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and a person’s tribal identity depended on his or her totem rather than his territory.
This, after all, was one of the main legacies of the Cognitive Revolution. Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.
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 are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
There is no evidence that people traded staple goods like fruits and meat,
Most Sapiens bands lived on the road,
But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
‘niches for imbeciles’
But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.
the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom.
Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature.
Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.
Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.
These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage.
We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.
people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.
The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed
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The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.
This also explains the perversity of our current capitalist economy.
This was the turning point, they say, where Sapiens cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation.
Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature.
The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had ever been before. Farmers
Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
The French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished peasants.
While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.
Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.
Even prisons and concentration camps are cooperation networks, and can function only because thousands of strangers somehow manage to coordinate their actions.
Our personal desires thereby become the imagined order’s most important defences.
Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.
There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.
is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1
Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.
Standardisation was a boon to emperors.
Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys.
As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC.
Hence the first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.
the sky god and the god of medicine took centre stage when plants and animals lost their ability to speak,
and the gods’ main role was to mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals.
Hello Julian Jaynes
classical Greek polytheism, Zeus, Hera, Apollo and their colleagues were subject to an omnipotent and all-encompassing power – Fate (Moira, Ananke). Nordic gods, too, were in thrall to fate, which doomed them to perish in the cataclysm of Ragnarök (the Twilight of the Gods). In the polytheistic religion of the Yoruba of West Africa, all gods were born of the supreme god Olodumare, and remained subject to him.
Yet at the same time they continued to view Him as possessing interests and biases, and believed that they could strike deals with Him.
Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host.
The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars.
He missteps here - there is no way to equate economic output denominated in any currency across these changes.
Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.
it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future.
This is patently not true. Algorithms replace the religions and ideologies is all.
There is no scientific answer to this question.
Patently not true!
but because the dairy industry, which stands to benefit from the research, has more political and economic clout than the animal-rights lobby.
That is precisely a scientific reason.
In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy.
