Well lately i was thinking about how life was back in the stone age- prehistoric times. I think it was so connected to nature, the evils and the goods more aceptable, and more peacefull than any age i could imagine... If i take a look at people that still live in this kind of way (only can see that by media and stuff, but ok) i can imagine that it would be a great world to live in. I love to hear your thoughts and vieuws about it.
There are many tribes in the world which have never had any contact from the outside. We can look at them to see life long ago. Not much has changed really People are basically herd animals and group together for protection. You've got alpha males and females which give some form of leadership and direction to their group. Mainly defense and food gathering. Things essential for life. The rest is just social interaction. Some thing never change. x
i know it isnt weird at all that we never changed, but for me i love the way how that people still living in that kind of "area" are so peacefull with nature and each other... i love it.
When most of your free time is spent on the basics of life, you don't have much to spare making trouble. Such people can be easily cast out in small social groups. REAL democracy. The bigger the group, the more easily they can hide and get away with it. Look at small towns. Everybody knows everybody else. Knows their business too. A gang almost never forms in a small town because people are held accountable by their peers. A gang would quickly be dealt with in a small town. Less places to hide. Peer pressure works just as effectively now as it did in the stone age, but it's been diluted by our ever growing population and the fact our survival is now taken for granted by too many people. Einstein said "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." x
Prehistoric times before the advent of agriculture? Times were tough then, to our standards. Every thing was made from what was available to one in a given area. Strategies had to be placed and executed for the most trivial essentials, things we take for granted today: food, water, medicine and protection-and those took energy and time. Different pressures faced early man that no longer pressure us today. The environment was totally, at least for this moment in time, in balance and truly pristine. A visitor from outer space then would and could not of distinguished us from say, a pride of lions on the African plains. Man did not grasp the idea mass agriculture. So our notion of villages or towns were not quite there yet. Rather, we lived in small bands or hunting groups. Mainly following prey to place to place...proabally with the seasons. We did eat and pick plants, but could not bridge the gap of selecting the best to plant and domesticate. Things were emotional. Everybody within a group had a key role to the survival and care of each other. Elders were valued as they taught practices to the younger generation...this was how information was passed on. No domestication of animals or plants meant that big populations of people could not live together in one area. Life was then in its most pure state, the way evolution paved for us...as in all our senses peaked for survival and very necessary. Today, we have become domesticated in a sense. This is all MHO Social ties then were different, something none of us can comprehend today. I can't imagine how personal it was...the feeling of togetherness and family meant different things then compared to the impersonal social networks of everyday life today. Every aspect of being was different. Concept of time, space and spirituality must of been extraordinary.
Oh yeah, post number 2: the last "tribe" to have no contact with the outside world or a clue to it was discoverd in 1930. They called it the Last First Contact.
It'd be nice, but, IMO, it isn't going to be that way for a long, long time. Go camping, it's close The Mushroom Man
I don't understand why people romanticize the past so much. We have never been altruistically minded groups living in harmony with the planet. we have wrought environmental destruction everywhere we've spread since the invention of the spear. Just ask a Mastodon. Oh wait, our harmonious ancestors killed them all. Truth is, as a species we're more concerned with our impact on the environment more than any other time in history. I don't mean our actual impact is less, it's much worse, but we are aware of it, and want to change it. In a hunter-gatherer situation, you don't care if your food is endangered. Modern dentistry alone makes it worth living nowadays...
im not really romantacizing the past, only HOW they lived back then. i mean i do not know how crazy, bloodlusting, peacufull or whatever the where back then. But if you live in harmony with nature i think it's deffinatly much more harmonious allready with the "Thing" that provides us food, water, fresh air, and so on. I think we can learn much from our ancestors, if it is in an environmental way and maybe i just post this all because i'm bored with nowadays society, i love to live in nature again. it is much more basic, the evils and the goods are much more acceptable cause it is just like that and are not created by some human-being.
But people have never lived in harmony with nature. In fact we've spent most of our time on this planet living in direct opposition to it. Nature was what killed you, it's what ruined your crops, infected your children, or attacked you in the middle of the night. Nature was not a good thing. The idea that mankind should, and has , live in a an environmentally friendly way didn't arise until the 19th century and industrialization, when people left the countryside for urban areas. It's a 'the grass is greener' mentality. again, it's only comparatively recently that people have started to care about the environment. A good example of this is the tired cliche "Native Americans used every part of the Buffalo." I've had people throw this at me before in an attempt to paint the Native Americans as conservationists, and if you pay attention to the wording, you'll see why it's wrong. While it's arguably true that Native Americans found a use for every part of a buffalo, it's as unremarkable as stating that Europeans use every part of the pig, that the Chinese used every part of bamboo, or that Eskimos used every part of the baby seal. People make tools, and they work with the materials they have (which, on the Native American plains at the time were pretty limited, you had a few trees, scrub land, grass, rocks, and buffalo parts). People seem to believe that this statement means that Native Americans only killed the buffalo that they needed, and they picked the carcass clean before killing another one. this is just not true (in fact one of the preferred ways of hunting was to spook a herd near a cliff, causing a stampede. Making it rain bison is not exactly a conservationist attitude.) right now, i'm theoretically interacting with a worldwide audience, almost instantaneously. I have access to media published in pretty much every country on earth. If you are bored by this, then how do you think you'll be during a time when the only leisure activities were, (besides the all-time #1... ) killing things, painting on walls, and praying that you aren't injured, fall ill, or killed by another competing clan/predator? Not that you'd have much leisure time though, because you'll need to make everything you use, as well as hunt and forage enough not to starve to death.
I can not agree with this, like completely not. people lived thousands of years like this, and if you live in harmony with something it is just there, and you accept it. nature is so much 100% around as you are. there is no really way to not accept it without any other knowledge. im bored by the unnessecary things, living naturally is not unnessacary and that bored thing is by matter of speaking.
We have never lived in harmony with our surroundings. Ever since the invention of the tool we move into an area, strip it of the available resources, and then move on. It's only natural, it's what animals do. We just do it with a vengeance. Do some research on the history of environmentalism, and you'll see that until very, very recently, the past 200 years or so, did we even give a damn about nature. If you don't believe me, ask the woolly mammoth... And it's a pretty easy thing to say that we should accept nature, when you don't have to accept nature. The people that do have to accept nature have a distinctly different view. You can live like a caveman in modern society, but for some reason you choose things like indoor plumbing, heating, electricity, leisure time, and the internet. We live in a time where technological advantages extend to a greater portion of human kind than ever before. we actually have enough food to go around, something that our caveman ancestors would have (and very frequently) killed for.
If you want to know what people from the stone age were like you just have to see what the muslims believe in and then imagine them dressed in fur stuff carrying stone axes
Read Conciousness and the Voices of the Mind. It paints a pretty good picture of how civilizations in the "stone age"(neantherdal and bicameral periods) lived and thought. It's more about the evolution of Conciousness, but he gets into the affects it had on societies and ancient civilizations.
We have never lived in harmony with our surroundings. Ever since the invention of the tool we move into an area, strip it of the available resources, and then move on. It's only natural, it's what animals do. This is not true. The word "harmony" is very subjective, so it's hard to see how you can say who lived "harmoniously" or who didn't, but Stone Age cultures did not "strip an area of its resources and move on." Hunter-gatherers are nomadic and simply follow the game and ripening wild food sources. Actually, it's more correct to call them "gatherer-hunters", since studies have shown that up to 70% of their calories were obtained from plant material. And what "tool" are you talking about? That's a very generic term. Even chimpanzees manufacture tools. If you're talking about agricultural tools, then that puts you beyond the Stone Age. In the Stone Age, tools were made of, well, stone ... which was an improvement over wood or bone, and include tools for digging, chopping, butchering, and the like. It's hard to see how possessing a stone-flaked knife indicate that Stone Age peoples "strip an area of its resources." It's also not true to say that our "cavemen ancestors" did not have enough to eat. Since the earth provides a bounty to skilled gatherers, Stone Age cultures generally were well-fed and actually had more leisure time than we do today. Even the Australian Aboriginals, who lived in what seems to us the most inhospitable of environments, were well-fed and had an advanced esthetic sense, full of dances and oral traditions. Starving people don't produce advanced artwork and elaborate stories. Nor is your comment about "enough food to go around" accurate. In the face of seemingly advanced agricultural technology and techniques, more people in the world starve to death today than ever before. Perhaps what you mean is ... there is potentially enough food to go around. I'm not saying that all Stone Age peoples' lives were necessarily happy, carefree frolics in the sunshine. Some of them were "nasty, brutish, and short", as the saying goes. Nonetheless, they were not obliged to devote a significant portion of their energy dealing with crime, delinquency, drug addiction, mental illness, or divorce. They knew who they were and what their place was in the world. They did not have to concern themselves with drive-by shootings, children going to bed hungry (unless everyone went to bed hungry), domestic abuse, undrinkable water, unbreathable air, suicide bombings, or the spectre of nuclear annihilation. One person's problems were everyone's problems, and you took care of your own. If you didn't, you didn't last long in your tribe. Or your tribe itself didn't last long. It's certainly true that I'd rather take my broken leg to the ER instead of the local shaman, but Stone Age health was far better than you might imagine. The impact of contagious diseases, for instance, was minimal because of the small size of traveling clans. The low average lifespan of primitive peoples is often cited as an indicator of a terrible quality of life, but remember that the "average" is skewed by infant mortality, which was high compared to modern times, but low compared to most other animals. Not to sound cruelly cold-hearted, but infant mortality among all species is a natural, selective phenomenon. If you count only infants who survive their first year, Stone Age average lifespan compares much more favorably to modern times. I agree that it's easy to romanticize earlier times, and most of us living today would perhaps not have fared well 10,000 years ago. But you at least need to be accurate in your comments about Stone Age life.
I'm down for this as long as I get to bring my TV and my Playstation. And my electric guitar. And the microwave.
