36 ms·

Why human societies developed so little during 300k years

• faitswulff 3y ago
  Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check. This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. Single point of data as a counterpoint: the Mosuo people, who are a matriarchal society. Viewing other cultures as primitive and current society as "advanced" is a long discarded idea in anthropology due to ethnocentrism and racism. This is also incorrect: > The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females. Male bonobos will have sex with each other as a way to defuse tensions, for instance, and male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other.
  • rainsford 3y ago
    > This article takes a lot of essentialist positions based on a single point of data: the Yanomamö. The article feels very much like a thesis in search of support, which might explain the laser like focus on one particular data point that appeared to support the author's premise. It also explains why criticism of the original research is dismissed as "cancel culture" rather than taken as a sign to at least look for other supporting data. The motivation makes more sense if you look at the rest of that substack (I wasn't familiar with it, so I poked around a bit). The author evidently has a deep interest in sex and gender role topics viewed through a particular lens. The second post I looked at was basically incel ideology 101, complete with Becky, Chad, and links to Jordan Peterson. I'll save you a click, but apparently teenage girls are depressed because they're not having sex with incel teenage boys. Given the rest of that blog, it's probably not surprising the author managed to boil down a topic as complex as the development of societies into a simple explanation about sex, backed by a single data point that's out of favor with actual professionals in the field.
    • olddustytrail 3y ago
      I assume you're referring https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/becky-is-depressed https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/becky-is-depressed And your take on it is so utterly bizarre I can't believe you actually read it. He literally talks about how strange it is that the "Becky" concept exists as it never did when he was a teen (it seems equally weird to me).
      • rainsford 3y ago
        Right but the point she (I think the author is actually a woman) seems to be making is that the "Becky" concept is a legitimate reaction to actual (and problematic) societal change, rather than an incorrect belief about the world among incels fostered by people like Jordan Peterson. It's less "Becky is an insult now because people are poisoning the minds of young men" and more "Becky is an insult now because of society and feminism". The reason I brought that up was less that I think that viewpoint is wrong (although obviously I do), but more that it pervades a lot of the content on that substack, so the original post claiming societal development can also be boiled down to sex (and in particular, more 'primitive' sexual roles) should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
        • olddustytrail 3y ago
          Ah, yes, of course Tove would be female. I hadn't looked at the name and I thought the picture of Napoleon Chagnon at the top of the article was a picture of the author! I consider the popularity of arseholes like Peterson to be more symptom than cause but I could be wrong. I'll think about it.
      • lanstin 3y ago
        I read it and can confirm that the take is basically the same as my take on it. Totally sexist garbage. Or pro-restrictive gender roles. Also, charmingly unaware of history. Moving to the cities for free love, gender flexibility, and parties is not some new 2000s thing. That was disco and cocaine in 80s. That was the hippies back when the boomers were young, and that was the 1920s. “How you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen gay Paris”. Sexism and anti-sexism have neither been newly created nor nearly defeated in the past ten or twenty years. Now, social media on the other hand…
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    > male wolves and lions will form groups to support each other. They band together to fight the male who has the pride so they can get the females. The difference between humans and other mammals in these fights is that we are much more efficient at killing and that females are fertile all year round.
    • faitswulff 3y ago
      > They band together to fight the male who has the pride so they can get the females. Not necessarily: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gay-lions-male-kenya-masia-mara-affection-cuddling-mounting-public-a8031701.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gay-lions-ma... And if your definition of default must expand in order to include homosexuality then you really need to examine the benefit of saying that it is a "default."
      • swayvil 3y ago
        "it is written". You hear that, in movies and books. It basically means that, because it is is asserted in textual form, it is authoritative. Which is absurd of course. But it that how we think?
  • rajin444 3y ago
    > Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before No, but Mother Nature has ample evidence of doing so. If we want to continue as a species we need a way to persist after the next apocalyptic natural disaster. We’re fortunate some ancient peoples lived in environments that forced them to build societies and progress technology - otherwise we might not know we’re one meteor away from extinction!
    • lanstin 3y ago
      Or one mass CO2 release away from extinction! https://www.montclair.edu/newscenter/2021/09/22/new-research-uncovers-cause-of-earths-largest-mass-extinction/ https://www.montclair.edu/newscenter/2021/09/22/new-research...
  • ttyprintk 3y ago
    Since you brought up the Mosuo, it’s entirely possible that the harmonious feudal depiction of their society is exaggerated for reasons of national politics; to the same extant Chagnon was accused of exaggerating the Yanomamö.
    • faitswulff 3y ago
      That’s exactly my point.
  • himinlomax 3y ago
    > Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either The pleistocene megafauna would like to have a word with you.
  • Amezarak 3y ago
    > Human societies never destabilized the entire global ecosystem before, either. Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check. Aside from the fact this is incorrect, it's also rooted in a false assumption. It's a common mistake to believe the ecosystem is in some sort of steady state or equilibrium. It is not and never has been. The climate changes. The geology changes. Invasive species arrive. Someone wins an evolutionary arms race and wipes out the rest. Populations go through booms and busts - or even extinctions - because they consume resources too rapidly. There is no variable that is not in continual flux. Things only appear to be "steady state" on very short timescales, but attentive people have always noticed this - the ancient Greeks were aware of massive geographic changes, for example. When too many variables change too fast or too far, we see mass extinctions (really just an increase in the extinction rate) as different species don't make it through the selection pressure. Are we causing one now? Sure, absolutely. But not because we're special. Because we're not. We like to believe we are wise, rational technocratic masters of nature. We are not. We are causing climate change and extinctions like every other species that begins to dominate (dominate may not even be the right word - some species that don't dominate produce massive 'destructive' changes.) Probably the earliest known example is the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. No amount of trying to be more 'rational' and 'sustainable' will produce an ecological equilibrium over anything but the very short term.
  • NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
    The Mosuo are _matrilineal_ (figure out which kinship group you're in based on Mom's line) but not _matriarchal_ (women hold most of the political power). You'll occasionally see it argued that the Mosuo are matriarchal, but what's going on is many people are desperate to try to find an example of matriarchy, and the Mosuo are as close as it gets. So yeah, if you squint, stand on one leg, and crook your head a bit it sort of looks like they might be. What's really the case is that every single human society we know of has been some flavor of patriarchal.
  • margalabargala 3y ago
    > Viewing it as "progress" to be able to cause climate change, mass extinction and pollution is a bias that we should check. How could that not be progress? If we've never been able to do that before, but now can, we've moved from a state of inability to a state of ability. That is progress. Now, if you view "progress" as something that is inherently positive, that is a bias you should check.
  • jacob171714 3y ago
    Pretty sure his version of developed only happened recently is because the climate has been really stable for the last 10k or so years meaning we can actually have agriculture based societies not get screwed when their climate suddenly changes
• stodor89 3y ago
  "Developed so little" compared to what? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • olddustytrail 3y ago
    Compared to the last 10k years.
  • faitswulff 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • czbond 3y ago
      Why? [I scanned the article because I only need some details]
      • faitswulff 3y ago
        Viewing other cultures as primitive is a long discarded racist idea in anthropology and the article hinges on it.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • andsoitis 3y ago
          If some cultures aren’t less advanced than others, then we also can’t really talk about some cultures being more advanced, either relative to other cultures or to themselves across the span of time.
          • faitswulff 3y ago
            That's tautological
        • pixl97 3y ago
          If I have a a spaceship and you have a burning stick, you are technologically primitive. Being technologically primitive does not necessarily make you culturally primitive, for example... If I use that spaceship to explode your technologically primitive culture to little bits because I can, it's highly likely that my culture is underdeveloped when it comes to finding non-violent solutions.
• arthurswin 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • faitswulff 3y ago
    Q: Is viewing cultures as ancient or primitive still a popular perspective in academia like anthropology? Why or why not? GPT: In contemporary academia, especially in anthropology, viewing cultures as "ancient" or "primitive" is no longer a popular perspective. This shift has occurred due to several reasons: • Critique of ethnocentrism: Modern anthropologists recognize that ethnocentrism—the belief that one's own culture is the standard against which others should be judged—can lead to biased perspectives and misunderstandings. Anthropologists now strive to understand cultures in their own contexts, considering their unique histories, values, and practices. • Cultural relativism: The concept of cultural relativism emphasizes the importance of understanding cultures within their own context, without imposing one's own values or judgments. This approach discourages the labeling of cultures as "primitive" or "ancient," as it recognizes that each culture has its own complexities and should not be evaluated based on a hierarchy. • Rejection of evolutionary models: Early anthropological theories often relied on unilinear evolutionary models, suggesting that cultures progress along a linear path from "primitive" to "civilized." Modern anthropology largely rejects these models in favor of more nuanced understandings of cultural change and diversity. • Decolonizing anthropology: The discipline of anthropology has undergone a process of decolonization in recent decades, which involves critically examining the field's history, assumptions, and methodologies. This process has led to a greater awareness of the power dynamics involved in studying other cultures and has contributed to the rejection of the "primitive" or "ancient" labels. • Focus on cultural diversity and complexity: Contemporary anthropology values the diversity and complexity of human societies, recognizing that each culture has its own unique historical trajectory, social organization, and belief systems. This perspective discourages simplistic labels like "primitive" or "ancient," as they fail to capture the richness and depth of human cultural variation. In summary, the perspective of viewing cultures as "ancient" or "primitive" is no longer popular in anthropology and other academic disciplines, as it has been replaced by a more nuanced understanding of cultural diversity, context, and complexity.
• syntaxing 3y ago
  I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.
  • raincole 3y ago
    > Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally. Answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s
    • geoduck14 3y ago
      You juts made me watch a 4 minute video on ballpoint pens. Thanks.
    • pier25 3y ago
      Woah suer interesting video. Thanks for sharing.
    • syntaxing 3y ago
      Definitely agree, even our modern toilet we use everyday is pretty crazy to wrap your head around
      • irrational 3y ago
        You might be using the toilet wrong.
        • AlbertCory 3y ago
• netbioserror 3y ago
  Technology develops, but our psychology changes very little. Evolution is slow. Every new idealistic framework for constructing a society inevitably proposes a hypothetical "new man" who lionizes those values and possesses the ideal psychology, so of course the framework fails. And we return to tried and true defaults.
  • czbond 3y ago
    I believe the critical failure point of humanity is that is requires enough humans to act in a "global idealist" manner, eschewing the societal easy fruit of the local maximum for building a global minimum/maximum, while giving up personal energy & opportunities, and taking risks & having personal power to do so. I used to believe much of the population can and will do that. Now I realize only a very small percentage get to the can + will + do + succeed portion - since there is so much failure along the way. As we see, in a civilized society - there is little reason for most to do this - and they hence waste away watching Netflix (etc.) You're on to something. Thats the way I believe.
    • astrange 3y ago
      > As we see, in a civilized society - there is little reason for most to do this - and they hence waste away watching Netflix (etc.) Prime age employment in the US is currently higher than it has ever been in history. (There are some "people just don't want to work" stories but these are mostly reading the wrong numbers; what they're seeing is society aging causing people to retire.)
• awesomegoat_com 3y ago
  More spiritual society is the less stuff it needs to amass. One of the theories goes that ancient civilizations made progress in non material domains. How else would you explain these thousands years long periods in the history when a table or a spoon looked the same. And nothing visible happened?
  • pixl97 3y ago
    "And nothing visible happened" Are you just neglecting all the human suffering, pain, and death that was occurring in that nothing visible happening moment? History looks a lot different when you just ignore the parts you don't like.
• AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  The Yanomami tell us very l little about human life prior to the year zero, so extrapolating to 300k us a bridge too far. However this does back up work done by Chris Knight [1] showing that pre-modern societies did in fact organize around fertility rituals and reproduction is the first order game. The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. Whether this is because wars attrite the population to such an extent that they remain sustainable is not a rigorously made argument IMO but seems at least plausible. This also supports my theory [2] that more complex games for reproduction, pushing people into the violence of property ownership, only comes when a food source is persistently scarce to the point of deprivation that can’t be remedied without private property. They seem to be able to prevent monopolists from monopolizing these open hunting grounds, which then in turn does not pressure them to an extent that they need to develop monopoly over resources. http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/origins_of_culture/ http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/origins_of_culture/ https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
  • phkahler 3y ago
    >> The lack of “development” however I would attribute to the fact that the Yanomami and other non-private property based societies, continue to have relative abundance of food. That was covered. The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources.
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Yes perhaps poorly directly attributed on my part but I’m stressing that specific point
    • yanderekko 3y ago
      >The women can feed the children on their own, so the men fight over women not resources. Notably the causality runs in both directions here - the fighting over women is what prevents the population from falling into a Malthusian trap. The next time someone tells you that pre-agricultural populations only spent 10 hours a week on work and the rest on leisure or whatever, you should reply asking what percentage of those populations died do to homicide. The answer might be revealing.
• maroonblazer 3y ago
  Really good article, and yet another newsletter/blog I feel compelled to subscribe to yet probably never read (sigh). > What Chagnon actually said when he reported about men making war over women, was that man actually is an animal among other animals. I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the GPTs. A considerable amount of the sturm und drang around this tech is centered on the question of how close to human intelligence they are, and/or whether or not it 'knows' anything, etc. All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I think what the GPTs are beginning to reveal is that they're not reaching some new threshold of 'human-ness', but rather that we humans are not as 'special' - i.e. 'separate' or 'above' nature - as we like to think.
  • ChainOfFools 3y ago
    > All of these questions seem to smuggle in the assumption that we humans are 'special' in some intrinsic sense. I this premise, which indeed does operate largely without conscious acknowledgement, is the basis of belief in human rights.
    • psychphysic 3y ago
      The basis of human rights is largely that we fought for them. That's why they seem arbitrary. And why animals lack them entirely in the strictest sense. Similarly democracy is just an analogy for battle. The bigger group wins, ideally with less blood shed. No one should be under the illusion that democracy does anything other than try to minimize disquiet (it doesn't select the best by any other metric leadership necessarily). It does not even matter how informed the population is. Back to the point. Why do we have human rights? Basically they are the things that were either fought for directly or got in at the same time. They are now expanding but I don't think many realise why they were started and the expansion might reverse what won't is the things people are willing to pick up arms over It's also interesting to look at the theories of human morals like Kohlberg's model. Very few humans reason with the post conventual moral stages.
  • satvikpendem 3y ago
    Indeed, I was talking just the other day with someone who mentioned that machines will never do X like humans. I simply had to say that never is a long time. If you are a physicalist who believes that the physical state of the brain determines consciousness and thought, then there really is nothing special about humans that we couldn't replicate given enough technological skill.
• melling 3y ago
  Edison invented his lightbulb less than 150 years ago. Before that we used candles and gas lights for indoor lighting. Half of US homes didn’t have electricity until 1925. https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/kidsyouth/the-electric-light-system-phonograph-motion-pictures.htm https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/kidsyouth/the-electric-light-... We seem to have become complacent with progress, and don’t make quite the same effort. For example, commercial supersonic flight became available when I was a kid, and we lost it 2 decades ago. We haven’t been to the moon since the 1970s.
  • meindnoch 3y ago
    We haven't built too many pyramids or Gothic cathedrals either in the past few hundred years. Does that mean we couldn't anymore? Nope. We just don't bother, because we have better use of the necessary resources.
    • melling 3y ago
      No one wants to fly supersonic commercially? Isn’t that simply a matter of being available and affordable?
      • qwytw 3y ago
        Also physics. Supersonic travel is prohibitively expensive because it requires exponentially more energy than flying at ~900 km/h. More efficient engines can't really change that much..
        • MichaelZuo 3y ago
          Clearly millions, if not billions, of people would want to fly supersonically if they could afford it.
          • qwytw 3y ago
            I wouldn't mind a Gothic cathedral if I could get one for cheap and maintenance didn't cost anything. At the end Concorde failed because it was mainly a status symbol (for the governments, airlines and passengers). As long as subsonic remained considerably cheaper (and it probably would because of physics) I'm convinced most people would still ussually choose it even if supersonic became more affordable. I mean it's like saying most people would prefer to fly first class if it was more affordable, well.. obviously.
• hownottowrite 3y ago
  Probably better to get a fuller view of history from The Dawn of Everything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeveryt...
• hoseja 3y ago
  See also The Gossip Trap about another, similar hypothesis https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap
  • rrherr 3y ago
    Yes, The Gossip Trap is a great read! Here's an excerpt from the intro, for context: "This essay of mine won 1st place and $5,000 in Scott Alexander’s anonymous book review contest, which was hosted at Astral Codex Ten. It attempts to solve the “Sapient Paradox,” which asks: Given that humans have been around for 200,000 years, why did civilization take so long to get started? Why were we stuck in prehistory for so long?"
• czbond 3y ago
  I've always believed a main weakness of humans are the wide range of emotions many have and their influence on decision making. I've always believed if we could cull out say.... 60% of emotions and get to logical decision making - that humanity could excel. Heck - I'd even wondered if CRISPR could help with that. Clearly doing this is morally wrong, but would be useful. Then I heard about AGI years ago. The real usefulness for me of AGI - to help the emotional see the error of their ways and possibly use higher level logic, rather than base emotional logic, for decision making.
• nemo44x 3y ago
  Well you see we invented beer and that was good enough for a really long time.
• stevenwoo 3y ago
  This feels a bit like Baader–Meinhof phenomena to me, just after reading on reddit /r/explainlikeimfive earlier today but with a different perspective. ELI5: If humans have been in our current form for 250,000 years, why did it take so long for us to progress yet once it began it's in hyperspeed? https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6oz1/eli5_if_humans_have_been_in_our_current_form_for/jfe8bzt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6oz1/...
  • satvikpendem 3y ago
    Hah, I posted the same thing after reading that reddit post yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35493633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35493633
• xrcws 3y ago
  Misinterpretation of Chagnon’s work. Read The Dawn of Everything for more on this. So-called “primitive” societies have been experimenting with things other than material technology (e.g. different ways of organizing themselves) for much of that time. There’s a reason colonists often defected to Native American tribes despite their lifestyles being less comfortable in certain material ways.
  • everybodyknows 3y ago
    Certainly inadequate in some respects: > According to Chagnon’s calculations about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence. So, given abundant food, and no obvious limit on the size of a man's "harem", what kept the female population numbers from runaway? Also, what were the proximate causes of the female deaths by violence?
    • reducesuffering 3y ago
      Why would the female population runaway? It doesn't matter what they die from, only that enough died of homicide to impact the numbers of pre-reproduction people dying. If you have population X that reproduces 20% y/y, but 20% (avg. of 10% and 30%) are killed before the next generation reproduces, you have steady state population.
    • scotty79 3y ago
      Female infanticide. Warriors were more valuable than women because they were killed off faster and lack of warriors meant you'll be loosing women too. So they most likely just killed female infants so mother has free capacity for next pregnancy and feeding a boy, future warrior.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• satvikpendem 3y ago
  Interesting that this post came out only 12 hours after this similar question on reddit was asked (but I suppose coincidences are bound to happen)[0]. The reddit post's top answer corresponds pretty nicely with TFA, as it seems true that until we got the ability to share knowledge and have enough of a baseline to work from, we weren't able to bootstrap our progress. The people in TFA simply have not gotten to the baseline yet it seems, as they're still killing each other. It parallels the creation of life, only one cell needed to have the right conditions to then bootstrap to reproduction, and later on, only one cell needed to absorb another cell to then bootstrap to eukaryotic, multi-celled life. Humans are the same, we subsist until we are comfortable enough to start bootstrapping our progress. It's also no wonder that civilization only started in a few specific places, the rest simply were not suitable conditions to bootstrap higher order civilizational structures. [0] https://www.old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6oz1/eli5_if_humans_have_been_in_our_current_form_for/ https://www.old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12f6...
• marsven_422 3y ago
  [dead]
• mirekrusin 3y ago
  Religion shadowing reason as local maximum.
• retrac 3y ago
  The sheer number of people with free time and who are able to communicate long distances with others who share their interests (whether practical or frivolous) seems to often be left out of these discussions. Right now there are a billion people using electronic devices, engaged, productively or recreationally, with other human beings. The elite of Ancient Rome, the people literate, with some free time, measured in perhaps the tens or hundreds of thousands. So one hour of our collective mental wankery today is equivalent to tens of thousands of hours of it in Ancient Rome, assuming all other things were equal (which they are not). In other words, I don't think it's a coincidence things started changing rapidly after the invention of agriculture, when the human population started to steadily increase.
  • leobg 3y ago
    Didn’t Wait But Why post something along those lines recently?
    • charlieflowers 3y ago
      That is hard to parse. Eventually I realized you are saying: Didn't a person we refer to as "Wait but Why" post something along these lines recently?
      • astrange 3y ago
        That's the power of capitalization for proper nouns.
        • leobg 3y ago
          That power was diminished by the capitalized title appearing right after the first word in the sentence, which thus was also capitalized. Adding quotes would have made it easier to parse I guess.
          • charlieflowers 3y ago
            I wasn’t trying to be disparaging. Just informing the poster, sharing a bit of proofreading feedback in the hope they found it helpful.
• cattown 3y ago
  Was this written by a large language model? Meandering narrative and logic tenuously connecting related topics rather than a clear thesis and orderly presentation of evidence seems like the LLM style.
  • soared 3y ago
    Seems like writing to me - interesting context on a researcher, his thesis, some analysis.
• Convolutional 3y ago
  Developed into what? The hunter-gatherer bands still roaming the Amazon don't have to worry about unemployment, layoffs, crime or a host of other maladies - their only problem is encounters with murderous gold miners from the "developed" world. Sociologists found hunter-gatherer bands usually work less than 40 hours a week. They have it made more than Amazon SWE's grinding away on the weekend. The past 10,000 years of "development" has been a disaster for the majority of people, and a benefit to a small minority.
  • baremetal 3y ago
    That is a radical opinion you have there sir, I think I agree with you.
  • cjoelrun 3y ago
    Seems a little romanticized. Kind of like people who like the idea of homesteading, until they do it. Everything is a tradeoff of problems, never an elimination of all problems. I'd prefer to have modern societal problems, but power to you if you can make hunter gathering or homesteading work for you.
  • confidantlake 3y ago
    For real. They spend their entire lives mostly outdoors in the Amazon. I may have 1 2 week vacation to the Amazon in my entire life if I am lucky.
  • ativzzz 3y ago
    Or you know, the problem the people in the article encounter is primarily other people of a neighboring tribe who are killing them. 30% of their males died from violence. They worked less than 40 hours a week because food was abundant, easy to get, and their population was low. If food was scarce, they probably die of starvation or war.
  • astrange 3y ago
    > The hunter-gatherer bands still roaming the Amazon don't have to worry about unemployment, layoffs, crime or a host of other maladies - their only problem is encounters with murderous gold miners from the "developed" world. Isn't that a kind of crime? I daresay they have other issues too, like tropical or introduced diseases, parasites, disability, famines, substance addiction…
• intrasight 3y ago
  The correct answer is always the same: modern risk management. If you can't benefit from taking chances, you never will.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  It doesn't take long for the author's ideological agenda to surface: > "When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter." It's such a tediously predictable approach, regurgitating the theme that "Marxists captured academia and distorted science to fit their preferred narrative", which is as much projection as anything else (e.g. the takeover of American economics departments by the Milton Friedman crowd with the assistance of large cash donations from private foundations, etc.). Fundamentally, the problem with the author's claim is that you can't look at one group of humans living somewhere and then project your conclusions about how that group functions to the entire human species while proclaiming you've discovered some fundamental feature of human nature (that just happens to fit with your own ideological bias). This kind of bias projection is a huge problem in the social sciences, and is doubtless a main reason for poor reproducibility of studies, data manipulation and selection, and the like. People go in with a story they want to tell, and look for evidence that supports their preconceived notions, and surprise, they see what they want to see.
  • vitiral 3y ago
    Projection goes both ways. The author mentioned very little about Marxism and here you are picking a specific quote as damning proof of bias. Also I found many of the author's points (in the follow on article) to fit quite cleanly into what I know of Marxism.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • revelio 3y ago
    On academic takeover, the statistics are quite clear that 60 years ago there were far more Republicans in US academia than there are today. Economics departments may have somewhat less skewed numbers but you would certainly expect to see a dominance of left-leaning voters in a department like anthropology. >> you can't look at one group of humans living somewhere and then project your conclusions about how that group functions to the entire human species That's his point, not yours. He criticized anthropologists who were (in essence) projecting 19th century Victorian England onto the whole of humanity and its history, and argues that when other anthropologists were faced with indisputable evidence that this generalization could not hold they had a mini melt down and shot the messenger. Why the meltdown - Marxism takes as a founding axiom the idea that humanity is engaged in a constant war over control of the means of the material production, that it always had been and always would be. This idea is what justified their social agenda. >> This kind of bias projection is a huge problem in the social sciences Yup, and that's why the author is criticizing it. Also, is there any evidence the author is a social scientist? I don't see any. Plus the author doesn't claim all anthropologists are Marxists, only that some of them are.
• carlsborg 3y ago
  > Chagnon asked the Yanomamö what the wars were about, and got the answer that they were about women The ancient Sanskrit epic "Ramayana" is also centred around a war that stemmed from kidnapping of a bride.
  • lanstin 3y ago
    And the Odyssey.
• kurthr 3y ago
  There is the key TLDR line (and Chagnon's justification for why the lack of development was possible). "The obvious reason why the Yanomamö didn't reach a Malthusian condition was their high level of violence. The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. In practice they ran into violent neighbors long before they ran out of land to farm or game to hunt." The Malthusian condition is what gives us "progress", because you have to fight economically rather than individually (with knowledge, technology, and efficiency rather than with knives and individually) to survive. My concern over the last decade has been whether in wealthier societies grifting has become more profitable than developing technology or knowledge. One can argue what is better, but not really whether it is "progress". Moore's law is really one of the few things that was dragging us forward.
  • lanstin 3y ago
    We certainly,seem to be a more fraudulent society now than when I was a kid (1970s) but that might be a distorted perception. I think there are earlier times when hucksterism was even bigger than now. I guess it is down to the forces of don’t let the government regulate the operations of the market winning since 1980, so there is no one to stop the fraud or label it. But it at least the US has always been caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Maybe it is more fraudulent because the internet and fraudsters have gotten more effective and most people have blind spots where they are manipulable; crypto has bilked people of billions; Q Anon has gotten millions utterly divorced from shared reality; YouTube algorithm inadvertently spread flat earther stuff because it has algorithmically desirable features.
    • latency-guy2 3y ago
      You are definitely imagining things to say the least.
      • lanstin 3y ago
        Please elaborate. Kids surely don't have a good view on the amount of fraud, but I remember people going to jail and resigning for corruption or illegal schemes more regularly.
• BigCryo 3y ago
  These conclusions only apply to the tropics where you have no seasons are very little seasons and where the loose tropical soil can be easily maintained with hoe agriculture by the women... Up north in Europe where you have harsh Winters where the soil is hard and thick and where it must be plowed requiring strength and so forth, it's an entirely different story. Better notice the author did not say this did not mention this comparison. I wonder why
  • hexane360 3y ago
    This article is about the Paleolithic era, before agriculture was developed. Also, hoe vs plow agriculture tended to do with the availability of domesticated draft animals, not the hardness of the soil. The first plows appeared after oxen were domesticated in Mesopotamia. This did have an effect on the gender distribution of agriculture, not because women couldn't use hoes, but because they couldn't handle plows driven by draft animals.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  300kya there were no behaviorally modern humans. There were anatomically modern humans, or "early modern humans". Humans essentially domesticated themselves.
• ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  Hard to take this seriously when the author believes the Yanomami represent some kind of pristine culture, untouched by civilization. Instead they are more like refugees -- survivors of smallpox and other European diseases, and also of European colonizers. A few hundred years ago, they moved to some of the least hospitable land on the continent and were forgotten by the outside world. They are unique, certainly, but hardly representative of prehistoric humanity.
  • revelio 3y ago
    Are you arguing that they were once a lot more sophisticated and then regressed back to the stone age? It seems somehow unlikely given the description. Even if they fled contact with outsiders, they wouldn't have forgotten everything along the way.
    • ProjectArcturis 3y ago
      Certainly the destruction of their actual civilization, and moving to a new biome with different resources would have entailed the loss of much technology. But I'm mainly saying that the author isn't even aware of their history, and treats them as a stand-in for prehistoric peoples everywhere.
• treerunner 3y ago
  Maybe the biggest advancement in societal development is the idea that in some ways, many ways actually, non-development is the most advanced form of development.
  • lanstin 3y ago
    I think we are at an in between stage of development. Some tech but basically primitive tech. Like we have cars, but they are not capable enough to go over most surfaces, so we have to pave over where ever we want to go. Advanced tech would be putting us in more pleasant and natural environments but able to summon a cat bus https://totoro.fandom.com/wiki/Catbus https://totoro.fandom.com/wiki/Catbus for transportation. And have unobtrusive medical treatment things around in case they are needed. But trees and animals and so on on the surface. Tree houses, sure, but not interstate highways. Floating cities, why not. First we need energy, then we need safe nanotech and then we need a mechanical understanding of biology.
• dukeofdoom 3y ago
  No chocolate, coffee or high calorie foods. Imagine what you would do to get chocolate if you couldn't have it. Peanut butter sandwiches, kornflakes, fueled working people during the industrial revolution. Industry produced foods for workers
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• 00F_ 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • bowsamic 3y ago
    Is this a joke? His photo seems to be of a tomato plant
    • Eldandan 3y ago
      Either mistook the photo of Napoleon Chagnon as the author or has a very dry sense of humor. Too bad it wasn't the latter.
      • 00F_ 3y ago
        its too bad youre an underpaid teacher. isnt it fun to take cheap shots at people who dont deserve it?
    • vintermann 3y ago
      Whether he's a tomato plant or not, watch the way he starts out by retelling how the guy who studied the Yanomami had been accused of serious dishonesty, but it has now been conclusively proven that it's the guy who accused him who was the fraud. Right away, he's expected to be taken as an expert, and he knows he's talking to non-experts, but he's telling us, don't listen to those people, listen to me. And then he goes on with the sort of grand narrative that even I know - though I'm not an anthropologist - that most of them don't want to make, and are deeply sceptical about (also when made by people from the other political side, like Graeber) For all I know he's even right about his claims. But if you believe them just from coming across his article first (as opposed to those who would no doubt try just as hard to poison the well against him), then what's the point?
  • Alekhine 3y ago
    That's not the author of the post. That's a scientist the the post is about.
    • 3y ago
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  The reptilian brain often fools intelligent beings into believing they are capable of determining what progress even means. If one digs deep into noteworthy areas of theoretical change, than one often learns most were ambitious individuals exploiting hapless peers. Society tends to praise ethically dubious ambitious behavior, and punishes those who question conventional wisdom. This fact covers almost all areas of study, and results in irrational mythologies. Just be impressed a hive of psychotic primates accomplishes anything at all... let alone improve something through arbitrary metrics. =)
• CydeWeys 3y ago
  Interesting, but what the heck was this quote all about?? > When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter. This is hyperbolic, no? Most anthropologists are not Marxists, surely. So why is the author weakening his point by using such loaded language inaccurately?
  • blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    I have been away from academic anthropology for a couple of decades, but it wouldn't be too ridiculous to say that the social sciences tend to oscillate back and forth between materialist theoretical frameworks (like Marxism) and idealistic ones (which give culture / social practice more weight in explaining how people live, other than competition over resources). With occasional syntheses of the two. So in the context of Chagnon's career it was that he was annoying his mostly-Marxist colleagues (at the time) with his sociobiological explanations.
• 00F_ 3y ago
  i dont trust anyone who has a fancy media head-shot. i clicked on the link and before i had a chance to read anything i was confronted by a giant head-shot of a guy who is trying to look sophisticated -- a person who is clearly very concerned with his brand. at that point reading on is pointless because i already know that this person will never say anything that would threaten that brand, nothing that goes against the current societal dogma. and its likely that what he writes optimizes for reader engagement over truth. even though the headshot is not of the author, everything i said is still true! you cant flag a comment that hasnt broken the rules.
• avodonosov 3y ago
  > about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth) > The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down. Is 20% loss really enough to keep populations down? If every woman has 3 children, then populations inceases by 50% in each generation. Losing 20% will not keep the population stable. What if every woman has more children? Missing in the pictore presented by the article is the birth rate, and other causes of death. It is not evident the wars are keeping the Yanomamö population stable. Also I don't believe animal populatios are stabilized by conflicts within same species. And I heard from a hunter that the population of wild boars and other hunting animals depends mostly on food availability.
  • narag 3y ago
    Child mortality is a huge problem now. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-is-an-everyday-tragedy-of-enormous-scale-that-rarely-makes-the-headlines https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-i... And as close as my grandparents' generation, half of their siblings died before ten.
  • pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Also the idea that a non-catastrophic reduction in the male population would affect the size of the next generation is probably wrong. If we assume a lack of strict monogamy, that is (probably a reasonable assumption?).
    • avodonosov 3y ago
      > The Yanomamö had the habit of stealing each others' women for polygynous unions
    • scotty79 3y ago
      Reduction of number of males results in women getting stolen and probably even more men getting killed in the process. So the population of given group will significantly reduce.
• jokoon 3y ago
  No, it was the abuse of fossil fuels
• DubiousPusher 3y ago
  I think this article overstates how "underdeveloped" paleolithic peoples were. For example, regarding shelters: we see teepees, yurts and tents as "primitive" shelters but compared to living in a cave or sleeping in the open it is very advanced. We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested. What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.
  • civilized 3y ago
    Yeah, whenever I see pre-modern tools, clothing, shelter, I always think it's amazing and wonder at how much they must know to make it all work.
    • AlbertCory 3y ago
      Like bronze: alloy copper & tin together, when tin only came from a very few places on earth.
      • drewcoo 3y ago
        Linen is my usual example of cultural encoding of what we now see as early tech. Making linen from flax is complicated. https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made Ridiculously complicated. And there were oral folk tales passed along for years to keep the cultural memory of it. Eventually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote their versions down. Andersen: https://fairytalez.com/flax/ https://fairytalez.com/flax/ Grimm: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mother-holle/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mothe... There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them: https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-discovery-of-flax-from-myths-of-the-norsemen/ https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-disc...
• sdwr 3y ago
  Really fantastic article, love it. If revolutionary stuff wasn't coming by every other week, this would deserve a lot of attention. Very clearly stated, doesn't overreach, amazing work. Don't mean to overcomplicate the main point, but human behaviour everywhere lives on that spectrum of Malthus, from survival-driven to sex-driven. Stable and unstable microcosms pop up everywhere. I'd bet Chagnon was so controversial because the field he was trying to publish in is popularity-based (and therefore sex-driven), and not all that different from the tribe he was describing. > It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
• civilized 3y ago
  It is not surprising to me that Chagnon was cancelled over false accusations, which were accepted with undue credulity by his colleagues. As this author alludes, and my own experience has also shown, too much of anthropology seems to have an unfortunate culture of gossip-driven ideological conformity. Dissent from the party line, and it will be discovered, one way or another, that you are a Bad Person.
• sib 3y ago
  I was lucky enough to go to Bora Bora a few years ago. I spent a few hours talking to a native and one of the things he said to me was, "we see someone who's skinny and we think, 'he must be lazy,' since there is plentiful food all around, fish, fruit, etc., and you just pick it up and eat." While their ceremonies and dances all relate to physical feats of prowess and strength. This seems to fit well with the hypothesis laid out in this article.
• boringuser2 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ryanwaggoner 3y ago
  Who is this person and why should I care about their musings? The fields of anthropology and evolutionary psychology have enough controversy and differing opinions among the experts to waste time reading overly confident conjectures from some rando who doesn’t even give their last name.
  • Seattle3503 3y ago
    This is phrased harshly but is a good point. Who is this person and why do their musing merit attention? Have they done decades of research on this field and staked their reputation on this position, or are they another person on the internet with an opinion?
• Tycho 3y ago
  Mimetic desire and external memory. Countless advances would have been erased by conflict, or simply forgotten. Not until we had more developed mechanics of information preservation and ethical systems that could protect against the destructive crises that result from mimetic desire could progress start to compound and accelerate.
  • jvm___ 3y ago
    One village or area develops written language, and their neighbors just smash and burn it all when they come raid them.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• legitimayzer 3y ago
  it's not that we didn't develop culture, it's just that the scientific/academic CANNOT accept nothing which is not written down (or which exist as material remnants), and writing is barely over 10 or 12 thousand years old. meaning that the preceding period of cultural development doesn't exist for them by the 'choice' of relying solely on material artifacts as admissible evidence; which unwritten (oral only) transmission does not have.
  • DuckFeathers 3y ago
    I think it has little to do with "science"; it is the westerners who have held science hostage which has led to all kinds of idiocy. They will accept Egyptians as "civilized" because they can then go on to claim that the ancient Egyptians who lived 2500 years ago, who were more close to Europeans, totally built the pyramids even though nothing suggests that they had the means to do so... and the answer to that obviously is "slavery"... because that is how Europeans would do it and therefore that is how it was done. And nothing is unknown or open to explanation because western "experts" of course know everything. I don't think there is much hope for knowing more of human past until the western empire collapses and more intelligent civilizations take over.
• ranprieur 3y ago
  The author uses the word "develop" a lot without ever defining it. If he tried to, I think it would become more clear that there are a lot of things human societies can get better at, which don't necessarily go together.
• kilroy123 3y ago
  I feel like anyone who has ever played the game Civilization on any mode equal to or higher than "Warlord" can understand. It was probably brutally hard to get a civilization going for long enough to even invent any tech let alone share that knowledge with the rest of the world.
• lanstin 3y ago
  It seems a bit naïf to assume that nothing happened during that time. Gaining a whole lot more sentience is a big adjustment. We have to build language, build teaching methods, figure out how, to cooperate via trade and so on, master parenting of sentient creatures, notice patterns in the year and seasons and maybe decades and so on. I mean maybe nothing happened, but it seems like the first order assumption would be there is a lot that goes into modern society and it took time to develop. We can see for ourselves that new inventions and methods can speed up cultural rates of change and adaptability, so it makes sense the groundwork would be filled in slowly.
• entropicgravity 3y ago
  There is a distinction between human tribes that lived in permanent locations and human tribes that were nomadic. Over the 300k years that this article cites its likely that the majority of human tribes were nomadic because as the resources of any give location were used up the tribe had to move on likely following a relatively well known seasonal route. During this phase their primary dangers were wild animal rather than other tribes. The technology made a big change was the domestication of dogs which happened around 70k years ago genetics suggests. This was a symbiotic relationship that worked very well. Dogs could help with defense of wild animals, finding food, guarding infants etc. In return the dogs and humans were more effective hunters than either was on their own. This relationship was the spark that freed humans' time to progress in many ways. It probably would have happened sooner if the wild dogs of Africa could be domesticated but to my knowledge they could not.
• Invictus0 3y ago
  This guy's writing style is terrible. I feel like I walked into the middle of a PhD defense.
• gcb5 3y ago
  this comment will be buried, but anyway. this guy is a impostor. and you are all discussing some crazy charlatan's ideas, and it's too f* funny from the outside. undeniable proof: a yanomami learned Portuguese and wrote a (extremely beautiful) book to introduce his culture. the book is written with yanomami "language" (well, mannerism and figures of speeches) but Portuguese grammar and syntaxe, comprehensible but too neologism at some points, requiring too much creativity to understand. but a native Portuguese speaker translator/editor did ease the work. anyway, the first hand author https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davi_Kopenawa_Yanomami https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davi_Kopenawa_Yanomami don't even mention that impostor, but gives us a complete different picture were you can clearly see everything this fake-anthologist wrote is false. yanomami rite of adulthood involves walking and meeting nearby "cities" were they often intermarry. so theses sex wars sounds like a lunacy. also the fact they haven't interbreed to extinction is another good proof. anyway, this guy sucks and published lies for self promoting and financial gain. sorry if his lies were validating some hypothesis you hold (held hopefully) dear.
  • goodpoint 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • dang 3y ago
    You may well be right but this comment isn't written in a way that gives your argument a fair hearing. It's too much in the flamewar style and breaks a whole bunch of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - including this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." The latter is reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads. If you know more than the rest of us do, that's great—but then please share some of what you know, so we can learn (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - and please drop the putdowns. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... It would have been much better to take out the flamebait and name-calling bits, and instead add more detailed information—enough to let people make up their own minds, or at least get a good amount of understanding of the other side.
• WobbuPalooza 3y ago
  In 1987, Alcida Ramos--an anthropologist who had worked with the Yanomami--published a terrific article going over what she recognized about them in other texts, including Chagnon's, but more importantly pointing out the degree to which each ethnographer's selective emphasis yields a very different overall picture. Although not too surprising, it's a useful summary for anyone who only knows the Yanomami from one point of view, and it offers a sense of what an anthropologist sees in other work about a group they've worked with themselves--rare insight. Her article is called "Reflecting on the Yanomami: Ethnographic Images and the Pursuit of the Exotic," and for the moment, it's online at http://webspace.pugetsound.edu/facultypages/bdasher/Chem361/Review_Articles_files/Yanomami-%20Pursuit%20of%20the%20Exotic.pdf http://webspace.pugetsound.edu/facultypages/bdasher/Chem361/...
• ajross 3y ago
  This seems... maybe too handwavy. His core theory is that "intra-culture violence keeps populations down, ergo there's no food pressure, nor impetus to increase food production". And the evidence there is quite frankly really weak. He cites just one number (~20% of the population studied died from violence), and that isn't extrapolated in any way to actual population size estimates. Also it seems to ignore the Darwinian angle here: it doesn't matter whether or not a culture "needs" to develop agriculture, the second one does its overwhelming size will destroy its neighbors. We see this effect with damn near 100% rates everywhere in the world it happened. So that seems like a poor analysis. Really at best this is just arguing for an unstable equilibrium waiting for someone to start planting. I dunno. This is heavy on the "feels right" and really light on the analysis. I'd steer clear.
• _8j50 3y ago
  So many assumptions and biases, even using moral terms like greed. This sounds very smart but to me it has no substance. The first rule of living is you want to continue living. The author and anthropoligists seem to rediscover this in different ways and marvel at thr fact for some reason. They don't understand that reproduction is a means through which one continues to live. This is true for anything that lives. Comparisons with chimpanzees and all of that is silly. The core fact doesn't change. I don't get why they won't ask themselves about belief and how different beliefs contributed to development. Perhaps because in modern western culture that term is synonymous with imagination and fairytales? The tribe he described had a buffer zone and raided anyone they found threatening. Kind of like the british and japanese with their islands and invasions of the mainland whenever they felt threatened. Yet they are the most developed. Developlment patterns in the past few thounsand years are such that war and conflict is the fuel of develpment and innovation. Because humans like any creature want to live and continue to live and live well we have conflicts and to gain the upperhand in conflicts new developments are born. The question that was not answered for me after reading this post is why "300k years"? Because people could afford to just move elsewhere in most circumstances?
• coldtea 3y ago
  "So little" compared to what? What other societies are there to compare them as a baseline, that have "faster development"? For starters, humans are animals. Major change, evolutionary speaking, can take tens of thousands of years or more...
• WalterBright 3y ago
  > When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. They chose the latter. Ok, I laughed.
• darkerside 3y ago
  I think this is interesting and thought provoking as a framing, but I do think it could be greatly simplified. People will either fight over resources, or they will work on creating more resources more efficiently. They will tend to the former when resources are adequate and the latter when resources are scarce. Resources can mean mates, food, land, etc. Growth can be just as impeded by fighting over a constrained food supply as by fighting over reproductive partners. But, it is provocative as stated!
• jojobas 3y ago
  Because human behaviour is driven by the same motivations as then, and same chemistry as half a billion years ago.
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  Probably because they were just busy enjoying their lives and the wonders of nature and didn’t feel the need to go full speed into whatever we’re going full speed at right now ?
• paulusthe 3y ago
  The author seems to act as if primitive man faced an equal choice: agriculture, or hunting and gathering. He says they chose the latter because it's easier, given the larger land availability. This is only half the equation: domesticating today's agricultural products took tens of thousands of years. And throughout the interim, that process of learning must have gotten broken dozens of times until it finally resulted in something resembling the plants which can sustain a civilization. Normal wild wheat, for example, is unharvestable. Its seeds just drift away into the wind. I'm surprised he ignores this, but it's a pretty glaring flaw in his argument.
• golemiprague 3y ago
  [dead]
• fallingfrog 3y ago
  I get the sense here that the author is really more of a pop psychologist than a real anthropologist. These kind of plausible sounding arguments are very convincing if you don’t have a background in anthropology- and I don’t, so I’m not going to say he’s wrong, I will just say that based on the tone of the piece, I’m not convinced that he knows much more than I do.
• Thuggery 3y ago
  > When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. Eyebrow raising statement. As someone with Marxist sympathies I don't agree or know what he's talking about. What is true is whenever it is argued that anthropology points to pre-agriculture humans living surprisingly healthier less labor intensive lives than expected and etc. it becomes a political fight where some reel back and pull out the "Nasty, brutish, and short" Hobbes meme. The Yanomamo and their extreme murderousness are always the go to push-back example. It's obviously a stand in for a left/right "is capitalism right and the natural state of man" thing and I do think it lead to a motivated reasoning to attack Chagnon's character (he just provoked them. They're outliers!), but I don't see where a Marx view is upended. > This is probably a general rule: In a society where children are difficult to feed, dedicated fathers focusing on feeding their children will have an evolutionary advantage. In societies where mothers can feed their children without much assistance, men who strive for many children with several women will have an evolutionary advantage. Another interesting and potentially radical line. Maybe a motivator this being posted? One could argue that current society, in a world were single motherhood is increasingly easy, is re-trending towards this way. Which, as pointed out, is actually the norm for mammals. Humans are a weird exception in not being harem maters. > I absolutely do not intend to single out the Yanomamö as unusually unindustrous. To the contrary, I think they represented a kind of human default. I think that humans have mostly existed in a stage of population equilibrium, ... the result becomes an equilibrium that can go on for thousands of years. As per the title. I ain't no anthropologist but if we are talking Anatomically Modern Humans vs Behavioral Modernity I think there's another equally or more uncomfortable and unPC answer, rather than this thesis. Just because anatomically modern humans 300k years ago had the same skeletons as modern man doesn't mean they had the same brains. What happened was probably an event horizon brain evolution. Not that men were stuck in an unproductive, antisocial women hording social equilibrium for hundreds or thousands of years until they weren't.
• jacob171714 3y ago
  Assuming by developed they mean agriculture and the industrial revolution. Probably because the climate has been unusually stable for the last 10-12k years. Many likely did agricultural but when the climate suddenly shifts it means everything you have learned about growing in that region is lost. Thus agriculture is never sustained and populations never blow up.
• archibaldJ 3y ago
  > What made human males finally abandon that zero-sum game and develop more complex societies? I think it's magical mushrooms and religions. - With religions in the west comes a systematic approach of dissecting things (e.g. from the beginning of natural philosophy to Isaac Newton and so on) - With religions in the east comes more intense forms of poetry and arts (e.g. I always consider the Chinese language to be more "psychedelic" than English) The human history has always been about psychedelics. Related: [1] Soma siddhas and alchemical enlightenment: psychedelic mushrooms in Buddhist tradition https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8583800/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8583800/ [2] The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East https://www.amazon.sg/Sacred-Mushroom-Cross-Christianity-fertility/dp/0982556276 https://www.amazon.sg/Sacred-Mushroom-Cross-Christianity-fer...
• Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  Reminds me of that quote about going broke "It happens slowly at first and then all at once". This applies to lots of things and I would argue it applies to both the development of a society, and its downfall.
• kaba0 3y ago
  Only marginally relevant, but the people who are in this thread and can answer may overlap quite a bit. I have always been fascinated with why did so many advancements have been made in the last few hundreds of years, centralized mostly in the “Western countries”? Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely not some “superiority-check” on my side, I have just never heard a convincing argument that made this area special. Was it just a “good place at the good time” event, something related to some side effect of religion/society? One somewhat convincing argument was the constant battles between small countries?
  • alchemist1e9 3y ago
    Protestant Ethic? Not sure.
  • cdot2 3y ago
    The enlightenment, the scientific method, and capitalist societies that fund research and development
    • kaba0 3y ago
      But why did those develop in Europe, instead of, say, China?
      • cdot2 3y ago
        Resourse abundance? I would recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" as a good book on this question
  • pfannkuchen 3y ago
    What is more likely, that this has never happened before ever and we are the very first, or that it has happened before and our expectation that we definitely would find some evidence X years later is simply incorrect?
• pontifier 3y ago
  This is very thought provoking. I think this is going to be one of those foundational pieces that I return to again and again when evaluating a situation. It helps to explain a lot of behavior that seems totally irrational on the surface.
  • scotty79 3y ago
    When you consider this in the context of human anatomy like flat faces, beards, fists and p*nis shape it becomes frighteningly sensible.
• jasmer 3y ago
  I wonder why monogamy is not mentioned here? Given a very primal mammalian impusle towards power-structed polygamy, social conditioning around monogamy has to be pretty profoundly integrated into culture. Or you are going to have some very seriously angry young men. And given the numbers being posted, they may be coming back.