|
I of course reject the concept of the "hunter gatherer"
because it cannot be substantiated. Rather, man evolutionary path indicates that
he was a gathering shaping stone instruments for digging and shaping objects.
Further, what we call economics or economic relations arises - in its
fundamentality, on the basis of agricultural relations - gathering, rather than
hunting animals or domestication of animals. The concept of the hunter gatherer
rather than the gathering and then the gatherer hunter, arises in the
ideological sphere as justification for violence and violent subjugation of
"others."
"Western man" at first believed that man originated in Asia
some 500,000 years ago, but as older fossils were found, it became evident that
the mills of evolution grind much, much slower. Our ancestor apes are now placed
at a staggering 25 - 40,000,000 ago. Discoveries in East Africa reveal a
transition to manlike apes (hominids) some 14,000,000 years ago and this past
Saturday I watched a program that reconstructed a human like skull dated to be
7,000,000 years old. It was about 11,000,000 years later that the first ape-like
man worthy of the classification Homo first appeared in Africa.
Apparently the first being considered to be truly manlike -
"Advanced Australopithecus" - existed in the same parts of African some
2,000,000 years ago. It took another million years to produce Homo erectus. Then
after another 900,000 years, the first primitive Man papered: he is named
Neanderthal after the site where his remains were first found.
In spite of the passage of more than 2,000,000 years between
Advanced Australopithecus and Neanderthal, the tools of these two groups - sharp
stones, were virtually alike and the groups themselves were hardly
distinguishable. There are several complex biological reasons why these tools
were not used primary - if at all, for killing animals and eating their flesh.
Under most circumstances modern man does not hunt and eat other modern men. Why
should it be any different with Advanced Australopithecus and early Neanderthal,
who had yet distinguished themselves from other animals in their environment?
Then there are biological reasons why the body would reject means flesh in an
unaltered state of decomposition.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, some 35,000 years ago, a new
kind of man - Homo Sapiens (thinking man) appeared as if from nowhere, and swept
Neanderthal Man from the face of the earth. The modern man - named Cro-Magnon,
looked so much like us that, if dressed like us in modern clothes, they would be
lost in the crowds of New York, the landscape of Nigeria or even a large city in
China.
As mysterious and unexplianed as the appearence of Cro-Magnon
Man has been, the puzzle is still more complicated. For, as other remains of
modern Man were discovered it became apparent that Cro-Magnon man stemmed from
an even earlier Homo spaien who lived in western Asia and North Africa some
250,000 years before Cro-Magnon man.
The appearence of modern man a mere 700,000 years after Homo
erectus and some 200,000 years before Neanderthal Man does not make sense, given
the slow evolutionary process and the evidence that many of our features, such
as the ability to speak, seems to be unrelated to the earlier
primates.
How did the ancestor of modern Man appear 300,000 years ago -
instead of 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 in the further following evolutionary
development? We now know where civilization began - more than less, and the
unanswered question is why and why did our modern civilizations come about? If
man took some 2,000,000 to advance in his "tool industries" to
the realization that he actually shape them to better suit his purposes,
why not another 2,000,000 years to learn to use other matters and say another
10,000,000 years to master math and engineering and astronomy?
What these early stone tools were used for a question I have
tried to study and think out and I am convinced beyond doubt that man used such
tools for gathering and defense rather than as hunters.
I ran across a reference to a book by R. J. Braidwood and B.
Howe (Prehistorical Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan) summarizing the works of
many scholars stating that genetic studies concluded and confirm the
archaeological finds that leave no doubt that agriculture began exactly where
this so-called "Thinking Man" had emerged. By agriculture is mean something more
sophisticated than gathering. There is no doubt, at this stage of the
investigation, that agriculture spread all over the world from the Near
Eastern arc of mountains and highlands.
Another riddle appears . . . why the highlands and mountains
rather than the flat plains?
Noah arch or the immense tidal wave of 13,000 - 12,000 years
ago that left the flat plains soggy and unusable. Obviously the name Noah is a
more than less Westernized corruption from earlier Summerian text. However, the
hunter gather is a bogus concept that cannot be authenticated and no one in
modern times even tries to authenticate it, rather than the more accurate
gatherer and then gatherer - hunter. To authenticate the hunter gatherer as a
concept one must minimally present a reasonable scenario whereby the gatherer is
driven to reverse the essence of his species activity as being and enter a path
of weapon construction, when in fact the path was agricultural tool development
and construction.
The path of our evolutionary development was indisputable
along a line of march of vegetation, fruits, nuts and then with the thinking man
the farming and cultiavtion of wheat and barley, probably through the
domestication of a wild variety of emmer.
Man did undergo a gradual process of teaching himself how to
domesticate, grow and farm wild plants but what is baffling and not settled is
the incredible profusion of other plants and cereals basic to human survival and
advancement that kept coming out of the Near East. These include in rapid
succession, millet, rye, and spelt among the edible cereals; flax, which provide
fibers and edible oil and a variety of fruit bearing shrubs and trees.
In every instance, the plants were without any doubt
domesticated in the Near East for millennia before it reached Europe. Apples,
peers, olives, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts - all originated in the Near
East and spread from there to Europe and other parts of the world. I cannot help
but recall that the Old Testament of the Bible - even in its horribly corrupted
Western version, proceeded modern science by thousands of years in identifying
the very same area as the world's first orchard.
Look . . . I am 100% communist - from the old Stalin polarity
and a materialist to boot with a rigid tendency towards productive forces
determinism, but I was taught how to read books. Later in life I learnt how to
thing out a process. This means we cannot look at ourselves and way of life and
project it backwards to explain the present. The hunter gatherer is a 100%
modern bourgeois conception and not even an old or early bourgeois approach,
when the bourgeoisie emerged dripping from the theological and philosophic
legacy of his birth. The bow is not a critical element from any standpoint in
the emergence of modern man or the development of agriculture (by definition) or
the construction of the early Temple cities of man - that is, the rise of
society.
More man is not and never has been and cannot be a hunter
gatherer and these two words as a concept convey the wrong conception of modern
man. Modern man's spontaneous impulses, based in his biological matrix, does not
drive him to seek prey but vegetation and fruits or alkaline. Prey becomes an
option under dire circumstances.
Also Engels is wrong when he states meat eating developed the
brain.
Then of course there are the Summerian
(Shurmerian) legends of the origin of cities and society worth
investigating.
More later.
Waistline
JD: isn't blamng the bow an example of technological
determinism?
^^^ CB: I'd say so. On the other hand, the alternative theory - the origin of agriculture, which is to say a whole set of cultivation technology, farming science, etc. - also relies on some technological determinism at this level. Very sketchily, after 200,000 years of hunting and gathering,with very little surplus production, "somebody" decides do some planting to save up for hardtimes. We could speculate that it is some kind of environmental disaster for a particular group in Mesopotamia that causes a serious scarcity. People decide to start producing surpluses to save against some future disaster. Necessity is the mother of invention. The surplus production allows more "leisure" time for some to develop the science of cultivation. Somehow at some point some of these newly differentiated predominantly mental laborers decide to become the first ruling class...the rest is history, a history of class struggles. So, there's a technological prime mover in there. |
