back to the primative

good morning, i posted this b4 but in the wrong place so ill post it agian. id just like to ask your opinions on something if i may, you see i was having a discusion with a guy on here about capitalism and i made a piont that i fell quite strongly about it. we should go back to the primative i make this point as i real do feel we would be better of there would be no war (at least not on the scale of things now), there would be no famine as we would all be hunter gatherers and able to collect our own food no matter what enviroment we lived in. yes the populatoin would shrink quit dramatically at 1st but thats because there are too many of us and the naturall rescorces could not support such a large populatoin. which brings me onto another point there would be no industry this means no chemicles released in to the atmosphere no deforestation so maybe even a chance to reverse global warming. these are just the benifits to us all there would be personell benefits too in the neolithic ages there was no stress where stress is now one of the biggest killers in the wolrd, we would be fitter and more healthy as a result of our naturall diet and the exercise we did to get that food now i know that thats only a short argument. id just like to know if there are any others out there that share this view or do you all think im barking mad.

 

well things would be better for the planet as a whole yes.....but in your same thought you could just say as well say it would be great if humans just disappeared.

paleolithic living was not easy there was alot of stresses there was no guarantee the animals would be there for food...do not kind yourself and the average life span back then was what 30? and infant deaths were very high with no medical knowledge ......no war haha yeah right humans were just as savage then as they are now ....

i do agree with you living with the earth in a more primitive fashion is needed but to revert back to the past is not the answer, what would be needed is a blending of low tech and high tech(when needed) and a change of society's views ...technology is not the enemy, its the current society's views on the environment and all that are causing current global problems.....what is needed is more of a new type of low tech living

 

No, I don't think you're barking mad, but I do think you haven't thought deeply about what you're proposing. When humans were hunter-gatherers, there was only a tiny fraction of the population we have now. There's simply not enough to hunt/gather to sustain us now. If you don't believe me, equip yourself with simple tools of the hunter/gatherer age and spend a week in the woods trying to feed yourself.

Don't forget that those chemical plants that produce the pollution you'd like to eliminate also produce the medicines and medical equipment that keeps many of us alive.

So, if we go back to a primitive lifestyle for all

- many, many more people would starve than do today
- lifespan would quickly drop to around 30 years old
- the habitable part of the world would roughly be cut in half
- possibly 8 out of 10 people would die. Are you one of the 2 who might live, or one of the 8 who won't?
- there'd be no toilet paper

OK, I was kidding a bit on the last one. Only a bit. Trying to wipe your butt with a handful of leaves or some moss will leave you with a new sense of the great value of toilet paper.

:jester:

 

i have thought about it alot and i know that the averge lifespan would go down and i know the population would drop dramatically in the first 20-30 years, but i think alot more will die if we carry on doing what we are to this planet. i do hunt and gather some of my foods stuffs so maybe i would be one of the 2 that survived. the point purple moss made about the stress i simply dont belive stress is a mordern thing it comes about with pressures of a mordern scociety stress was not a factor back then. i used to work in a call centre now thats stress having to be nice to the man calling you all names under the sun even though its not your fault stress. it comes from bottling up your feelings. and if you were a hunter gatherer you'd know where the food was just as if your a factory worker you know how your machiene works its your job.back to the toilet paper thing now i had'nt thought of that maybe ill just pop down the shops and stock up.

 

We are the same human as them nothing has changed physically....granted they had less stress on somethings and they had no worries about how much money is coming in....but they had stress do not kind yourself that it was a simple easy life .

Their stress were more like when the animals did not arrive on time or when they over harvested and there simple were no animals around and their food reserves were gone ...and the possiblity of starving might happen. That is one of the major reasons farming was invented and became so popular it takes away that stress.

Or how going up against a bison or mamoth with nothing but simple spears and the beast is ready to take anyone out to survive...remember a simple wound could kill, being run over by an animal would surely mean death.

or how about defending your village from blood thirsty grizzly bear or a nearby waring tribe.

or severe weather changes ...unexpected snow storms or higher rain count that causes massive flooding....they did not know about weather and the planet and we do....they would have thought the spirits were upset or something.

or illness... without modern medical skills, common things could kill you ...a cold could turn into pneumonia, dental problems like tooth aches and such could make your life miserable....

I watched a travel channel program on tribal living ....they were a simple hunter gatharer group in the amazon ....as it turns out even tho the jungle is lush it is not as bountiful as it looks ....the tribe had to wait for the food to come into the area ...in that case monkies ....they tried fishing but only caught a few minows spread out over the group each person got only a small bite .... they did have some simple tasteless starch to eat to, but it was also shared so they had to go to bed hungry ....that went on for days until they could catch something ....it was not a easy go life even tho they did not work much ....another thing that was stressing them was the nearby tribe they had fought alot with and had members of their tribe killed not to long ago...

then there was another stress ...it was an odd one ....witch craft...they were very afraid others would do witch craft against them, if someone got sick it was witch craft ...maybe from a jealous rival....

Alot of the time humans will make there own stresses ...its apart of being human.

As for modern stress, it is the result of people's own devises.....from picking the wrong jobs to racking up to much debt and such.....these stresses can easliy be changed and controlled.

 

no no no 1st of all they did not just rely on one food source, the amount of edible plants out there id emense and meat comes in all shapes and sizes there are animals that dont migrate so waiting for it is not always an isiue. and protien can be gained from insects not very apatising but alway there even in winter. as for the wether same thing happens now have you forgoten hurricain katrina. the diffrence there is we are worse at dealing with problems such as these as in the past they would have just moved on where as now people loose so much more and cant just up and leave unless they have the money to. ilness yes that was a problem but they didnt have many of the ilnesses that are about today and a cold could turn into pnumonia but thats survival of the fittest which is how nature intended it and nature in my eyes is never a bad thing. as for the witchcraft thing people didnt start fearing witch craft untill the christianty came about and told everyone it was evil. tribes back then would have a shaman and yes they could cause harm but the rolre was more as healer to the tribe, i dont think it would have been a great stress at all. as for the tribe in the amazon dont you think it could be something we did that makes live a little harder for these people like cut down hundreds of miles of this habitat causing there to be less monkeis in the trees. as for defending your village from a bear bears are shy animals that would not walk in to your village and attack people at random i watched a documentry where where a guy takes baby bears that have been rescued in to the wild and shows them how to live in this programe a male bear came after the cubs this guy who was in his late sixties stoodd in front of the bear with a can of mace to bear ran so it cant be all that hard when your entire village runs out with spears. i have found this article on the net that should tell you about how are stress reactions work.

The good news is that your stress reactions are the perfect tool for survival.

The bad news is that they're meant for survival challenges that existed 30,000 years ago.

Your body may be covered in cutting-edge clothes, but inside it lurks some prehistoric traits. (If you're a guy, your girlfriend can probably go on about this at length).

Today, when you get up to present to a skeptical audience, or charge in to a crowded store during a big sale, reactions kick in that were meant to help you survive a showdown with a saber-toothed tiger.

The medical profession calls it the "fight-or-flight" response. Our culture calls it stress (borrowing a term from engineering in the 1950's that had not been applied to human beings before then).

so althouth stress was about then we were meant to deal with those problems not the ones we face today

 

The first thing we have to recognize is that we are all just apes living on a fairly small planet that we share with billions of other species, all of which have lives and concerns of their own, and have value beyond their usefulness to us. We may be very safe and comfortable here, but only at the expense of the health of the planet, which is not only our home, but a conscious, living being of which we are a part.

We must also recognise that we are not above the laws of natural selection. Since the primitive days, humans have lost much of their old hardiness (I'm thinking now of a picture I saw of some indians who fought at Little Big Horn..... All of them in their 80's to late 90's, and still tough as leather) and most of all the old skills. Most humans are more adapted to cubicals and keyboards. For all of our sophisticated technology, It's hard to find someone who can make a fire without a lighter. Technology is only applied knowledge. These people weren't savages, their "technology" was in many ways at least as sophisticated as ours.

Alot of people are going to die. It's not nice, but it's innevitable. The planet simply cannot support an industrial civilisation, and when it crashes, it's going to be messy. Alot of individuals are going to die, but if we can relearn our old skills, and relearn our role on this planet, humanity will survive. Now I'm not a man of faith, but I'll wager that modern tribes of wild humans will start moving back to the wilderness soon, if they haven't already. It's not something to be done openly, and maybe not all at once, but the wild is our only hope.

What I read about Indian warfare amoung the plains Indians before the white man came is that it was based on a system of "counting coups." Coups were basically considered to be honorable deeds in battle. A coup might be earned by stealing an enemy's weapon, knocking someone off his horse, especially brave or heroic acts, etc. Among many warrior societies, the highest honor is to touch an enemy without injuring him. Killing an enemy was judged according to circumstance, but was generally considered to be the lowest coup. Doesn't sound so savage. Sounds like an exillerating game of tag.

I usually don't miss tp. Some damp moss, and some creek water will make your day.

 

i think that our developed, processed and packaged society (i hesitate to call it a culture) in the first world is the cause of many problems and we would moslty be better off and generally happier if we were to revert (progress?) to a primitive way of life. i would love this, and plan on living a simple, no footprint life, but i dont think people are likely to give up their material goods and commodities and embrace a healthier, more community minded, more caring existence. people are so cold and distant and out of touch with everything. they dont know or care where their food comes from so long as it ends up on their plate, where their waste goes so long as they dont have to see it, what state they leave the world in after they die so long as they dont have to live in it. some day, im sure we will be forced to live with nature, nurturing and respecting the great life force that brought life, fed and nurtured it.

 

imho, I couldn't do it -- you'd have to kill me first. I'm sorry but a society like that would demote women back to the status of cattle. Rape, back-to-back pregnancies, beatings for the hell of it -- these were common if the female wasn't strong enough to defend herself. Sorry, but that thought scares the hell out of me. I'm not a feminist, but I enjoy my rights as a human more than that. There are plenty of alternatives that the human race could adopt that could bring the earth back to it's "Garden of Eden" state without a complete reversal in our advancement.

 

Stig, you can find folks who are living the life you describe in a lot of places in South America along the Amazon River. I've been there many times and love the feel of the place and the people. It is a difficult life in some ways but also very rich in the connection to the earth and the people around you. Realizing that you are no longer at the top of the food chain does wonders for humility. It sets you to being more vital and alert...much more atuned to your environment. You truely have to rely on others to survive, you have to be able to trust others and they have to have the same trust in you. It would be very difficult for someone who has grown up in the modern industrial world to be able to survive there with out help from people native to the area. There are many little pieces of survival knowledge that kids who are raised there absorb and use that we simply don't know. Medicinal plants, animal sounds and warnings, feeding habits of game, where to fish for what, where its safe to enter the water, which plant is medicine which is poison, how to prepare food, and endless variations on that theme. Do a search for survival trips to the Amazon where you can go with indigenous guides into the deep jungle. Thats a great way to get a sense of what the life would be like.

 

Hiya

Personally I reckon the dangers of "neolithic life" are a tad over stated - I mean, there were a LOT fewer people (so, less of a population to absorb losses) and nothing like modern medicine....but we survived and thrived at it for at least 100,000 as biologically modern humans....so it cant have been so harsh really (its more that modern folks are domesticated and far feabler by comparison ).

And indeed in some places today there are folks who remain hunter-gatherers....

Ak-chooooly those things are more the province of agrarian societies; hunter-gatherers have a far lower birth rate (because of the need of mobility and the risk pregnancy means in a smaller population - you do it carefully!). Also in hunter-gatherer societies women tend to be equal more often than in settled agrarian ones...as everyone has to provide food (and given that there are no surpluses and everyone is independent in this manner, you dont generally see the arrival of class distinctions until farms turn up).

To answer the question though; nah you aint a nutter But it would mean 5.95 billion people die for the whole world to be like that (have you considered that its for some folks to just do this (in the shadows so to speak) rather than "copvert the world").

 

Rapes and beatings are already common practice in our culture. The statics will make your stomach turn...

Every 9 seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted and beaten.
4,000,000 women a year are assaulted by their partners.
In the United States, a woman is more likely to be assaulted, injured, raped, or killed by a male partner than by any other type of assailant.
Every day, 4 women are murdered by boyfriends or husbands.
Prison terms for killing husbands are twice as long as for killing wives.
25% of all crime is wife assault.
Up to 37% of all women experience battering. This is an estimated 566,000 women in Minnesota alone. (I'm skeptical about this one: I'm not sure I know a woman who's never been abused)
60% of all battered women are beaten while they are pregnant.

 

Also many native cultures, such a the iroquois, were matriarchal. So even if domestic abuse worsened for a time, in the long run the world will be a whole lot safer in that respect.

And no we can't convert the whole world. Wild game will disapear very quickly in my neck of the woods once the grocery stores close up shop. And the remnants of industrial civilisation will still be there. There is plenty of work to be done, inside and outside the cities, and on all fronts. So the question becomes one of tactics. Anyone for 1001 uses for a dead poice car?

 

You are right. That naturally lower birth rate kept the population stable.

 

Okkk...........

First off, i gotta knock out the myth that the average life span was 30yrs old.
Not quite.. If you lived to at least 5 years old, you pretty much were set to live for an average modern life span. The reason the oft quoted 30 year average life span gets thrown around was because of the high infant mortality rates. About 50% of babies didnt live to see their 5th birthday. This was due to poor care from the mothers, acidents, and exposure. When there is a high rate of young deaths, that pulls down the average to about 30years but its not an accurate portrayal of how it actually happened.

Second of all, women didnt have back to back pregnancies. Among the !Kung of africa who basically have a neolithic lifestyle, the average age between pregnancies is 3 years because women breast fed far longer than modern women.

 

Alot of the data is from archaeological records, with a mix of modern hunter-gatherer studies....not from birth rate statistics.

The Hiwi hunter-gatherers of Venezuela have a higher mortality rate then the !Kung of Africa ...but not by much...
"Among pre-1960 Hiwi males, 57 percent could expect to survive to age 15, and 43 percent to age 30, with an average young adult mortality rate of around 2 percent annually."

When you factor in that hunter-gather groups are/were usually small populations those are not very good numbers....yes a few did live longer lives but they were the excemption not the norm.

Mortality rates do/did vary from group to group, but over all it was not this happy go lucky, live long and prosper day dream that alot of people seam to think.

As for the having a child every 2-3 years sounds like back to back pregnancies to me, remember unlike the modern world ... women would start at a young age.



http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolution/hill_2007_hiwi_mortality.html

 

Hunter-gatherers in colder temperate climates would have to have reserves of meat and plants stored for winter when all of the animals and plants become scarce....granted that would not be the case in warmer climates, but most habitable places are temperate on this planet....and insects would not be anything you could rely on....

That is just laughable to compare New Orleans with a population of millions to a tribe of 30 people.....New Orleans has the resources of the rest of US to help them ... what would a small tribe have?....oh they can move on of coarse ...its just that easy .... wow talk about dreaming

You can not blame christianty .... humans have feared evil spirits from times beginning ...long before christians spread there beliefs....

Nope ...wrong again .....it was just simply easier to wait the to trek thru the jungle.....

Ever heard of grizzlies?....and if you go back 12ooo-14ooo years, you have short face bears that were 50% larger then the largest living bear today ....including polar bears...

But unlike back then, you can change your life style to make it as stress free as you want .....your choices are what are causing you stress ....they could not change there enviroment like you can ...

In the end ...day dreaming that it was a happy go lucky life compared to the modern world a joke... ...yes modern humans have stress but it is stress they cause themselves ...yes hunter-gatherers had simple lives but it was not a joy ride as some would love to believe, they were not in control of there surroundings and were at the mercy of nature.

Modern humans have been on this planet for some 100ooo years that does not mean because humans have lasted so long that it must have been an easy life .......

Its laughable when educated people sitting in there homes protected from the weather, using there computers to chat with others thousands of miles away, with light and energy pipped in and a fridge full of food and material goods all ready for use at a whime, with total control over there lives,and more choices then any human before them....... think that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a better life .....

 

Im not ( unlike most of the people on here) trying to say that life was a bowl full of cherries, but im also saying its not nearly as bad as some people on here are making it out to be.

One thing that struck me about the article you posted (and it was a good article by the way) was that it stated that among the Hiwi, disease accounted for about half of all deaths (both adults and infants).
Before the neolithic, disease was actually rare. Most diseases resulted from agriculture and close association with domestic animals. Smallpox, chickenpox, mumps, rubella... in fact all childhood diseases were germs that "jumped" from animal to human.
Another consideration is that a lot of sanitation problems and illnesses that resulted thereof were due to living in one spot, and not foraging.

(sourcealeopathology and the origins of agriculture, the academic press)

Among the hadza of portugal, the average age for a first pregnancy is 16 and among the !Kung, its 18. I dont think this is terribly young. hell, the year i graduated from highschool, there were 36 girls pregnant. When i was in 7th grade (age 13) on of the classmates had a baby. so i dont think that 16-18 years is that terribly young.
a back to back pregnancy is having your kids one year appart. 3 years isnt bad. In fact the average age gap between children is about 4 years so its not that big of a deal.
Also, its not like women were baby-making machines like someone else stated on here. The Hadza average is 6 kids, the !Kung average is 4 kids.

(source: Collar del Neanderthal by Arsuaga, professor of paleoanthropology at Madrid university)

 

Good point Anagaharad
and dont forget the Flu virus would fit in with those viral diseases, but some viruses can be picked up when humans hunt animals such as the Rabies, Ebola virus and the Aids virus. Bacterial diseases like Anthax and brucellosis also lets not forget rodents can transfer the Hantavirus and the Plague, and insects like mosquiteos can spread diseases like malaria and west nile virus, ticks can spread lyme disease.

Humans are also inflicted with alot of other bacterial, parasitic, fungal, and viral diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid fever, [size=-1][size=-1]typhus[/size][/size], [size=-1]t[size=-1]etanus[/size][/size], [size=-1][size=-1]thrush, [/size][/size][size=-1][size=-1]cholera,[/size][/size] giardia, encephalitis to name a few. Researchers believe TB might be as old as 3 million years old and been with humans as they left Africa.

Lets also not forget genetic diseases and birth defects due to poor diet or
improper breeding.

Being mobile would have some advantages for hunter-gatherers like sanitation to a point, poor hygiene could quickly spread a disease to other members tho so moving to a new location may not help with that. One thing is for sure new enviroments would mean being exposed to possibly new diseases.

So i would have to disagree that most diseases resulted from agriculture but i will say that agriculture is responsable for major viral outbreaks in this day and age.

I do agree 18 is not to young of an age. One of the reasons for the older age might be due to a lack of enough calories in a females diet without enough of a fat reserve females stop or have delayed menstration. That could be one of the factors why the Human population stayed small for so long up until the being of agroculture.

I would also agree that it was not an all the time miserable or grim life to be a hunter-gatherer, i have been more or less just trying to state that is was not this hollywood day dream that seams to be common ...where humans lived this perfect life with nature.

Humans were like every other animal on the planet fighting for survival they lived and died at the whime of nature.







A Virus Crosses Over to Wild-AnimalHunters

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040403/food.asp


Deadly Diseases
While Out Hunting and Hiking

http://www.tdh.state.tx.us/news/ac081800.htm

Ancient Origins Of Tuberculosis

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050819130824.htm

 

you guys suck. stop thinking about yourselves and start thinking about every other soul on the planet. human beings are not the only living thing on earth. just cuz we'd have it a little worse doesnt mean this shouldnt happen. id be willing to die to save some of the glorious life on this earth