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Up until the Neolithic Revolution human population was stable, before that people were venturing out to hostile lands in search for food, as populated land coul

Up until the Neolithic Revolution human population was stable, before that people were venturing out to hostile lands in search for food, as populated land couldn't carry any more. Infanticide as a population control measure was the norm, early Australian explorers recorded about 30% of children being killed and/or eaten business as usual. There is no reason to think they were unique, equilibrium with your food chain is a cruel mistress. Early stone quarries don't necessarily speak of abundance, it might have been a measure to extract more food out of existing area when time spent hunting/foraging barehanded didn't yield more food.

defrost 3y ago
> early Australian explorers recorded about 30% of children being killed and/or eaten business as usual. This seems extremely unlikely. While it is true that early European explorers of Australia were notorious for not surviving and starving en route, it is also true that very few of them, if indeed any, took children along as a form of emergency ration. Can indicate which "early Australian explorer" you're thinking of? Perhaps you're thinking of explorers commenting on indigenous behaviour? I'm not finding much on eating children in the works of Francis James Gillen & Walter Baldwin Spencer so again, perhaps you can provide a source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Baldwin_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Baldwin_Spencer https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/spencer-papers https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/spencer-papers https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1127482824/findingaid https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1127482824/findingaid
- jojobas 3y ago
  Sure. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-traditional-aboriginal-society/ https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-trad... https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40330368 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40330368
  - defrost 3y ago
    Good on you for the reply and the two sources, have an upvote for engaging :) Quadrant Well, there's your problem - it's not a science or anthropology journal it's an unabashedly conservative wank fest for overly educated private school chums that utterly hate the proles and Australian aborigines. > According to University of Michigan professor of anthropology Aram Yengoyan: Who has spent how much time in Australian aboriginal societies? > Contemporary European observers of nomadic, tribal Aborigines were in apparent agreement that about 30 per cent of new-born Aboriginal children were routinely killed. Again, no surprises there - there's an extremely long list of things that early European observers agreed upon about aborigines ... and most of them were garbage, worthless save as justification for having repeated massacres of local groups upset about being pushed from their lands. > According to Samuel Gason (1845–97), an early settler of the Flinders Ranges, writing of the Dieyerie tribe of the Cooper’s Creek area between South Australia and Queensland, “about thirty per cent are murdered by their mother at birth”. These are the same early settlers frequently associated with poisoning water holes and killing the very people they spent some time defaming as barbaric. The problem with all these accounts is that many aboriginal groups continued through until recent times with their traditional practices, in the Western Desert [1], far north Queensland, remote Kimberley regions (where I'm from) etc. and anthropologists didn't find much in the way of actual baby eating. What you have in the Quadrant article is a collection of all the European "Aboriginals are heathen scum" gossip of times past bundled up and presented as fact. Your second link, the paper on scihub by Collishaw (1978) is, umm, kind of long winded and noncommittal - it passively rejects the 30% figure thus: both reported that 30% of the children were killed at birth. These contrast with other reports from S.W. Australia of infrequent infanticide. and then never really commits to a frequency figure other than discussing at length the kinds of things that happened at much the same frequency in European countries at the same time - deformed children were often killed at birth, in hard times with not enough to eat weaker children would die to allow stronger children to survive. It's an odd paper that has a few sound sources (Spencer .. good source, but unsurprisingly had a strong European point of view) but largely appears to repeat a lot of settler gossip. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
    - jojobas 3y ago
      So, basically, anybody who wrote about it is a part of an evil white conspiracy engaging in a coordinated attack on the noble savage, and William Rubinstein is just as well a bigot by virtue of publishing in Quadrant. Unfortunately for this viewpoint, Paleolithic infanticide is firmly in the "why and how" stage of research, rather than "did it happen", welcome to sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_infanticidal_childrearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_infanticidal_childrearin... It was a universal phenomenon not disputed by anyone of note, some societies (i.e. Marshall Islanders) developing a complicated system of who gets not to kill their child, and assuming Australian Aboriginals should be seen as a null hypothesis with no serious evidence to the contrary, and a fair amount of supporting evidence. As for contemporary Europeans, your claim is not supported by near exponential population growth ever since the Neolithic Revolution, as agricultural mothers didn't have to walk ~9km per day carrying all her non-walking babies. Children sure died left right and center, but infanticide was a no-no since at least the Middle Ages.

defrost 3y ago

> early Australian explorers recorded about 30% of children being killed and/or eaten business as usual. This seems extremely unlikely. While it is true that early European explorers of Australia were notorious for not surviving and starving en route, it is also true that very few of them, if indeed any, took children along as a form of emergency ration. Can indicate which "early Australian explorer" you're thinking of? Perhaps you're thinking of explorers commenting on indigenous behaviour? I'm not finding much on eating children in the works of Francis James Gillen & Walter Baldwin Spencer so again, perhaps you can provide a source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Baldwin_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Baldwin_Spencer https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/spencer-papers https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/spencer-papers https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1127482824/findingaid https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1127482824/findingaid

jojobas 3y ago
Sure. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-traditional-aboriginal-society/ https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-trad... https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40330368 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40330368
- defrost 3y ago
  Good on you for the reply and the two sources, have an upvote for engaging :) Quadrant Well, there's your problem - it's not a science or anthropology journal it's an unabashedly conservative wank fest for overly educated private school chums that utterly hate the proles and Australian aborigines. > According to University of Michigan professor of anthropology Aram Yengoyan: Who has spent how much time in Australian aboriginal societies? > Contemporary European observers of nomadic, tribal Aborigines were in apparent agreement that about 30 per cent of new-born Aboriginal children were routinely killed. Again, no surprises there - there's an extremely long list of things that early European observers agreed upon about aborigines ... and most of them were garbage, worthless save as justification for having repeated massacres of local groups upset about being pushed from their lands. > According to Samuel Gason (1845–97), an early settler of the Flinders Ranges, writing of the Dieyerie tribe of the Cooper’s Creek area between South Australia and Queensland, “about thirty per cent are murdered by their mother at birth”. These are the same early settlers frequently associated with poisoning water holes and killing the very people they spent some time defaming as barbaric. The problem with all these accounts is that many aboriginal groups continued through until recent times with their traditional practices, in the Western Desert [1], far north Queensland, remote Kimberley regions (where I'm from) etc. and anthropologists didn't find much in the way of actual baby eating. What you have in the Quadrant article is a collection of all the European "Aboriginals are heathen scum" gossip of times past bundled up and presented as fact. Your second link, the paper on scihub by Collishaw (1978) is, umm, kind of long winded and noncommittal - it passively rejects the 30% figure thus: both reported that 30% of the children were killed at birth. These contrast with other reports from S.W. Australia of infrequent infanticide. and then never really commits to a frequency figure other than discussing at length the kinds of things that happened at much the same frequency in European countries at the same time - deformed children were often killed at birth, in hard times with not enough to eat weaker children would die to allow stronger children to survive. It's an odd paper that has a few sound sources (Spencer .. good source, but unsurprisingly had a strong European point of view) but largely appears to repeat a lot of settler gossip. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
  - jojobas 3y ago
    So, basically, anybody who wrote about it is a part of an evil white conspiracy engaging in a coordinated attack on the noble savage, and William Rubinstein is just as well a bigot by virtue of publishing in Quadrant. Unfortunately for this viewpoint, Paleolithic infanticide is firmly in the "why and how" stage of research, rather than "did it happen", welcome to sources here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_infanticidal_childrearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_infanticidal_childrearin... It was a universal phenomenon not disputed by anyone of note, some societies (i.e. Marshall Islanders) developing a complicated system of who gets not to kill their child, and assuming Australian Aboriginals should be seen as a null hypothesis with no serious evidence to the contrary, and a fair amount of supporting evidence. As for contemporary Europeans, your claim is not supported by near exponential population growth ever since the Neolithic Revolution, as agricultural mothers didn't have to walk ~9km per day carrying all her non-walking babies. Children sure died left right and center, but infanticide was a no-no since at least the Middle Ages.