From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Sat May 24 2003 - 18:53:12 MDT
On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 04:13:49PM -0400, gts wrote:
> here). I would guess the painter was painting a picture-story about an
> especially memorable hunting expedition, and that he knew the difference
> between "2 beasts" and "4 beasts" even if he could communicate those numbers
FWIW, I think ravens and other animals can count up to four, or at least tell
the difference between such numbers.
> (or perhaps for religious reasons). The skill of some paleolithic painters
> was actually quite amazing. I know I could never paint as well as some of
> show that at least some paleos were very sensitive and artistic. Paleo
> people were not just stupid brutes as they are so typically characterized to
> be.
Old news.
> Yes, well this is my point. You wanted evidence for "a move in that
> direction" toward writing and math prior to agriculture. Cave paintings are
> exactly such evidence.
Movement between what points? Yes, there seems to be a Great Leap Forward,
giving us art and music (old flutes) and better stone tools and presumably
language and counting. So, we hit that point 50,000 years ago. What's the
evidence of progress between then and the actual invention of writing, less
than 10,000 years ago?
> when we settled into complex farming societies. I just wanted to make it
> clear that this was only an escalation of a process that started long before
> the advent of agriculture. We cannot thank agriculture for the ability to do
> math and write language. We can thank it only for adding more selection
No one has claimed that agriculture should be thanked for that ability.
(Well, maybe Julian Jaynes.) Obviously that ability was probably latent (or
not so latent, with basic counting-off arithmetic) 50,000 years ago. But
I'd want to see evidence that that ability was being further developed, not an
assumption of gradualist progress being made.
> pressure to the development of these traits that were already under pressure
> for development anyway. There is no reason to think we would not have made
What pressure for development of writing or geometry?
> We humans are, by nature, curious about the world. This trait of curiosity
> is I think at the root of intellectual progress. Farming did not make us
But that curiosity was limited by a lack of recording ability and by limited
venues of exploration, people being limited to their traditional grounds,
probably not crossing long distances to explore and bring back information.
Remember there's a basic problem with hunter-gatherers and records: the H-Gs
are mobile, and can't carry a lot.
As for all the extolling of the H-G life, let me bring up some neglected
points. Not life expectancy, I think that's abused -- LE from birth with 50%
infant mortality isn't telling us anything about average age of adults, or the
LE of someone old enough to know what a LE is. But as an H-G you lived in a
fairly small world. There was often raiding of women or fighting for
bloodfeuds or fun, and the death rate from violence was really high. Lose one
man from a band of 30 and you have a 3% casualty rate right there. H-Gs knew
a lot about the plants and animals around them, and the seasons, and may have
been less superstitious and fearful than subsistence farmers[1][2]. But you
still have a lot of arbitrary taboos and beliefs which, not to put a fine
point on it, Were Not True. And your life was pretty similar to that of your
grandparents. Maybe a new tool would be developed, maybe a new food or poison
would be discovered or heard of through tribe-to-tribe trade, probably new
songs and stories would get written. But what you knew was limited to what
you could learn by song and story and example from your elders, and what you
could pass on to your grandchildren had the same hard limits. Well, plus some
cave art, but the information density wasn't too high there. Perhaps someone
could have had a ritual library of clay tablets children could study at in the
right season... but we haven't found any.
Yeah, agriculture sucked for a lot of people[3]. But if you believe progress
is at all desirable, it seems to have been necessary. H-Gs had 40,000 years
to do something other than become cozily fitted to their local environments
and I know of no evidence that they did so[3].
-xx- Damien X-)
[1] _The Mbuti Pygmies_, on the pygmies vs. the surrounding farmers.
[2] OTOH, Jane Jacobs argued that cities and agriculture would have grown
together, or even that 'cities' (trade concentrations, at least) came first
and invented agriculture "the same way they invented everything else". And
exported it to the countryside where land was cheap, as per the usual pattern.
In this view the benighted subsistence farmer is not the 'natural' state of
agriculture, it's what got left over after the city was sacked and the farmers
were deprived of their source of tools and trade.
[3] Of course, as they slowly spread they did adapt to different environments,
and the aborigines must have had a really early use of the boat.
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