It seems that the fact that the vast majority of modern humanity's time on earth has been spent as hunter gathers that as a way of life it might have more going for it than that they were too dumb to know better.
History and contradiction are one in the same thing, but the idea of progress, in the simple sense, is a widespread and deep prejudice.
A better understanding of prehistory not only rescues the humanity of the past but is a critique of the present. Likewise the view of progress as merely an accumulation of technical knowledge is blinding to the real dynamics of social change, both in the past and in the present.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia
--- Message Received --- From: Eric Franz Leher <fr102anz at netvigator.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 19:47:10 +0800 Subject: Re: Hunter-gatherers
Greg Schofield wrote:
> The main feature which made farmers successful is not their
> health or their environmental abilities, but that farming allowed higher
> concentrations of people, not necessarily more people, but more people in
> the one spot for longer.
>
> In otherwords the advantage was military.
>
Entirely correct. So even if agriculture was a comparatively dumb idea
(more hours devoted to gaining food, for what may have been in fact a
net loss of nutritional value per individual; production of surplus and
the advent of class society), we end up stuck with it just because the
farmers outfought the hunters from weight of numbers.
Eric Leher