5 ms·

If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was play, it for sure was closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun. Also, sharing of work was alread

by hef19898 3y ago

If the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was play, it for sure was closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun. Also, sharing of work was already a thing back than: hunters hunted, others went gathering, again others built tools... Damn it, and I swore I wouldn't read stuff from substack again...

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is just all totally incorrect What you described is a pop-culture idea of pre-history, nothing like what the actual research and literature shows. I suggest you start with Claude Lévi-Strauss' but that's only if you're interested in spending years learning, The Dawn of Everything is more recent and more accessible most likely.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Which part is wrong so? The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not? Or the one where they already shared tasks between them? Edit: There is archaelogical evidence from the stone age of shared work, namely in the form quarries in which the stone for the stone tools, axes, spear and arrow tips and the like, have been collected.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    "closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun"
    - swagempire 3y ago
      But it's true. Life WAS like that back then.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      As in dying of malnutrition? Of course it was. Or injuries, diseases... Pardon my word play on applying the word "play" to a society that constantly faced severe consequences of literal hunger...
      - stillwithit 3y ago
        If saving people from malnutrition is your concern, good news; it’s still a problem today. Perhaps we could all spend less time generating empty rhetoric online and more time engaged in what we claim to be via logic, our real concerns It feels really disingenuous when all the pearl clutching office workers go home to video games not a soup kitchen. Spend their weekends hiking not nursing the sick, fixing poorer people’s homes. Modern day infantilized office worker crowd is the most off putting group of people I’ve ever encountered.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Saving people from malnutrition, hunger, violence and war are noble goals. They have nothing to do with discussing, and assessing, the situation in pre-historical times or the live of tribes living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to this day.
        stillwithit 3y ago
        Genius of the highest order
        hef19898 3y ago
        Is that an insult, a compliment or both? I seriously cannot tell.
        stillwithit 3y ago
        [dead]
        hef19898 3y ago
        Fair enough, I guess?
  - taurusnoises 3y ago
    TW: Look up any pics online of people actually on the brink of starvation, and you will immediately see how inaccurate a description this is for a way of life that was dominant for the vast majority of time modern humans have been wandering the planet. - Agriculture: 10,000 years ago - Hunter-gatherers: 200,000 years ago
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Starvation was the extreme end, constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so. And yes, that is a constant threat for the few true hunter-hatherer societies still left. Or why do you think they are so few in number? Hint, it is not an abundance of food.
      - parl_match 3y ago
        > constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so it was not an easy life, for sure. but, "constant malnutrition" is also incorrect.
        hef19898 3y ago
        That's not what, e.g., tooth and bone samples tell us. Those tell us that everyone from this period, and as far as the early mosern / renessaince period, went through multiple periods of being under nourished, aka suffering hunger, during their lifetimes.
        slothtrop 3y ago
        > it was not an easy life, for sure. Then it wasn't play.
        parl_match 3y ago
        I didn't say it was continual hard times, did I? I just said it wasn't easy.
      - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  - fatherzine 3y ago
    i have no beef in this argument, except to note that if one wants to study hunter-gatherer societies, one does not dig three rotten sticks from the ground and wildly extrapolates some cockamamy just-so story about the lives of that society that is 90% a reflection of the biases and pieties of the bureaucracy that is funding ones work. instead, one buys a ticket to Port Moresby, and hauls ones ass into the mountains on the horizon. carry on.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    > The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not? That's the wrong part. I believe there's no known history of famine in hunter-gatherers. That only really became a thing with agriculture. Hunter-gatherer populations were small; there was plenty of food generally speaking. Which is why relatively so little time had to be spent acquiring it, in comparison with the back-breaking worth of agriculture. Of course, once agriculture started using up all the land that was previously being used for hunting and gathering, well then hunting and gathering was no longer viable. But that was something new with the introduction of agriculture.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      As I said elsewhere, tooth samples and bones from those periods tell a different story, namely famine, or serious malnitrition, happening frequently.
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        "Hunter–gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists" -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ "Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less -- not more -- famine than other subsistence modes."
        hef19898 3y ago
        There is no sepcific time frame mentioned in the paper, the closest thing I saw was the NASA satelite data from the early 2000s. And that period in time can hardly be uses to draw conclusions about HG and agriculturalist lifestyles throughout history.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Which part is incorrect? The violence or the division of labor? Violence has been attested to in many of the remains that made it to modern people for study. Division of labor in hunter gatherers is the only real way to explain Gobekli.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Most contemporary evidence on hunter gatherers does lean towards them being considerably more violent than both agricultural societies and industrialized societies on proportional terms. It's true massive wars did not occur, but populations are also smaller. 1 person dying violently every other year out of a tribe of 50 is still an incredibly high rate of violent death. Contemporary evidence puts figures of about 25% of Hunter gatherers men dying violently and 15% of women and children: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.21446 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.21446
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    I think that is an old understanding. "Small- and medium-scale collective violence, in the form of confrontations between neighboring groups, may be as old as humankind [e.g.,1, 2]. By contrast, larger-scale organized and sanctioned lethal violence between sociopolitical groups (i.e., warfare), seems to be associated with certain socio-economic conditions that generally accompanied the shift to a farming economy,3 such as higher population densities and greater degrees of sedentism4, 5, in parallel to the increasing importance of resource ownership and property that led to the concentration of resources and power [e.g.,6, 7]." [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9 The references above: 1. Fry, D. P. Cooperation for survival: Creating a global peace system. In War, Peace and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (ed. Fry, D. P.) 543–558 (Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Kim, N. C. & Kissel, M. Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past (Routledge, 2018). 3. Fibiger, L., Ahlström, T., Meyer, C. & Smith, M. Conflict, violence and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe. PNAS 120(4), e2209481119 (2023). 4. Ferguson, R. B. Archaeology, cultural anthropology, and the origins and intensifications of war. In The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest (eds Arkush, E. & Allen, M.) 469–523 (University Press of Florida, 2006). 5. Fry, D. P. & Soderberg, P. Lethal aggression in mobile forager bands and implications for the origins of war. Science 341, 270–273 (2013). 6. Golitko, M. LBK Realpolitik: An Archaeometric Study of Conflict and Social Structure in the Belgian Early Neolithic (Archaeo Press, 2015). 7. Bogaard, A., Fochesato, M. & Bowles, S. The farming-inequality nexus: New insights from ancient Western Eurasia. Antiquity 93(371), 1129–1143 (2019). 8. Chenal, F., Perrin, B., Barrand-Emam, H. & Boulestin, B. A farewell to arms: a deposit of human limbs and bodies at Bergheim, France, c. 4000 BC. Antiquity 89, 1313–1330 (2015).

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

This is just all totally incorrect What you described is a pop-culture idea of pre-history, nothing like what the actual research and literature shows. I suggest you start with Claude Lévi-Strauss' but that's only if you're interested in spending years learning, The Dawn of Everything is more recent and more accessible most likely.

hef19898 3y ago
Which part is wrong so? The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not? Or the one where they already shared tasks between them? Edit: There is archaelogical evidence from the stone age of shared work, namely in the form quarries in which the stone for the stone tools, axes, spear and arrow tips and the like, have been collected.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  "closer to the literal hunger games than anything people do for fun"
  - swagempire 3y ago
    But it's true. Life WAS like that back then.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    As in dying of malnutrition? Of course it was. Or injuries, diseases... Pardon my word play on applying the word "play" to a society that constantly faced severe consequences of literal hunger...
    - stillwithit 3y ago
      If saving people from malnutrition is your concern, good news; it’s still a problem today. Perhaps we could all spend less time generating empty rhetoric online and more time engaged in what we claim to be via logic, our real concerns It feels really disingenuous when all the pearl clutching office workers go home to video games not a soup kitchen. Spend their weekends hiking not nursing the sick, fixing poorer people’s homes. Modern day infantilized office worker crowd is the most off putting group of people I’ve ever encountered.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Saving people from malnutrition, hunger, violence and war are noble goals. They have nothing to do with discussing, and assessing, the situation in pre-historical times or the live of tribes living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to this day.
        stillwithit 3y ago
        Genius of the highest order
        hef19898 3y ago
        Is that an insult, a compliment or both? I seriously cannot tell.
        stillwithit 3y ago
        [dead]
        hef19898 3y ago
        Fair enough, I guess?
- taurusnoises 3y ago
  TW: Look up any pics online of people actually on the brink of starvation, and you will immediately see how inaccurate a description this is for a way of life that was dominant for the vast majority of time modern humans have been wandering the planet. - Agriculture: 10,000 years ago - Hunter-gatherers: 200,000 years ago
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Starvation was the extreme end, constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so. And yes, that is a constant threat for the few true hunter-hatherer societies still left. Or why do you think they are so few in number? Hint, it is not an abundance of food.
    - parl_match 3y ago
      > constant malnutrition the norm rather than the exception so it was not an easy life, for sure. but, "constant malnutrition" is also incorrect.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        That's not what, e.g., tooth and bone samples tell us. Those tell us that everyone from this period, and as far as the early mosern / renessaince period, went through multiple periods of being under nourished, aka suffering hunger, during their lifetimes.
      - slothtrop 3y ago
        > it was not an easy life, for sure. Then it wasn't play.
        parl_match 3y ago
        I didn't say it was continual hard times, did I? I just said it wasn't easy.
    - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
- fatherzine 3y ago
  i have no beef in this argument, except to note that if one wants to study hunter-gatherer societies, one does not dig three rotten sticks from the ground and wildly extrapolates some cockamamy just-so story about the lives of that society that is 90% a reflection of the biases and pieties of the bureaucracy that is funding ones work. instead, one buys a ticket to Port Moresby, and hauls ones ass into the mountains on the horizon. carry on.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > The part of hunter-gatherer societies being at the brink of starvation more often than not? That's the wrong part. I believe there's no known history of famine in hunter-gatherers. That only really became a thing with agriculture. Hunter-gatherer populations were small; there was plenty of food generally speaking. Which is why relatively so little time had to be spent acquiring it, in comparison with the back-breaking worth of agriculture. Of course, once agriculture started using up all the land that was previously being used for hunting and gathering, well then hunting and gathering was no longer viable. But that was something new with the introduction of agriculture.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    As I said elsewhere, tooth samples and bones from those periods tell a different story, namely famine, or serious malnitrition, happening frequently.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      "Hunter–gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists" -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ "Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less -- not more -- famine than other subsistence modes."
      - hef19898 3y ago
        There is no sepcific time frame mentioned in the paper, the closest thing I saw was the NASA satelite data from the early 2000s. And that period in time can hardly be uses to draw conclusions about HG and agriculturalist lifestyles throughout history.
BirAdam 3y ago
Which part is incorrect? The violence or the division of labor? Violence has been attested to in many of the remains that made it to modern people for study. Division of labor in hunter gatherers is the only real way to explain Gobekli.
Manuel_D 3y ago
Most contemporary evidence on hunter gatherers does lean towards them being considerably more violent than both agricultural societies and industrialized societies on proportional terms. It's true massive wars did not occur, but populations are also smaller. 1 person dying violently every other year out of a tribe of 50 is still an incredibly high rate of violent death. Contemporary evidence puts figures of about 25% of Hunter gatherers men dying violently and 15% of women and children: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.21446 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/evan.21446
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  I think that is an old understanding. "Small- and medium-scale collective violence, in the form of confrontations between neighboring groups, may be as old as humankind [e.g.,1, 2]. By contrast, larger-scale organized and sanctioned lethal violence between sociopolitical groups (i.e., warfare), seems to be associated with certain socio-economic conditions that generally accompanied the shift to a farming economy,3 such as higher population densities and greater degrees of sedentism4, 5, in parallel to the increasing importance of resource ownership and property that led to the concentration of resources and power [e.g.,6, 7]." [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43026-9 The references above: 1. Fry, D. P. Cooperation for survival: Creating a global peace system. In War, Peace and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (ed. Fry, D. P.) 543–558 (Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Kim, N. C. & Kissel, M. Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past (Routledge, 2018). 3. Fibiger, L., Ahlström, T., Meyer, C. & Smith, M. Conflict, violence and warfare among early farmers in Northwestern Europe. PNAS 120(4), e2209481119 (2023). 4. Ferguson, R. B. Archaeology, cultural anthropology, and the origins and intensifications of war. In The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest (eds Arkush, E. & Allen, M.) 469–523 (University Press of Florida, 2006). 5. Fry, D. P. & Soderberg, P. Lethal aggression in mobile forager bands and implications for the origins of war. Science 341, 270–273 (2013). 6. Golitko, M. LBK Realpolitik: An Archaeometric Study of Conflict and Social Structure in the Belgian Early Neolithic (Archaeo Press, 2015). 7. Bogaard, A., Fochesato, M. & Bowles, S. The farming-inequality nexus: New insights from ancient Western Eurasia. Antiquity 93(371), 1129–1143 (2019). 8. Chenal, F., Perrin, B., Barrand-Emam, H. & Boulestin, B. A farewell to arms: a deposit of human limbs and bodies at Bergheim, France, c. 4000 BC. Antiquity 89, 1313–1330 (2015).