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I'm a bit puzzled. This seems like it's trying to push for a narrative (communal planning) when the issue here is that there is a lack of evidence of a centrali

• bloqs 3y ago
  Human beings are instinctively hierachical like many mammals, its essential to survival.
  • csomar 3y ago
    I am not saying they are not but hierarchical representations do not have to be physical.
  • onion2k 3y ago
    Stating this as a fact in the comments about a society that (seemingly) didn't have the hierarchy you say is essential flies in the face of the evidence. Maybe this is a case of the black swan disproving the "all swans are white" hypothesis.
  • mannyv 3y ago
    One of the things that's talked about in "the dawn of everything" is the large number of what seem to be extremely egalitarian societies...ones that spanned large areas. And that social groups form and get their values/norms/behaviors from being explicitly against certain values/norms/behaviors. According to them, human beings are not instinctively anything. Hierarchy is just one form of social organization. Due to the way history is made it seems to be dominant, but that may or may not be accurate. It may be that hierarchy is easier to understand when you're dumb as a rock. And as any student of humanity knows, there are plenty of those kinds of people all over the world.
    • hef19898 3y ago
      I know you did noz mean it that way, so just to point out that rock dumb people are to be found on levels of a hierachy. Not that people think hierachies are somehow resulting in the smartest and best leaders, no matter how much evidence we have to the contrary in our everyday, personal lives. Nor does it mean the opposite, so far I think the rock dumb folks are equally distributed on all level,. Maybe with a slight bias for a*holes the higher up you get.
    • thworp 3y ago
      This is a claim so extraordinary you should at least have linked some obscure paper from a *-Studies department. Every human has their own hierarchies. Hierarchies of need, of goals and of peers (this is basically each individual's social hierarchy). But when these people form large groups they are somehow able to blank the slate and not make it hierarchical? All mammals that form groups instinctively form hierarchies and constantly validate their own and other's position in it (any dog owner will know first-hand). Arguably the first multi-celled organism formed a hierarchy and pretty much every animal with a few Neurons has Serotonin receptors, which can be described as a pathway to continuously re-order its hierarchy of needs. The only way in which anything social isn't hierarchical is if you look at a tiny tiny cross-section. Otherwise any "egalitarian" and "flat" organization just swapped one way to determine a hierarchy for another. As a case in point, the Liberal model of the 19th century was a project to replace an aristocratic hierarchy (based on attributes that were no longer a good fit) with a competence hierarchy. This was often called egalitarian, but practically it was just a more adapted way of forming a hierarchy. We are so adapted to hierarchies that 6-month olds understand physical dominance and 3-year olds easily form more complex hierarchies based on social support, resources etc. edit: Ironically calling other people "rock-dumb" is a way to signal ones own place in the hierarchy.
      • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > This is a claim so extraordinary It's your claim thats is extraordinary. Humans are beholden to a single form of organisation? I feel that you are so stuck in this mode of thinking that you struggle to see these other forms of organisation despite the fact that they surround you. Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy. Social networks form a web, they are not a hierarchy. If you try to organise any data, you will find it cannot be fit into a hierarchy, it is either relational or a graph. Relationships dominate the world, hierarchy is an illusion
  • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Have you considered herds? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd
  • mock-possum 3y ago
    Okay but like so what
  • goodpoint 3y ago
    Not for a second, ask any anthropologist.
  • kybernetikos 3y ago
    Human beings have multiple, sometimes competing instincts and in different proportions in different individuals. While one of them seems to include voluntarily giving up responsibility of some aspects of your life to sufficiently respected others, another you can observe in many places is an instinct towards self-sufficiency and a reluctance to accept people telling you what to do. Without the first, many large scale achievements of the human race would have been more difficult or perhaps impossible. Without the second we would have lost a valuable check on the power of the leaders, and a much reduced propensity to explore and experiment.
• MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  also the introductions shortly mentions the "Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai". So the city wall were also planned and built in a decentralized fashion, all by the community? James C Scott used to say, that city walls were all designed to keep their own people from running away, sort of like the Berlin Wall, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ukte-je8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ukte-je8k
  • notahacker 3y ago
    It also describes it as being unlike other neighbouring towns...
  • pjc50 3y ago
    The claim that city walls were always some sort of prison is going to need extraordinary evidence, not a video.
    • MichaelMoser123 3y ago
      the speaker is a scholar, so he has some authority in the field of anthropology. See his wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott He also wrote a well known book on the subject: 'against the grain', where this argument is put forth. Wikipedia has a summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...
      • fsloth 3y ago
        Note that James C Scott speaks specifically of the very deep pre-historical middle east. I'm not sure if the conclusions are generalizable to China, thousands of years later. There are examples of large scale public engineering works with and without observable central authority throughout archaeological record around the globe. So just "having walls" is not sufficient implication of central authority attempting to control the population. IMO in the specific example of Against the grain the central authority thesis is pretty solidly framed. But, it does not aim to be a generalizable theory, nor IMO should it be viewed as such.
• strken 3y ago
  I've been reading through a beginner-level archaeology textbook that devotes multiple chapters to explaining, with examples, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record. An example my book gives is Lake Mungo in Australia, where researchers tried to demonstrate that life was much the same in the prehistoric period as it was in the historic period just after British colonisation by proving that grindstones were in use in both the historic period and 15000 years ago, and thus that food sources hadn't changed. This was demonstrated to be wrong by later findings showing changes to technology and food sources over time, particularly in response to conditions of abundance due to higher rainfall during the last ice age. In this case the factual evidence is (paraphrased) "The village of Pingliangtai had no big houses, no obvious social hierarchy in burials, and a system of ceramic drainage pipes". It's tempting to read this as evidence for having no hierarchy; it's also tempting to think about the obvious ways in which a hierarchy could exist without leaving any record, like a leader who lived one town over, and conclude the opposite; but I think my book would caution against believing either interpretation. Small houses, matching graves, and pipes are the truth and everything else is an educated guess.
  • Keirmot 3y ago
    'Absence of evidence is not evidence os absence' is a mantra that was instilled in me when I was trying to figure out my uni undergraduate and went with history for a year. This was also a center point in Historiography, and how, when analysing old documents by historians, one needs to be aware of possible bias, not only of the writers, but also of one self.
    • nathan_compton 3y ago
      In the presence of a model the absence of evidence _can be_ evidence for absence if you have good reason to believe your model is complete. If your model is the oft cited celestial teapot then the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence. But if your model is 1 trillion celestial teapots in orbit around the sun than absence of evidence _is_ evidence of absence. People would do well not to rely too heavily on this asinine little phrases. They make us feel smart, sure, but they are very simple minded.
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure what the narrative is supposed to mean, it sounds like trying to make more out of this discovery than it is. How about "This town built a drainage system on its own, independently from other towns"? Sounds more factual / less wooly.
  • lazide 3y ago
    Hard to get tenure if that’s what you lead with!
• rakkhi 3y ago
  +1. I'm a massive free market guy but even I draw the line at infrastructure, health and education. Too many externalities. That water infrastructure was built by a government. Especially in china
  • lazide 3y ago
    Co-ops build stuff like this all the time in rural areas.
  • andriesm 3y ago
    Making the strong claim that this infrastructure was for a fact built by a government is not merited, unless you have some compelling evidence? I am also not sure if the article's claim is merited - it sounds a little too convenient and I struggle to find the watertight case for it in the article. It could be a case of us simply not knowing either way, and thus should avoid making a strong claim for either A or not(A).
  • Ebree 3y ago
    Elders of family in a way are also a government
    • porkbeer 3y ago
      Yes, some backward nations still have kings, but thats a bit dated.
• DonHopkins 3y ago
  Maybe they used slime mold to plan the water networks! ;) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GwKuFREOgmo https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GwKuFREOgmo
• coldtea 3y ago
  >I'm a bit puzzled. This seems like it's trying to push for a narrative (communal planning) when the issue here is that there is a lack of evidence of a centralized one. I'm not sure how lack of proof of that will imply the other. Perhaps because of the law of excluded middle. It's either communal or centralized...
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  In the academic context, it seems to be using an archaeological example to push back against the theory of 'hydraulic despotism' i.e. that an empire could arise by controlling access to water, and evidence of that would be that the empire had complete control of the water system: > "Among the prominent scholarly advancements on water and society, the hydraulic origins of state and coercive power proposed and developed by Wittfogel and some other scholars have come under rigorous scrutiny in recent studies in East Asia and beyond..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire This has some present-day relevance, as there's an ongoing battle over privatization schemes for water systems which would tend to place control of water in the hands of the ruling oligarch class, from Enron's Azurix c.2000 up to present-day efforts related to how to rebuild America's aging water infrastructure e.g. https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/presidential-council-advises-privatization-of-water-systems https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/presidential-council-advises-... Note that this study seems to address flood control more than anything else; hydraulic despotism might have been more of a feature of dry land irrigation-based civilizations.
  • Telemakhos 3y ago
    Outside the western ivory tower arguments of hydraulic despotism, I wonder how well the claims made by these Chinese scholars working at state-supported Chinese academic institutions reinforce the narratives favored by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in reference to history of Chinese lands and peoples. They seem to toe the party line very well at first glance.
• detourdog 3y ago
  Large scale water management I see as human instinct. It is exhibited by a group of kids playing in a creek. Imagine how cultures could be built up simply on water management. Finally a recent culture with a flood story has a funny twist. None of the normal words for flood like events were used to describe the event. Instead there is a a unique word that describes the event and is used in one other location in the whole collection. The second occurrence doesn't describe a flood at all. I only bring up the ideas becuase I think communal water management is fun and if there are always enough resources could be communal with each member doing their small part for the whole. The second is just how big water catastrophe was in the older worlds. I included a link to a reference. (not the reference I wanted the one I could find). https://reformedreader.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/the-hebrew-term-for-the-flood-twot/ https://reformedreader.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/the-hebrew-t...
• allemagne 3y ago
  I think everyone else is puzzled why you're asking a question about the scientific method here when clearly the topic at hand is whether Pingliangtai proves or disproves your favorite political ideology.