I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
I always assumed that hunter gatherer division was mostly down to the individual, some traits make some better at hunting than others.
I struggle to locate static objects, I for the fucking life of me just can’t see it. I’ll be looking for something and either look right over it or walk past it multiple times
But if I go outside and look in the trees I can spot all the squirrels within seconds. Not like that’s a talent or anything special, but my point is that I’d starve if I had to look for food in the brush, and likely I imagine these types of traits are what defined who did what job, meaning who was good at what, and likely considering lots of hunting was endurance based and not skill based at all, then most adults probably participated to some degree.
I’ve also gone shroom hunting and had to come back empty handed because I can’t see the god damned things.
i’m rather convinced that stuff like ADHD and autism was at least co-opted by evolution (if not outright created by it) because tribes with a certain percentage of it had an advantage.
For example ADHD seems great for foraging, that provides the stimulation that is desired and the ability to completely lose track of time is pretty nice to stave away boredom from trudging through the forest for hours on end;
and autism is pretty obvious in how a defining feature is having special interests that you LOVE doing and get extremely competent in.
I myself have autism and i have no doubt that in a hunter-gatherer tribe i would have been having a blast creating tools and stuff like wicker baskets and trying to improve them as much as i can.
When you start looking at older debunked theories that lasted for a long time you can see the human bias in them. Not just a human bias but a a western bias.
Two that stick out for me:
Trees compete for sunlight - I think it makes sense to us humans because we compete for resources but in truth trees are way more ‘community’ based
The male alpha wolf - It’s how the western world has been organized for centuries so it’s easy to see that in a wolf pack even though its not true.
I am pretty sure that modern archeology agrees with you in at least some ways (know an archeologist, not an archeologist). I don’t have any specific evidence for mammoth trapping but there are these really interesting stone funnel traps that were used to trap gazelle herds …blogspot.com/…/ancient-gazelle-killing-zones.htm…
Also consider how long humans have walked the earth as hunter gatherers. Agriculture goes back to around 10.000 BCE. The entirety of time between 300.000 BCE and 10.000 BCE was likely (mostly) spent as hunter gatherers. Imagine in how many ways local roles and culture could have differed in that time!
The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.
Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren’t more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.
You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.
the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence
Surprised you didn’t get downvoted here. It’s like if you tell people science is done by humans and humans arre flawed people flip out and call you a science-denier.
Our bias tells us we can confidently assert such simple statements, but the truth is, unless we spend an agonising length of time understanding the most insignificant and asinine facts, we NEED biases to understand the world.
The point of understanding we have biases is to think more critically about which ones are most obviously wrong.
Nothing, I’m only making a better world if I can make my own life better at the same time. I do live an extreme frugal existence and avoid working for any unethical organization, but it’s not a sacrifice.
What we can “bear” is the wrong question for a couple reasons:
Consumer luxuries don’t actually make for a better life.
Altruistic scheming isn’t anyone’s actual motivation for doing things.
“sacrifice” is irrational bargaining; reality doesn’t care whether you’ve made yourself enough of a martyr, and people who want to be martyrs don’t care if what they’re sacrificing actually makes much of a difference.
An effective solution will involve changes we can be happy about and a lifestyle that is actually better than what we have now. Commutes and lives spent stressing over money are a shit trade for what people get from it anyway, it won’t be hard to do better with less.
Consumer luxuries don’t actually make for a better life.
The fundamental luxuries do.
Humans spend a third of their life asleep. A good mattress makes a big difference in the quality of sleep, but it being a Cali King sure isn’t going to change much.
Modern life requires a high degree of physical mobility. Public transportation (Europe, etc) and cars allow us to cover distances in hours that would have taken days even a century and a half ago. A decent-quality vehicle can make a big difference in the reliability of said transportation and our ability to get around, but it being a Mercedes or a Bentley sure isn’t going to change much.
And the list could easily run to hundreds of examples, if not thousands.
We live in a world where most any first-world consumer item is a luxury compared to the global poor, or pretty much anything comparable from a century and a half ago.
What doesn’t have much of a positive impact, however, is the delta between an affordable item and a high-end item that costs many multiples more. People can and should aim for those “luxuries” that don’t yet tip over into deminishing returns, as opposed to those luxuries that are excessive purely for the purpose of producing excessive displays of wealth.
Like vehicles - both of mine (sedan, utility pickup) are approaching a quarter century of age. Could I afford brand-new vehicles? Sure. But why would I waste my money and planetary resources like that? The ones I have still work just fine with only basic maintenance, and are perfectly adequate in getting me (and cargo) from point A to point B. I have absolutely no ego that demands newer or fancier.
Modern life requires a high degree of physical mobility
It doesn’t have to be that way, and I’m not convinced it’s strictly better that way.
We live in a world where most any first-world consumer item is a luxury compared to the global poor
Idk about that, even people without electricity or running water can get a cheap cell phone and solar charger now.
What doesn’t have much of a positive impact, however, is the delta between an affordable item and a high-end item that costs many multiples more. People can and should aim for those “luxuries” that don’t yet tip over into deminishing returns
Definitely. No need to be giving up things like regular bathing and functional cooking utensils that make a big difference for little expense.
I think I'm in the minority, but PS3. It was the most powerful console of its time, it released The Last of Us, Uncharted, Gran Turismo and a ton of other classics and the PSN was free to use.
It also had my favorite game of all time on it - Littlebigplanet 2. The custom levels people made were insane.
I mean, you can't neglect the prior 2 PlayStation generations. Gran Turismo started on ps1 with the first two, and the next two on PS2. Besides that, great entries like the first three Spyro games, Jak and Dexter, Ratchet and Clank... And let's not forget just home much freaking staying power the PS2 had! Was still getting new games alongside Wii, Xbox 360, even the PS3
That's fair about the staying power, but I prefer playing Multiplayer so the PS2 and 1 never hit the same (I did play them a lot as well though - I had the OG Gran Turismo, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, Metal Gear Solid and a bunch of others for PS1, and I had NFS: Underground 2, Gran Turismo: A-Spec, Medal of Honor: Frontline and a bunch of others for PS2 as well). I do respect how well they did, but I really enjoy multiplayer (and the PS2 multiplayer didn't do it for me)
I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don’t dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. ‘Ick’ factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain’t risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.
Look, as long as you don’t hover-squat or use other techniqies that make it more dirty, you can autoclave the toilet before using it for all I care, so long as that means you actually sit down. I hate seeing poop stains on the rim. That said I will usually sit down without a buffer.
I could see it in Quantity but not the qualities of the pathogens. A disease contracted from a toilet that has had contact with blood and feces versus a grimy membrane keyboard shouldn’t even be a contest.
There is something to be said for using squat toilets instead of sitting toilets in public bathrooms, so long as there are properly cleaned sitting toilets for the elderly and disabled (I have seen some shocking disabled public bathrooms over the years)
Sega Dreamcast. It was ahead of its time, at the time. GD-ROM (1.2Gigs of data in an era of CD), Dual pressure sensitive triggers, modem, ethernet adapter. Even the memory card was a portable minigame device.
I couldn’t convince my parents to buy me one when I was younger.
Now I’m an adult and the Mrs. Won’t let me buy one either
EDIT: it’s a joke people. I just don’t have a TV that will connect to one and I have way more pressing money matters on my hands than buying very old consoles and trying to make them work. Seriously though, it looked wicked when it came out, well ahead of its time, then seemed to die off despite being (at least on paper) one of the best consoles available. RIP Sega consoles.
have you seen a grizzly bear? those things are huge, and strong. a black bear or something maybe, but no way can people believe their stronger than a grizzly
I’ve given up huge piles of cash by choosing to not work for megacorps.
It’s worth it to me.
Confronted with the likelihood that we cannot achieve climate goals.
The current trend line sucks, but we’ve seen plenty of times in history what the ultra rich ignoring the plight of everyone else looks like. Someone please pass the “not with them” list to me to sign when it’s time to chop their heads off.
I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Seriously. I’m not with them. I would like to keep my head while we adjust course abruptly.
Edit: To be clear, I am not advocating. What should happen is that our climate, inequality, and injustice trends get fixed through peaceful cooperation. But our current crop of billionaires don’t show a lot of sign of either wanting that, or having any real awareness of where their current path, historically, goes. Which wouldn’t really be material to me, other than beacuse I’m at risk both from the climate, and from how guillotines historically kill a lot of bystanders.
Yeah, a lot of hippie trends are bad for people: mushroom coffee can cause miscarriages and spoonful’s of cream of tartar can kill you. I’m not here to crusade, though, I just want some thought provoking discussion and the potential of working through our anxieties together with some sound logical arguments.
I don’t believe that fire played as big as a role in early human development that scientists claim. There are cases of modern humans eating raw rotten meat and being fine. A lot of the chemical shit that goes down when meat rots has a lot of the same effects of cooking it. There are plenty of ways to do a thing and we should view it as lots of useful things instead of one end all.
Do you mean early human development biologically, or early human development overall (including culturally)? Because if the latter, humans using fire to cook meat was probably significantly less important than humans using fire for heat and light.
I think the answer is complicated. Homo erectus, the first homo species thought to use fire and our direct ancestors were as close to obligate carnivores as there is in the homo genus, but they focused on big animals with a lot of fat like hippos and elephants. They likely did not cook that fat, because it would store just fine without doing so.
I know Greek mythology is very centered on the idea of fire being a defining things that made man civilizable. From Prometheus to the sacredness around keeping hearths lit.
Curious how many other mythos carry on those ideas tbh
asklemmy
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.