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Thanks to their ability to invent fiction, Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and elaborates even further.
Why, for example, do people gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies?
one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare.
not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover.
The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient
hunter-gatherers were made of wood.
Our eating habits are mediated by a mind-boggling collection of such items, from spoons and glasses to genetic engineering labs and gigantic ocean-going ships.
Our romantic and sexual relations are accoutred by rings, beds, nice clothes, sexy underwear, condoms, fashionable restaurants, cheap motels, airport lounges, wedding halls and catering companies.
Gothic churches, Muslim mosques, Hindu ashrams, Torah scrolls, Tibetan prayer wheels, priestly cassocks, candles, incense, Christmas tree...
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Foragers moved house every month, every week, and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs.
They consequently had to make do with only the most essential possessions.
that the greater part of their mental, religious and emotional lives was conducted with...
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The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens.
There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens
Trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigments.
preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity.
Walden
What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You
about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise.
Children who made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, forty-five-year-old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5–8 per cent of the population is over sixty.6
Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.
Both women and men were free to change partners at will. They smiled and laughed constantly, had no leadership hierarchy, and generally shunned domineering people.
They viewed the killing of children, sick people and the elderly as many people today view abortion and euthanasia.
The Aché were neither angels nor fiends – they were humans.
The generic rubric ‘theists’ covers Jewish rabbis from eighteenth-century Poland, witch-burning Puritans from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Aztec priests from fifteenth-century Mexico, Sufi mystics from twelfth-century Iran, tenth-century Viking warriors, second-century Roman legionnaires, and first-century
Each of these viewed the others’ beliefs and practices as weird and heretical.
is better to be frank and admit that we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers.
It’s one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history.
During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence – and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history. If this revelation is typical, the ancient Danube Valley was as violent as the twentieth century.*
