Ranto! Part One: Cavemen!

SOMETHING TO CRO ABOUT

So about 200,000 years ago, evolution had narrowed the "homo" strain down to two strong species: Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. There were probably some human-ish types in Indonesia and other remote communities (remote from Eastern Africa, that is), but they're no longer around today, and it's unlikely they found their way into the homo sapien line.

Neanderthals were about 5 feet tall, wide, pretty hairy and pretty clever. They had large hearts and brains (physically I mean) and they buried their dead. They probably had some language, and they probably used fire to cook with. They were probably much stronger than modern humans, and with their big chests came big lungs- they could probably track game for a long, long time. They infrequently settled, and they never seemed to engage in agriculture, at least not dedicated agriculture. They never seemed to acquire a taste for fermented things, so they probably never came across wine, cheese or bread, and they needed a lot of fresh meat. They probably had high infant mortality rates, but if they survived childhood, they likely lived well into their 70's. They lived in Saharan Africa, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Most of Europe and Central Asia. They don't seem to have gotten much further than that.

Cro-Magnon were as tall as modern humans. In fact, Cro-Magnon were modern humans. I doubt they did battle with the neanderthals. They probably interbred with them, but as they were faster and cleverer (big asterisk- see next paragraph), they probably just pushed them out and monopolized their food supply. Cro-Magnon genes got passed along, neanderthal ones largely did not. No mystery there.

Cro-Magnon didn't have neanderthal's stamina. So they were forced by necessity to become more efficient hunters. I should point out, I don't think they were cleverer per se- I think they were just physically weaker and were therefore required to become cleverer. I think both species possessed the same capacity for ingenuity, but Neanderthal never had to progress much beyond hunter-gathering to survive in the long term, and the short term encroachment of Cro-Magnon was both too quick and too subtle for them to respond to effectively.

Cro-Magnon lived in tribes: closely bound groups, mostly kin, where survival was determined by how best to survive, and set rules were entirely anathema. What good is a set rule if it isn't working? I don't mean to suggest that life was a constant battle without time for discussion or debate- the opposite. I think that's all life really was. A few hours a day to secure food, then the rest was sleep, sex, socializing and play time. Traditions only came about when they were necessary and they worked.

Of course, early on, they would have realized that they couldn't afford to stay to themselves for long. Interbreeding is one of those things that probably made a lot of sense at first glance ("But she's right there!") but we wouldn't be here if they didn't figure out that they needed to talk to other tribes and organize some cross-territory hot-boning. That worked out nicely, because the by-product was alliances with other groups. And another nice by-product was Trade.

YOU HAVE CARROTS? WE WERE GONNA MAKE CARROT CAKE! OH THIS IS NICE.

Trade is awesome. Tribesman A and Tribesman B are watching their kids get married. Tribesman A mentions that they have shitloads of carrots. Tribesman B sighs. They'd like some carrots. All they have is abundant skins of water. Tribesman A moans. Man, they could really go some water.

Then a chocolate truck crashes into a peanut butter truck, and lo, the Peanut Butter Cup was born.

This is really cool: there's been no unequal gain- the same amount of goods is still present in the room, but the amount of happiness has increased several-fold. Og has carrots, Bill has water- and no-one had to kill anyone else to better their lot! Who needs theft, murder and rape when you have trade? And best of all, at the end of the day, we can go back to our camps, and we don't have to "get all up in each other's faces".

TOTALLY CEREAL

Well, this is almost exactly how it worked for a long time. I don't mean to imply it was all hunky-dory- it was probably difficult, though no moreso, relatively, to working 8 or 10 hours a day in an office. The main thing is that the child mortality rate was pretty high. Few made it past 5 years, but the ones who did, lived as long as we do now. And they had skirmishes too. Frequently. With neighbouring tribes, amongst themselves- maybe as often as every week. But they weren't wars of destruction, they were mostly preventative clashes to establish that each tribe had a claim to be there, the strength to back that up, and the will to use it. And even that standoff would be put on hold once there was something to trade.

In this set-up, calories came from hunted meat and gathered vegetables. Probably a 50-50 split. But whereas gathering took quite a few calories to perform, hunting took A LOT of calories. Since these dudes were semi-nomadic, camping down for a number of weeks at a time before moving on, they probably knew about wheat. It grew wildly. They probably knew that if cut at a certain time, they could get some fat, juicy kernels out of a stalk. And over time, they probably saw what happened when you crushed those kernels up into a paste and baked it. You got damper. Let the mix rot for a bit before you bake it, and you get bread. And bread was totally tits.

We're at about 10,000 years ago now. 8000 BCE.

One tribe decided to put aside hunting for a bit, and to concentrate on this bread dealio for a while. They got expert at it. It was seriously hard work, but the long-term payoffs were big. They had a surplus of food after a while. Which meant they didn't eat all their vegetables and milk straight away, since they had other food available...and once they were allowed to rot a bit, wine and cheese came next. Then preservation, which had been an amateur sport til then, went pro. Because you have all this food now, that you can control yourself...cant let it go to waste! And hey, we have excess food...so wolves hang out with us, and whaddya know- they're not bad to have around, once food is available (that isn't in the form of our young children). And hey! excess food can be fed to other animals, like reindeer and oxen and goats...so they stick around, and we have lots more milk available! And now we can/have to build more permanent settlements. That'll require more tools, and more tools means small jobs get done quicker, and we can turn to bigger jobs meaning bigger tools, and so on...

THE FALL (?)

Depending on your viewpoint, this was either the most glorious moment in human history, or the start of the end. The plus sides seem self-evident: with more food and permanency, our kids live longer, and we have more need for and access to, tools. That's about the end of the up side. The other stuff- we get bigger and more well fed, we have to work less, we get wiser- that's not really true. We're on the whole no taller, smarter, stronger, or healthier than we were before the agricultural revolution.

The downside is pretty big. We develop fear of the future for the first time. I'm sure hunter-gatherers know fear. But I doubt an idea of "the future" ever came to them- Life is now, and it'll be now tomorrow, and it was now yesterday, too. They know time passes, but it doesn't pass towards anything, it just passes.

Farmers, meanwhile, know full well that time passes, and that it may not be in their favour. Without a good harvest, things will be very bad indeed. They're going to agonize over that.

There's a weakness in this part of the theory- surely the hunter-gatherers knew to measure time in human physical development, and in seasons. I'm sure they did. But I'm not convinced that those things brought enormous fear. Maybe winter, for the sheer difficulty. But not the same way it would have struck doubt and fear into a farmer, who knew that he had locked himself into a system of producing food that was completely fucked over by lack of sunlight and water. A hunter gatherer can still go hunting in winter. Tough, but not impossible.

But the farmer has preserves of food! But the hunter gatherer has those as well. But the farmer has more, because he has a house, and he can store more than he can carry! True. That part is true. It just means the hunter gatherer has to limit how many people can be in his tribe. The farmer can wile away those winter nights, 6 inches deep in moist farm-wife, knowing that while he builds his stocks of food in the harvest months, he builds his stocks of more farmers in the winter.

More downside. Jealousy, violence and stress. The farmer has toiled very hard for his food. Very hard. Much harder than the hunter gatherer! Losing his food- be it to fire, plague, locusts, theft, foxes, whatever- is going to hurt awful bad. So he stresses over it. How to store it. How to protect it. How to ensure that no-one else gets it. Sure enough, that's going to require some very powerful, high strung and violent genes to succeed in that environment. So that's what the farmwives are going to pick. Of course, you'll also need some very talented and clever genes too. So that becomes part of the equation as well. What do the Hunter-Gatherers need? Well, realistically, they'll need violence, strength and cleverness too. But a different cleverness, and a different violence. This part is hard to pin down, but I think the hunter gathers were sexually selective towards co-operation, and farmers for competition. Make of that conclusion what you will: I'm still trying to get my head around it.

But sure enough- when the farmers started to multiply- and they did, very quickly- they had no time or patience for hunter-gatherers on "their land". And they had very good tools to deal with interactions.

Of course, the poor shmuck hunter gatherers probably thought someone owning land was totes retarded (if they bothered to think about it at all), and ignored warnings from the farmers to bugger off. They weren't stubborn, they were probably just bemused.

If someone started yelling at you to stop blueing his peaches, would you quickly get out of the way, or would you kinda stop and say "what are you on about?". Of course, you could hazard a guess at what's making this guy so upset, and you could try to work out in what way you had blued his peach, but in the meantime, he's used some wicked awesome scythe to chop your head off.

And after a while, even the dudes who had learned to just get out of the way of these high-strung farmers, pretty soon discovered that all the way had done been gotten out...of. So hunter gatherers were soon driven to those places so remote and hostile that you couldn't even grow a seed on it, and stuck around until many centuries later, when a farmer decided that there was something in that area that was needed back home for that ongoing competition with other farmers. Be it rubber, or tobacco, or sugar or whatever. And before you know it...no more hunter gatherers.

I'M JUST GOING TO BITE AIR, LIKE THIS

I like mythology and legend. They're like little knowing references to history. And the more obscure, the better. Like when someone makes a pie, and you make a Simpsons reference by saying "Now Jim, don't you eat this pie..." It's a random quote, but it calls on the shared experience that you and Jim had of the episode where Bart and Lisa are on different hockey teams, they start fighting, and Marge goes to check on them, tells Homer not to eat the pie, and en route to surreptitiously eating it (by "biting air"), Homer smashes his head. FUNNY.

Of course, if Jim has never seen the Simpsons, he wouldn't get the subtext, and contextually he'd be like "fuck you dicknose, It's my pie". (Of course, his "dicknose" reference would suggest he's seen Teen Wolf, so let's not judge Jim too harshly, even though he is a pie-eating-no-simpsons-watching motherfucker).

If Jim knows that episode, he cracks up. You've strengthened the pair bond, by saying "hey! we like and know the same things! Marry my sister!" NICE.

Ok, so back to mythology. Mythology of itself is like this big debate, this big reasoning. All these early folks kinda know that they used to be hunter-gatherers, and that life was different. So they form this way of short-handing this difficult concept:

Flood myths- there were humans, but something happened, and those humans were wiped out, and we're like, "new humans".

Gilgamesh- The great-grandfather of our people had a brother, whom he really loved. But the brother was wild, and great-grandfather had to destroy him. But he feels totes bad about it.

Golden Age- Those old humans were really cool. We're Silver Age humans. We're also cool. Not quite as cool. *Sniff*

Paradise- Life used to be really great, when we lived in this nice, walled, apple orchard. Then we discovered something, and we lost that, and now we're out in the wilderness, always toiling.

Cain and Abel- The farmer and the herdsman were brothers. Sky father preferred the herdsman's lifestyle, and the farmer, in his jealous rage, killed his brother. Then he refused to own up to it, and now he's cursed.

Pandora/Eve- Things were good when we didn't know. But we got curious and tried to find out. We found out, but now we can't un-know.

NOW WHAT?

So here we are. We're at about 6000 BC. Farmers have been around a while, and after a lot of hard work, they're pretty much alone, with the hunter gatherers and tribal types on the fringes. Of course, the farmers are hunter-gatherers too, and 2000 years or so of sexual selection doesn't quite stand up to 200,000 years of tribal sexual selection. They don't have it out of their system yet. So they congregate in weird tribes. Inter-competitive tribes. Catal Huyuk, in Turkey was an early one. Jericho was another. These are some of the first cities, in a context we can understand today. Not villages or settlements, but a collection of non-related families, collected near a water source and easily defended ground, where labour is specialized and trade is ever-flowing. All this supported by a geologically close agricultural sector, just outside the boundaries of the city. It's not a tribe, exactly, but it works almost as well as tribes have for 200,000 years. And in many ways, better.

We're at this point because of some very ground breaking ideas. They are:

1. We want freedom from powers beyond our control.
2. We love our children as individuals, not as an ambiguous "next generation".
3. Work is virtuous, and what I earn is mine alone.

If those things sound perfectly reasonable in context, don't be alarmed. That's because you're descended from farmers. Here, more or less, is the exact opposite conclusion:

1. We want to leave the power over life and death to the Gods.
2. An individual child is not as important as the overall health of the tribe.
3. Work, for it's own sake, is totally shit. And screw your rights, I want what you have

If you thought these things all the time, you'd be thought of as backwards, cruel and lazy. If that seems about right to you...again, don't be alarmed.

Here's my take: neither of these viewpoints is right or wrong, because the world doesn't actually work like that. Both work a little bit. Both can be made to work in the long term. But one method has been around for a lot longer than the other.

To put it another way: Let's assume two men want freedom.

One man envisions being able to walk completely unencumbered by anything, completely naked, through the wilderness, hunting and eating only when he needs to. He doesn't worry about the future, because he knows he has no power over it.

The other man worries about the future. He worries it will be really bad unless he plans for it. So he encumbers himself with weapons, clothes and provisions. He goes traipsing off into the wilderness, eating and hunting to a schedule, to ensure he can get through the bad times that he knows full well is just around the corner.

Let's say it another way. One man believes in God. The other believes in Apocalypse.

That's where I'm going to leave this for now. I should point out: I don't believe in socialism, I value the individual over the group, I believe in freedom and I really like science and machines. I don't believe man is flawed, and I don't believe women are sneaky or evil. I also don't believe in God, or at least, I don't believe in a beardy giant man who lives on a mountain and is concerned about what I eat or whom I shtup.

Because think about it. That's retarded.

Next: Ye Olde Times!