10/24/22 -Anthropology -Lecture 12

Handout on forms of human society

Stone Age / So-called Civilization

Stone Age:

1) Sexual _Equity_ or equal status : Division of Labor: foraging labor/childcare labor

Egalitarian between adults; Adults/Children is the only hierarchy; no state or standing bodies of armed men as in Civilization.

2) Public or Shared Property; very small toolkit relative to Civilization technology . The land is shared. Foraging , Hunting and gathering, direct appropriation of wild plants and animals, is done socially, not individually. Childcare also done socially, not in “nuclear family”. Nomadic, mobile , temporary settlements .

Stone , bone and wood are the hard material out of which technology is made.

3) Ancestor Veneration : Society organized based on Language-Culture-Tradition-Morality passed on from Dead Ancestor Generations. This tradition is passed on orally and in pictures.

4) See Marshall Sahlins’s essay “The Original Affluent Society” on the Comparative Method inference that life in the Stones Age was _not_ nasty, brutish , miserable or starving compared with life in So-called Civilization. Not only that Stone Age didn’t have War or poverty, defined as difficulty in satisfying basic needs and culturally required needs. Quote Sahlins.

So-Called Civilization:

1) Male supremacy or unequal status between males and females : however, continuing with same division of labor

2) Males divided into economic classes based on private property. There begins production on a _large scale_ ( larger than in the Neo-lithic) , in the form of planting seeds, cultivation , and domestication of animals . Private property means slaves doing the work, producing surpluses to support the masters , and for trade. This is the origin of trade, commodity production , or production for exchange.

3) Origin of the State, or standing bodies of armed men , who capture slaves and force them to produce the surpluses; and give up them up to ownership of the masters; origin of War.

4) Origin of Cities, large settlements ( Latin root of City is Civis ; thus “Civilization”; monumental architecture ( pyramids and the like); still in stone on a larger scale.

5) Origin of alphabetic Writing 6) Origin of Religion, with _immortal_ individual beings, Gods.

10/26/22 -Anthropology 152- Lecture 13

What am I getting at on the questions under A) on Test 3 ? Usually the term “Civilization” or Civilized is used to refer to human society that is superior morally and technologically to the Stone Age human societies. The popular image of “cavemen” and Neanderthals is of brutes, savages who drag women around by the hair and presumably force themselves on them. Cannibals who are in regular and frequent conflict with each other .

Civilization is superior technologically in that it has an increasingly more productive social organization and technology. With Civilization population size begins to grow more and is more concentrated than in the Stone Age. So , in that regard , Civilization is superior to the Stone Age on the Darwinian Fitness/Adaptation test, moving further from potential extinction/zero population.

On the other hand, the total population of the Stone Age was growing and perpetuated for approximately 2.5 million years; and it was able to adapt to the full range of environmental types , from arctic to rain forest. Civilization has only existed for about 6,000 years, a tiny fraction of the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age . And , importantly, tragically, “civilized’ technology has gone so far as to invent NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Nuclear war at this stage would probably create a “nuclear winter’, similar to the “winter” created by the comet that hit the Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. So, by So-called Civilization originating War between members of the same species, and super-destructive war technology, weapons, it has created a potentially UNFIT /EXTINCTION/POPULATION LOSS , in the Darwinian sense, dynamic for the human species. Civilization has 100,000s of years to go before it equals the Stone Age longevity of the human species.

Not only that: War with even less than nuclear destructive potential , with swords, knives, clubs, guns and other weapons USED ON MEMBERS OF OUR OWN SPECIES is morally inferior – real savagery/barbarism- to Stone Age largely peaceful society, in my opinion.

Furthermore, “Civilization’s” slaves work harder at food production than foragers or hunters and gatherers . This claim is based in part on Marshall Sahlins’s thesis in “ The Original Affluent Society” essay with the inference that societies through the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age were basically the same in terms of work time and intensity as Stone Age/Hunter-gatherer societies in the last 500 years; societies that Europeans _observed_ as they conquered the globe in the era of Capitalist Civilization . Civilization has more toil than Stone Age Society (See Lecture 12). A society with more leisure is superior , in my opinion.

“Civilized” society with masters exploiting production surpluses from slaves, greed; and oppressing and capturing slaves with armed force is inferior to Stone Age society where all adults are of equal status

Also, Stone Age society with equal status between women and men is morally superior to So-called Civilization’s Male Supremacist culture.

Along with the inference concerning the nature of Ancient Stone Age society from the thesis of “The Original Affluent Society”, I make the following inference concerning the superior morality of Stone Age Society ( from the Overview Lecture number 1):

Since the advent about 6,000 years ago of so-called civilization, as you have no doubt heard it referred to sometimes, it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools or controlling fire made through culture or symbolic or imaginary thinking and communication, etc, raising our species fitness, the growth of our population . This is evidenced by _Homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now named Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species ' existence, 95% or more. The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 100 people living in the ecological food chain location close to the one described in our textbook , Chapter 4, would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies or selves. Ancient kinship /family/culture /symbolic communication systems from around 2.5 million years ago ( the beginning of the Truly Civilized Stone Age) were almost super-organic bodies; the human social group was a harmonious , multi-individual Body, quasi-organism. The Individual human bodies, Selves, were very frail and weak in contrast with the bodies of the field of predators they were prey for .

The dominance of the food chain that humans, ultimately reached even in the Stone Age with relatively _frail_ individual bodies. could only be reached by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony . This was only possible with symbolic communication both within a living generation and across generations, It is clear to me that natural selection , in the classical Darwinian sense, elected hominin groups with policies and practices of of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization.

Treating each other better was critical to survival and thriving for the ancient Stone Age.

Concerning my claim that American society is white supremacist (racist), in every statistical category measuring the quality and quantity of life – life expectancy, wealth , income, quality of neighborhoods, academic attainment, etc., whites _on average_ are better off that Black and Brown people. Not every white person is better off than every Black/Brown person ; but on average it is so. The legacy of white supremacist history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation is inherited by today’s white population,

__________________ Survival of the Nice and Fertile

 THIS IS ANTHROPOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY Survival Of The Nicest? A Theory Of Our Origins Says Cooperation-Not Competition-Is Instinctive CB: Darwin’s principle is actually survival of the _fertile_ in the first place ; the fit are more fertile . Fertility success is the Darwinian definition of fitness success Being nice , cooperative is a better way to be fertile .

https://nypost.com/2019/12/31/doing-good-deeds-actually-reduces-physical-pain-study/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site+buttons&utm_campaign=site+buttons http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html "

The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species." — Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87.

http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_036.pdf v>

Antoinette Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6] FIT , physically fit , in the sense of bodily fit for success in the struggle for existence ( the Darwinian term of art for longevity in an individual organism ) surviving , getting enough to eat , not getting eaten , not falling out of a tree or off a cliff , not freezing to death , not overheating to death BEFORE REPRODUCING , BEFORE BEING FERTILE, passing on one’s genes to next generations . In Darwin's theory of natural selection concerning living beings, the "struggle" in the struggle for existence, to live, is not between Individual Selves of the same species to the point of Individual Bodies, somebodies,of the same species killing each other except very rarely. Most of the deaths before passing on genes to the next generation, are due to failures in struggles with some Individual Body of _another_ species., plant and animal, as predator and prey; or struggle against bad weather, heat exhaustion, sunburn It is easy to see how some people get a misconception of Darwinian natural selection because it _is_ posed in most of it prime formulations with a sort of emphasis on the fact of indirect "competition" in the sense that for the typical bodily form of a species to change under Darwin's theory, some members with genes that change species typical traits must more successfully pass them on than members with species typical traits over successive generations until the new trait is universal and the old typical trait is extinct. But this does not necessarily or even conventionally imply direct physical conflict between Individuals of the two types but the same species in the day-to-day struggle for existence to survive as Individual Bodies. This is demonstrated by the famous anthropological micro-evolutionary study of sickle cell genes on pages 44 to 46 of _The Essence of Anthropology_. There is no direct physical competition between the people of the various genotypes with different fitnesses in the different environments in the study. It is not an Individual , but a species, a group of the same type who "evolve", "adapt" or "survive". Individuals must live their individual life long enough to reproduce for the species to survive. However, every individual eventually dies. "Survival" of the individual means living long enough to pass on genes or a geno-type to the future generations. If mutated genes, changed geno-type, are passed on, there is a potential unit of evolution between the parent and the offspring. That is evolution occurs between Individuals of different generations, not in one Individual Self. If the mutated genotype results in a phenol-typical trait that is adaptive in some significant way, it may become an evolutionary change by the species through several individuals.

Male supremacy, greed and war are not in our genes The male supremacist family, private property (classes; greed), and the state ( special repressive apparatus ) arises as a complex together circa 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. They are still together in a complex that dominates the human species in 2018. Before that for the about 2.5 million years of the Stone Age ( true Civilization) there was gender equivalence, sharing and peace in the species; that's when we were substantially "hardwired " genetically . So, Male supremacy and class divided society and war are not in our genes. /// Ancestor veneration The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it . https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/survival-of-the-nicest/?fbclid=IwAR1eZzRTAeGl6NrV4DugDM_HVthON2Wy9khZCKnQ1Y4SbKpo3K2RomlFqEY .