Author Topic: How the Extinction of Ice Age Mammals May Have Forced Us to Invent Civilization (?)  (Read 489 times)

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How the Extinction of Ice Age Mammals May Have Forced Us to Invent Civilization

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Overhunting of megafauna such as mammoths might have caused us to take up farming, which ultimately brought about modern-looking communities.
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Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilizations appearing 6,400 years ago. [ See also: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/the-birth-of-civilisation-cult-of-the-skull-(8800-bc-to-6500-bc)/ ]
For 95 percent of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting and gathering. Then, something changed.

We transitioned from hunter-gatherer life to plant harvesting, then cultivation and, finally, cities. Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna – mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer and horses – disappeared. The reasons humans began farming still remain unclear, [ See also: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/human-evolution/misinformation-about-racial-origins/ ] but the disappearance of the animals we depended on for food may have forced our culture to evolve.

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Early humans were smart enough to farm. All groups of modern humans have similar levels of intelligence, suggesting our cognitive capabilities evolved before these populations separated around 300,000 years ago, then changed little afterwards. If our ancestors didn’t grow plants, it’s not that they weren’t clever enough. Something in the environment prevented them – or they simply didn’t need to.

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This will to sacrifice, to devote personal labor and, if necessary, life itself to others, is most highly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan’s greatest power is not in his mental qualities necessarily, but in the extent of his readiness to devote all his abilities to the service of the community. In him, the instinct of self-preservation can reach its noblest form because he willingly subordinates his own ego for the prosperity of the community and is even willing to sacrifice his own life for it, if necessary.

The reason for the Aryan’s constructive ability and especially his ability to create civilizations does not lie in his intellectual gifts. If he only had intellectual abilities, they might easily be destructive and he would never be able to organize and build. The essential character of the individual depends on his ability to forfeit his personal opinions and interests and to offer them instead for the service of the community. Only by serving his community and assuring its prosperity does he receive his own rewards. He no longer works only for himself, but takes his place within the structure of the community, not only for his own benefit, but for the benefit of all. The most wonderful demonstration of this spirit is through Work. He understands that his labor is not just for his livelihood, but his labor serves the interests of the community without conflicting with community’s interests. Otherwise, the goal of his work is only self-preservation without consideration for the welfare of the community. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pg. 196

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This is usually how their development occurs: Often, amazingly small groups of Aryan tribes overpowered other peoples and caused the dormant intellectual and organizing powers of the conquered people to surface. These abilities were unexercised until the Aryans awoke these abilities in the lesser race. The benefits of the particular living conditions in the new territory, such as the fertility of the soil, climate, etc., made it possible for them to accomplish this cultural reawakening by using the large number of available workers from the inferior race. Often in a few thousand or maybe just a few hundred years, they built up civilizations which originally displayed every inner mark of their founder’s character but were adapted to fit within the special qualities of the local area and the characteristics of the subjugated people. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pg. 192

Continuing with the article:
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Global warming at the end of the last glacial period, 11,700 years ago, probably made farming easier. Warmer temperatures, longer growing seasons, higher rainfall and long-term climate stability made more areas suitable for cultivation. But it’s unlikely farming had been impossible everywhere. And Earth saw many such warming events – 11,700, 125,000, 200,000 and 325,000 years ago – but earlier warming events didn’t spur experiments in farming. Climate change can’t have been the only driver.

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Human migration probably contributed as well. When our species expanded from southern Africa throughout the African continent, into Asia, Europe and then the Americas, we found new environments and new food plants. But people occupied these parts of the world long before farming began. Plant domestication lagged human migration by tens of millennia.
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If opportunities to invent farming already existed, then the delayed invention of agriculture suggests our ancestors didn’t need, or want, to farm. [ See also: Aryan Diffusion and compare with Turanian Diffusion ]

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Agriculture has significant disadvantages compared to foraging. Farming takes more effort and offers less leisure time and an inferior diet. If hunters are hungry in the morning, they can have food on the fire at night. Farming requires hard work today to produce food months later – or not at all. It requires storage and management of temporary food surpluses to feed people year round.

A hunter having a bad day can hunt again tomorrow or seek richer hunting grounds elsewhere, but farmers, tied to the land, are at the mercy of nature’s unpredictability. Rains arriving too soon or too late, droughts, frosts, blights or locusts can cause crop failure – and famine.
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These abilities are the clearest in the race which has been, and is, the bearer of human cultural development: The Aryans. The moment Fate imposes special conditions on them, their inborn abilities surface at a quicker pace and their genius is shown through the physical result. The cultures they create are almost always determined by the soil, the climate, and the conquered people. The last of these elements is the most important. The more primitive and the greater the technical limitations of any acquired culture, the more effort will be required for the civilizing activity and therefore the more man-power will be needed. When the man-power is organized, concentrated, and applied, it can substitute for the power of mechanical machines. Without the availability of lower ranked men, the Aryan could never have taken the first step toward his later civilizing of those people. It is the same as if he had never tamed and used various domesticated animals to help build the foundation of civilization. Then he would have never arrived at a level of technical development which now is gradually permitting him to do without these very animals. The saying, “The Moor has finished his job, so let him now depart” (possibly a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Othello, also attributed to the German poet Schiller) has an unfortunate meaning which is deeply true today. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pg. 194

Back to the article:
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Agriculture has military disadvantages as well. Hunter-gatherers are mobile and can travel long distances to attack or retreat. Constant practice with spears and bows made them deadly fighters. Farmers are rooted to their fields, their schedules dictated by the seasons. They are predictable, stationary targets, whose food stockpiles tempt hungry outsiders.

And having evolved to the lifestyle, humans may simply have loved being nomadic hunters. The Comanche Indians fought to the death to preserve their hunting lifestyle. The Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa continue to resist being turned into farmers and herders. Strikingly, when Polynesian farmers encountered New Zealand’s abundant flightless birds, they largely abandoned agriculture, creating the Maori moa-hunter culture. [ See again: https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/turanian-diffusion/ ]

Read the rest of the article here: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-extinction-of-ice-age-mammals-may-have-forced-us-to-invent-civilisation?utm_source=pocket-newtab

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Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2021, 03:29:38 pm »


I think observing people's reactions to the sentiment in this image is a good way to gauge if they have gatherer blood memory or farming blood memory.

My first thought was that the poster was nostalgic for a pre-industrial simple agrarian life, but many people in the comment section seem to be interpreting it as hunter-gatherer nostalgia (and multiple people even repeat the assertion of Jared Diamond (chosenite) that agriculture was "the worst mistake in history"...)
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race


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Agriculture is where it all went wrong. We were better off as hunter/gatherers.

I feel like it wasn’t so much agriculture as it was the industrial revolution that lead us astray
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qfs0u9/right/hi1r0lz/


For some strange reason, many communist-influenced people (like those on the Reddit forum linked above) idealize hunter-gatherer society because they believe it was "economically egalitarian" compared to the subsequent stage of civilization in farming societies.

Biologically, it's literally insane to think hunter-gatherers were somehow "egalitarian". The skeletons of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are easily contrasted to later Neolithic individuals, because the hunter-gatherers had quite extreme sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is inequality literally written into our DNA and our bones. That's way more absolute, oppressive, and difficult to change than man-made economic systems which varied from culture to culture and time period to time period. (And, going on a tangent, I suspect that sexual dimorphism is why so many teenagers these days express gender dysphoria and call themselves "non-binary", since they developed a sense of personal "identity" prior to puberty and are psychologically unable to process the changes of their "new" dimorphic self and unable to transition into the social class of adulthood). Good luck abolishing the oppression of sexual dimorphism with a communist revolution. There was only one ideology which was actually capable of doing that!

Also, this isn't even pointing out the fact that hunter-gatherer societies observed historically typically had very very strong gender roles assigned to labor and social status/customs!!! ...So the communist assertion that hunter-gatherers are "economically egalitarian" isn't even accurate. The only thing stopping hunter-gatherer societies from reaching the same level of "class" stratification and material wealth accumulation as farming civilizations (and, later, industrialized civilizations) is that hunter-gatherer groups were much smaller. Even then, modern and historically-observed hunter-gatherer groups usually have an "elder" class,  priest class, hereditary leadership in one or both of those, special status for 'elite' hunters or warriors, etc.

90sRetroFan

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"many people in the comment section seem to be interpreting it as hunter-gatherer nostalgia"

Yes, as if we didn't have enough problems with losing a large chunk of leftists to progressivism, among the remainder of regressives we lose another large chunk to these guys.

While pro-hunting types are barbarians who should simply be executed, I would be willing to have a respectful conversation with those (vegans) who support a pure gathering lifestyle over a farming one. Some of them have genuinely good intentions, and dislike farming on serious ethical grounds (e.g. ploughing might kill worms etc.). In theory, we should be able to collaborate with these types by convincing them that they have more in common with us than with the pro-hunting types. But in practice they often have anarchist tendencies that both causes them to reject our strong statist position. Without state intervention, however, there will be no organized phasing out of modern complexity, so by not being anti-statists they will never see their ideals realized beyond the scale of intentional communities that will not affect the rest of the world's continuation towards ever-increasing complexity.

"Biologically, it's literally insane to think hunter-gatherers were somehow "egalitarian". The skeletons of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are easily contrasted to later Neolithic individuals, because the hunter-gatherers had quite extreme sexual dimorphism."

Even more obviously, do non-cannibalistic hunters treat prey species as "equals" to their own?

It is farming habitats that permits evolution away from tribalism. Contrast the attitude of the universalist farm-evolved chicken with that of the tribalist wild-evolved eagle:

https://ng.opera.news/ng/en/pets/da8548d583e3d5764107aea63139b2e9

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He took an eagles egg and placed it in the chickens next, he also too the hens egg and dropped it in the eagles nest
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soon after the egg harshed the eagle immediately noticed the strange creature amongst them and could not forgive the farmer, she sidelined the hens chicks and will only give food to her biological chicks.

The hen on the other hand took in the eagles chick and treat it as if it were her own, chickens have great maternal abilities and very good at raising babies.



https://w0.peakpx.com/wallpaper/662/883/HD-wallpaper-impartial-love-hay-chick-sleeping-cute-hen-warmth-love-puppy-impartial.jpg

(By the way, how Western civilization treats chickens is covered here:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-sustainable-evil/msg72/#msg72 )

But ultimately, there is no way round the need for us to debunk egalitarianism itself in order to turn leftist attention towards the far more meaningful ideal of universalism (which does not require belief in egalitarianism). As I have mentioned in the past, someone who must first believe two people are equal in order to treat them fairly is in effect admitting that if in fact they were not equal then they indeed have no reason to be treated fairly. Someone like that is not a universalist. But at present most people cannot tell the two apart.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2022, 07:39:52 pm by 90sRetroFan »

guest55

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I think observing people's reactions to the sentiment in this image is a good way to gauge if they have gatherer blood memory or farming blood memory.

Not to detract from all the great points both of you made in the posts above but when I see the term "credit score" it always forces me to ask: "Who was it that handed the money power of king's and queen's over to handful of bankers?" "Who of us consented to bankers keeping score of our lives?"

If I do not agree with the regime of a nation I can usually pack up and move to a nation that has a regime in power that I do agree with. But, I can never escape a bankers credit score can I, no matter where I move to? How then is the credit score that I did not consent to not tyranny?

I suspect much of the Sinophobic sentiment in the West ultimately can be traced to financial and banking interests because these interests understand that if the world follows China's example many of them will be hanging at the gallows for their tyranny sooner than later! And, they absolutely deserve it!

Zea_mays

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Scholarship over the past few decades has become more aware that a large portion of modern/historic hunter-gatherers did more gathering than hunting.

Apparently this was not always the case.

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So far, attempts to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans were mostly based on comparisons to 20th century hunter-gatherer societies," explains Dr. Ben-Dor. "This comparison is futile, however, because two million years ago hunter-gatherer societies could hunt and consume elephants and other large animals -- while today's hunter gatherers do not have access to such bounty. The entire ecosystem has changed, and conditions cannot be compared. We decided to use other methods to reconstruct the diet of stone-age humans: to examine the memory preserved in our own bodies, our metabolism, genetics and physical build. Human behavior changes rapidly, but evolution is slow. The body remembers."

In a process unprecedented in its extent, Dr. Ben-Dor and his colleagues collected about 25 lines of evidence from about 400 scientific papers from different scientific disciplines, dealing with the focal question: Were stone-age humans specialized carnivores or were they generalist omnivores? Most evidence was found in research on current biology, namely genetics, metabolism, physiology and morphology.
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Comparing humans to large social predators of today, all of whom hunt large animals and obtain more than 70% of their energy from animal sources, reinforced the conclusion that humans specialized in hunting large animals and were in fact hypercarnivores.
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Evidence of genetic changes and the appearance of unique stone tools for processing plants led the researchers to conclude that, starting about 85,000 years ago in Africa, and about 40,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, a gradual rise occurred in the consumption of plant foods as well as dietary diversity -- in accordance with varying ecological conditions. This rise was accompanied by an increase in the local uniqueness of the stone tool culture, which is similar to the diversity of material cultures in 20th-century hunter-gatherer societies. In contrast, during the two million years when, according to the researchers, humans were apex predators, long periods of similarity and continuity were observed in stone tools, regardless of local ecological conditions.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210405113606.htm

Hunter-gatherer groups who had become adapted to gathering gave evolution a head-start prior to the invention of agriculture.

So, it seems we can declare that individuals with "hypercarnivore" blood memory (e.g. Paleodiet advocates, etc.) are distinct from, and categorically inferior to, gatherer-centric hunter-gatherers. Indeed, it was from these gatherer-centric groups that agriculture first developed.

christianbethel

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As I have mentioned in the past, someone who must first believe two people are equal in order to treat them fairly is in effect admitting that if in fact they were not equal then they indeed have no reason to be treated fairly. Someone like that is not a universalist. But at present most people cannot tell the two apart.
Are you saying only superior people deserve to be treated fairly?
National Socialism ≠ Nazism

Aryan ≠ 'White'.

Race = Quality && Race ≠ Ethnicity.

History is written by the victors.

The truth fears no investigation.

(He) who controls the past controls the future; (he) who controls the present controls the past.

UNITY THROUGH NOBILITY.

90sRetroFan

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No. I am saying that egalitarianism is a poor approach to arguing in support of fairness.

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Someone like that is not a universalist.

I myself am a universalist.

christianbethel

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How does a universalist argue in favor of fairness?
National Socialism ≠ Nazism

Aryan ≠ 'White'.

Race = Quality && Race ≠ Ethnicity.

History is written by the victors.

The truth fears no investigation.

(He) who controls the past controls the future; (he) who controls the present controls the past.

UNITY THROUGH NOBILITY.

90sRetroFan

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As a necessary corollary of universalism. Ensuring fairness requires effort. If, in the interest of spending less effort, we are willing to overlook fairness for some, we are in effect treating those overlooked as part of the outgroup.

christianbethel

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Would I be correct in saying fair treatment for a Westerner would be to inflict suffering/loss and fair treatment for a non-Westerner would be to render aid?
National Socialism ≠ Nazism

Aryan ≠ 'White'.

Race = Quality && Race ≠ Ethnicity.

History is written by the victors.

The truth fears no investigation.

(He) who controls the past controls the future; (he) who controls the present controls the past.

UNITY THROUGH NOBILITY.

90sRetroFan

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Fairness refers mainly to how we treat people before we have enough information about them as individuals.

christianbethel

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That explains why many of our fellow travelers don't completely fit the criteria for being an Aryanist.
National Socialism ≠ Nazism

Aryan ≠ 'White'.

Race = Quality && Race ≠ Ethnicity.

History is written by the victors.

The truth fears no investigation.

(He) who controls the past controls the future; (he) who controls the present controls the past.

UNITY THROUGH NOBILITY.