Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> > [WS:] You fail to mention that they survived for
> > those millenia when there was no alternative to
> > hunting and gathering, and started vanishing as soon
> > as alternatives became available. So if those who
> > knew hunting and gathering first hand abandoned it as
> > soon as alternatives became available - perhaps this
> > life style was not that great as Western intellectuals
> > imagine it to be.
> >
> > Wojtek
>
> Their way of life is vanishing because of the enroachment of
> industrialization and agriculture, not because they willingly
> "abandoned" their way of life. Your argument reminds me of the bogus
> claim that capitalism took off in England because feudal peasants
> willingly and enthusiastically gave up their traditional way of life to
> become wage workers in factories (Michael P. nicely demolishes that myth
> in Invention of Capitalism).
'Progress' in practice has never occurred without imposing extreme misery on huge numbers. The cultivation of grain & the techique of baking bread doomed the women of neolithic cultures in the middle east to crippling from rheumatism and to spending much of their lives kneeling to grind the day's grain for the evening meal. Of course that particular horror was remedied by further 'technological progress' in milling grain -- but those crippled women were also of curse dead by then. And the newer technologies enabled new and greater horrors of oppression. Probably other forms ofn 'progress,' however, were not so massively destructive of human welfare as capitalism was and continues to be.
Carrol