Website review: Hunter-gatherers | Noble or savage...
Mopster discovered this in Science/Tech
•5 reviews since Dec 30, 2007
science, anthropology, agriculture
•economist.com/displaystory.cfm
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Mopster discovered 7 months ago- A bit simplistic (it glosses over a few controversies), and nothing terribly new, but not a bad article: the life of hunter-gatherers was not quite as idyllic as many people imagine.
- XenZ rated 7 months ago
- From the page: "Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all."
- chocnut rated 7 months ago
- you'd learn a lot from this article. reminds me of why i love anthropology!!! :) "Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their birth. The industrial revolution caused a population explosion because it enabled more babies to survive--malnourished, perhaps, but at least alive. It is irrelevant to ask whether we would have been better off to stay as hunter-gatherers. Being a niche-shifting species, we could not help moving on. Willingly or not, humanity had embarked 50,000 years ago on the road called "progress" with constant change in habits driven by invention mothered by necessity. There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us."
- pamur rated 7 months ago
Interesting. I don't know about you but I always assumed that life was pretty rough anytime prior to the internet.
[Thanks, laodan]
- laodan rated 7 months ago
- Hunter-gatherers, noble or savage? via Arts & Letters, in The Economist
It is irrelevant to ask whether we would have been better off to stay as hunter-gatherers. Being a niche-shifting species, we could not help moving on. Willingly or not, humanity had embarked 50,000 years ago on the road called "progress" with constant change in habits driven by invention mothered by necessity. ... Incessant innovation is a characteristic of human beings. Agriculture, the domestication of animals and plants, must be seen in the context of this progressive change. It was just another step. ... There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Hunter-gatherers, noble or savage? Societal evolutionary development has made it to the headlines of our media in 2007. We should be wondering why this is so. It is assuredly not an accident that this idea comes to the fore while humanity approaches a turning point in its evolutionary history: - a radical expansion of modernity (rapid expansion of science and technology + globalization) is destabilizing and eradicating what was thought of in the West as acquired benefits of modernity while simultaneously disrupting the mechanics of the system (financial breakdown, crises,...) - an unsustainable demand for resources (energy, minerals, metals, food,...) - radical side-effects of modernity are destabilizing the conditions of our environment (species extinction, erosion of soils, climate change, and so on are mowing our life lines) Those 3 heavy tendencies are intensifying simultaneously and bringing us close to a societal turning point where development turns negative where progress shifts in reverse and where modernity is condemned. The economist magazine is the most prestigious media representative of modernity. In this article it comes to the rescue of its ideology that it feels is crumbling and against the apologists of "primitivism" that it feels are gaining ground. Modernity and primitivism are not sacred. I believe, as the author of the article, that we evolve under the duress of necessity and necessity in late modernity means that we'll be going to have: - less people on earth - sustainable societal organizations - sustainable technologies - a holistic vision of reality (worldview) giving the framework in which rationality operates and thus guiding the logic of capital and science to serve humanity within the confines of its newly acquired worldview.
- Hunter-gatherers, noble or savage? via Arts & Letters, in The Economist
