I certainly believe that ideas of divinity and spirituality (not the shallow, Western lifestyle brand but the realm of the spirit) and perhaps some Jungian constructs need to be actively integrated into our psychology and sociology and pedagogy. Unfortunately I don't have much more in the way of specifics. It simply seems that we have a profound cultural deficit, and it needs to be filled.
Worlding does not required religion. 'Religion' like art, performance, polity, is an outcome and not a source, these distinctions arise in more complex economies. State-sponsored and imperial monotheism even later (we often regard polytheistic systems as many-monotheisms but this is _Belles-lettres_. Polytheism is about representation of responsibilities not command, social negotiation/performance. Foisting statist ideas of practices as religion back into the late neolithic misses the point.
"This went on and on, without one single group on the entire island of Papua conquering their neighbors and creating a bigger political unit."
Couldn't this be explained by low productivity of their lands? In places like Mesopotamia, unlike Papua, conquering one's neighbors could be extremely profitable.
There are many less productive places that were conquered by bigger groups, like, for example, Mongolia. Another example is Australia and Central Asia. Australia is not obviously less productive than Central Asia. Still, Australia was controlled by small groups of hunter-gatherers when the Europeans arrived, while Central Asia at least at times have been incorporated in empires.
I am afraid Tove K. you have no idea how extensively bad the soils are in the Sahul (Australia & New Guinea) growing up on a glacial churned landscape. Nor how extreme the terrain is on the island of NG. The central highland populations did not even meet the outside world until the 1930s and there was a huge population in near isolation due to the terrain and not the lack of ideas. Yet it was this area that domesticated the banana a lot time ago. (This is a Jared Diamond example).
However, ideas fall off me like sweat in the Australian sun, but go no where without a social support network.... a network that connects across populations, as geography and economies allow. (Take compositional poetry as an example from 30 years ago https://meika.loofs-samorzewski.com/compositionalpoetry.html )
Or, here's a quick idea, will it get taken up??
It is best to think of Aboriginal Australia (even its entire population through time) as a small to medium European city spread out over a continent. How's it going to trade with another city at the speed of any small Polis in the Aegean? Let alone the Mediterranean.
The idea of god is extremely late in this process of a social learning species finding its way when group compete for individuals
PS Henrich covers some New Guinea examples in "chiefdom" formation, are you drawing on those?
Henrich, Joseph Patrick. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton: Princeton university press.
pages 171... followed by some examples of inter-group competition in northern Australia
It is certainly true that unrelated males cooperating in large groups to solve a common problem is likely a uniquely human characteristic. That male cooperation was critical to technological development and ideas probably played a key role in that evolution.
I think a better explanation for why civilization evolved in certain places is geography. Most regions do not a natural environment that allows for productive food production given primitive technologies. So even if great ideas evolve in other areas, it does not matter, because they can acquire enough food to generate sufficient density of population.
It is quite possible, however, that in those few areas where the natural environment is conducive to higher food production, then cultural evolution takes over and those rare ideas matter. If many Hunter-Gatherers bands are in that regions, they will each evolve their own cultures based on ideas. The ideas that work best in food production, political organization, trade, and military conquest will then be able to establish a populous civilization that endures for centuries.
So I think your theory works, but you need to add in the constraints of geography and competition between groups for a full explanation.
>>I think a better explanation for why civilization evolved in certain places is geography. Most regions do not a natural environment that allows for productive food production given primitive technologies. So even if great ideas evolve in other areas, it does not matter, because they can acquire enough food to generate sufficient density of population.
There is nothing wrong with the geography of northern and eastern Australia. It is as good as any area on this planet, more or less. And still Australia was left behind when human societies increased in complexity.
Not true. The region does have many geographical advantages, but it was lacking a key factor.
Before the European conquest Australia lacked the wild ancestors of domesticated plants (wheat, corn, rice) and animals (horse, cow, pig, goat) so they could never evolve very productive food techniques. Australia is also very isolated from regions that did have these plants and animals (unlike Europe).
In addition, northern Australia had a savanna biome so was very unlikely to support productive agriculture. Eastern Australia has a Temperate Forest biome, which is conducive to productive agriculture, but it was very far from other agricultural regions.
That is why the human population density was so low and the complexity of technology was so low in Australia. Once the British brought domesticated plants and animals (as well as modern technologies) a massive growth of population became possible.
This is quite similar to what happened in North America.
But pre-colonial Australia did have an inflow of both dingos and, at a later stage, human genes from the outside. So it wasn't isolated in an absolute sense.
Have you ever tried to tried to train a dingo to pull a plow? I am pretty confident that the Aborigines were never able to.
Aborigines occasionally ate dingoes and sometimes raised them from pups as companions that might help in hunting, but they were never trained on a large scale as a systematic food-hunting aid.
Not sure what you mean by “at a later stage, human genes from the outside.” If you are referring to the British, this does not refute my argument at all.
If you do not think that Australia was not isolated enough, can you name a major technology that was transferred from Agrarian societies in Asia to the Aborigines before the Europeans arrived?
If the Aborigines were engaged in widespread seaborne trade with Chinese, Japan, Thai, Java, and Vietnamese that would have overcome their isolation, but I know of no evidence that this occurred.
If you already knew about the Jared Diamond explanation, then why did you start by claiming that there was nothing wrong with Australian geography?
The Aborigines were engaged in at least small-scale trade with Indonesians, who camw every year to fish for sea cucumbers. Here's the first link I found discussing some of the evidence: https://youtu.be/R_ztpo8ExkU?si=SElzimGyEV5ctMWI
Australia really isn't that far away from everywhere else; I'd be danged if the Chinese didn't know about it, but they weren't super interested in oceanic exploration most of the time, and the Australians didn't have much to trade.
As for draft animals, the Aztecs/Incas/Mayas/Olmecs/Puebloans/Cahokians etc didn't have them, either, but they still farmed and built cities.
I am not sure what you mean by “Indonesia” as it did not exist during that time period. The region also had a huge amount of variation of types of societies, largely due to geography. The only Agrarian society in the region that I know of was Java.
Until there is solid evidence of technology transfer between Java or China and the Aborigines, then I think whatever trade there existed was not relevant to the Aborigines long-term development.
Yes, Aborigines did not have much to trade. That is kind of the point. They had a very low level of development due to geographical constraints.
The constraints of geography on human societies are a lot more complicated than just a few factors.
South America and Mesoamerica had very different geographies from Australia. So they evolved to different types of societies, but a lack of animal-traction plows was a huge constraint. They did have maize and potatoes, which were a great staple crop.
"Nothing wrong" was a wrong way to put it. If course there is always something wrong with all geography and Australia doesn't have the best geography in the world. The reason why I'm not applying the Jared Diamond explanation is that I don't believe very much in it anymore. I believe much more in population density and ideas (the two are related, of course) as the most important factor that led to the primacy of Eurasia. I'm working on a theory about it.
As far as I know there was no major copying of technology from India, but the gene flow is interesting.
To be clear, I think the Jared Diamond explanation seriously underplays the role of many geographical factors (such as biome, soil type, proximity to the Middle East, proximity to the Central Asian steppe herders). I believe that my theory offers far more explanatory power.
As I mentioned in the first comment, ideas obviously matter, and I like that you include population density as an independent variable. It is hard to see how dense populations can grow without plenty of food. And geography highly constrains food production. So geography is key cause of population density (but not the only one).
If would love to hear more about your theory, but perhaps this is the wrong place. Feel free to comment on my articles. I enjoy the conversation with differing opinions.
Social technologies vs physical technologies is an interesting distinction. Social technologies form culture, but they are also much more slow moving than physical tech. If someone invents a new more efficient pump, you are likely to see it spread all over the world in no time, while if someone comes up with a better way to ensure healthcare for all, it will take ages to spread, if it happens at all. Same for better ways of doing democracy or governance in general. I guess our cultures have a high resistance to changes that would affect the culture itself.
One thing I feel missing in your thesis is the role of variance. Even in you base case, the Chimpanzes, you really have to bring in Bonobos as well as a prime example of how a change in environment can effect a totally different culture.
Same with human cultures. We have lots of examples of cultures under heavy environmental pressure, like on Papua New Guinea or the Yanomamo, who evolved into horrific violent cultures. But we also have lots of example of cultures that that seemed relatively peaceful and egalitarian.
So that brings us the crux of the question. What does it mean to be civilized? Is that a question of our technological progress, or would a society with a really advanced social technologies (but maybe comparably low tech), also be regarded as "civilized"?
>>One thing I feel missing in your thesis is the role of variance. Even in you base case, the Chimpanzes, you really have to bring in Bonobos as well as a prime example of how a change in environment can effect a totally different culture.
But Bonobos are a different species compared to chimpanzees, separated by something like two million years. That new species definitely originated because of a change in environment. But you can't put present-day chimpanzees in a bonobo-typical environment and get bonobos. They will largely remain chimpanzees.
>>What does it mean to be civilized? Is that a question of our technological progress, or would a society with a really advanced social technologies (but maybe comparably low tech), also be regarded as "civilized"?
I would say that also low-tech societies can be civilizations. Like the example of the Caral-Supe civilization.
I remember an interview with Frans De Waal where he lamented that one of the biggest tragedies of anthropology and the studies of human evolution was that the Chimpanzees was discovered so much earlier than the Bonobo, and how that had biased all the subsequent research.
I think he had a point, and whenever Chimpanzee behavior is brought up to explain something in human culture, it is healthy to counter check it with Bonobos to see if it really is a universal, or just chimp specific culture.
It reminds me of how you see the same bias in psychology. When Abraham Maslow studied psychology he wanted to write about power structures, and his advisor told him that if he stayed put, he would just end up writing about the psychology of New Yorkers (where he lived and studied), not humans. He had to go live with Native Americans for a while to be able to see if his theories was really universal for humans, or if it was specific to a single culture (and based on his learnings there, he ended up totally discarding his original theories as faulty).
I suspect that we are doing a lot of the same by extrapolating cultural insights from chimpanzees and societies under heavy environmental pressure. It may not be wrong, but it also might not be pointing to a human universal. To ascertain that, we need to also explore the counterpoints.
>>I remember an interview with Frans De Waal where he lamented that one of the biggest tragedies of anthropology and the studies of human evolution was that the Chimpanzees was discovered so much earlier than the Bonobo, and how that had biased all the subsequent research.
Yes, I guess I haven't read exactly that interview but it sounds like what Frans de Waal writes in his books.
>>He had to go live with Native Americans for a while to be able to see if his theories was really universal for humans, or if it was specific to a single culture (and based on his learnings there, he ended up totally discarding his original theories as faulty).
I wish psychology professors were that way today. I figure that they aren't, because then anthropology would be held in higher esteem.
>>I suspect that we are doing a lot of the same by extrapolating cultural insights from chimpanzees and societies under heavy environmental pressure. It may not be wrong, but it also might not be pointing to a human universal. To ascertain that, we need to also explore the counterpoints.
Amen to that! I also think we must separate what is a human universal due to the rules of the game (or whatever the part of reality that game theory studies is called) and what is a human universal because humans just can't live in other ways. Take for example violence. Put a number of people in an area, let them reproduce exponentially and the violent ones will take the lead. That doesn't mean that all humans always, under all circumstances, are violent and want want to be led by violent people. It only means that most humans through history probably had to deal with living in a rather violent environment.
> Put a number of people in an area, let them reproduce exponentially and the violent ones will take the lead. That doesn't mean that all humans always, under all circumstances, are violent and want want to be led by violent people. It only means that most humans through history probably had to deal with living in a rather violent environment.
I'm not sure the data actually support this hypothesis. Exponential reproduction rates didn't arise until agriculture. When you look at what we know about hunter-gatherer birthrates, they average around 4-6 births per woman. Combine that with an infant and child mortality rate of 30-50%, and you are pretty much looking at a stable population rate with very low growth.
There is actually very little room for (mortal) violence in that model. With population growth hanging on a brink, too much violence resulting in deaths quickly risks pushing it over the edge into decline.
This does not mean that violence did not exist between hunter-gartherers, but it was often very performative. There are plenty of reports of explorers watching skirmishes and being surprised of how few participants was actually killed.
What you are saying is largely true for chimpanzees, but not for humans. In a book called Ache Life History, Anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado state that human hunter-gatherer populations that have been studied as a rule increase their numbers exponentially, while Chimpanzees more or less just replace their population in every generation. For example the Aché of Paraguay, who were studied by Hill and Hurtado, had an explosive population increase before they were pacified and took up agriculture. This is spite of a homicide rate of about fifty percent, hazardous living conditions in an area with jaguars and poisonous animals and very a poor vegetable supply in their area, forcing them to get most of their calories from meat.
It is logical that human pre-agricultural populations increase exponentially. Why would they otherwise have colonized all continents of Earth? Why would they otherwise have crowded out other human population like the Neanderthal and the Denisovans. And how could otherwise the descendants of only a few hundred people have peopled America and Australia?
The other great apes stay where they are because among them, births and deaths are fairly balanced. For humans, excess births are the very engine of change and development.
Well, one thing we know for a fact is that humans did not see exponential population growth until 10,000 years ago around the introduction of agriculture. We know that because Homo Sapiens by then had already existed for more than 200,000 years without getting to a population bigger than around 10 million. If there had been a growth rate of even just 1% per year, the population would have been magnitudes higher.
The question is if that close-to-zero growth rate was primarily caused by long spacing between births, high infant, child and maternal mortality, and the carrying capacity of the environment around them - or if violence was much more of a factor.
It is an important question and obviously a topic of heavy debate, but I will say that the consensus from *anthropologists* does seem to be that nomadic hunter-gatherers were mostly peaceful, and that most of the reports of heavily violent societies came from studies of more sedentary societies and groups under outside pressure.
I am not sure that I agree with your statement that there “lots of example of cultures that that seemed relatively peaceful and egalitarian.”
Except for Hunter Gatherer societies, there are no societies that can be characterized as egalitarian, and they are typically not considered to be civilizations. And those Hunter Gatherer societies likely had high levels of violence, though probably not as high as some to the societies listed in this article.
Interesting as usual. But you are still condescending to the religious.
Religion is not merely a matter of ideas but of direct experience as we are told by the religious persons themselves.
People heard and saw gods. Ancient Hindu rishis heard Vedas that's why the most ancient parts are called Shrutis (meaning heard),
Hebrew prophets heard the voice of God as well.
I still think that Julian Jaynes had got something right and I would appreciate your take on him. It is right up in your alley--the civilization, language, and religion are all tied up together.
Thankfully, I'm not the only one to point to anthropology to contradict Jaynes' hypothesis. Someone who met Julian Jaynes before he died asked what he thought of the minds of Australian Aborigines on the 19th century and Jaynes is reported to have answered that it was an interesting question worth to investigate. I find it difficult to imagine why Julian Jaynes didn't do that himself for his entire life. Do psychologists feel such contempt for anthropology or did the thought never occur to him?
I think I can find several instances in anthropology books where people in primitive societies are talking about what other people think. For example, Yanomamö men were concerned that people would believe that they were afraid.
I see another reason to be skeptical of Julian Jaynes hypothesis: Why would all people have had the same kind of theory of mind before the Bronze Age, when theory of mind is so variable today? I have family members with very low degrees of theory of mind. Not because they have low IQs (they don't), but because that is just their way of being. Most notably, my crazy teenage daughter has always made the impression of more of less lacking a theory of mind. In reality, present-day people exist on a spectrum between very high interest in the minds of other people and personality disorders that makes people unaware that other people have minds like their own. Why wouldn't that spectrum of interest in the minds of other people exist also in simple societies?
Anyway, my conclusion has been that I should read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind again. Because even though I find the idea that civilized people think very differently from uncivilized people easy to refute, I find it entirely possible that the Bronze Age was an age of mass psychosis. Some crazy people today act as if a deity is constantly talking to them (and probably many non-crazy people too do something similar). It is entirely possible that such a way of being was particularly fashionable in the Bronze Age. Julian Jaynes' book should be worth reading just because it highlights that phenomenon.
I recommend David Stove' review which is a great piece of writing in itself.
I found Scott Alexender's so-called review unsatisfactory. Scott even says that he wants to talk not about the book Jaynes wrote but the book Scott wishes Jaynes wrote instead.
In particular, the term "Theory of mind" conveys nothing to me. Is it a synonym for consciousness or introspection ?
Bicameralism is not a property of uncivilized people. In fact, in Jaynes account, the ancient civilizations were bicameral.
I don't understand why you say Jaynes had a contempt for anthropology. If you read the book you will see that the analysis is heavy on language ---of ancient poetry, inscriptions etc. Since Jaynes presumably didn't know Aboriginal languages, he could hardly do the analysis himself.
Anyway, irrespective of validity of the hypothesis, it is a very interesting and original book. Given your fecundity of thought, I am certain Jaynes would provoke interesting ideas in you.
"Theory of mind" and "introspection" are not the same thing. But as I understand it, Julian Jaynes actually reasoned that introspection followed from people developing a theory of mind. He wrote that far-away trading required imagination of other people's minds. For that reason I thought Scott Alexander was justified to mix the two together.
Do you believe that talking to a person from a primitive society could add something to Jaynes' hypothesis? In that case, I would like to ask you what kind of questions you think would be suitable to pose. The reason why I'm asking is that I'm currently talking to a man who has talked a lot to people who lived as savages in the Jungle in the mid-20th century. Unfortunately I don't know any such people myself (they tend to be dead by now, sadly). But I would be very happy to do the second-best thing and compare Jaynes' hypothesis to whatever information there are about the thinking of wild people. Any suggestions are very welcome.
And I'm reading Jaynes' analysis of the Iliad right now.
The Jaynes type questions might be to ask the terms of mental acts--like thinking, willing, terms for past and future.
Jaynes also points out a distinction between animal affects such as shame, anger, fear and copulation and conscious human emotions such as guilt (developed from shame), hatred (from anger), anxiety (from fear) and "sex" or fantasies from copulation.
A term corresponding to guilt would be a strong indication for consciousness.
In Jaynes, foreign trade is one way the bicamerality breaks. But given increasing size and complexity of the city-states themselves, the bicamerality was ever in danger of breaking down.
Bicamerality is no introspection and hearing voices. The way it breaks, is through development of metaphors. the hypostases of chapter 5 --The intellectual consciousness of Greece.
So, the theory of mind, the idea that other people too introspect, follows introspection in oneself. Indeed, without introspection or self-consciousness , there could be no such thing as "theory of mind". There would be no place for such a theory to be in.
Theory of mind may be a big thing for Scott Alexender but it is not in Jaynes and that's why Scott's review was disappointing.
I certainly believe that ideas of divinity and spirituality (not the shallow, Western lifestyle brand but the realm of the spirit) and perhaps some Jungian constructs need to be actively integrated into our psychology and sociology and pedagogy. Unfortunately I don't have much more in the way of specifics. It simply seems that we have a profound cultural deficit, and it needs to be filled.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-return-of-the-spiritual
Worlding does not required religion. 'Religion' like art, performance, polity, is an outcome and not a source, these distinctions arise in more complex economies. State-sponsored and imperial monotheism even later (we often regard polytheistic systems as many-monotheisms but this is _Belles-lettres_. Polytheism is about representation of responsibilities not command, social negotiation/performance. Foisting statist ideas of practices as religion back into the late neolithic misses the point.
"This went on and on, without one single group on the entire island of Papua conquering their neighbors and creating a bigger political unit."
Couldn't this be explained by low productivity of their lands? In places like Mesopotamia, unlike Papua, conquering one's neighbors could be extremely profitable.
There are many less productive places that were conquered by bigger groups, like, for example, Mongolia. Another example is Australia and Central Asia. Australia is not obviously less productive than Central Asia. Still, Australia was controlled by small groups of hunter-gatherers when the Europeans arrived, while Central Asia at least at times have been incorporated in empires.
I am afraid Tove K. you have no idea how extensively bad the soils are in the Sahul (Australia & New Guinea) growing up on a glacial churned landscape. Nor how extreme the terrain is on the island of NG. The central highland populations did not even meet the outside world until the 1930s and there was a huge population in near isolation due to the terrain and not the lack of ideas. Yet it was this area that domesticated the banana a lot time ago. (This is a Jared Diamond example).
Also geographically central Asia is the steppe and as a social learning species the story of the steppe is the story of empire, horses, wheels, trade/war with state based agrarian economies. https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/christopher-i-beckwiths-the-scythian
So yes, ideas.
However, ideas fall off me like sweat in the Australian sun, but go no where without a social support network.... a network that connects across populations, as geography and economies allow. (Take compositional poetry as an example from 30 years ago https://meika.loofs-samorzewski.com/compositionalpoetry.html )
Or, here's a quick idea, will it get taken up??
It is best to think of Aboriginal Australia (even its entire population through time) as a small to medium European city spread out over a continent. How's it going to trade with another city at the speed of any small Polis in the Aegean? Let alone the Mediterranean.
The idea of god is extremely late in this process of a social learning species finding its way when group compete for individuals
PS Henrich covers some New Guinea examples in "chiefdom" formation, are you drawing on those?
>>PS Henrich covers some New Guinea examples in "chiefdom" formation, are you drawing on those?
No, I have forgotten about that, if I ever read it. In which book does Joseph Henrich write about that?
Henrich, Joseph Patrick. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton: Princeton university press.
pages 171... followed by some examples of inter-group competition in northern Australia
Thank you! I will read those passages again.
Interesting idea.
It is certainly true that unrelated males cooperating in large groups to solve a common problem is likely a uniquely human characteristic. That male cooperation was critical to technological development and ideas probably played a key role in that evolution.
I think a better explanation for why civilization evolved in certain places is geography. Most regions do not a natural environment that allows for productive food production given primitive technologies. So even if great ideas evolve in other areas, it does not matter, because they can acquire enough food to generate sufficient density of population.
It is quite possible, however, that in those few areas where the natural environment is conducive to higher food production, then cultural evolution takes over and those rare ideas matter. If many Hunter-Gatherers bands are in that regions, they will each evolve their own cultures based on ideas. The ideas that work best in food production, political organization, trade, and military conquest will then be able to establish a populous civilization that endures for centuries.
So I think your theory works, but you need to add in the constraints of geography and competition between groups for a full explanation.
For those who are interested, I write more here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/all-of-human-history-in-one-graphic
>>I think a better explanation for why civilization evolved in certain places is geography. Most regions do not a natural environment that allows for productive food production given primitive technologies. So even if great ideas evolve in other areas, it does not matter, because they can acquire enough food to generate sufficient density of population.
There is nothing wrong with the geography of northern and eastern Australia. It is as good as any area on this planet, more or less. And still Australia was left behind when human societies increased in complexity.
Not true. The region does have many geographical advantages, but it was lacking a key factor.
Before the European conquest Australia lacked the wild ancestors of domesticated plants (wheat, corn, rice) and animals (horse, cow, pig, goat) so they could never evolve very productive food techniques. Australia is also very isolated from regions that did have these plants and animals (unlike Europe).
In addition, northern Australia had a savanna biome so was very unlikely to support productive agriculture. Eastern Australia has a Temperate Forest biome, which is conducive to productive agriculture, but it was very far from other agricultural regions.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/biomes-have-profoundly-shaped-human
That is why the human population density was so low and the complexity of technology was so low in Australia. Once the British brought domesticated plants and animals (as well as modern technologies) a massive growth of population became possible.
This is quite similar to what happened in North America.
Yes. The Jared Diamond explanation.
But pre-colonial Australia did have an inflow of both dingos and, at a later stage, human genes from the outside. So it wasn't isolated in an absolute sense.
Have you ever tried to tried to train a dingo to pull a plow? I am pretty confident that the Aborigines were never able to.
Aborigines occasionally ate dingoes and sometimes raised them from pups as companions that might help in hunting, but they were never trained on a large scale as a systematic food-hunting aid.
Not sure what you mean by “at a later stage, human genes from the outside.” If you are referring to the British, this does not refute my argument at all.
If you do not think that Australia was not isolated enough, can you name a major technology that was transferred from Agrarian societies in Asia to the Aborigines before the Europeans arrived?
If the Aborigines were engaged in widespread seaborne trade with Chinese, Japan, Thai, Java, and Vietnamese that would have overcome their isolation, but I know of no evidence that this occurred.
If you already knew about the Jared Diamond explanation, then why did you start by claiming that there was nothing wrong with Australian geography?
The Aborigines were engaged in at least small-scale trade with Indonesians, who camw every year to fish for sea cucumbers. Here's the first link I found discussing some of the evidence: https://youtu.be/R_ztpo8ExkU?si=SElzimGyEV5ctMWI
Australia really isn't that far away from everywhere else; I'd be danged if the Chinese didn't know about it, but they weren't super interested in oceanic exploration most of the time, and the Australians didn't have much to trade.
As for draft animals, the Aztecs/Incas/Mayas/Olmecs/Puebloans/Cahokians etc didn't have them, either, but they still farmed and built cities.
I am not sure what you mean by “Indonesia” as it did not exist during that time period. The region also had a huge amount of variation of types of societies, largely due to geography. The only Agrarian society in the region that I know of was Java.
Until there is solid evidence of technology transfer between Java or China and the Aborigines, then I think whatever trade there existed was not relevant to the Aborigines long-term development.
Yes, Aborigines did not have much to trade. That is kind of the point. They had a very low level of development due to geographical constraints.
The constraints of geography on human societies are a lot more complicated than just a few factors.
South America and Mesoamerica had very different geographies from Australia. So they evolved to different types of societies, but a lack of animal-traction plows was a huge constraint. They did have maize and potatoes, which were a great staple crop.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/impact-of-geography-on-human-progress
I'm referring to the genetic inflow from Indian seafarers about 4000 years ago. https://www.mpg.de/6818105/Holocene-gene-flow_India-Australia
"Nothing wrong" was a wrong way to put it. If course there is always something wrong with all geography and Australia doesn't have the best geography in the world. The reason why I'm not applying the Jared Diamond explanation is that I don't believe very much in it anymore. I believe much more in population density and ideas (the two are related, of course) as the most important factor that led to the primacy of Eurasia. I'm working on a theory about it.
As far as I know there was no major copying of technology from India, but the gene flow is interesting.
To be clear, I think the Jared Diamond explanation seriously underplays the role of many geographical factors (such as biome, soil type, proximity to the Middle East, proximity to the Central Asian steppe herders). I believe that my theory offers far more explanatory power.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/impact-of-geography-on-human-progress
As I mentioned in the first comment, ideas obviously matter, and I like that you include population density as an independent variable. It is hard to see how dense populations can grow without plenty of food. And geography highly constrains food production. So geography is key cause of population density (but not the only one).
If would love to hear more about your theory, but perhaps this is the wrong place. Feel free to comment on my articles. I enjoy the conversation with differing opinions.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-five-keys-to-progress
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-how-humans-create-progress
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/all-of-human-history-in-one-graphic
Social technologies vs physical technologies is an interesting distinction. Social technologies form culture, but they are also much more slow moving than physical tech. If someone invents a new more efficient pump, you are likely to see it spread all over the world in no time, while if someone comes up with a better way to ensure healthcare for all, it will take ages to spread, if it happens at all. Same for better ways of doing democracy or governance in general. I guess our cultures have a high resistance to changes that would affect the culture itself.
One thing I feel missing in your thesis is the role of variance. Even in you base case, the Chimpanzes, you really have to bring in Bonobos as well as a prime example of how a change in environment can effect a totally different culture.
Same with human cultures. We have lots of examples of cultures under heavy environmental pressure, like on Papua New Guinea or the Yanomamo, who evolved into horrific violent cultures. But we also have lots of example of cultures that that seemed relatively peaceful and egalitarian.
So that brings us the crux of the question. What does it mean to be civilized? Is that a question of our technological progress, or would a society with a really advanced social technologies (but maybe comparably low tech), also be regarded as "civilized"?
>>One thing I feel missing in your thesis is the role of variance. Even in you base case, the Chimpanzes, you really have to bring in Bonobos as well as a prime example of how a change in environment can effect a totally different culture.
But Bonobos are a different species compared to chimpanzees, separated by something like two million years. That new species definitely originated because of a change in environment. But you can't put present-day chimpanzees in a bonobo-typical environment and get bonobos. They will largely remain chimpanzees.
>>What does it mean to be civilized? Is that a question of our technological progress, or would a society with a really advanced social technologies (but maybe comparably low tech), also be regarded as "civilized"?
I would say that also low-tech societies can be civilizations. Like the example of the Caral-Supe civilization.
I remember an interview with Frans De Waal where he lamented that one of the biggest tragedies of anthropology and the studies of human evolution was that the Chimpanzees was discovered so much earlier than the Bonobo, and how that had biased all the subsequent research.
I think he had a point, and whenever Chimpanzee behavior is brought up to explain something in human culture, it is healthy to counter check it with Bonobos to see if it really is a universal, or just chimp specific culture.
It reminds me of how you see the same bias in psychology. When Abraham Maslow studied psychology he wanted to write about power structures, and his advisor told him that if he stayed put, he would just end up writing about the psychology of New Yorkers (where he lived and studied), not humans. He had to go live with Native Americans for a while to be able to see if his theories was really universal for humans, or if it was specific to a single culture (and based on his learnings there, he ended up totally discarding his original theories as faulty).
I suspect that we are doing a lot of the same by extrapolating cultural insights from chimpanzees and societies under heavy environmental pressure. It may not be wrong, but it also might not be pointing to a human universal. To ascertain that, we need to also explore the counterpoints.
>>I remember an interview with Frans De Waal where he lamented that one of the biggest tragedies of anthropology and the studies of human evolution was that the Chimpanzees was discovered so much earlier than the Bonobo, and how that had biased all the subsequent research.
Yes, I guess I haven't read exactly that interview but it sounds like what Frans de Waal writes in his books.
>>He had to go live with Native Americans for a while to be able to see if his theories was really universal for humans, or if it was specific to a single culture (and based on his learnings there, he ended up totally discarding his original theories as faulty).
I wish psychology professors were that way today. I figure that they aren't, because then anthropology would be held in higher esteem.
>>I suspect that we are doing a lot of the same by extrapolating cultural insights from chimpanzees and societies under heavy environmental pressure. It may not be wrong, but it also might not be pointing to a human universal. To ascertain that, we need to also explore the counterpoints.
Amen to that! I also think we must separate what is a human universal due to the rules of the game (or whatever the part of reality that game theory studies is called) and what is a human universal because humans just can't live in other ways. Take for example violence. Put a number of people in an area, let them reproduce exponentially and the violent ones will take the lead. That doesn't mean that all humans always, under all circumstances, are violent and want want to be led by violent people. It only means that most humans through history probably had to deal with living in a rather violent environment.
> Put a number of people in an area, let them reproduce exponentially and the violent ones will take the lead. That doesn't mean that all humans always, under all circumstances, are violent and want want to be led by violent people. It only means that most humans through history probably had to deal with living in a rather violent environment.
I'm not sure the data actually support this hypothesis. Exponential reproduction rates didn't arise until agriculture. When you look at what we know about hunter-gatherer birthrates, they average around 4-6 births per woman. Combine that with an infant and child mortality rate of 30-50%, and you are pretty much looking at a stable population rate with very low growth.
There is actually very little room for (mortal) violence in that model. With population growth hanging on a brink, too much violence resulting in deaths quickly risks pushing it over the edge into decline.
This does not mean that violence did not exist between hunter-gartherers, but it was often very performative. There are plenty of reports of explorers watching skirmishes and being surprised of how few participants was actually killed.
What you are saying is largely true for chimpanzees, but not for humans. In a book called Ache Life History, Anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado state that human hunter-gatherer populations that have been studied as a rule increase their numbers exponentially, while Chimpanzees more or less just replace their population in every generation. For example the Aché of Paraguay, who were studied by Hill and Hurtado, had an explosive population increase before they were pacified and took up agriculture. This is spite of a homicide rate of about fifty percent, hazardous living conditions in an area with jaguars and poisonous animals and very a poor vegetable supply in their area, forcing them to get most of their calories from meat.
It is logical that human pre-agricultural populations increase exponentially. Why would they otherwise have colonized all continents of Earth? Why would they otherwise have crowded out other human population like the Neanderthal and the Denisovans. And how could otherwise the descendants of only a few hundred people have peopled America and Australia?
The other great apes stay where they are because among them, births and deaths are fairly balanced. For humans, excess births are the very engine of change and development.
Well, one thing we know for a fact is that humans did not see exponential population growth until 10,000 years ago around the introduction of agriculture. We know that because Homo Sapiens by then had already existed for more than 200,000 years without getting to a population bigger than around 10 million. If there had been a growth rate of even just 1% per year, the population would have been magnitudes higher.
The question is if that close-to-zero growth rate was primarily caused by long spacing between births, high infant, child and maternal mortality, and the carrying capacity of the environment around them - or if violence was much more of a factor.
It is an important question and obviously a topic of heavy debate, but I will say that the consensus from *anthropologists* does seem to be that nomadic hunter-gatherers were mostly peaceful, and that most of the reports of heavily violent societies came from studies of more sedentary societies and groups under outside pressure.
I can recommend this paper that sums up some of the latest research from an anthropological perspective: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267631384_Myths_about_hunter-gatherers_redux_Nomadic_forager_war_and_peace
I am not sure that I agree with your statement that there “lots of example of cultures that that seemed relatively peaceful and egalitarian.”
Except for Hunter Gatherer societies, there are no societies that can be characterized as egalitarian, and they are typically not considered to be civilizations. And those Hunter Gatherer societies likely had high levels of violence, though probably not as high as some to the societies listed in this article.
Interesting as usual. But you are still condescending to the religious.
Religion is not merely a matter of ideas but of direct experience as we are told by the religious persons themselves.
People heard and saw gods. Ancient Hindu rishis heard Vedas that's why the most ancient parts are called Shrutis (meaning heard),
Hebrew prophets heard the voice of God as well.
I still think that Julian Jaynes had got something right and I would appreciate your take on him. It is right up in your alley--the civilization, language, and religion are all tied up together.
I have given Julian Jaynes a few thoughts this summer. I recently read the Slate Star Codex post on the book and that answered a few questions. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ In particular I found Scott's use of "theory of mind" instead of "consciousness" very useful.
Thankfully, I'm not the only one to point to anthropology to contradict Jaynes' hypothesis. Someone who met Julian Jaynes before he died asked what he thought of the minds of Australian Aborigines on the 19th century and Jaynes is reported to have answered that it was an interesting question worth to investigate. I find it difficult to imagine why Julian Jaynes didn't do that himself for his entire life. Do psychologists feel such contempt for anthropology or did the thought never occur to him?
I think I can find several instances in anthropology books where people in primitive societies are talking about what other people think. For example, Yanomamö men were concerned that people would believe that they were afraid.
I see another reason to be skeptical of Julian Jaynes hypothesis: Why would all people have had the same kind of theory of mind before the Bronze Age, when theory of mind is so variable today? I have family members with very low degrees of theory of mind. Not because they have low IQs (they don't), but because that is just their way of being. Most notably, my crazy teenage daughter has always made the impression of more of less lacking a theory of mind. In reality, present-day people exist on a spectrum between very high interest in the minds of other people and personality disorders that makes people unaware that other people have minds like their own. Why wouldn't that spectrum of interest in the minds of other people exist also in simple societies?
Anyway, my conclusion has been that I should read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind again. Because even though I find the idea that civilized people think very differently from uncivilized people easy to refute, I find it entirely possible that the Bronze Age was an age of mass psychosis. Some crazy people today act as if a deity is constantly talking to them (and probably many non-crazy people too do something similar). It is entirely possible that such a way of being was particularly fashionable in the Bronze Age. Julian Jaynes' book should be worth reading just because it highlights that phenomenon.
I recommend David Stove' review which is a great piece of writing in itself.
I found Scott Alexender's so-called review unsatisfactory. Scott even says that he wants to talk not about the book Jaynes wrote but the book Scott wishes Jaynes wrote instead.
In particular, the term "Theory of mind" conveys nothing to me. Is it a synonym for consciousness or introspection ?
Bicameralism is not a property of uncivilized people. In fact, in Jaynes account, the ancient civilizations were bicameral.
I don't understand why you say Jaynes had a contempt for anthropology. If you read the book you will see that the analysis is heavy on language ---of ancient poetry, inscriptions etc. Since Jaynes presumably didn't know Aboriginal languages, he could hardly do the analysis himself.
Anyway, irrespective of validity of the hypothesis, it is a very interesting and original book. Given your fecundity of thought, I am certain Jaynes would provoke interesting ideas in you.
Isn't it commonly accepted that the primitive people interact with spirits and both see and hear them?
More than the civilized people. Won't it count in favor of bicameral hypothesis?
Having read some essays by David Stove a long time ago and liked them, your recommendation of Stove's review of Jaynes' book prompted me search it out on the internet and I found it here. https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Miscellaneous/Other/StoveOnJaynes/page.html
You were right, it is indeed a very interesting review and much shorter than Jaynes' actual book!
Thank you for that.
"Theory of mind" and "introspection" are not the same thing. But as I understand it, Julian Jaynes actually reasoned that introspection followed from people developing a theory of mind. He wrote that far-away trading required imagination of other people's minds. For that reason I thought Scott Alexander was justified to mix the two together.
Do you believe that talking to a person from a primitive society could add something to Jaynes' hypothesis? In that case, I would like to ask you what kind of questions you think would be suitable to pose. The reason why I'm asking is that I'm currently talking to a man who has talked a lot to people who lived as savages in the Jungle in the mid-20th century. Unfortunately I don't know any such people myself (they tend to be dead by now, sadly). But I would be very happy to do the second-best thing and compare Jaynes' hypothesis to whatever information there are about the thinking of wild people. Any suggestions are very welcome.
And I'm reading Jaynes' analysis of the Iliad right now.
The Jaynes type questions might be to ask the terms of mental acts--like thinking, willing, terms for past and future.
Jaynes also points out a distinction between animal affects such as shame, anger, fear and copulation and conscious human emotions such as guilt (developed from shame), hatred (from anger), anxiety (from fear) and "sex" or fantasies from copulation.
A term corresponding to guilt would be a strong indication for consciousness.
I will do my best to find a someone who speaks fluent Yanomamö to ask those questions.
In Jaynes, foreign trade is one way the bicamerality breaks. But given increasing size and complexity of the city-states themselves, the bicamerality was ever in danger of breaking down.
Bicamerality is no introspection and hearing voices. The way it breaks, is through development of metaphors. the hypostases of chapter 5 --The intellectual consciousness of Greece.
So, the theory of mind, the idea that other people too introspect, follows introspection in oneself. Indeed, without introspection or self-consciousness , there could be no such thing as "theory of mind". There would be no place for such a theory to be in.
Theory of mind may be a big thing for Scott Alexender but it is not in Jaynes and that's why Scott's review was disappointing.