Worst Mistake Never Made

zhao

there are no accidents
To me that suggests that the impulse towards population growth was always there but was limited by the scarcity of food and that once agriculture created a (comparative) surplus of food that lid was lifted off population growth, not than that people generally held off shagging until they started farming.

it is impossible, but we still must try not to project our sexuality as conditioned by our environment onto those whose lives are organized in DRASTICALLY different ways.

Abstinence after a newborn for periods of up to 1 year is common, and so is infanticide, as ways to control population. Scarcity of food may also have been a factor, but i'm reluctant to believe to a great extent, because, again, of a much more plentiful earth.

And we must not use our moral codes to judge their practices either, for one thing, we are always completely biased to down play our own systematic cruelty when looking at the other: if infanticide is a part of a sustainable way of life in which the well being of every one is accounted for, it makes sense for that system.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i am speaking of the entire history of Homo Sapiens. The period of several million years is from the emergence of Homo Sapiens as the dominant Hominid species on earth (which some speculate may have involved genocide), and the advent of Agriculture/large scale societies/war.

If you don't know what i'm talking about, don't waste our time :rolleyes:

Ah, that classic zhaoist humility and politeness...

The *earliest* form of any creatures that could be considered 'human' in the loose sense evolved around half a million years ago, and the very earliest anatomically modern humans appeared around 200,000 years ago. 'Several' (3-4) million years ago, your 'humans' looked like this:

A.afarensis.jpg
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
zhao said:
You are denying that pre-agricultural people had culture of any kind??

No of course I'm not saying that, that would be utterly ludicrous. Perhaps you could break the habit of a lifetime and respond to what I'm actually saying, rather than what you've imagined I've said. Your response to me rests on your bizarre equation between "culture" and "deliberate population control through voluntary celibacy". Many cultures around the world traditionally value large familties and encourage fertility, you know, "go forth and be fruitful" and all that. Consider the official Catholic position on contraception even to this day.

no groups prior to agriculture experienced population explosion.

No, because there was very limited and seasonally available food - a problem that was solved by the adoption of agriculture! There was nonetheless gradual population growth - it's thought the total human population was under 10,000 about 70,000 years ago, whereas humans had colonized most of the world by the time agriculture began in the Middle East. There would have been no need to deliberately limit the population while there was still plenty of land to expand into, which was the case for tens of thousands of years. And disease, predation and hunger would have done a pretty good job of preventing population explosion (without even considering human-on-human violence) for most of our species' existence.

Please go read your history.

This isn't 'history' we're talking about, it's pre-pre-prehistory. And don't you think people might be more willing to engage with you if were just a tiiiny bit less arrogant and high-handed? Especially when you come out with demonstrably incorrect statements like "Homo sapiens existed 3 million years ago".
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Many cultures around the world traditionally value large familties and encourage fertility, you know, "go forth and be fruitful" and all that. Consider the official Catholic position on contraception even to this day.

Many post-agricultural revolution cultures you mean. Which are of course DRASTICALLY different from pre-agricultural ones.



No, because there was very limited and seasonally available food - a problem that was solved by the adoption of agriculture!

a problem that probably did not arise for most of human prehistory, but only relatively recently.


There was nonetheless gradual population growth - it's thought the total human population was under 10,000 about 70,000 years ago, whereas humans had colonized most of the world by the time agriculture began in the Middle East.

sure, gradual, very slow and gradual. There are lots of evidence of cultural means to limit population in small nomadic groups, but over a period of 70,000 years a little bit of over all growth is reasonable, especially given lush and abundant climates. [/QUOTE]



There would have been no need to deliberately limit the population while there was still plenty of land to expand into, which was the case for tens of thousands of years.

Yet there exists lots of evidence of cultural means to limit population in pre-agricultural nomadic groups.

This isn't 'history' we're talking about, it's pre-pre-prehistory. And don't you think people might be more willing to engage with you if were just a tiiiny bit less arrogant and high-handed? Especially when you come out with demonstrably incorrect statements like "Homo sapiens existed 3 million years ago".

I do apologize for the mistake: what i meant is the entire "Homo" genus, and not specifically Sapiens: "The earliest documented members of the genus Homo are Homo habilis which evolved around 2.3 million years ago; the earliest species for which there is positive evidence of use of stone tools."

But what IS irrefutable is that the history of both Sapiens as well as entire genus of Homo, keeps being steadily pushed further and further back by each advance in Paleontology.

About the "heavy handedness": it is to make a point entirely against the tide of popular belief (i.e. Pinker) which IMO is mostly the result of ubiquitous biased conditioning on behalf of civilization and capitalism.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Marshall Sahlins said:
"The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a pre-social and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. "Sorry, beg your pardon," Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature."

The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and other Conceptions of the Human Condition
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
No, because there was very limited and seasonally available food - a problem that was solved by the adoption of agriculture!

a problem that probably did not arise for most of human prehistory, but only relatively recently.

I find that extraordinarily unlikely. The norm for wild animals is scarcity interspersed with periods of abundance. It would have been the same for 'wild' humans, moreso in temperate regions. You can't base arguments on ancient humans in general on a few select modern-day H/G groups living in the tropics.

Let's put it simply: if agriculture was such a universally terrible idea, why is it practiced today by almost all human societies?
 

zhao

there are no accidents
You can't base arguments on ancient humans in general on a few select modern-day H/G groups living in the tropics.

EXACTLY.

The surviving modern-day G/H groups have been pushed to the least abundant part of their former environments, and live under conditions much harsher than before.


Philip Leckman said:
the interesting thing here is that with few exceptions (the Yolngu, some of the other Pacific and Indian islander groups) the forager societies that hung around long enough to have their customs and social organization documented and studied by anthropologists lived in pretty marginal environments - they likely had it comparatively rough compared to small-scale pre-agricultural societies in more favorable zones, who had already adopted agriculture, social hierarchies, etc. by the time anyone began documenting their lifeways in detail. and yet even among these marginal groups there's still abundant evidence for the "original affluent society": relatively little time spent on feeding and supplying the group, relatively more time spent on socializing, joking, or hanging out with the family. and that's based on groups in the world's badlands - what would life have been like where food, shelter, etc. were easy to come by?

Let's put it simply: if agriculture was such a universally terrible idea, why is it practiced today by almost all human societies?

Also, you are forgetting a little thing called the Last Ice Age, an event which drastically changed living conditions on Earth from very good to not-so-good, and which ended, funnily enough, right before the advent of agriculture.
 
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