Human origins, In a nutshell

[Spaceception]

Like many of their videos, I now feel insignificant.

[Green Baron]

 

Hehe. like it, though i only watched the first 3 minutes. Calling us as a subspecies of homo sapiens, namely homo sapiens sapiens is on my "wavelength". That leaves room for other subspecies, like homo sapiens neandertalensis.

All our so-called cultural achievements including intraspecies violence are just a few thousand years old.

 

 

[Andem]

The comment section of that video is so cancerous and toxic... Bonus points if you can wade through it and find me.

But back OT, that's by far one of my favorite Kuzrezgat videos.

[Thor Wotansen]

I am often frustrated by the mundane nature of modern life and wish that it were as black and white as the hunter gatherer lifestyle.  Even with all our knowledge and organization our greatest achievements make our lives far more complicated than the "simple" survival cultures.  I guess that having grown up in the woods and knowing a fair bit about survival in the northeast US wilderness (what there is of it anyways) I tend to take for granted that most people don't know what plants are edible and how the various critters think, but I often find my self wondering how life would be in a catastrophic system failure akin to The Walking Dead.

[Spaceception]

17 hours ago, Thor Wotansen said:

I am often frustrated by the mundane nature of modern life and wish that it were as black and white as the hunter gatherer lifestyle.  Even with all our knowledge and organization our greatest achievements make our lives far more complicated than the "simple" survival cultures.  I guess that having grown up in the woods and knowing a fair bit about survival in the northeast US wilderness (what there is of it anyways) I tend to take for granted that most people don't know what plants are edible and how the various critters think, but I often find my self wondering how life would be in a catastrophic system failure akin to The Walking Dead.

SNIP:

Edited July 14, 2016 by Spaceception
I need to read these things better

[p1t1o]

9 hours ago, Thor Wotansen said:

I am often frustrated by the mundane nature of modern life and wish that it were as black and white as the hunter gatherer lifestyle.  Even with all our knowledge and organization our greatest achievements make our lives far more complicated than the "simple" survival cultures.  I guess that having grown up in the woods and knowing a fair bit about survival in the northeast US wilderness (what there is of it anyways) I tend to take for granted that most people don't know what plants are edible and how the various critters think, but I often find my self wondering how life would be in a catastrophic system failure akin to The Walking Dead.

I think many of us feel like this occasionally. My preferred "systems failure" is a Russian invasion (I tend to ignore the socio-politico-economic environment that this would require, it gets in the way of my saviour fantasies).

Living in this way precludes playing KSP though so Im not in any hurry. Maybe after I have played out v1.2.

 

[Andem]

7 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I think many of us feel like this occasionally. My preferred "systems failure" is a Russian invasion (I tend to ignore the socio-politico-economic environment that this would require, it gets in the way of my saviour fantasies).

Living in this way precludes playing KSP though so Im not in any hurry. Maybe after I have played out v1.2.

 

It's interesting, because when I imagine that type of situation it has more of a "Hitler's Germany" vibe to it, maybe with a little bit of "Hunger Games" thrown in for good measure. When in doubt, KSP will always save the day!

[SinBad]

I wouldnt mistake hunter gathers for a simple life. They had the same pressures on them that we have now. Probably more. We worry about money, because all security comes from money, food, healthcare, shelter. If you have lots of money, and are very careful with your social networks, you can get yourself a good  reputation and earn respect. Respect, reputation and money gets you a mate, who maks you happy then helps you make a bunch of little resourrce sinks. Which means you need to collect more money. All the while you worry about others who want to take your thing, but if someone does, society automaticaly upholds your rights as a victim.

The H/G doesnt have the nice single asset to collect. If they want food, they have to spend a day hunting. If they want shelter, they have to gather the materials, build and maintain it themselves. Healthcare is more along the lines of 'smear moss and honey on it, then pray' which seems pretty stressful. Their reputation and respect is tied directly to their ability to manage their social networks. But their reputation and respect is what stops their tribe mates from stealing their things while they are out hunting, their protection from victimisation is not a given, but rather depends on the mood of their peers. So a HG is likely to spend much more time on social activities then we are. A well liked person can murder a disliked person and get away with it if they have kissed the right donkeys first. But on the otherside, a person who has to devote more time to survival (maybe they have an elderly, non productive mouth to feed as well as the usual pack of dependants) spends less time with networking, so falls out of favor. No one will pay much attention if they start hollering that they had four fish on the drying rack that morning, not three. Sounds stressfull to me.

Lone H/G, fine. Good stuff. Dont get caught immobilised without stored food though.

H/G with partner to share the chores, even better!

H/G with partner and 3 dependants? Dont get sick, dont sleep in, or your loved ones die.

H/G with tribe, partner and dependants? Invent agriculture and professions and law so if you get sick or gain a dependant you dont die as a social outcast.

MM in a city with a job, partner and dependants? Dont worry about it. Our society wont let you die of neglect if you income doesnt meet your expenses. And the law protects everyone equally, rich and poor, famous or unknown. And if you have enough money, you can pay other people to gather money for you!

I would rather look forward to a post scarcity future for an easy life.

[Green Baron]

20 minutes ago, SinBad said:

The H/G doesnt have the nice single asset to collect. If they want food, they have to spend a day hunting. If they want shelter, they have to gather the materials, build and maintain it themselves. Healthcare is more along the lines of 'smear moss and honey on it, then pray' which seems pretty stressful. Their reputation and respect is tied directly to their ability to manage their social networks. But their reputation and respect is what stops their tribe mates from stealing their things while they are out hunting, their protection from victimisation is not a given, but rather depends on the mood of their peers. So a HG is likely to spend much more time on social activities then we are. A well liked person can murder a disliked person and get away with it if they have kissed the right donkeys first. But on the otherside, a person who has to devote more time to survival (maybe they have an elderly, non productive mouth to feed as well as the usual pack of dependants) spends less time with networking, so falls out of favor. No one will pay much attention if they start hollering that they had four fish on the drying rack that morning, not three. Sounds stressfull to me.

Lone H/G, fine. Good stuff. Dont get caught immobilised without stored food though.

H/G with partner to share the chores, even better!

H/G with partner and 3 dependants? Dont get sick, dont sleep in, or your loved ones die.

H/G with tribe, partner and dependants? Invent agriculture and professions and law so if you get sick or gain a dependant you dont die as a social outcast.

MM in a city with a job, partner and dependants? Dont worry about it. Our society wont let you die of neglect if you income doesnt meet your expenses. And the law protects everyone equally, rich and poor, famous or unknown. And if you have enough money, you can pay other people to gather money for you!

I would rather look forward to a post scarcity future for an easy life.

Errr, that's a rude simplification of hunter/gatherer societies. Read about the circumpolar tribes aka eskimos or the last hunter/gatherers in mid 20th century in africa, a lot has been written about them.

First: we do not know how societies in the ice age worked. Respect, reputation, property, that all is just our (your) fantasy and is naturally strongly biased. There are, in fact, a lot of hints that all of these did not exist until maybe the late ice-age, the last hunters of the open cold-steppe called magdalenien (roughly 15.000 before now). They lived in a paradise, built yurts and (a little jokey) just where waiting for food to come home. Storage of food did not exist until the epipalaelothic - hunter/gatherer mobility and storage is grossly contradictory.

"Dependants" did not exist, that implies social stratification which is just your fantasy but is not reflected in reality, neither in finds nor in historic observations. Hunter/gatherers lived in groups, sizes varied, but not in the hundreds individuals.

"Loved ones die" ??? You mean murder ? Your fantasy plays tricks on you. There is no proof of violence in prehistoric hunter/gatherers. There is, in fact, proof of life without property and social stratification in last centuries hunter / gatherers. A successful hunter performed a ritual of diminishing himself before the group in order not to get the "nose too high". That'll be bad for everyone.

"Invent Agriculture ?". There is no need for a hunter gatherer to do so. It took several 1000 years of climatic stability from picking up crops via simple storage to half-mobile living spaces and caught animals that had to be separated from the wild ones for several generations in order to have "household" lifestock.

"Murder": murder is an invention of the last 10.000 years, after hunter / gatherers began to adopt a new lifestyle. Not before.

 

[SinBad]

So, you dont mean nomadic hunter gathers, like the australian aborigines, or some tribes of native americans, or even the innuit. You mean like a family of bonobos, human like primates with some social order and a vocabulary of a hundred terms or so. Cool. I want to be a cat. Eat, sleep, repeat

[Green Baron]

I don't see your point ... you are talking about settled or semi-settled societies. And as i understand you mix them up with hunter / gatherers and the first societies that "invented" agriculture.

 

Edited July 14, 2016 by Green Baron

[SinBad]

Just that if you want to live stress free, its better to be less like us, and more like animals, right? my initial counter argument assumed a smaller step backwards than what was first implied. So why not skip the human part all together, throw out the last 70ky of progress and grunt our way to happiness. We are stressed and unhappy now because of resource shortages (real, imposed, and imagined). The key feature of these primitive harmonious lifestyles doesnt seem to be the low tech simplicity, or any inherent non-violence of early man. They had resource abundance, so much so that even if their resource distrobution was unfair, there was still enough to meet evveryones needs. We dont need to go backwards to get back to abundance, we need to go forwards to the point where our most limiting resource, energy (given enough energy and we can make just about anything else we want) is no longer scarce. Then we can start to relax and use our big, hard bought brains on something more worthwhile than trying to figure out how to make ends meet.

[Green Baron]

A, now i see. My usual monologue when it comes to prehistory ...

Well, after all, i fear there is no way back. Only for a few, but i don't think rest will let them ;-)

 

[Thor Wotansen]

Just to correct a few points, Medicine:  If you know where to look and what to look for you can cure a vast number of ailments that pharmaceuticals have yet to conquer with herbal remedies.  The reason you have not heard of this (although herbal remedies are barely 100 years out of practice) is that the large pharmaceutical companies can't make money off of yarrow as a cold remedy or camomile as a sleep aid.  Sure, there were no antibiotics but you can bet your donkey that the immune systems of those people made ours look like pathetic cripples.  Society:  In a H/G society there is no need for money.  If you watch the show Naked and Afraid you know that two knowledgeable people working together have a very hard time surviving with minimal tools.  The bigger your group (to a point) the better off you are as some can hunt/gather and others can build shelter, fire, etc.  In a H/G society everyone pulls their weight period.  Even the kids do valuable tasks like picking berries or gutting fish or whatever.  Culture:  The Native Americans had an extremely rich culture including oral histories that went back over 12,000 years.  There were tribes in Florida that had developed brain surgery and other highly advanced medicine simply because they had more resources than they could use and spent less than 4ish hours a day actually providing for themselves. 

People seem to think that the hunter gatherer lifestyle was a harsh and unforgiving life, and in a way it was, but if you know every tree and rock within 20 miles and know how every animal in the area thinks and acts, and you know every plant you come across then you are going to have a much easier time making a living than working a minimum wage job or three to buy overpriced lettuce that has been shipped from California or Mexico.  Agriculture certainly led to the Human race's explosive growth but I certainly think it has also led to us leading fairly miserable lives without a lot of personal freedom.

[Green Baron]

Thanks, @Thor Wotansen. Life expectancy in first agricultural societies was way lower than in contemporary mesolithic hunter gatherers. As how forgiving or harsh life really was we can only deduct from climatic evidence and density of find-sites. It varied, but at the end of the ice age, before reforestation startet, it probably really was a paradise.

A conference transcript dealing about the socalled solutreen, the 10-8.000 years before the last glacial maximum, was titled a little heroic "Hunters of the golden age" :-) But during the glacial maximum the environment could probably not bear more than a few hundred individuals in middle europe, between the scandinavian and the alpine glacier. Though i last (2 years ago) heard that there was probably no gap, people could live there without a hiatus (unpublished, from a former collegue).

I know little about north american indigenous tribes, but as far as i recall they lived semi-settled or even settled, grew crops (maize ?), and there were fights between tribes. One must tale into account that humans, as settled as they were or are, never totally gave up hunting.

 

[Thor Wotansen]

Another thing I was thinking about while biking home from work today, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were about half what they are now acording to climate change studies, which would have made running long distances and other strenuous tasks easier. 

Does anyone want some 100 degree weather?  I can send some in a box for a small fee. 

[PB666]

38 minutes ago, Thor Wotansen said:

Another thing I was thinking about while biking home from work today, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were about half what they are now acording to climate change studies, which would have made running long distances and other strenuous tasks easier. 

Does anyone want some 100 degree weather?  I can send some in a box for a small fee. 

But sea levels were lower, which means atmospheric pressure was lower for any given current spot.

Other things that would have made it harder to breath, the screeching cold wind that blew out of the Artic across western Europe that could have frozen the lungs off of a wooly mammoth. That would have made breathing harder.

Jet stream upon the northern ice sheets that tend to be far faster and cause specific high velocity inversions of very cold dry air.

Because CO2 levels were lower plants that lived in regions with shorter growing seasons would have found it harder to accumulate biomass, and there would have been less biomass for humans.

There was an estimate that the population stand for Neandertals that lived from Iberia to Siberia had an effective population size of 7000 individuals. through most of the period from 100000 until shortly before they went extinct.

Another fact people did not know, before the end of  the Younger Dryas there was cultivation, rye had either been domesticated or cultivated habitually in some areas. But rye was adaptive to poor climate, it was not until the Younger Dryas ended that you see the emergence of Emmer's wheat and domestication of cattle, both within 1500 years. This was followed within another 1500 years by the domestication of Hexaploid wheat. Development of much more productive seed crops did not just happen in a few places but everywhere.

So as you are riding your bike though a field of grain, just remember that high O2:low CO2 makes it easier to breath but high CO2 and warm moist air, to a degree, makes it easier to eat.
 

[magnemoe]

12 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Thanks, @Thor Wotansen. Life expectancy in first agricultural societies was way lower than in contemporary mesolithic hunter gatherers. As how forgiving or harsh life really was we can only deduct from climatic evidence and density of find-sites. It varied, but at the end of the ice age, before reforestation startet, it probably really was a paradise.

A conference transcript dealing about the socalled solutreen, the 10-8.000 years before the last glacial maximum, was titled a little heroic "Hunters of the golden age" :-) But during the glacial maximum the environment could probably not bear more than a few hundred individuals in middle europe, between the scandinavian and the alpine glacier. Though i last (2 years ago) heard that there was probably no gap, people could live there without a hiatus (unpublished, from a former collegue).

I know little about north american indigenous tribes, but as far as i recall they lived semi-settled or even settled, grew crops (maize ?), and there were fights between tribes. One must tale into account that humans, as settled as they were or are, never totally gave up hunting.

 

Yes, life expectancy was lower, primitive farming with stone tools and no animals was also backbreaking hard work. 
Good chance farming was an know strategy but not done much as it was to much work. 
Then population grew to large in some areas they started farming, this supported an far larger population so the population grew and would then replace hunters in the surrounding areas. 

Situation in North America showed this, after the Europeans came to America they brought a lot of old world diseases who caused most of the population to die.
This caused many tribes in areas who become low population areas to go back to hunter gatherer as it was more effective. 

14 hours ago, SinBad said:

So, you dont mean nomadic hunter gathers, like the australian aborigines, or some tribes of native americans, or even the innuit. You mean like a family of bonobos, human like primates with some social order and a vocabulary of a hundred terms or so. Cool. I want to be a cat. Eat, sleep, repeat

At that time we was more like chimpanzee than people at the end of the ice age who would be pretty much like peoples who was hunter gatherers up to modern time. 

Expect chimpanzee like behavior too, in that the alpha was the strongest one. As we got smarter this changed, easy to cut the trough on the alpha while he was sleeping, doing this for some hundred thousand years would have evolutionary effects. Humans is less violent than most other primates. Yes we are good at large scale organization including war but that is not general violence. 

[kerbiloid]

14 hours ago, Green Baron said:

There is no proof of violence in prehistoric hunter/gatherers.

Apes are cruel beings and don't hesitate too much before attack and tear somebody. Post-icepocalypse people are too.
Unlikely if between them there was a kingdom of kindness and humility.
They could be not angry. In their understanding of the word, For example, leaving an old person in a forest or killing the youngest of their children are well-known traditions in many peoples' communities. It looks cruel for you but absolutely normal for them. In their sense, they do absolutely moral things having nothing common with cruelty.

Edited July 15, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

21 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Apes are cruel beings and don't hesitate too much before attack and tear somebody. Post-icepocalypse people are too.
Unlikely if between them there was a kingdom of kindness and humility.
They could be not angry. In their understanding of the word, For example, leaving an old person in a forest or killing the youngest of their children are well-known traditions in many peoples' communities. It looks cruel for you but absolutely normal for them. In their sense, they do absolutely moral things having nothing common with cruelty.

Apes are no prehistoric hunter gatherers. I should be more specific, and this applies to palaeolithic / mesolithic groups in europe / asia before the arrival of the neolithic package:

There is no proof of intraspecies violence, in contrary, we have evidence of care for the old and harmed even in neandertals that were badly handicapped, even crippled and unable to chew a steak on their own, and that for many years (La Chapelle-aux-Saints for example).

Violence between modern humans and neandertals is disputed, but archaelogy doesn't deliver any proof. There is one suggested case but we can more likely assume that it was a hunting accident; almost every neandertal had hunting-related injuries (See: Trinkaus). Of course violence always sells better and those stories are more likely to deliver a message than a banal hunting accident (one of many).

Your examples are most likely late neolthic / bronce age or younger, to me they sound medieval. Violence seems to be connected to social stratification and property, which did most probably not exist in "old world" palaeolithic hunter / gatherers.

One word to population pressure: Birth control happens quite automatic in mobile groups (and those were highly mobile) because a baby must grow up a few years to be self-reliant before a woman can have the next child. There never was a pressure of population in palaeolithic peoples, in contrary they went through several genetic bottle necks. Pressure comes with the neolithic.

 

Ah, this takes too much time here ;-)

 

[peadar1987]

This "paradise" chat is pure speculation, and depends on a subjective idea of "paradise".

The best window we have on what pre-agriculture societies might have been like is current hunter-gatherer tribes. They have high infant mortality and relatively high levels of violent death. They do benefit from low population density, which reduces competition and the spread of disease.

 

[Green Baron]

Ha ! Thinks you ! But you have no idea. There are people who have studied it, dug it out, counted the bones and tools, reconstructed the sites and the environments, even where the stone-knappers sat and what they made and how they did it, what grew in the vicinity and abroad, how people moved, how old they were when they died and, if possible, what they died from. Climate, environmental composition (animals and plants) are pretty well reconstructed. Finds, sites and knowledge about it are constantly discussed, compared and compiled. Sure there is some speculation involved but far less than you might think. And if there was more speculation involved be assured i'd tell you.

You cannot compare todays hunter gatherers in barren reserves and with ongoing contact to modern life. Very few are left and they are strongly influenced and not to the best. They are more a mirror for ourselves than a window to the past.

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

Still don't understand how a murderous ape could mutate into a peaceful paleohuman and then again into a murderous human.

Also, the paleohumans' axes and spears look enough agressive. Not sure if they really made a difference between a deer and an alien in alien deer mask.
The initiation rituals also look not very kindly. Mostly they are about "killed-died-eaten-thrown out-reborn". The same with young hunters/robbers teams terrorising the neighbor tribes.

About the neaders there was something several days ago.
http://www.livescience.com/55343-neanderthal-cannibalism-northern-europe.html

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by kerbiloid

[PB666]

4 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Yes, life expectancy was lower, primitive farming with stone tools and no animals was also backbreaking hard work. 
Good chance farming was an know strategy but not done much as it was to much work. 
Then population grew to large in some areas they started farming, this supported an far larger population so the population grew and would then replace hunters in the surrounding areas. 

Situation in North America showed this, after the Europeans came to America they brought a lot of old world diseases who caused most of the population to die.
This caused many tribes in areas who become low population areas to go back to hunter gatherer as it was more effective. 

At that time we was more like chimpanzee than people at the end of the ice age who would be pretty much like peoples who was hunter gatherers up to modern time. 

Expect chimpanzee like behavior too, in that the alpha was the strongest one. As we got smarter this changed, easy to cut the trough on the alpha while he was sleeping, doing this for some hundred thousand years would have evolutionary effects. Humans is less violent than most other primates. Yes we are good at large scale organization including war but that is not general violence. 

The LBK package included two varieties of wheat, assorted other fruits, pottery of the LBK type and cattle. The loess that was originally utilized were thun strips of land bordered by gennarlly dense pine forests as Europe was just coming pit of the orbiroeal period, the pine soils were pretty much terrible for agriculture. There has been speculation that the einkorn wheat that was used was largely as a fodder crop, much like we use winter rye as a fidder crop now. Cattle were an essential element of LBK and, in fact, the presence of cheese fats in the British Ilse precedes evidence of grain cultivation, the earliest settlers to Ireland appeared not to have grown crops at all, originally focusing only on cattle and later drafting cereals typical of early western europe and africa. Bread wheat is not suitable for much of northern Europe. 

The bigger problem in the Neolithic was stable soil improvement, cows can graze and be rotated, they can be traded on the hoof for other sources of nutrition, like seafood from mesolithic hunter gatherers (the healthy ones). 

[Green Baron]

 

22 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Still don't understand how a murderous ape could mutate into a peaceful paleohuman and then again into a murderous human.

 

You can do so in a lifetime. Our behavior is not totally controlled by genes, it's also and much more dependent on cultur and tradition. It is not "built in" to kill each other, in fact most humans (i know) are pretty peaceful.

You're judging from your perspective, and that is filled with terrible pictures, wars and since two decades intense terrorism, but it's money (resources), ideology and strive for power that produces these things (aka culture), it's not built into human beings by default.

I tell you, that was not always the case, and this is the link to human origins :-)

!! Speculation (there are only a few archaeological hints in cave-art) !!: Just try to imagine a different ideology, shamanism, that teaches a spirit in everything and a link between everything. Couldn't that be a ground for peaceful coexistence ? I am not preaching here, hope you get me right ;-)

Peace, brother :-)

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by Green Baron