I love how the text is organized. On page 12, the test asks, "does it make sense to ignore the first 200,000 years or more of human experience?" I agree it does, since "the achievements of Paleolithic peoples—the initial settlement of the planet, the creation of the earliest human societies, the beginning of reflection on the great questions of life and
death—deserve our attention. The changes they wrought, though far slower than those of more recent times,were extraordinarily rapid in comparison to the transformation
experienced by any other species.Those changes were almost entirely cultural or learned, rather than the product of biological evolution, and they provided the foundation on which all subsequent human history was constructed. Our grasp of the human past is incomplete—massively so—if we choose to disregard the Paleolithic era."
The Ju-Hoansi were a pleasure to read about. "What made the Ju/’hoansi way of life possible was a particular kind of society, one characterized by mobility, sharing, and equality.The basic unit of social organization was a band or camp of roughly ten to thirty people, who were connected by ties of exchange and kinship with similar camps across a wide area." page 26
At one level, Ju/’hoansi society was extremely simple. "No formal leaders, chiefs, headmen, priests, or craft specialists existed, and decisions were made by individual families and camps after much discussion. On another level, social relationships were extremely complex...Richard Lee noted “relative equality between the sexes with no-one having the upper hand.” Teenagers engaged quite freely in sex play, and the concept of female virginity was apparently unknown, as were rape, wife beating, and the sexual double standard. Although polygamy was permitted, most marriages were in fact monogamous because women strongly resisted sharing a husband with another wife. Frequent divorce among very young couples allowed women to leave unsatisfactory marriages easily." [page 27]
As for chapter 2 about agriculture and its spread, that didn't interest me as much as the social people chapter did. food is food, it is consumed and grown and consumed again :/
However, many of the breakthroughs to agriculture occurred only after gathering and hunting peoples had already grown substantially in numbers and had established a sedentary way of life, so it definitely did not happen overnight.
for instance, "in present-day Sudan. Between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, however,“the Saharan desert . . . effectively did not exist,” according to scholars, as the region received more rainfall than currently, had extensive grassland vegetation, and was “relatively hospitable to human life.”8 It seems likely that cattle were domesticated in this region about 1,000 years before they were separately brought under human control in the Middle East and India. At about the same time, the donkey also was domesticated in northeastern Africa near the Red Sea and spread from there into Southwest Asia, even as the practice of raising sheep and goats moved in the other direction. In Africa, animal domestication thus preceded the domestication of plants, while elsewhere in the world it was the other way around."
one other thing i found interesting: corn was nutritionally poorer than the protein-rich cereals of the Fertile Crescent. To provide sufficient dietary protein, corn had to be supplemented with squash and beans, which were also domesticated in the Americas. Thus while Middle Eastern societies quite rapidly replaced their gathering and hunting economy with agriculture, that process took 3,500 years in Mesoamerica. It is a clear argument on why agriculture grew differently in different parts of the world.
The Ju-Hoansi were a pleasure to read about. "What made the Ju/’hoansi way of life possible was a particular kind of society, one characterized by mobility, sharing, and equality.The basic unit of social organization was a band or camp of roughly ten to thirty people, who were connected by ties of exchange and kinship with similar camps across a wide area." page 26
At one level, Ju/’hoansi society was extremely simple. "No formal leaders, chiefs, headmen, priests, or craft specialists existed, and decisions were made by individual families and camps after much discussion. On another level, social relationships were extremely complex...Richard Lee noted “relative equality between the sexes with no-one having the upper hand.” Teenagers engaged quite freely in sex play, and the concept of female virginity was apparently unknown, as were rape, wife beating, and the sexual double standard. Although polygamy was permitted, most marriages were in fact monogamous because women strongly resisted sharing a husband with another wife. Frequent divorce among very young couples allowed women to leave unsatisfactory marriages easily." [page 27]
As for chapter 2 about agriculture and its spread, that didn't interest me as much as the social people chapter did. food is food, it is consumed and grown and consumed again :/
However, many of the breakthroughs to agriculture occurred only after gathering and hunting peoples had already grown substantially in numbers and had established a sedentary way of life, so it definitely did not happen overnight.
for instance, "in present-day Sudan. Between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, however,“the Saharan desert . . . effectively did not exist,” according to scholars, as the region received more rainfall than currently, had extensive grassland vegetation, and was “relatively hospitable to human life.”8 It seems likely that cattle were domesticated in this region about 1,000 years before they were separately brought under human control in the Middle East and India. At about the same time, the donkey also was domesticated in northeastern Africa near the Red Sea and spread from there into Southwest Asia, even as the practice of raising sheep and goats moved in the other direction. In Africa, animal domestication thus preceded the domestication of plants, while elsewhere in the world it was the other way around."
one other thing i found interesting: corn was nutritionally poorer than the protein-rich cereals of the Fertile Crescent. To provide sufficient dietary protein, corn had to be supplemented with squash and beans, which were also domesticated in the Americas. Thus while Middle Eastern societies quite rapidly replaced their gathering and hunting economy with agriculture, that process took 3,500 years in Mesoamerica. It is a clear argument on why agriculture grew differently in different parts of the world.
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