I wrote:
> . . . they pass on cultural and technical knowledge. (People obviously > more than chimps!) This created an advantage to surviving into old age. > Especially during long span of history in which we had language but no > writing, and the only store of knowledge was in people's brains . . . > A vivid example of this was in the movie "The Seven Samurai." The village is in huge trouble, about to be attacked by brigands. Someone suggests they fight back. They debate this and go to the village elder to decide. He says: "When I was a lad, after one of the wars, the villages all around were sacked, except one, where they hired Samurai . . ." He had knowledge of a rare event 60 years earlier, in a society which was largely illiterate, in an isolated place where news and knowledge did not travel far. That movie, by the way, is probably the most accurate movie portrayal of Edo-period peasant living conditions we will ever see. Unless someone invents a time-machine, that is the closest we will ever get. You could not make something like it today. Experts may know how to make houses, and plenty of people still know how to ride horses or use ancient weapons, but you could not find people with that body type from the pre-WWII diet, or people who talk like that. Other movies set in pre-modern Japan seem utterly fake compared to it, even to me, and I am no expert. Even the other movies by Kurosawa are fake. It was made just beyond the living memory of the Edo period, 90 years after it ended. It was set in 1600, but the life style, weapons, food and whatnot were still current in 1868. It was similar to making a WWI epic today. There are still enough people around today whose grandfathers fought in WWI or flew Sopwith Camels to give a movie verisimilitude. There will not be anyone like that in 2070. It is interesting to think about the flow of time and receding memory, which recedes even with books, photographs and video. - Jed
