Author Topic: Uneducable Gentiles  (Read 589 times)

90sRetroFan

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Uneducable Gentiles
« on: September 16, 2020, 05:38:32 am »
OLD CONTENT

sciencenordic.com/first-stone-age-farmers-norway-gave-after-short-period-time

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the first farmers in Norway appear to have given up relatively early. They stopped growing crops after a relatively short period of time and returned to hunter-gatherer-fisher lifestyle.
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However, settlements in the coastal areas grew and were strongly linked to the sea, where food was plentiful.

Characteristic ceramic objects tell the story of a maritime culture.

Nielsen says the arguments have gone back and forth as to why people returned to a fishing culture or gave up farming. Some think its an obvious way to live, given the country's huge coastal resources. On the other hand, why would the people who introduced agriculture end it?

Because it wasn't us; it was those whom we tried to teach - without success.

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www.thevintagenews.com/2019/06/27/neolithic-city-overcrowded/

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Archaeologists recently discovered that the transition from foraging to a communal farming lifestyle caused problems for people who lived at a 32-acre site in southern Turkey that was occupied from 7100 B.C. to 5950 B.C. Çatalhöyük was home to as many as 8,000 people at its peak.
...
“The scientists found that the number of injuries, evident in skeletons, increased when the community was at its largest, suggesting that as Çatalhöyük’s population boomed, violence became more frequent,” said Live Science. “About 25 percent of the 95 examined skulls showed healed injuries made by small spherical projectiles, probably a clay ball flung by a slingshot. Many of these clay spheres were also preserved around the site, according to the study.”

But were these Aryans? No:

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Bull (Auroch) heads from Catalhüyük in Angora Museum. Photo by Stipich Béla CC BY 2.5

Neolithic hunters attacking an auroch, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Photo by Omar Hoftun CC BY-SA 3.0

Besides the absence of respect towards cows (a distinguishing Aryan characteristic) another dead giveaway is their worship of high sexual dimorphism:

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Mother Goddess from Çatalhöyük flanked by two feline lionesses, neolithic age (about 5500-6000 BC), today in Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. Photo by Nevit Dilmen CC BY-SA 3.0

These were the Gentiles we tried and failed to teach.

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I told you so:

www.genomeweb.com/genetic-research/anatolian-hunter-gatherers-adopted-farming-practices-ancient-dna-study-suggests

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An international team of researchers has generated genome-wide SNP data on eight prehistoric individuals, including an Epipaleolithic Anatolian hunter-gatherer, five early Neolithic Aceramic Anatolian farmers, and two early Neolithic farmers from the Levant. As they reported in Nature Communications today, the researchers found that the Neolithic Anatolians derived a large portion of their ancestry from the Epipaleolithic Anatolian, indicating genetic continuity in the region.
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When they modeled the Neolithic Aceramic Anatolian farmers' ancestry, they noted the best fit suggested that Anatolian hunter-gatherers provided the most — about 90 percent — of their ancestry. This, the researchers added, indicates there was long-term genetic stability in central Anatolia, even as the subsistence strategy changed.

The later Neolithic Ceramic Anatolian farmers, though, shared more alleles with the early Holocene Levantines than the Neolithic Aceramic Anatolian farmers did. Still, the researchers noted that the Neolithic Aceramic Anatolian farmers contributed about three-quarters of the Neolithic Ceramic Anatolian farmers' ancestry.

~75% of ~90% is still at least ~68% Gentile. Hence the atrocious behaviour as mentioned in the previous post.

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This has been a growing enemy narrative recently:

www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/our-worst-mistake-part-1/Content?oid=13669919

www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/our-worst-mistake-part-2/Content?oid=13801092

Discuss. I will respond later.

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The exaltation of the Paleolithic lifestyle by those such as Christopher Ryan (Gentile?) stems primarily from the fact that those societies were more allowing of sexual promiscuity among women. This caters to the PC, and hence False Left worldview that women have the "right" to be as equally promiscuous as men. Moreover, his criticism of Neolithic societies as being patriarchal is only applicable to Gentiles who adopted the practice of farming without changing their behavior, and is thus intellectually dishonest. This is no doubt designed to facilitate the backlash to patriarchy as manifest in the present day far-right movements.

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Yea that "patriarchy started in the Neolithic" bullshit got brought up in my history class a few weeks ago. As if the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle doesn't REQUIRE gender-roles, and as if farming DOES...

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www.zmescience.com/science/gender-inequality-neolithic-emergence-22062019/

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Archaeologists at the University of Seville in Spain have studied prehistoric societies in the Neolithic Period in the Iberian Peninsula from the perspective of gender. They looked at two types of evidence: biological and funerary.

In the first category, the team focused on demographic proportions between men and women, as well as other clues such as diet, genetic data, and common diseases. For the funerary evidence, they analyzed how “important” a burial site was — whether it was an individual or collective burial, the position and orientation of the body, as well as any goods placed in the tomb.

They found that at the start of the Neolithic, there was no significant difference between men and women in this regards, suggesting a generally equal society. However, as things progressed, it started to change. A key indicator is the growing association of men with violence. Male bodies started exhibiting more arrow wounds, their tombs featured more weapons or projectiles, and men were increasingly depicted in fighting scenes in cave paintings, whereas women were not. Hunting and warfare were a masculine business. Conversely, women’s’ burial sites were more likely to contain ceramic pots, indicating a separation of gender roles.

Interestingly, out of all the aspects considered in this study, the ones that show the greatest difference between males and females are related to violence: projectiles, trauma including impact by arrowheads, and graphic depictions of war and hunting.

The absence of patriarchy at the beginning of the Neolithic (a.k.a. Golden Age) fits our model of innately anti-sexist Aryans. The subsequent emergence of patriarchy could be accounted for, as rp suggests, as merely the behaviour of the Gentiles who had learned farming from us. This is reinforced by the cave paintings which clearly indicate that these people were hunting alongside farming, as we would expect Gentiles to do. Indeed we have noted in the past that Gentiles who learned farming usually left their women to do most of the actual farm work while their men hunted just as they always did. This would also mean that the selective pressure (for Aryan traits) exerted by farm work would have been mostly avoided by the Gentile men. This then ties back into the present-day observation that more men than women retain certain traits adaptive to hunting but maladaptive to farming:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/human-evolution/non-aryan-adhd/

(This is on top of the selective pressure (for other Aryan traits) exerted by diet being avoided by Gentiles of both genders (since the men would probably share their hunted meat with the women).)

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scifare.com/science-news/article/european-inequality-traced-back-to-the-neolithic-age/

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After analyzing the teeth from more than 300 Neolithic-age skeletons, a team of researchers from across Europe have found links between access to prime farming lands – along with their fruits – and hereditary inequality.
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The team found those people buried with a prestigious Neolithic tool, known as an adze, had substantially less variation in the ratio of the element strontium – it incorporates into the enamel of teeth, like calcium – compared to people buried without one.
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They also found that those with higher than expected variation in strontium ratio levels, almost exclusively, were buried without an adze – of the 41 samples, only one was buried with the stone tool.

“We think that’s because there’s a particular kind of soil type those farmers preferred, called loess soils,” Bentley said.

For Neolithic farmers, it was land that drained water well, was easy to work and because loess soils are found primarily along the river valleys of central Europe, it was fertile land that was great for growing crops.

Considering how varied strontium signatures can be, the incredibly narrow variation seen in skeletons with the Neolithic tool implies their diets were sourced, almost exclusively, from a narrow region that’s closely related to the loess soil regions.

“Individuals who weren’t buried with adzes were probably farming further afield or obtained their food further away, from slightly less preferred soils,” Bentley said. “It’s a real hint at a system of inequality that surely got magnified over the generations.”

If you ask me what is going on here, the people buried with adzes were Aryans who loved farming, whereas the people buried without were Gentiles who had learned farming but who were not sentimentally dedicated to it and thus did not care for being buried with their adzes.

We already know that the Aryans migrated following the rivers, so it is no surprise that they farmed on the valley land. On the other hand, the Gentiles on lower-quality land could still have produced enough food so long as they had been willing to keep their population down. But they were not: they were outnumbering the Aryans 41:1! So of course they didn't have enough food to go round!

Moreover, what the data shows is that Aryans have less variation in strontium than farming Gentiles, in other words all Aryans had similarly high strontium whereas some farming Gentiles had high strontium and other farming Gentiles had low strontium. In other words Aryans were sharing food fairly, whereas it was the farming Gentiles who were not sharing food fairly.

Now read carefully:

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The researchers also found a similar difference when they compared genders. Men, on average had substantially less variation in strontium ratios than women. They also found that approximately eight of every ten individuals with higher than expected ratios of strontium were female.

Did you catch it? In the second sentence the author is talking about variation in strontium ratios. In the third sentence, however, the author subtly switched to talking about the strontium ratios themselves! A less careful reader primed by the claim of a "similar difference" in the first sentence would easily misread that women had higher variation in strontium (ie. more women have low strontium), when in fact more women had high strontium!
« Last Edit: September 25, 2020, 12:10:21 am by 90sRetroFan »

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90sRetroFan

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Re: Uneducable Gentiles
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2020, 06:23:29 am »
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-the-first-farmers-arrived-in-europe-inequality-evolved/

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Eight thousand years ago small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers were the only human beings roaming Europe's lush, green forests. Archaeological digs in caves and elsewhere have turned up evidence of their Mesolithic technology: flint-tipped tools with which they fished, hunted deer and aurochs (a now extinct species of ox), and gathered wild plants. Many had dark hair and blue eyes, recent genetic studies suggest, and the few skeletons unearthed so far indicate that they were quite tall and muscular. Their languages remain mysterious to this day.

Three millennia later the forests they inhabited had given way to fields of wheat and lentils. Farmers ruled the continent.

Before we get back to the main topic, here is a sidetrack about something that is new to me:

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the LBK farmers reached the Rhine within just a few centuries, around 7,300 years ago.
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On the southern route, the farmers leapfrogged along the Mediterranean coast from Italy to France and on to the Iberian Peninsula. After reaching French shores, 7,800 or so years ago, they migrated northward toward the Paris Basin, the plain between the Rhine and the Atlantic Ocean that forms a kind of continental cul-de-sac. It was there that the two great streams of farmers met, around seven millennia ago. By then their cultures had diverged to some extent—they had been separated for more than 500 years—but they would still have recognized their own kind. They mingled both biologically and culturally.

Aesir-Saturnian reunification! It must have been wonderful! Now back to the main topic:

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Sooner or later the immigrant farmers must have met the resident hunter-gatherers—and when it happened, it must have been a shock. Approximately 40,000 years had elapsed since their common ancestors split paths on their way out of Africa—long enough to distinguish them physically, culturally and linguistically. Comparisons of their genes with those of modern Europeans indicate that the farmers were shorter than the Western hunter-gatherers who occupied most of the continent. They also had dark hair, dark eyes and, probably, lighter skin. There is no evidence of violence between the two groups in the earliest encounters—although the archaeological record is incomplete enough that violence cannot be ruled out. Yet in large parts of Europe, the hunter-gatherers and their Mesolithic culture simply vanished from both genetic and archaeological records the moment the farmers arrived. Where did they go?

For decades archaeologists have wondered whether, in the face of this massive influx, the hunter-gatherers retreated—into the hills, perhaps, where the soil was less fertile and hence less suitable for farming, or deep into the forest, where the farmers were unlikely to interfere with them. “Maybe there were massive pockets of hunter-gatherers surviving there, not for a generation but for 1,000 or 2,000 years after the farmers arrived,” suggests Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Vienna in Austria.

Yes, there were. Hence the Giant myths.

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The hunter-gatherers must still have been there somewhere because modern Europeans carry their genes, and Europe-wide surveys of ancient DNA have highlighted a so-called Mesolithic resurgence that started 6,500 years ago. Hunter-gatherer genetic elements accounted for more and more of the farmers' genomes as time went on—but the resurgence was not just genetic. “Around the same time, we see the reemergence in the archaeological record of Mesolithic ways of doing things,” says archaeologist Thomas Perrin of the Jean Jaurès University of Toulouse in France. The hunter-gatherers themselves were no longer there, except for possible pockets of them hiding deep in the forest—but their genes, and their technology, were.

By the time the farmers started moving out again from that hub of the Paris Basin, they were no longer the same people who had set out from Hungary or beached on Europe's prehistoric Riviera. They carried a little bit of the old Europe within them.

They were no longer Aryans.

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There may even have been rare exceptions to the rule that the two groups did not interbreed early on. The Austrian site of Brunn 2, in a wooded river valley not far from Vienna, dates from the earliest arrival of the LBK farmers in central Europe, around 7,600 years ago. Three burials at the site were roughly contemporaneous. Two were of individuals of pure farming ancestry, and the other was the first-generation offspring of a hunter and a farmer. All three lay curled up on their sides in the LBK way, but the “hunter” was buried with six arrowheads.

This is what degeneracy looks like.

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On the southern route, however, those interactions seem to have included interbreeding right from the start. “Within the first two centuries of the first farmers' arrival, we have individuals whose genetic makeup is 55 percent hunter-gatherer,” says paleogeneticist Maïté Rivollat of the University of Bordeaux, co-author of a genetic analysis of human remains found at Neolithic burial sites in southern France that was published in May in Science Advances. Moreover, by looking at the way the hunter-gatherer component was distributed through farmer genomes, Rivollat and her colleagues could tell the interbreeding had gone on for five or six generations already—perhaps starting as soon as the pioneers landed.

Yes, as the myth recounts of Janus ceding the throne to Saturn on condition that they became in-laws.

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Archaeologists have long regarded Cerny as a last vestige of LBK, developing just as LBK was embracing other elements. If that premise is correct, the inhabitants had farming in their blood—their ancestors were the early farmers of the Carpathian Basin. Yet in cemeteries dating from 6,700 years ago, men of high status were buried lying on their backs, not curled up on their sides, and arranged around them were hunting weapons and ornaments made from red deer antlers, the tusks of wild boars and the claws of birds of prey. “Their funerary rites speak to another world from their day-to-day,” says archaeologist Aline Thomas of the Museum of Mankind. “They make reference to the sphere of the wild, things that are more often associated with Mesolithic populations.”

Those rites have prompted Thomas and Bon to ask: Who were the Cerny people really? Were they farmers who had adopted Mesolithic ways and come to venerate them, or were they recently converted hunter-gatherers who had never let them go?

Definitely not pure Aryans.

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Bon and Thomas have been analyzing DNA extracted from the Cerny cemeteries to try to answer that question. So far they have analyzed the (maternally inherited) mtDNA and found that it contains Mesolithic elements.

See?

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If so, those societies now contained people with high levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry who may still have looked different from their “pure” farmer neighbors and whose existence was not necessarily happy.
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Several of those whose bodies appeared to have been dumped had severed limbs, and one had traces of burns, suggesting that they had been subjected to rituals. Significantly, the researchers sequenced mtDNA from the teeth of 22 individuals and found differences between those laid deliberately into graves and those thrown in alongside them in “unconventional” positions. “The individuals in the unconventional position had mitochondrial profiles inherited from hunter-gatherers, while those in the conventional position had not,” Rivollat says.

We should do this with rightists today.

And of course the Turanian epilogue:

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Nearly 1,000 years after Kapellenberg was deserted, a new people arrived there and built two ritual mounds. Called the Yamnaya, they came from the steppe in chariots, and the fact that they contributed relatively few X chromosomes to the European gene pool—as Goldberg reported in 2017—suggests that their invasion was overwhelmingly masculine. Researchers, including Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, have found traces of plague DNA in the remains of Yamnaya teeth, leading them to propose in 2018 that the Yamnaya pastoralists laid waste to farming communities by sowing plague among them.
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Before the newcomers made their appearance, did the last of the hunter-gatherers emerge from their hiding places to pick over the farmers' abandoned wealth—their animals, their once vibrant copper trade—and enjoy a new lease on life as forager-herders? It is a theory that Nikitin, for one, favors.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2020, 06:35:58 am by 90sRetroFan »

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Re: Non-Aryan ADHD
« Reply #2 on: May 04, 2021, 12:26:17 am »
This comes up under the google search for neolithic winter attire:

A group of recreated Neolithic men wearing naturally tanned animal hides.

In fact, an image search of the neolithic period clothing brings up a lot of pictures of people wearing fur and the like....

Articles speak of it as well apparently:
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Furs and non-cured hides were among the most popular materials used to make clothing during the Neolithic Age. Furs required the least amount of processing, as they were pinned together with bone fasteners, rather than stitched. They were also the best material to provide protection to the body during harsh, cold winter months.

With the surplus production in agriculture following the transition to sedentary life, cultivators began trading their harvest of flax, cotton, wool and goat hair for specialized services like weaving, making textiles abundantly available. Each household began to weave its own clothing. Some weavers with specialized skills began to manufacture excess clothing for trade of grains, milk and meat. Specialized weavers produced clothing with stitched patterns, dyed textiles and scraped hides.
https://www.reference.com/history/kind-clothing-did-neolithic-people-wear-4d216149d355d30f

90sRetroFan

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Re: Uneducable Gentiles
« Reply #3 on: May 16, 2021, 04:00:59 am »
https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/job-association-to-biological-sex-began-5000-years-ago-study-665338

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The peer-reviewed open-sourced study presented in PLOS analyzed over 400 stone tools which were buried in graves throughout Europe from the Early Neolithic period – which began approximately 5,000 years ago – to understand the use of each tool was. They then looked at the biological sex of the person it was buried with.

Through this method, researchers found a consistent correlation; males were more commonly buried with tools used for hunting, butchery, woodwork, or generally violent tools, while females were more often buried with stone tools used on leather or animal hides.
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There were, however, certain geographical exceptions and differences, depending on the community in Europe, suggesting that farming patterns – and labor sharing by sex – were different as they spread across the continent.
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The study noted also that early findings suggest that females and children were more physically battered than the males, while the male adults were the ones most often found with interpersonal violent stone tools or weapons.

So, once again, teaching Gentiles to farm does not turn them into Aryans.

How do I know these were Gentiles who had learned to farm? Let's go to the research paper:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249130#sec018

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In contrast to males, females are not often associated with bone and stone tools
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It is certainly striking the fact that different dietary groups in life received different treatment after death, and that those dietary groups were tightly related to biological sex. In this sense, higher δ15N dietary values reflecting a richer protein intake tended to be related to male individuals. In turn, the higher those δ15N values were, more were males likely to be buried with more stone and bone tools

rp

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Re: Uneducable Gentiles
« Reply #4 on: May 20, 2021, 09:47:13 pm »
Indus Valley diet consisted of pig and cattle meat:


Not surprising.

As the saying goes, you can take a non-Aryan (Vanavasi) to the water (river Indus)....
« Last Edit: May 20, 2021, 10:16:14 pm by rp »

rp

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Re: Uneducable Gentiles
« Reply #5 on: April 26, 2022, 10:05:11 pm »


More about kimchi:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi
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Kimchi (/ˈkɪmtʃiː/; Korean: 김치, romanized: gimchi, IPA: [kim.tɕʰi]), is a traditional Korean side dish of salted and fermented vegetables, such as napa cabbage and Korean radish. A wide selection of seasonings are used, including gochugaru (Korean chili powder), spring onions, garlic, ginger, and jeotgal (salted seafood), etc.[1][2] Kimchi is also used in a variety of soups and stews. As a staple food in Korean cuisine, it is eaten as a side dish with almost every Korean meal.[3]

I suspect it was gentiles that introduced the seafood seasoning, given what we know about fishing gentiles being the first to learn Aryan crafts.

The origins of Kimchi seem to substantiate this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi#Early_history
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Samguk Sagi, a historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, also mentions the pickle jar used to ferment vegetables, which indicates that fermented vegetables were commonly eaten during this time.[19][20] During the Silla dynasty (57 BC – AD 935), kimchi became prevalent as Buddhism caught on throughout the nation and fostered a vegetarian lifestyle.[21]

« Last Edit: April 26, 2022, 10:31:05 pm by rp »

antihellenistic

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Re: Non-Aryan tribalism
« Reply #6 on: March 09, 2024, 04:49:36 pm »
Ancient Root of Endless Competition and Economic Capitalism

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Should we be surprised that Diamond’s assessment of Europe’s uniqueness in comparison to the Americas is only about its lethal diseases and weapons? In his remarkably successful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), he contends that the ultimate causes for the faster rate of development of the Eurasian continent in relation to the other continents were the greater availability of potentially domesticable species and a geography conducive to the diffusion of useful species. He further argues, though in far less detail, that Europe’s advantage over China within the Eurasian landmass lay in its geographical fragmentation in contrast to China’s open spaces, which made centralization early on in its history possible, whereas Europe’s division resulted in the generation of a highly competitive inter-state system which promoted technological innovations and the pursuit of power. I will address this argument later.

...

Snooks’s work, however, needs to be supplemented by more empirically-oriented historical accounts. Peter Bogucki’s The Origins of Human Society (1999) synthesizes recent findings and interpretive issues in world prehistory, bringing archeologically-based insights into a book written in the grand overview tradition of classical evolutionary theory. The argument he advances, plainly stated, is that among hunting and gathering societies there were already present ambitious individuals who wanted to enhance their self-interest. He borrows this idea from Brian Hayden (1995), whom I cited earlier in reference to the “self-interested” behavior of big men. He draws from J. E. Clark and M. Blake (1989) the term “aggrandizer” to refer to any ambitious and aggressive individual striving to achieve a higher status by economic means. Hayden is quite explicit in asserting that individual self-interest is “the ultimate determining force behind human behavior” (23). This is an assumption that is at the base of all evolutionary or sociobiological models. This is not to say that all humans are uniformly wired to maximize their self-interest. Rather, being self-interested is a central aspect of our human nature, which manifests itself in different ways across history, and to a higher degree among some individuals. These “individual aggrandizers” were kept in check during much of the hunting and gathering era. They were given freer rein only when it became possible to pursue one’s self-interest without threatening the survival chances of the villagers. Bogucki follows this line of reasoning to argue, in his case study of Europe, that until about 12,000 years ago Paleolithic bands kept these individuals in check insofar as it was in the survival interests of everyone to enforce strong sharing norms. But with the end of the Ice Age, new opportunities were created through a prolonged sequence of ecological changes (127–159). Essentially, these new environmental conditions came to function as incubators for individual aggrandizers who were finally afforded with opportunities to emerge as major agents of social change (209). Rather than speaking in terms of demographic and ecological “laws of nature,” Bogucki argues that these new conditions made it possible for these individuals to make their own choices, improve their own lives, and accumulate more resources.

He envisions a situation in which individual households increasingly acted independently of the collective band units, each making their own decisions regarding the acquisition of resources, property, favors, and obligations, with differential degrees of success. Given the natural inequalities between households operating under competitive conditions (in a world of scarce resources, random risks and uncertainties) the long-term outcome of such autonomous choices was the emergence of ranked tribal organizations. Bogucki avoids a “free market” image (in which some individual households would have emerged to the top by racing ahead of the others) by observing that inequality could have emerged gradually as some households dropped below a particular material baseline, while a few remained at the original level. The more successful ones – the ones with the more enterprising individuals – could thus be envisioned as consolidating and perpetuating their relative gains. As this process unfolded, the norms for cooperative sharing were further eroded, which in turn augmented interhousehold competition. According to Bogucki, by the late Neolithic Era, over the period 4000–2000 BC, Europe had undergone a “remarkable transformation” as “transegalitarian” or “ranking” tribal groups came to emerge throughout the continent, with households competing for status and prestige, and their differences becoming progressively greater, leading eventually to the formation of chiefdoms and rigid hierarchies

Steven Mithen, an archeologist of Europe who specializes in the “Mesolithic” period (12,000–7,000 BC) – situated between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods – believes that even prior to the rise of “big men” in Neolithic societies there were already signs of “intense competition” amongst complex foragers. He thinks that this competition “may have been the motor behind the innovation of new technology that allowed additional resources to be exploited so that surpluses could be created” (2002: 133). The use of pottery, sedentism, and ranking were once believed to have emerged with farming. Mithen, however, notes that these phenomena were generated during the Mesolithic era, “one of the most critical periods in European prehistory” (79). This period saw not only the end of egalitarian relations and the rise of ambitious households, but also the rise of a ranked society combined with incipient agriculture. Like Bogucki, he ties these changes to a whole sequence of environmental changes, to which I would add the end of the final cold spell known as the Younger Dryas (which lasted from about 10,800 until 9,600 BC) and with it the resulting dramatic spread of vegetation, and the migration and availability of animals. These social changes included an “immense diversification” of microlith technology, extensive use of organic materials for the manufacture of tools (93–98), substantial dwellings with numerous pits and features representing storage, fishing techniques indicating that marine resources were being “systematically exploited,” domesticated dogs and techniques such as burning, weeding, and irrigation suggesting the beginnings of cultivation and a sedentary lifestyle (100–111).

Mithen portrays Mesolithic foragers as extremely knowledgeable and flexible individuals, continually making decisions from a “cost-benefit-risk perspective” (118). The marked variability in the quantity and quality of grave items suggests that the “first ranked societies of Europe appeared during the Mesolithic” (125). In addition to the “natural” distinctions of age, sex, and personality that were evident in egalitarian societies, there were new hereditary and property distinctions. These were not cultures living in a state of equilibrium waiting to be pushed into stratified relations by population pressures: “the Mesolithic was not a period of stasis in European history; rather it was a time of considerable socio-economic change” (132). Clearly, as Mithen recognizes, the intensification of economic practices brought increases in population densities and thus pressures upon land resources. These pressures, in turn, forced foragers to further diversify and improve their subsistence base, leading to the establishment of social boundaries and territoriality, and ranking and competition for status and power.

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 45, 48, 49, 50
« Last Edit: March 09, 2024, 04:53:25 pm by antihellenistic »

antihellenistic

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Re: Western Democracy
« Reply #7 on: March 10, 2024, 10:42:18 pm »
Ancient Autocratic Socialist States solved the inter-group of human violence that Constantly Happened during the Stone Age era

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Hobbes has been persistently criticized for describing the state of nature as if it were made up of isolated individuals, but this is inaccurate. Of course, his account of the “savage people” is clearly insufficient as it was based on the scanty anthropological reports of his time. But this should not impugn the value of Hobbes’s main point, which is that the question of conflict resolution in early societies was fragilely dispersed over many competing leaders and kinship groups. Societies lacking in centralized rule in the form of codified law, police, and diplomatic treaties, were more likely to experience continuous and prolonged intergroup feuds and killings.

During the last decades anthropologists and sociologists have generally believed that inter-group warfare made its appearance only after the emergence of “selfish” ruling classes. As Mead famously entitled one of her essays, “warfare is only an invention – not a biological necessity” (1940). Some scholars did acknowledge that warfare existed among a number of hunting and gathering societies, but they argued nonetheless that it “increased substantially during the horticultural era” (Lenski and Nolan 1995: 132). While Harris paid attention to the “unusual” warlike behavior of Yanamamo men living in simple horticultural cultures, he accounted for this behavior in terms of its adaptive function. It was a rather forced explanation: the Yanamamo engaged in war because this violent behavior functionally worked to encourage them to concentrate their scarce resources on the raising of future boy warriors by practicing girl infanticide, which provided an overall check on population pressure and, in turn, increased their adaptability (1974: 75–80).

There is no need to appeal to this type of contrived explanation. Hunting and gathering societies experienced conflict over a wide range of issues related to scarce resources and the self-interested drives of humans over such matters as territorial rights, marriage arrangements, and restitution for past grievances. Fierce raids were common. These raids were not allowed to escalate into full-scale battles, or into wars of conquest, because hunters and gatherers had no use for more land and slaves, and because the loss of too many men could easily threaten the survival of the remaining members in the band (Snooks 1996: 271). The sociobiological or Darwinian argument is not that all humans are inevitably driven to act violently, and that all hunting and gathering societies have always been similarly warlike. Aggression is in our genes, “but only as a skill, potential, propensity, or predisposition” (Gat: 39). It is a “basic and central skill” of the human species which was selected over many millions of years of evolution as a very successful option in the struggle for survival.

Gat thinks that competition for resources and reproduction is the primary cause of aggression. Humans tend to propagate rapidly when resources are abundant, and so population pressure and competition tend to be the norm in nature. But this does not mean that human competition per se is a creation of the environment. Scarce resources may intensify the competition but humans, according to Gat, are still predisposed to maximize their reproductive chances and increase their competitive advantages. Territorial disputes and raiding expeditions against other bands or tribes were actually common even in low population density areas with rich ecological niches. Gat observes that “across the whole range of hunter-gatherer societies, from the simplest to the most complex,” lethal raiding, abduction of women, and blood feuds were widespread (11–35). He calculates that, on average, “human violent mortality rates among adults in the state of nature may have been in the order of 15 percent (25 percent for the men)” – a percentage higher than for advanced civilizations even during such devastating periods of warfare as the Second Punic War (218–202 bc), the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the First World War, and the Second World War (Gat: 131–2)!

What humanitarian materialists have ignored – in their emotional attachment to the “sharing and generosity” of primitive peoples – is that the rise of chiefly authority and the monopolization of force by states “promoted happiness,” to use the words of Jared Diamond, “by maintaining public order and curbing violence”(1999: 277). Diamond, a geographical determinist with strong sympathies for primitive lifestyles, correctly recognizes that the maintenance of order and the settling of disputes is “a big underappreciated advantage of centralized societies over noncentralized ones” (277). One could go further and argue that the energies that had hitherto been expended in prolonged bloody feuds could now be redirected – after the consolidation of authority at the top – against other peoples in the pursuit of conquest and glory. The worldly success, the empire-making, the grandeur we associate with Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, would have been a historical impossibility in the state of nature. The expansion, refinement, and enrichment of man’s distinctive intellectual capacities, the realization of the potentialities of brain power developed by biological evolution, would have remained hidden without the rise of stratification, elites, and the invention of writing.

Source :

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization Ricardo Duchesne page 42, 43, 44