Category Archives: Ancient Humans

People of the Amazon Rainforest

Ancient Humans, art, expansive religion, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

The story of where the ideas of Chaco came from arose far from Chaco. Archeologists Anna Roosevelt and Chris Davis were interviewed in the series Native America.  They explained that they have been trying to answer such questions. They have been searching for evidence of the earliest people in the Americas.

Some interesting data has been discovered in the Amazon Rainforest of western Brazil. They looked in a cave there referred to in Portuguese as the Caverna da Pedra Pintada, or in English, the cave of the Painted Rock.  The walls of the cave are covered with art of animals and the sky. “This cave in the Amazon is re-writing the history of when and how people settled the Americas and who those people are.”

For a long time history books presented only one view of how this happened. They said that about 11,000 B.C. during the last Ice Age big game hunters from Asia crossed over to North America a frozen land bridge in the area known a Beringia. That land bridge arose when sea levels dropped dramatically during the last Ice Age.  Later when the continental ice sheets of North America and the world melted. the ocean levels rose again sharply growing that land bridge once more. It was thought that after the ice melted the people of Asia who had arrived in North America  migrated south into North and South America. They were thought to have hunted mammoths, giant sloths and caribou with finely fashioned stone spear points. Many of these animals have since disappeared.

According to the standard view people reached the Amazon about 1,000 years ago.  Recently scientists have discovered evidence in caves that people arrived in the Amazon much earlier than that. ?That evidence even includes some surprising art as well as human remains which have been carbon dated. .  As Anna Roosevelt from the University of Illinois said, “The remains we found and dated in the cave show that people were living deep in the Amazon forest at least 13,000 years ago. This is some of the earliest art and its definitely so far, the earliest art, so far, in the hemisphere.”

This demonstrates, she said,  that, “Thousands of years before the Romans or Greeks, eight thousand years before the Egyptians, at least 13,000 years ago, people arrive in the Amazon, and their stone tools and paintings reveal these first Americans are not only mammoth hunters, they are foragers, fishermen, artists, and perhaps scientists.”

Chris Davis is a specialist in archaeoastronomy, the study of how ancient peoples looked at the sky. He and Roosevelt found images that appear to be a grid that indicates how something was tracked  in the sky, because it was outdoors, not in a cave. These two scientists believe that these images represent calculated observations.

Davis thinks the art represents very sophisticated thinking. As Roosevelt said, “This art links people with their environment through its animals, its plants, and the heavenly bodies of the sky.” This actually reminds me of what Northrop Frye, Canada’s pre-eminent English literature scholar described as the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to give the world a human face.  Artists try to connect the world to us.

Bertrand Russell also agreed. As he said in his book On God and Religion:

“Men, as is natural, have an intense desire to humanize the universe:  God and Satan, alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.” Of course this is exactly what Northrop Frye said too.

Roosevelt concluded, “These paintings are the earliest art ever found in the Americas. They suggest that people 13,000 years ago had already developed ideas about the world that centered on the sky, caves, and nature. But what exactly are these First American artists trying to say?” What is clear though is that we ought to be wary of making easy conclusions that Europeans and their descendants were vastly superior in knowledge to the Indigenous people. If you recall, this is the point I am trying to make. I think that for too long we in the west have been blinded by bias about our own superiority to Indigenous peoples. The point is that this is a bias.

People of Chaco

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

This past year I watched an amazing series called Native America on PBS. It was narrated by Robbie Robertson of the Band.

The more I learn about Native Americans the more I am surprised by them. By Native Americans I mean the people of North, Central, and South America that lived here when the Europeans officially arrive in 1492. Like Europeans, there were an astonishing variety of peoples. No stereotypes fit. They did not think and act alike anymore than humans from Europe, Asia or Africa did. Diversity is the most important key to understanding Indigenous people. And that diversity is their greatest asset. We can learn a lot from them. But to do that we have to ditch our inbred sense of superiority. We  have to look at them without bias and with empathy. If we can to that we will be blessed.

More than a 1,000 years ago, 500 years before contact with Europeans, Native Americans built one of the largest cities of North American New Mexico. It was called Chaco.

Most of the city has been destroyed. All that remains are largely dismantled or ruined structures that most of Americans have forgotten about. To them they are insignificant. But they aren’t.

Some Native Americans still maintain a strong connection to Chaco. People like the Hopi from Northern Arizona make pilgrimages to Chaco because it is a way of connecting to their ancestors. One of these people is Leigh Kuwandwisiwma who is an ancient keeper of knowledge. He husbands and cherishes ancient knowledge–the traditional knowledge of America’s first peoples.

The Hopi are one of the pueblo communities–the most ancient people that live in the American Southwest. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma helped lead a group of elders from the Hopi community to a cave north of the ancient city of Chaco. The Hopi are notoriously reticent to share their culture with outsiders. For the filming of the series Native America, for the first time, the Hopi people shared an ancient ceremony outside their community. They offered cornmeal and eagle feathers in gratitude.

The Chaco housed a lot of people with high spiritual knowledge. A lot of great teachings were shared and stored there. The Hopi and other native peoples see this ancient city as being still alive. The structures contained 100s of rooms and were, skyscrapers by standards of the time. “Their walls were carefully aligned to the sun and stars. They transformed the surrounding desert into gardens and fields of corn.” The Hopi believed that many people, perhaps thousands came here to learn about natural forces. As Robertson said, “It was a place of higher learning hundreds of years before Harvard University was built.” In the Chaco the people shared secret knowledge, traditional practices, about the world of nature and the natural forces that governed it. Except for being secret, isn’t that what universities are all about? They believed that in this way they learned to influence the natural elements like wind, rain, and clouds. “Here a thousand years ago in the American Southwest was a thriving center of science and spirituality.”

What people learned at this center of knowledge helped them to cope, survive, and even thrive in a harsh environment. That knowledge was not useless; it was essential. Many clans came together there to share their knowledge. Each wanted to learn from the other and each wanted to help the others for the mutual benefit of all. They shared their wisdom about how to be and act as caretakers of the earth.

Recent archaeological evidence is showing how far Chaco influenced societies and how far people were willing to travel to come there. They came from hundreds of miles away. Archaeologist Patti Crown was the lead scientist in the search.

One of the rooms is very interesting. It is called Room 28 and when it was originally excavated in 1896 it contained dozens of cylindrical pots of which scientists have only recently come to understand the significance. Crown thought they were drinking vessels but was not sure what they were drinking. She used modern forensic techniques to get at the surprising truth. What they were used for was chocolate! Chocolate comes from the Cacao bean that only grows on trees in the tropics of Central America more than 500 miles away! Obviously they had to trade with people that far away to eat drink chocolate at Chaco.

There  “Chocolate was considered food for the gods.” I know my wife would agree. It was used in ceremonies where it would be poured from one vessel to another. The shape of the vessels in Central America were similar to those found in Chaco. “Chocolate and its sacred drinking ritual must have travelled from Central America to Chaco.” It is surprising how far ideas travelled in the ancient world.

Many other sacred objects were found at Chaco. They found carved shells from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. They found precious metals and minerals that could only have come from far off mountains. They found colorful tropical bird feathers that came from Central America over a thousand miles away! All of these were objects of ritual significance that had been carried here from a great distance.

As Crown pointed out, “It made Chaco part of this very, very deep and distant belief system. The remains of an ancient city, combined with Hopi traditions of a great center of knowledge, and sacred artifacts that connect Chaco with distant cultures, have together helped create a new vision of what Chaco was all about.

“In a world of cities teeming with people, immersed in the science and spirituality of earth and sky Chaco is a metropolis of ideas and beliefs that span two continents.” That of course leads to the next question, ‘Where did these ideas come from?’

Cultural Relativism

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, racism, Sociology of Knowledge, , ,

 

If you want to understand Indigenous People you should know something about anthropology. Sadly, I know little about anthropology. Of course, as faithful readers of my blog know, absence of knowledge has never stopped me from offering my opinions. Today is no exception.

I have said that to understand the relationship of the invaders of the western hemisphere to the Indigenous people cannot be understood without realizing the arrogance and superiority they felt to indigenous people.

Franz Boas, sometimes called the father of modern Anthropology was perhaps the first anthropologist to poke holes into the false sense of superiority of the west. He was interested in how beliefs and convictions coalesced into something he referred to as culture. He thought this was a valid organizing principle. So does Wade Davis another eminent anthropologist. Boas, appreciated, as very few of his fellows did, that cultures of the west had a lot to learn from indigenous cultures.  As Davis said of Boas, “Far ahead of his time, he sensed that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise.”

Each culture provided an opportunity that every one who contacted it would be well advised to pay attention to it and learn from it. Ideological blinkers are never helpful. Boas is seen by many as the originator of modern cultural anthropology and for good reason.  He looked at cultures without bias and without suffocating feelings of superiority. Boas wanted to learn from people he met. He was not there to teach them. He was not there to save them, he wanted to benefit from their stored ancient wisdom. That attitude was extremely unusual in its time. Boas worked among many people including the Inuit of Baffin Island, the indigenous people of the west coast of North America and in every case made sure that his students kept an open mind. Boas ensured that his students communicated with the indigenous people they met in the language of those people. He asked them to participate as much as possible in the lives of those people they studied.  As Davis said of Boas,

“Every effort should be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. This notion of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against the orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, and ever since, anthropologists have periodically been accused of embracing an extreme relativism.”

That does not mean we have to abdicate from making judgments. That does not mean we can’t cherish the good from our society too. Lets cherry pick the best from each world. Lets just not be blind to the good fruit from our kin. When we make judgments, lets make sure that they are informed, based on reasoning not wishful thinking, or worse, no-thinking, and free from bias. In other words we should always try to be ideal observers.  We owe that not only to them, but to ourselves.

One day Boas in the cold winter of 1883 was caught in a dreadful snowstorm in northern North America. It was the mother of all blizzards. Temperatures dipped to minus 46º C. That would even impress people from the prairies of Canada like me. Boas and his group understandably became disoriented in the storm. For 26 hours in the freezing cold there was nothing he could do to help his men. He left himself and his entire crew to the care and custody of the local Inuk companion and their dogs. Eventually the Inuk guide led them to safety and the men survived, though half dead when they arrived. They were nearly frozen to death and nearly starved. The next day Boas wrote this in his diary,

“I often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over that of ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down on them…We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are much worse, relatively speaking.”

Boas opened the eyes of anthropologists, but many more. Many people came to realize we have a lot to learn from others. Our hubris must be put on the shelf.

Boas  explored the idea that random beliefs could coalesce into what he called “culture.” Boas was among the first to promote the idea of culture as an organizing principle of anthropology.

Boas became the leader of modern cultural anthropology. He studied with an open and unprejudiced manner how human social perceptions are formed and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. I would say Boas was the father of modern cultural anthropology and also the father of the sociology of knowledge.

Boas insisted that his students learn and conduct their research in the language of the place and even participate in the lives of the people that they studied. These were revolutionary ideas at the time.  Davis said of him, “Every effort should be made, he argued, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts.”

Of course this required his students to set aside their preconceptions and actually look at, and listen to, the people they were studying. Prejudice had no place in their science. One had to look skeptically at one’s own cultural preconceptions in order to avoid being enslaved by them.

This led Boas to his revolutionary idea of cultural relativism. According to Davis, “This notion of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, and ever since, anthropologists have periodically been accused of embracing an extreme relativism.”

This does not mean that all cultures are equal. It does mean that all cultures merit respect. It does mean that all cultures have something to teach us. It does mean that cultural arrogance is misplaced. As Davis said,  “In truth, no serious anthropologist advocates the elimination of judgment. Anthropology merely calls for tis suspension, so that the judgments were are all ethically obliged to make as human beings may be informed ones.”

Boas wanted to see the world through the eyes of his subjects. He wanted to walk in their moccasins. He practiced radical empathy, not arrogance. That is the attitude we need to understand Indigenous issues. Not arrogance. Not a sense of superiority. Empathy is much more helpful.

Superiority and Race

Affinity, Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, ,

 

People of European descent have long had a grossly exaggerated sense of their own superiority to indigenous people around the world. After all weren’t they politically and technologically dominant around the world? They must be superior. What other explanation could there be? This is part of what I have called the Original Sin.

From that robust sense of superiority sprang the notion that they must have sprung from a superior race.  Even though that notion has been intellectually discredited, this feeling of superiority runs deep. It is easily sublimated when under siege, but invariably bobs up somewhere else.

At one time such notions were convenient. For example, they were used to justify first the destruction of native societies and then slavery and later more subtle forms of dominance over other races. That allowed Europeans to prosper unimaginably from an economic perspective.  It also allowed them to sleep at night, or perhaps, put their conscience to sleep.

It is difficult for us to comprehend objections to what is to our advantage. That is why slavery and  racial bias were so difficult to defeat.  These were convenient biases. Bias has in fact not been defeated in centuries of trying.

Yet this entire feeling of being a superior race is a feeling built on sand. There is no secure foundation for it at all.  Partly because the entire notion of race itself has been discredited. As Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis said in his book The Wayfinders, “science in fact suggests an end to race, when it reveals beyond any reasonable doubt that race is a fiction.” Of course racism is not a fiction!

Science has clearly demonstrated:

“The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum.From Ireland to Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia, there are sharp genetic differences among populations. There are only geographical gradients. The most remote society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total genetic diversity. Were the rest of society to be swept away by plague or war, the Waroni or the Barasana, the Rendille or the Tuareg would have within their blood the genetic endowment of all of humanity. Like a sacred repository of spirit and mind, any of these cultures, any one of these 7,000 would provide the sees from which humanity in all its diversity might be reborn.

What all of this means is that biologists and population geneticists have at last proved to be true something that philosophers have always dreamed: We are all literally brothers and sisters. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth.”

This of course is a recurring theme in my blog. I come back to it over and over again. We are connected. None of this should come as surprise to anyone. After all, we are all descendants of a small group of humans, perhaps as small as 150 people, that migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago and proceeded to colonize the world. And guess what, those people were likely dark skinned! I remember when we were in Africa a few years ago in what was called “the Cradle of Humanity,” when I mentioned this fact to an evangelical Christian in our group, he was obviously disturbed by that possibility. Why should that be?

The consequence of this is, as Davis said,  “all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth—a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia—is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities.”

After all how can one say the people of the west who created a great technological society are superior to the indigenous people of North America who learned to flourish and not just live in North America where the Europeans who arrived on contact would have starved or frozen to death? Who can say Europeans are superior to the people of the Amazon rainforest who have learned to live with robust knowledge and experience amidst the natural splendors of their homeland? In particular, when modern industrial society, of which the West is inordinately so proud, has led to the destruction of about half of life on the planet, does it even resemble sense to hold the western ways superior?

Davis got it profoundly right when he said,

“There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilized, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited—indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial conceit that it was.  The brilliance of scientific research and the revelation of modern genetics have affirmed in an astonishing way the essential connectedness of humanity. We share a sacred endowment, a common history written in our bones. It follows, … that the myriad of cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us.  They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?  When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species over the next 2,5000 generations, even as we continue this never-ending journey.” And we need that entire repertoire.

The ignorance of western cultures mired in the excrement of  feelings of superiority is magisterial in its colossal stupidity. There really is no ignorance like it–anywhere any time.

 

Sociology of Knowledge & the “Discovery” of the Americas

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, racism, Sociology of Knowledge,

The story of exploration, “discovery,” conquest, and colonization of the western hemisphere By Europeans is incredibly important and incredibly interesting. The explorers were astonishingly brave. They sailed towards what many people thought was the edge of the world where they would fall off. Yet they did it. They plowed ahead no matter what the dangers. They were brilliant in their adaptions. Yet, also importantly, there was a dark side to the impact of conquest and colonization. That dark side, in my view, grew out of the soil of the Original Sin. Often it showed the utter brutality of the conquerors. The Christians, for examples, seemed profoundly barbarian.

We must always remember that all “knowledge” is coloured by ideology. This is what the sociology of knowledge is all about.  We see the world through the invisible lens of our own beliefs and presumptions. It is very difficult to avoid this. As Wade Davis in his brilliant book The Wayfarers, said “Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and interpretation is too often an expression of convenience.”

The study of anthropology was born out of a deep attitude of superiority, as did so much of “knowledge.”  People believed in an evolutionary model in which 19thcentury men like Herbert Spencer saw that societies developed in a linear progression from savagery to barbarism to civilization.

In time anthropologists learned a lot more and abandoned the error of their earlier ways. As Davis, reported,

“Such transparently simplistic and biased interpretation of human history, though long repudiated by anthropologists as an intellectual artifact of the nineteenth century, as relevant today as the convictions of Victorian clergy who dated the earth at a mere 6,000 years, has nevertheless proved to be remarkably persistent, even among contemporary scholars.’

Davis gave a powerful example of this in a  Canadian book, Disrobing the Aboriginal History: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, that ridiculed the very idea that the original inhabitants of the Americas had anything useful to offer to the Europeans they encountered. Here is what that book said, “Never in history has the cultural gap between two people’s coming into contact with each other been wider.” The profundity of this ignorance is astounding, and I will have a lot to say about how wrong this idea was as we meander through this issue. That does not mean the idea is not common and deeply pervasive.

It is pervasive because it is deeply embedded in the ideology of supremacy that grew out of the fundamental sin–White Male Human Supremacy has been the implicit underlying ideology of the west for centuries. It cascaded through the generations. It blinds everyone under its influence, both the alleged superiors and the presumed inferiors. Everyone has been infected. It makes the privilege invisible.

For generations indigenous peoples have been taught they are inferior. For generations white people have been taught they are superiors. And likewise, men are superior, and women inferior. Or that Christians are superior to all others. And finally, and still largely underappreciated, that humans are superior and animals and nature inferior. These attitudes are so pervasive that it is almost impossible to dissent. These assumptions are invisible. They imbue nearly everything that happens in the west. Any dissent from the predominant ideology is automatically seen as irrational if not insane. As Herbert Marcuse noted, dominant groups rarely acknowledge anything that undermines their dominance. They just don’t see it.

Members of the dominant group do not even see their privilege. This is just who they are.  Only those who relentlessly try to act like ideal impartial observers with fellow feeling and are armed with critical thinking skills are able to extract themselves from the influence of the dominant ideology and even then, only with great difficulty.

The Luxury Trap

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, The Simple Life

 

Like most big changes, farming arose gradually. It did not happen all at once. The change from hunter-gathering to farming occurred incrementally in small almost imperceptible steps.  Had the changes occurred rapidly the reaction of humans might have been very different. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on the stove. If you throw a frog into a boiling pot of water it will leap out immediately. In such a case no harm is done. The frog does not get seduced. If you place a frog into a cold pot of water and then turn on the element so that the pot is heated very slowly, the frog might stay in the pot until it boils to death. It does not notice the gradual changes until it is too late.

The change from hunting and gathering to farming happened slowly like that. Had it occurred rapidly humans would likely have jumped out before any harm was done. Where the change is gradual, humans can accept it and then become enmeshed in the new system.

Humans initially arrived in the Middle East about 70,000 years ago. For more than 50,000 years humans there were content. Humans did very well withoutagriculture. When humans started to settle more, perhaps because of the availability of food, their natural population control mechanisms started to produce more offspring as a result of hormonal changes.

The last Ice Age ended about 18,000 years ago as the climate warmed. Temperatures rose, but so did the amount of rainfall. The new climate was perfect for wheat and other cereals. People ate more of these cereals. They were not easy to eat. People could not eat the wheat and other cereals without first winnowing, grinding and cooking them. People began to carry the grains back to their temporary homes. No doubt some grains dropped to the ground. Some were lost, but others sprouted along human trails and campsites. Humans burned down forests to help desirable plants to grow and this also helped wheat to grow. As a result nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers started to give up their nomadic lifestyles and settled down into more permanent settlements. At first they likely stayed in one place only for short times, but in time, they stayed longer and longer as more and more cereals grew. Gradually hunter-gatherers added farming to their survival arsenal, without giving up foraging. Farming increased greatly. No one knows exactly when the decisive transition from hunting and gathering to farming occurred.

At first the humans probably stayed at their camps for about 4 weeks during the harvest season.  When wheat plants multiplied and spread through more areas of the Middle East the Homo sapiensstarted to stay put longer. Evidence of this has been found by scientists and historians. They have found evidence of stone houses and granaries for example.  The people learned to save some part of the harvest to sow the fields with seeds. Later they discovered how to plant seeds deeper into the ground and this produced more wheat.  Then the people adding hoeing and plowing to their techniques. Of course as the people put in more effort to improve their corps, they had less time to travel and hunt and gather. They never gave up foraging or hunting entirely, but people spent more and more time cultivating just a few crops.

As Yuval Harari said, “But by 8500 B.C. the Middle East was peppered with permanent villages such as Jericho, whose inhabitants spent most of their time cultivating a few domesticated species.”

Life changed slowly but over time dramatically, as more and more people became farmers. First the population began to grow. Remember that is not necessarily a good thing. In fact some have said that it is the worstthing!

As humans gave up the nomadic life women could have children every year. As Harari said, “Babies were weaned at an earlier age—they could feed on porridge and gruel.” Is that an improvement? Babies had to grow up faster to help in the fields. Lucky kids. Of course the extra mouths to feed wiped out the “benefits’ of having more food. That meant more fields had to be sowed. More work again.

More and more people began to move to towns and even cities. More close contact meant more diseases. Things got tougher. As Harari reported, “As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings , child mortality soared.” More dubious progress.

Even though many children died young, more children were being born than died. So the population increased. It appeared that things were good. Yet, the agricultural revolution was not an obvious success. As Harari said,

 

With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome.  Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 B.C. lived a harder lifethan the average person in Jericho of 9500 B.C. or 13,000 B.C. But nobody realized what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements,’ each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of the farmers.

 

All of these gradual changes ended up in disaster and no one noticed until it was too late to do anything about it. Like the frog in the pot of boiling water. People forgot what life had been like. People could not grasp the consequences of what they were doing, just like we in the modern social media digital age have not been able to comprehend how life is changing and too often assume, without good evidence, that things are getting better because we have more and faster computers.

Each of the changes the Homo sapiensmade required a little more work.     People thought the increased harvest would be worth the extra work. People worked harder, but they did not realize that with more children the “benefits” would have to be shared with more children. The extra “benefits” could not keep up with the extra burdens.

Are things so different today? How many modern “improvements” are just more powerful chains tying us to our personal air-conditioned prisons? How has the digital revolution improved our lives? Have our “time saving” devices saved time or squandered it?

Of course the newly minted farmers of the Agricultural Revolution did not understand that feeding children porridge instead of breast milk would weaken their immune systems just as more of them lived in crowded places where diseases were rampant. As Harari said, those “permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.” As well the increasing reliance on a single source of food exposed them to serious risks. Droughts now could be disastrous after people lost their foraging skills. As large granaries were needed to product the grain from bandits. As a result they had to spend more time “building walls and doing guard duty.”Not so much fun.

Humans screwed up. This has happened before and will happen again. As Harari said, “The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens today.” I know many young law students who join large law firms where they are expected to work inhuman hours in the pursuit of immense “billable hours” so that eventually they can retire and live the golden life. In time many of them realize they have pursued a chimera and their life is not worth living.

This is what Harari calls the “luxury trap”. Our luxuries become the prisons inside of which we live. Or as he put it,

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations…The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water under a scorching sun.”

It is requires a complex calculus to determine whether the life of the hunter-gatherer was better or worse than the farmer. People may disagree. But what is unarguable is that saying the life of European farmers was a vast improvement over the life of Indigenous people of the Americas, is a monumental assumption. It takes a stubborn over-confidence to stick to such a presumption.

 

History’s Biggest Fraud

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

 

For about 2.5 million years Homo sapiens were pretty content feeding themselves by hunting and gathering. During this time the plants and animals on which the humans dined lived without human intervention. Even though humans spread around the globe they continued their basic traditional means of finding food. They did that because their means of living were pretty darn good. As Yuval Harari asked, “Why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics?”If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

This changed about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapienslearned to manipulate the lives of a few animals and plant species to their “advantage”. At least they believed it was to their advantage. But was it?

Harari described the life of humans after the invention of agriculture this way,  “From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain, and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived—the Agricultural Revolution.”

This shift began in about 9,500-8,500 B.C. in the Middle East  of Turkey, Iran, and the Levant. It probably started with the domestication of wheat and goats. As Harari explained, “By 3,500 B.C. the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all of our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between about 9,500 and 3,500 B.C.—wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet, and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.”

At one time scholars believed that agriculture spread from this single source in the Middle East around the world, including the New World. Now most scholars agree that agriculture started up in other parts of the world without benefit of the Middle Eastern ancestors. For example, people in Central America domesticated maize and beans even though they knew nothing about wheat and pea cultivation in the Middle East. China domesticated rice, millet, and pigs. North American indigenous people cultivated pumpkin. In New Guinea the people domesticated sugar cane and bananas. In Africa they domesticated millet, sorghum, wheat, and rice. From these places agriculture spread around the globe.

The fact is that it is very difficult to domesticate plants and animals because few are good candidates. Where those species lived is where agricultural domestication began by very smart humans.

I have always thought, along with most other people, that agriculture was a tremendous advancement for human society. But was it?  Wendell Berry called agriculture one of the world’s worst disasters ever.  Yuval Harari came pretty close to saying this too. This is how he described agriculture:

“Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity.  They told a tale of progress fuelled human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often Spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.

That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers, knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.  The Agricultural Revolution enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible?  Neither kings, nor priests, or merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens rather than vice versa.”

 

As wild as these statements seem they do make sense. Look at the results. 10,000 years ago wheat was just a wild grass found only in a small area of the Middle East. Within a few thousand years it had spread around the world. Wheat became one of the most successful plants ever!  As Harari said, “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” Wheat sure was smart. Maybe humans not so much.

Now you could reverse this argument of Harari.  After all, since the domestication of wheat humans have prospered around the world so they now number nearly 8 billion. But the point Harari made it is that wheat and these other domesticated products did not really benefit individualhumans. They are no better of he claims. It did benefit the species because there are so many of us, but how does that benefit me?

As Harari said, It

“enabledHomo sapiensto multiply exponentially…This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of Homo sapiens? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution is a Trap.”

The Original Affluent Societies

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

 

Most people assume that hunter-gatherers had a much more difficult way of life than farmers. Indigenous people in North America were bothfarmers and hunter-gatherers in different places and different times. However, the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers was quite different from what many have assumed.

As Yuval Noah Harari explained in his book Sapiens,

“The hunter-gather way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers, an office clerks who followed in their footsteps.”

As we know people in modern societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week. In fact surprisingly perhaps, in the last couple of decades the average weekly workweek has been increasing. It seems the more “advanced” we get the more we work. What kind of advancement is that? Yet today, as Harari said,  “hunter-gatherers living in the most inhospitable of habitats—such as the Kalahari Desert—work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up to just three to six hours daily. In normal times this is enough to feed the band. It may well be ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.”

Harari  also pointed out that according to his research, “The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do.”

European people ate much less nutritious food than the Indigenous people they encountered in North America. At first contact, Europeans were surprised at how fit and healthy the indigenous people were. As Harari said,

“In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising—this has been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants.  Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty-four years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality…The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet.”

The reason for this is that foragers were not as dependent on one food as so many Europeans were. As a result they were much less likely to be ravaged by famine. If they suffered a loss of one of their staple foods the hunter-gatherers were easily able to switch to other species or move to a better area.

As Harari explained,

“Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements.”

Of course this became a serious problem when indigenous people in the New World were contacted by Europeans who had built up immunities to many of such infectious diseases. the Europeans  were able to spread their diseases quickly and with deadly efficiency to their indigenous hosts. Usually this was not done deliberately.

For all of these reasons Indigenous hunter-gathering societies were pretty good places to live. They were not perfect and we should never idealize them, but they were a lot better than many non-Indigenous people believed. Their prejudices against the Indigenous people were without foundation.

As Harari said, “The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working hours have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.”

We must as careful not to idealize them as we should be careful not to be biased against them. For example, in Paraguay there was a tribe of indigenous people that were called Achépeople. They were also hunter-gatherers and when an important member of their band died their custom was to kill a little girl and then bury the two together. If an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of society a young man would sneak up behind her and kill her with an axe-blow to the head. This does not sound ideal.

Yet Aché people had societies relatively free of violence. They smiled and laughed a lot. The things they valued the most were good social interactions and good friendships.  Interestingly this is exactly what modern research has demonstrated that this is precisely what leads to the happiest lives. If only we in the west could learn the truth of this.  It is also interesting that “the Aché were hunted and killed without mercy by Paraguayan farmers.” If only we could learn to be as smart as the hunter-gatherers.

We should always look at such societies without prejudice or bias. We should keep our blinkers off. As Harari said, “The truth is that Aché society, like every human society, was very complex. We should beware of demonizing or idealizing it on the basis of a superficial acquaintance. The Aché were neither angels nor fiends–they were humans. So, too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers.”

In any event, any presumption that Europeans were vastly superior to Indigenous people like so many people now seem to believe is entirely unjustified.

The Smartest People Ever?

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues

I read a fascinating book called Sapiens that was written by Yuval Harari an historian from Israel. It was one of those books where I learned something new on every page. Harari doesn’t just think outside the box he doesn’t recognized boxes. He is an original thinker like few others.

Harari pointed out that usually in most habitats Sapiens did not feed themselves by hunting. Usually they gathered.  They were hunter-gatherers. Harari described it this way:

“In most habitats, Sapien bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter,’ gathering was Sapiens main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood, and bamboo.”

This not the romantic or idealized picture I had of our ancestors.  I thought they were tough courageous hunters. They were that. But more than that, they were scroungers.    But sometimes the idealized version of events we hold dear has to give ground to other truths. And sometimes we learn our ancestors were amazing. They were just as amazing, but  in ways we have never thought of before. Harari added to his description of them this way:

“Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximize the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about he growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded thunderstorms or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, now to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and now to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Masters of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely.

In other words, the average forager had wider deeper, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited  to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.”

To support this startling conclusion Harari said, “There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain actually decreasedsince the age of foraging.”

I admit I never thought of our  ancestors quite that way. I think the use of the feminine “she” in this quote is not just a nod to avoiding masculine pronouns . This process of foraging, or gathering, was led by women.  Women  were vital in this process. Most of those important jobs were performed by women, while the men went hunting. It reminded me of what I learned in Africa.  The women did the hard work of fetching water I (among many other tasks). The men sat under trees discussing important matters! Women were incredibly smart in hunter-gatherer societies.

In other words ancient Sapiens were smart. Perhaps the smartest in human history as Harari suggests. They had to be in order to survive in a very dangerous world in which they were far from the largest, fastest, or keenest observers. They had to be smart—very smart. And this is what indigenous people were like when Europeans first contacted them! Makes you wonder why anyone would presume they were smarter. Only a deeply entrenched bias could do that.

 

The Original sin

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, New Attitude to Nature

 

Some of my Catholic friends might be surprised that a heathen like me believes in original sin. But it’s true. It is just that it is a little different form the original sin they are supposed to believe in.

When Europeans arrived in North America, (they did not discover it for it had been there a very long time) they came with that a lot of baggage. In particular they came with arrogance epitomized by that famous European attitude of superiority. They were better than everyone and more important than everything else. Everything was subordinate to them. I think this attitude was best exemplified by Cecil Rhodes that famous English colonialist from Africa. He said, “We happen to be the best people in the world. And the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.”These attitudes led to the genocide of indigenous people, barbarous enslavement of African-Americans, domination of women by men, the debasement of all religions except their own nasty versions of Christianity, and the subjugation of nature to the will and power of men.  This genocide Tzvetan Todorov in his book The Conquest of America called the “the greatest genocide in history.” Those attitudes were the original sin of the western hemisphere—the Americas.

The original inhabitants of North America had a very different attitude. Their attitude was more like this:

“Native America is alive. Its roots stretch back 13,000 years…to America’s original explorers. New people who create a new world. From North to  South America distant peoples share one common belief a deep connection to Earth, sky, water and all living things.”

The original explorers of the western hemisphere were not Europeans. They came here long before then. They came before the Egyptians built the pyramids. They came before Christ was born. They were different. They avoided the original sin. Fundamentally, they had a different attitude to nature and to people. They were the ancestors to the Indigenous people of today.

Teresa Ryan, in a recent PBS documentary series, Native America,  put it well, “We are part of this forest as much as the forest is part of us.” This is a fundamentally different attitude to nature and to all living things in it.

Beau Dick, n the same series,  added to that: “All of our ceremonies illustrate that one notion connectedness— not only with our fellow beings with animals and other creatures, but with all of creation.”

This attitude I have called Affinity. This is my word. I have applied it to this philosophy because I wanted a convenient handle. I considered the expression “being-in-the-world” invented by Martin Heidegger. But his philosophy is very difficult and  I am not sure I entirely understand it. He really uses it to apply just to humans, so it seems to me, but it does latch onto the very important basic notion that we are not separate and apart from nature. We are not alienated from it. We not apart from the world; we are a part of the world! We cannot hope to understand humans unless we take into consideration that they are part of the world. But, in my view, unlike Heidegger’s, this applies to all beings not just human beings.

From this fundamental principle, so different from the Europeans who later invaded their territory, a multitude of important consequences flow. As the PBS documentary Native America, said, “From this deep respect for nature, people create great nations.” That does not mean they were perfect. Not at all. But they were different in important respects. They had a lot they could contribute to the invaders, and they had a lot to learn from them. It is however very difficult, as the Europeans found after they invaded, to learn from the other whom you despise or at least do not respect. Feelings of supremacy are not a sound basis for learning. This does not mean they learned nothing from their hosts. It is just that they could have learned so much more had their feelings of superiority been blunted.

Many of the nations in the New World grappled with war and peace. They “develop governments from dictatorships to a democracy that will inspire the United States constitution.” Yet amazingly, here comes that powerful feeling of superiority again, that same constitution contained racist presumptions of superiority that helped to install the original sin as the basis of their society and has to this day prevented the United States from healing from that fundamental sin against at least 3 groups of people; Native Americans and African-Americans, and lets not forget, women. Of course, these white men also presumed to be superior to women.  That was also part of the fundamental sin of white male supremacy that still haunts the United States,  Canada, and frankly this entire western hemisphere. Not that the other hemisphere is much better. The other aspect of white male supremacy is supremacy over all animals, and even, all of nature. This last bias is still the least understood of these presumptions, but I believe eventually we will catch on that this too was a powerful illusion. It too has had a profound effect the west.

Sadly, the Europeans who arrived in the New World thought they were superior to the natives they found, to anyone who was not white, to women, and to all of nature. As a result they often failed to learn from their “inferiors.”

That deep sense of superiority drove the settlers in the New World and ultimately poisoned their relationship with indigenous peoples and African-American slaves.  The west is still suffering from that influence and non-Indigenous must recognized that ill influence or that relationship will never be whole.