FriendBurst Blog

I have been reading a lot of caveman books lately.  I’ve read two novels from Jean Auel’s  Clan of the Cave Bear series, and I just finished the first book from Harry Harrison’s West of Eden series.

There is something really deep down that resonates with me when I read these pieces of Stone age fiction…

Anthropologists disagree as to what specific  innovations mark the “beginning” of human civilization, but the way I learned it, there are four hallmarks that a society must own to be categorized as “civilized”… They are:

Agriculture: You have to be dependent upon the stability of plants and yearly crops to be considered civilized.

Calendar:  To be a civilization, you have to know what day it is.

Writing:  Some way of recording in a lasting medium messages of import.

Hierarchy: Some people have to lead over others.  Monarchy, Theocracy, whatever.

The first civilizations that could qualify under all four of those criteria began about 400o BC in Mesopotamia.

Civilization didn’t come to everyone all at once.  There are still societies in Amazonia, New Guinea and the Kalahari that can’t fulfill the four criteria I list above.  Anthropologists love these guys because they allow us glimpses of how ALL of us lived for hundreds of generations before the advent of civilization.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens evolved in Africa about 100,000 years ago.  It took us another 80,000 years to spread around the globe, subjugate or eliminate the Neanderthals or the last remnants of homo erectus.  So that represents about 400 generations of humans to influence how we think and act.  The “Age of Rationality” has been what?  7? 10 generations?

My point is that, biologically,  we are still hunter-gatherers living in the modern world.

The liberal-conservative divide may be based on socioeconomic factors that would baffle Grog The Hunter, but how we act, interact and confront the enemy in our conflicts reflect how Grog fought Og; the vary basis of ANY external political position derives from remnants of how hunter gatherer societies  dealt with the people on “the other side of the hills”…

I feel for the fans of Indiana and Atlanta as they battle the warriors of Chicago & Orlando and the chieftains Rose and Howard.

Let us assume my reader is neither descended from the ancient Egyptians nor is a tribesman from New Guinea…  Let us assume your ancestors got “civilized” 50 to 100 generations ag1o.  Realize this: you were “human” another 500 to 2500 generations before that!!  Then again, “rationality” only began to be worshipped as a quasi religion about 6 generations ago…

Here is my point of my missive:

Your monkey genes still influence who you are.

You are a member of a civilization that is still influenced by hunter-gatherer attitudes on gender roles, reproductive priorities and dominance.  That is why we insist men must be hunters, women must give birth to as many babies as they can and why we must impose our tribe’s way of life on those brown folks on the other side of the mountains.

Okay…and now the camp Shaman will hammer on some mammoth bones to make some entertainment…