I have a bone to pick with anyone who persists in assuming that the life of hunting and gathering is the evolutionary environment of adaptation” for humans, and that therefore, the human mind is best suited to such an economy. But this is a fallacy. I have lived with hunter-gatherers, as well as with horticulturalists Continue reading Hunter-gatherers do not represent life in our Evolutionary…
What can be the fate of humanity? There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the question of Peak Oil worldwide, and what our industrial civilization must do to deal with the problem. Off shore drilling (the drill, baby, drill school of thought) seems like a good idea until the explosion and massive Continue reading What can be the fate of humanity?
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Friendship is kinship by another mother. (This was originally published on-line as a guest blog in the International Culture and Cognition Institute. ) Why is this so important among humans? Well, consider what I found when studying the lives of hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari. I found that all the people were living in multi-family groups Continue reading Friendship is Kinship from Another…
In 2007, a psychiatrist, Martin Brüne, wrote an essay “On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics” published in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, in which he declared: In the biological literature following Darwin, the term “domestication” became increasingly poorly defined. The criterion of intentional and goal-directed selection, which according to Darwin’s…
Check out this painting. Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015 by Australian indigenous artists Exhibition opens at The Box, Plymouth (and thanks to cousin Clair Drever for drawing my attention to this) Look at the bottom right hand corner there is a group of people there. You know what this painting looks like to me? It looks like a Continue reading Ecological engineering illustrated in a painting
Culture as a collective cognitive niche. I suspect that one of the problems is the idea that science the method of testing causal hypotheses to establish models of reality is a recent invention. This creates the illusion that all cultures, prior to the European Enlightenment , were based on superstitious beliefs. The data from Continue reading The collective cognitive niche
We humans, the compassionate predator, entered into a contract with a large number of species in the course of the past twenty thousand years (some think longer), and species like the wolf (our domestic dogs), Bos Taurus (domestic cattle), Tarpans (domestic horses of all breeds today) and a legion of others entered the relatively new Continue reading Manure and Animal rights
In short, he first erects the "mobile, egalitarian, band-society" as a STRAW MAN and then sets about demolishing it to make his point that anthropologists have been fools and romantics. This is, essentially, the very same imaginary "Noble Savage" that Thomas Hobbes repudiated; the same fiction repeatedly resurrected and then demolished, with boring regularity, in the writings of other authors,…
In 1972, as I was just about to get married for the first time, I read the Club of Rome s Limits to Growth. I decided not to have children, given the long term prospects. In the meantime, while I went to study hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, a man called Robert Paine, who died two years Continue reading Economies are Trophic Flows