True, hunters and gatherers do not raise their own food, but they do produce
instruments that enhance if not enable the effectivity of their subsistence
activity. Developed hunting and gathering practice appears often to be
accompanied by collecting strategies that encourage the preservation of
their food sources, such as never killing nursing young or pregnant game and
taking care to leave some of the preferred plants in the ground to guarantee
next year's crop.
Most proto or near humans exhibit some instrument enabled activity, some of
it quite complex. Try ant fishing with a bit of grass (a narrow fresh green
leaf is best) as do the Chimpanzees. Clearly, the earliest forms of tool
assisted activity precede humanities emergence, men's special relations to
tool making and use being more a matter of its high significance for his
life activity rather than in its simple presence in a creature's repertoire
of activities.
By the way, the key word in hunting and gathering is "gathering". To gather
means to collect a quantity of whatever is to be gathered and to take it
home to enjoy later at the family meal. Very little can be carried home in
two closed fists. One may need not make a basket to collect greens, but they
should be arranged in a bundle so that a few leaves can hold much more than
a pair of hands. Stems twisted to make string or even simple knots may well
have been the first tools, but tools they are.
Oudeyis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx
andthe thinkers he inspired'" <marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 22:11
Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
Steve Gabosch quotes:
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or
anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves
from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence,
a
step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing
their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual
material life.
^^^^^
CB: Actually this isn't quite true. The first human modes of production
are
termed "hunting and gathering" because humans do not produce their own
subsistence, but rather gather what nature has produced without human
intervention. , so to speak. That doesn't happen until tens of thousands
of
years after the origin of the human species with horticulture, farming and
domestication of animals.
I'm not sure what implication this has for our dialectics and nature
discussion
What distinguishes humans from other animials is culture, language and
methods of passing on experiences from one generation to the next.
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