How come there is so much conflicting research as to what hunter gatherer societies were like?

How come there is so much conflicting research as to what hunter gatherer societies were like?

You've got people saying:

But not only opinions, even the books and research I've read is totally conflicted like this and I have no idea what to believe

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All that's really important and that we can say for sure:

There was no private property, as there was no capital or exchange of commodities, and therefore there was no class, as class is defined by the relation to the means of production.

Sure, maybe different tribes traded shit now and then, but they would of done so based on something's use value, as exchange value did not exist at the time.

This is why capitalism is not the 'natural' default mode of humans.

Different hunter-gatherers did shit differently. There was not one single culture. Christ.

People had value in those days. People had value in the iron age too. Generally in the past, before modernization, people had more value than they do today.

there was a huge diversity in ways of life due to what food sources there were, what water sources there were, and how spread out things were
I think the majority of cases, tribes practiced primitive communism because accumulation was difficult (one guy couldn't own a whole herd of cattle), and it made more sense to share with others during times of plenty because work was a part of life, not something you hated doing and therefore only did just enough for yourself, and there wasn't much other entertainment besides working and banging

They are not communist, but they are similar in that they opperated with a gift economy without money and without a state. However, their mode of production is pre-agrarian which leaves them with a tiny carrying capacity.

People have value today too. It just needs to be unleashed.

Pure sister fucking xenophobic tribalism…

But shhh leftcucks don't like to hear this part ;^)

because culture and opinions don't fossilize, all we know is through deductive reasoning, but that only goes so far. Using an example, if you find a cave that has animal bones with scratches, charring, with charcoal layers in the dirt, you can deduce people lived in the cave, ate meat, cooked their meat, used tools, and had fire. you can logically conclude from the species of animal what kind of lifestyle they lived, if the animal is a species that is native to the region or is migratory, you can deduce if the people were as well. It gets complicated, but there's a lot of good assumptions and flat our wrong assumptions, the unfortunate reality is that we will never really know what happened, and because of our annoying pattern of treating our ancestors like either brutes or children, guessing the truth is that much harder.

Yeah that explains new found evidence of communal architecture where multiple tribes would meet and discuss matters after a span of time, arranged in the way reminiscent of a calendar

Truly, even the Paleolithic was less stupid than you

Examples?

Well what I really meant was "even the articles and blogposts I've read and YouTube videos I've watched"

But I did read the Unabomber's technological slavery book. And surprisingly he thinks living as a hunter gatherer was tough and pretty shitty

Kaczynski is my husbando

Not in industrial society they don't. Communities are almost completely destroyed now. In an Iron Age society, everyone had a job that served an exact purpose, you had people who ground the corn down into flour and tended the plants, people who worked with wood, people who worked with metal, people who watched the pigs and goats and the sheep and cows, there were specific jobs that were valuable. Someone who knows how to mend wounds was valuable, so people relied on them. It's reasonable to assume that in such societies people talked more often and knew eachother better, and there were hardly strangers in the small villages, hamlets and towns.

Now we rely on complete strangers. We don't know who will be cutting us open and fiddling with our organs, we don't know who farmed our food, who made our clothes, who built our houses. We live in times of isolation. More than 7 Billion people live on Earth, so human life has become devalued, and we have become crowded. A factory worker can be replaced, and often it's cheaper to do so.

so Holla Forums basically

i think that's the joke

I wonder what you mean by "natural". At which time period whatever humans are doing stopped being natural and started becoming unnatural?

agriculture or animal herding, basically. The idea of certain lifestyles being "natural" and others being "unnatural" isn't great, but we did evolve in and for hunter-gatherer bands.

...

so you say that since the hunter-gatherer age the human genome didn't change at all? I would like source on that if you have it.

Anatomically modern humans first arose between some 200,000 years ago and supplanted archaic hominin species around 70,000 years ago. Agriculture is only about 10,000 years old. The time-span since "the hunter gatherer age" is a blink on an evolutionary time scale. Our genus is three million years old.

"It's natural" is a pretty fucking shitty argument. There's a pretty good reason why we developed out of hunter-gatherer societies, because we did better in agricultural ones, and the agricultural societies outcompeted the hunter-gatherer societies. Sounds pretty "natural" to me. (and what's stopping society from evolving back into the "unnatural" agricultural society once again?)
True, our modern society is alienating as fuck, but traditional societies are also shitty in their own unique way. The solution for those problems isn't to regress back to being cavemen, it's to develop a new society that solves the issue of alienation while still keeping the benefits of fucking vaccines and wi-fi.

What's admirable about advanced technology? Me and you can have a conversation, that's great, but we know that as technology improves, the level of social control does too, with computers and cameras the government can monitor so much more than before. Eventually it might reach the point where revolution is made impossible, humans are mere cogs in the machine without thought, without reason, without emotion. And if you care for ecology, even slightly, you'll know that technology has been more harmful than helpful for the Earth, with each new fuel source there arrives a new problem, Biofuel is just as bad as Fossil Fuel when it comes to greenhouse gases, with Nuclear the problem of malfunction and waste arrives, and so on.

People in agricultural societies were less healthy for a long time.
This was true of city proles even up to the world wars.

Probably would have depended on the tribe and the environmental pressures on each individual tribe. For example, a tribe in constant warfare is going to be more authoritarian, whereas a tribe surrounded by a lot of resources with few competing tribes around will generally be more peaceful.

Nothing because there's no legitimate definition for what's "natural" to humans without referring to literal basic physiological and biological needs. People who conflate capitalism to being a natural expression of human nature make me sick.

A primitive way of life would be preferrable over the way we have lived for the last 10.000 years or so, but technology provides us with the unique opportunity to free ourselves from material conditions and ease human suffering. If we can reach that I'll gladly take a couple thousand years of struggle.

...

It's a trade off, the Indo-Europeans were smarter, more warrior like, and had far better manpower than the hunters, and blitzed them out. The diet was not as good.

what a day

The admirable part is me not dying of cholera, or smallpox, or the plague, or the literally thousands of diseases that are virtually non-existent because of technology. It is me not having to spend my life hunting deer and learn about things that don't involve hunting deer. It is me living in a society that actually fucking changes.
Mate, that's why we have socialism. How about you spend your time fighting for that instead of arguing for something that would literally be a genocide of the majority of the world's population.
-I would never in my life support returning to a hunter gatherer society. Those societies were hugely energy inefficient and destructive to the local environment. There's a reason why they had to keep migrating. Also:
They emit the same, duh, because it's stuff you burn! Wood also emits greenhouse gases. The difference between wood and biofuel and fossil fuels, is that wood and biofuel is grown, which means it takes CO2 from the air that is then released again when burnt. That's why they're called "CO2 neutral".

Got any source for that? Seems pretty hard to compare.
Yeah, cities were unhygienic and full of diseases before the advent of proper sanitation and medicine. Another reason why we shouldn't go back.

Trade existed well into prehistory.

Those diseases wouldn't be as prevalent as they were in civilized populations. Disease isn't something that just floats around in the air, it is spread, and if you live your life with a group of people you know and interact with daily, your body will have become used to their germs. Evidently disease from food is a problem, but that can be cooked away.
Who says that a hunter-gatherer society is the only option? Agriculture isn't the cause of societal ills, it isn't the turning point from a healthy world to an unhealthy one. If they were as innefficient as you said, then wilderness would have been relatively scant in the time of agricultural people, but it wasn't.
Socialism isn't a cure-all. I sympathize with the movement, but I know that the drawbacks of technology will always be present, no matter how much is done to alleviate such things. The suffering will be greater from now to the domestication of the industrialtechnological system then it would be if revolution were to occur.
But they're not neutral. Agriculture on the industrial scale takes space, and the only way to free up space is deforestation and flattening the land/filling in holes. With "green" fuel sources you're presented with loss rather than gain, it might be a small loss, but a loss it is.

It was, except the free love bit, and it was also violent not unlike the inner city of detroit. Modern ideology can't deal with their ambiguity.

pls read this

pls readd

i thought it didnt make the post because it didnt appear at first

I go to x tribe in south America


I go to x sand tribe in sub Saharan Africa


I study x tribe in jungles of Congo

I study fossil remains of 21'st century America.

In conclusion on my report of this once great empire I believe all x western nations of the 21'st century were like this at the time.

Anthropologists fall for the fallacy of specialization as described by Socrates in the Republic. Boat captains think life is like wading through a river, brick layers think life is like building a structure, cooks think life is like cooking a meal etc. The process of recurring studies and synthesis of knowledge is supposed to bring the data together but that rarely happens anymore in modern academia. So a lot of conflicting studies give a lot of conflicting reports of what life was like before agriculture.

The gift economy was only intra-group. Inter-group you had trade through bartering and sometimes even primitive forms of money were used (shells or rare stones).

I think hunter-gatherers were already mostly a thing of the past when the Indo-Europeans emerged.

Wrong. Smallpox is extinct in modern times retard. Get a basic grasp on biology before you spew retardation online.


Absolutely holistic.

PROTIP: The babies/children who didn't have an immune system died.


Yeah, e. coli can be a bit of an issue you fucking moron.


Enjoy letting meat sit out in the danger zone in an age before refrigeration, developing helminth infection, and shitting out parasites for the rest of your short life. Primitive peoples salt cured their meats for a reason (btw enjoy suffering mining for the salt you need to survive and preserve food)

Can you be any more spooked?

well shit, we fucked up didn't we

You just got here from Holla Forums, didn't you? If you want to be a NazBol, you need to at least know what "capital" and "commodities" are.

marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/a.htm#capital

marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#commodity

Literally nobody says this

Dude, my clothes are capital


So… you are saying there were no means of production? That they didn't hunt, light fires or build huts?
Is your headspace that immersed into factories?
Also, leadership is enough to define class. See other primates as examples

I'm gonna stop replying, I think I fell for bait hard

Well gee i can't figure that out