that defined their path of rejecting technology as pursued by the empires of the time. However, I cannot get past the fact that life expectancy has risen steadily through the application of technology. And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective With what does that agree? Where is that stated?
  - jablongo 5y ago
    It’s just part of respecting the lifestyles and choices that our ancestors made - recognizing that there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      I understand the concept; it was expressed in the GGP as if someone else had said it and you agreed, and I didn't see where else it had been said. > there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group It's essential to understand that people have perspectives, values, and situations outside my own or even outside my own imagination, and that their similarity to my 'system' is not a measure of their validity. That means that making judgments is very error-prone. But that's different than saying all systems are equally valid, or are good, or that goodness is subjective. Making the judgment that system A is equally good and valid as system B by virtue of their existence is far more error prone. It's like saying, when evaluating programming languages for a project, 'I'm not absolutely certain, so I'm scoring them all 100!'.
akomtu 5y ago
IMHO, the biggest myth that modern historians adamantly believe in is that human intelligence has mysteriously developed from zero to current level in just 12,000 years. We are supposed to believe that humans were dumb savages, yet with fully functional, but apparently unused brains, and then they suddenly chose to become smart and in a few wild leaps they've gotten to quantum mechanics.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Practically all modern historians? Or even just the major consensus of this field? That's astounding to me, I have trouble believing it without at least some anecdotes. Do you have a link or name of one well respected and cited modern historian who adamantly believes this? And a reference to some of their writings or talks where they explain their ideas? That would be fascinating to read about, thank you.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Especially since this would be the field of anthropology. History is classically constructed as the study of texts and therefore doesn’t really have methods that extend past the development of the written word and the survival of sufficient sources.
- tremon 5y ago
  I'm not sure whether historians ascribe that to intelligence or to knowledge. My interpretation (not a historian) is that writing (i.e. the development of script) is what gave humans the means to go from the lore model of tribal knowledge to the collectively "smart" societies we developed over the past millennia. Whether you choose to ascribe the quality "savage" to a tribal society is a discussion all of itself; there is evidence of vast (continental-scale) trade networks even from the tribal era, so it wasn't all lets-bash-some-skulls-before-lunch. But being smart can only give you limited sight if you have no giants' shoulders to stand on.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Why do you believe that writing is a recent invention? Because we can't find samples older than that? Then what makes you think that all we can find is what can be found in principle? If tomorrow a solar flare wipes out our civilization, there won't be much scriptures left in stone and other resilient materials, so we all must be savages today for not engraving granite with equations in sufficient quantities.
chrisweekly 5y ago
syrupous?
barrenko 5y ago
The original meaning of the word "idiot" is someone who doesn't care for their local politics. Our ancestors were of course, the same as us.

jrochkind1 5y ago

What I see (and am glad for) as the narraritive being challend is not just the simplistic "our ancestors were dumb", which some people may have, but this other one, that's so widespread that it's often considered "common sense" and seems more "objective": ALL hunter-gatherer societies/culture are fundamentally the same, because the main components are somehow a necessary consequence of being a hunter-gatherer (which is a stable category, which applies to a variety of human cultures throughout history, that can all be summed up as being more or less the same), and therefore we can tell how ancient "hunter-gatherers" lived by looking at contemporary people we call "hunter-gatherers". No, no, no, no, and no. And, in fact, human culture always has and still is various, diverse, and with many possibilities. From the review: > Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity. > “How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”?

throwawaylinux 5y ago

> I am genuinely glad we are progressively leaving the "ancestors were dumb" narrative. It seems to have been a long and slow process, I fully root for it. Other than the "our dumb ancestors dumbly believed their ancestors were dumb" narrative, I don't think I have ever seen this among people who who have actually seriously thought about it. And if you're referring to dumb cavemen hitting everything with clubs "narrative" that's seen in comedy and other entertainment, I don't see why you think this article indicates we're moving away from that. Or really what the problem with it is at all, or why we would want to move away from it. Larson et al. rigorously proved it to be hilarious.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
Archaeologists' insistence on defining anything they don't immediately understand as "for ritual purposes" - implying our ancestors were prone to superstition, instead of admitting the archaeologists' own ignorance. Every time we say "civilisation started with X" and then discover a city from before that time. We still don't understand how the Australian Aborigines got to Australia 50K years ago. You can't get to Australia without good boats. Yet there's a blank refusal to admit that this means that early humans had sophisticated boats. It's really common to write off early humans as less sophisticated.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Are these all things you're just making up? It's a common theory that first people reached Australia with the help of boats (and lower sea levels), for example. Who claims they can not possibly have used boats?
- bigodbiel 5y ago
  I always considered rituals to be a form of proof of intelligence.
yongjik 5y ago
Well, FWIW, there was this weird guy who claimed our ancestors weren't dumb, they weren't even conscious. And by "our ancestors" he didn't mean Homo erectus, he meant ancient Greeks. (The so-called "bicameral mind" theory.) I think that's completely bonkers but apparently some people like the theory. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27917316

jablongo 5y ago

I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective, and that various indigenous communities made conscious philosophical choices that defined their path of rejecting technology as pursued by the empires of the time. However, I cannot get past the fact that life expectancy has risen steadily through the application of technology. And to me, a society in which the life expectancy at birth is 75 yrs (with a modest deviation from the mean) is clearly better to live in than one where the life expectancy is 25 yrs at birth. In that sense I still think "ancestors were dumb" because they didn't know what bacteria was and that it could kill you, for example.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wolverine876 5y ago
> I too, am all for recognizing that goodness is subjective With what does that agree? Where is that stated?
- jablongo 5y ago
  It’s just part of respecting the lifestyles and choices that our ancestors made - recognizing that there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    I understand the concept; it was expressed in the GGP as if someone else had said it and you agreed, and I didn't see where else it had been said. > there are different, equally valid systems for measuring the “goodness” of an individual or a social group It's essential to understand that people have perspectives, values, and situations outside my own or even outside my own imagination, and that their similarity to my 'system' is not a measure of their validity. That means that making judgments is very error-prone. But that's different than saying all systems are equally valid, or are good, or that goodness is subjective. Making the judgment that system A is equally good and valid as system B by virtue of their existence is far more error prone. It's like saying, when evaluating programming languages for a project, 'I'm not absolutely certain, so I'm scoring them all 100!'.

akomtu 5y ago

IMHO, the biggest myth that modern historians adamantly believe in is that human intelligence has mysteriously developed from zero to current level in just 12,000 years. We are supposed to believe that humans were dumb savages, yet with fully functional, but apparently unused brains, and then they suddenly chose to become smart and in a few wild leaps they've gotten to quantum mechanics.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Practically all modern historians? Or even just the major consensus of this field? That's astounding to me, I have trouble believing it without at least some anecdotes. Do you have a link or name of one well respected and cited modern historian who adamantly believes this? And a reference to some of their writings or talks where they explain their ideas? That would be fascinating to read about, thank you.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Especially since this would be the field of anthropology. History is classically constructed as the study of texts and therefore doesn’t really have methods that extend past the development of the written word and the survival of sufficient sources.
tremon 5y ago
I'm not sure whether historians ascribe that to intelligence or to knowledge. My interpretation (not a historian) is that writing (i.e. the development of script) is what gave humans the means to go from the lore model of tribal knowledge to the collectively "smart" societies we developed over the past millennia. Whether you choose to ascribe the quality "savage" to a tribal society is a discussion all of itself; there is evidence of vast (continental-scale) trade networks even from the tribal era, so it wasn't all lets-bash-some-skulls-before-lunch. But being smart can only give you limited sight if you have no giants' shoulders to stand on.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Why do you believe that writing is a recent invention? Because we can't find samples older than that? Then what makes you think that all we can find is what can be found in principle? If tomorrow a solar flare wipes out our civilization, there won't be much scriptures left in stone and other resilient materials, so we all must be savages today for not engraving granite with equations in sufficient quantities.

chrisweekly 5y ago

syrupous?

barrenko 5y ago

The original meaning of the word "idiot" is someone who doesn't care for their local politics. Our ancestors were of course, the same as us.