Al-Q Honcho Hit

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Nov 6 12:28:54 PST 2002


Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
>
> This conflates "civilization" and "rules for governing social
> "interactions". The latter can exist without the former. In fact,
> the vast majority of human history consists of "uncivilized"
> societies with informal social rules.
>

It's amazing how little anthropology or "pre-history" so many people seem to know. It reminds me of my freshman & sophomore students who thought El Salvador was in the mideast. Taking the narrowest definition of "human," or species goes back around 100,000 -- anything termed "civilized" goes back about 5000. How did we ever survive 95000 years of war of all against all?

But of course "rules for regulating social action" must have preceded "homo sapiens" by a few hundred thousand, or there wouldn't be a homo sapiens.

Carrol


> Miles



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