> Our lives are far more driven and less leisured.
> We have (if we have money or social democracy) more
> security and better health care, but defibitely less
> leisure. jks
Very true. We also have heaps of technology the Stone Age didn't have, of course (much, though not all, based on scientific discoveries), and a far greater breadth of ideas, world-views, etc., we can pick and choose from and communicate from one society and part of the world to all others.
I would also point out that it is a mistake to think of Stone-Agers as lacking in scientific knowledge, if you mean by that a lack of empirically based knowledge organized into concepts and theories. After all, their average intelligence was presumably about the same as ours, assuming that their brains were built about the same as ours, and there is no reason to think that they weren't as curious as we are about their surroundings. In fact, surviving "primitive" peoples living in rain forests, for example, have been found to have a knowledge of their environment which impresses modern Western biologists very favorably -- they have to know quite a bit about the local flora and fauna in order to know what is edible and poisonous, etc., as well as using their natural curiosity and the leisure time you refer to to study the world around them.
Would Stone-Age atheism have been invented and developed? Of course, there are no written records on the subject, and AFAIK, the surviving indigenous peoples don't have any such traditions. But we know that atheist/materialist views developed fairly soon after writing became common in places like India and Greece (and in somewhat different forms in China), so I would guess that it has something to do with the intellectual development that writing produced. This is very half-assed speculation which I'm not at all sure of (warning!), but it may be that pre-literate societies, dependent on memory for transmitting ideas and information, tend to be very slow to change their world-views, etc., because one can easily get confused between what one remembered one's elders said and the new ideas one thought of oneself. So they tend to be very "conformist." Whereas, once writing is pretty well developed and folks start writing down religious/metaphysical materials, they can put new ideas in separate documents from the ones containing the traditional ones.
People who are more expert than I in economic theories of history could say something about how this is related to economic classes, means of production, etc.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. -- Nietzsche