Anthropologist debunks Darwin’s most abused idea | James Suzman
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- Опубликовано: 17 ноя 2022
- James Suzman lived with a tribe of hunter-gatherers to witness how an ancient culture survives one of the most brutal climates on Earth. His learnings may surprise you.
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What do you imagine life was like for hunter-gatherers throughout human history? You might guess that daily life for them was a constant struggle between eating and being eaten in a world where surviving was a full-time job.
But anthropological research suggests that probably wasn’t the case. When the anthropologist James Suzman went to the Kalahari Desert to study the Ju/'hoansi hunter-gathers, for example, he found that they worked only 15 hours per week, and that much of that time was spent on activities that many people in the modern West consider leisure, like hiking and fishing.
Of course, hunter-gatherers experienced plenty of hard times throughout world history. But a general theme has emerged from anthropological research on hunter-gathers both contemporary and ancient: Rather than being a constant battle for energy between people and their environment, life was more of a continuous flow of give and take between species, and leisure was part of the fabric of daily life.
As Suzman told Big Think, looking at the lives of hunter-gatherers can help us rethink the ways we conceptualize work and society.
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About James Suzman:
With a head full of Laurens van der Post and half an anthropology degree from St Andrews University under his belt, James Suzman hitched a ride into Botswana’s eastern Kalahari in June 1991. He has been working with the Bushmen ever since.
He remains involved in a number of Kalahari initiatives in support mainly of community organizations and NGOs .
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"Survival of the fittes" comes from " to fit in (a certain environment)"... It's just misunderstood as "survival of the strongest" because of some economists who use dumb analogies 🤦♂️
ppl use phrases to fit what they already think...
The fittest means what best fits into a particular environment. Like a puzzle piece.
@@Catlily5 yes, and in fact the phrase really 'comes to life' when we consider the gene variant, rather than the individual, as having a degee of fitness or match with the environment.
I was always taught, "fitness," is a matter of how much a species can procreate. "The fittest" is the one that breeds the most.
Almost everywhere you look you can see examples of less-than-fittest surviving and breeding. As such they represent a set of genetics which work adequately to survive and reproduce in that environment. Recombination with this diverse pool of solutions show us that the evolution of solution to multiple challenges can and does occur in parallel.
The phrase "survival of the fittest" speaks to practices in horticulture and breeding of stock in which members with undesired features are kept from breeding while the members with the most desired features are provided with the most opportunities to breed.
When I got into small business I found that, contrary to what I'd been taught to think, it was not tooth-and-nail competition with other small businesses in the same field, but very cooperative and friendly. And occasionally I find myself talking a customer out of buying something from me because it's not right for them.
And that's why you're not Bezos but a respectable person.
Cooperation, friendlyness, helping, etc, can give a big ‘fitness’ advantage (using the term the way Darwin and modern biologists mean it.
I had similar experiences when i solely relied on business for 10+ years before covid. Many of my competitors actually became my frends and we still stay in touch
Pehaps because the notion that a capitalist economy is all about competition is a false assumption believed and populariced by left wing antropologists... For me a free market economy is more a cooperation system where all people accepts play with the same set rules (money use, safe contracts, confidence in transactions, competence laws, security) rather than a competitive one, for that I'm not surprised by your experience
@@Greman32 Ownership makes anything competitive. That's what you are competing for at the expense of others, it's not even close to being the same!
Darwin originally never described his idea as "survival of the fittest", rather as something more similar to "death of the least fit". The reason we remember "survival of the fittest" is because what he actually said was shortened to express his ideas to people who had never heard of it in a very short time and in the process partly butchered what was actually said.
Yes, well said. Also the "Darwinists" focussed on the fitness aspect, and, until recently, utterly neglected the other great force shaping animals : the females' aesthetic perception of male desirability. This differentiates species over time, brings forth great beauty, and causes some very unique appearances. Darwin himself, however, wrote of it and respected its importance.
@@mondopinion3777 I don't know what you mean by saying that 'Darwinists' have neglected that aspect of evolution. If you mean evolutionary biologists, no they didn't. Sexual selection is very well studied and understood, and all evolutionary biologists understand its importance. If you mean economists who use bad Darwin analogies to justify laissez faires capitalism, then fair enough.
@@monkeymox2544 Actually I am citing a discussion by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, who are highly qualified evolutionary biologists.
@@mondopinion3777 in what sense are you citing them, sorry? Because it's a simple fact that sexual selection is very well researched, going way back to the first half of the 20th century. Evolutionary biologists have long understood that sexual selection has extremely profound dimorphic effects that sometimes even make the survival of the individual organism less likely, the plumage of some birds often being used as a prime example.
@@monkeymox2544 Funny. Your knowledge-display performance reminds me of one of those birds.
"dog eat dog" is what we humans use to justify self interest and cruel acts towards others. We have much to learn from people who have nurtured that kinship with nature and even animals themselves - we're not above them
Add in the logic fallacy of the phrase "life isn't fair" as if the definition of fairness doesn't offer a suggestion of how any healthy society should be fashioned. Concepts of institutionalized corruption or fairness are policy choices.
@Contingency IBCT Unless your tribe backs you up, as in an egalitarian society, then it's a game of numbers over one person's size. In egalitarian societies, people who decide to act in self interest are quickly shunned and ostracized by their community, and they quickly learn that cooperation is the key to their survival.
When the hunter kills an animal he’s been “above” that animal: smarter, faster, stronger, etc…
A hunter still depends on its prays and a wise hunter is conscious of the importance of preserving them.
Interesting the difference between cute vs beautiful things, cute reminds us due to its features of a baby, and beauty dosent
Your comment deserves to be a quote and a Proverb.
As an also-anthropologist, I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that we can use modern hunter-gatherer communities to learn about stone age peoples. The Ju/'hoansi are not stone age. They are not living like the stone age peoples. They had the same ten or so millennia to change, adapt, and create their own cultures and societies as we did. It's actually been documented that they change _faster_ than "Western" people. They are not fossils to be studied for the past. They are a living, vibrant, ever-changing social group, and they are as modern as you and me.
Yes but I think more his point was learning how Homo sapiens operate as hunter gatherers? I don’t think he’s ignoring the modernity of the Ju/‘hoansi but simply observing that they are one of the few remaining groups who still embraces the once widely spread hunter and gatherer culture. Not to say they do everything the SAME as a ten millennia ago, but they may offer some insight into the lifestyle of hunter gatherers in general.
As a biologist I am uncomfortable with the fact this guy doesn't understand what biological fitness means.
@@scottapache5041 Lol They never bring anyone smart or intelligent on Big Think. Just these pseudo scientists trying to sell books filled with empty calories
@@christianboekhout3475 and if they are still Hunter-gatherers, it's because it must be working out for them, meaning they must have some similarities with past successful Hunter-gatherers.
@@globalist1990 How succesful can we assume past hunter-gatherers? They did stop hunting and gathering, and didn't exactly go back to it. Also, is there really just one set of mechanism to succes on what is a VERY general category? There are WAY more mechanisms adopted and succesfully used in settled cultures, which is us. And lets not forget how many different climates and enviorments these very different cultures lived in.
There you go. Thanks. I do get very tired of being called "unprofessional" when I take into consideration the "other." One of my supervisors recently told me I couldn't give out 5 cent bags "for free" to customers who were paying with food cards. I told her they had been paid for already by another customer (true, but I also put a few dollars in the register every shift so I can give them out free to everyone). When customers are surprised that the bags are free I tell them someone donated them and they are inspired to throw change in a little kitty sitting on my station so they can "pay it forward." Many men just sweep their change into that kitty and say "I don't like carrying change. Buy someone a bag." Having to pay for shopping bags irritates everyone. At my stand people are, instead, inspired and leave happy and with a sense of the generosity of mankind. I refused to stop paying for the bags. It's a tiny thing, but it brings everyone joy.
Here, shopping bags must be paid for, and shops cannot cover the cost: it must be borne directly by the consumer, by law. The intent is to reduce waste and plastic pollution by encouraging people to use reusable bags.
Where I used to work, bags are always free, but we give each customer a 5 cent discount for each re-usable bag they bring.
Nailed it. We assume money will be the sole medium of exchange for value in our culture, but people are willing to trade money, goodwill, good feelings, etc... if it seems worth it, and we are innately wired to see such small acts highly valuable ways to advance ourselves, and society as a whole...creating a better market for all of us.
Your supervisor is an idiot.
This is shockingly totalitarian.
"Survival of the fittest" was never meant to mean "Survival of the strongest". It means that the organism most suited to its environment will be the most likely to survive and reproduce. The tiny dinosaurs survived after the meteor impact, not because they were the strongest, but because they required less food and water to survive. The rabbit is hardly the strongest animal, yet it took over Australia. "Survival of the fittest" is not only the most abused, it is also the most misunderstood.
> "Survival of the fittest" was never meant to mean "Survival of the strongest".
But it's meant "Survival of the strongest" politically and culturally for a very long time. Dancing around a technicality doesn't change that. And the usage is not about a misunderstanding of the original concept. The concept didn't make the culture. The culture gave the concept its meaning because the misunderstanding was a useful narrative, "success or failure is individual and any problem is your own problem."
@@1monki You are missing the point.
@@MrGrumblier I'm not. The term as it's generally understood is misused on purpose. The video was addressing the concept as it's actually used directly rather than pretending that a redefinition solves everything
@@1monki The title of this video is "Debunking Darwin's most abused idea", which implies that it is the idea of survival of the fittest which is being debunked. If you are talking about anything related to evolution you use the correct definition of evolution related terms, not the bastardised popular ones. To do otherwise makes your writing or speech imprecise and basically dishonest because it is so easy to shift definitions to evade criticism.
@@nerdyali4154 > most abused idea
There's a reason the "abused idea" was used in the tile. Pretending that the "bastardized popular" understanding isn't important because it's not the correct definition comes off as an evasion. He's confronting the "abused idea" because it is the popular one. It's the version that people know. It's the one that actually has an effect on society. Trying to skirt the issue on a technicality just seem like an avoidance tactic
Many gardeners, myself included, start out thinking that gardening is a lot of work and make it so, but gradually they find ways to make it easier by letting the microorganisms in the soil work for you instead of disrupting their work. Ruth Stout was one who publicized her understanding of this method with the book, " How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back: A New Method of Mulch Gardening." When we ask for an easier way and one that focuses less on ourselves as special people and more on the grandeur of the life we are a part of, new methods come to us. As James Suzman quotes the Bible " We are on the earth but not of the earth."
*"We are on the earth but not of the earth."*
It's just that far too often we are too confident that our models of reality are sufficiently adequate despite knowing that they are only models and as such do not perfectly model reality due to not enough (or just plain wrong) information. Garbage in leads to garbage out (as the saying goes). The standard solution of trying to get more info and better quality info fails to address the arrogance of assuming one's models are correct and thereby not designing in adequate fail-safes. We seem instead to be more inclined to fix-after-it-breaks rather than employ attention to preventing catastrophic failures. Evolutionary "design" is worse. It is unable to communicate or distribute the efficacy of an evolved part or system other than through inheritance-via-reproduction.
@@ExtantFrodo2 To me it comes down to "who are we?" Edison tried thousands of different filaments before he found that tungsten gives us the longer lasting light bulb. It took another 75 years to invent the halogen bulb. The model consisted of thinking that we don't know the answer until we try, try again and again.
But where we are really from already has the answers without sacrificing our time and energy. Tesla tapped into this, our real source, from what I have read about him.
Jesus presented us with this "model." of who we are. Gautama Buddha didn't get there.
The First Noble Truth is the idea that everyone suffers and that suffering is part of the world.
The Old Testament didn't get there, either. Because of our errors and because of our sin, Yahweh supposedly made us suffer through life "by the sweat of our brow" and through the labor of child birth.
Jesus cut through that because he knew that while we have made mistakes, those don't make us guilty sinners that have to suffer through. Forgiveness (metanoia) takes us to the place of being able to listen directly to the wisdom of God.
"If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the innocent.
@@robertdouglas8895 I'd sooner say that forgiveness might do well for those who lack deep insight into other people's nature, as I would reiterate my previous bit about how we make do with models even those made with sparse data. Can I fault you your transgression if I would do the same in your situation? It's an understatement to say it isn't easy to really know yourself despite the fact that most people take it for granted based on how they reacted and behaved in previous circumstances.
Yeah, the notion that people's suffering is god's punishment for being "sinful" is utter hogwash. Let's hope that meme never resurfaces.
@@ExtantFrodo2 "Can I fault you your transgression if I would do the same in your situation?"
That is what projection is. It's finding fault with others to project out the guilt elsewhere instead of on ourselves that we don't see yet. The world is our mirror but we stay unconscious of it until we really want to correct ourselves instead of project. Why do we do that? Because we associate guilt with sacrifice and are trying to avoid the pain but don't mind that other people suffer it.
Forgiveness is deep insight. In the New Testament it's the Greek word "metanoia" which now has an English meaning.
You guys are having a philosophical discussion here, I am aware of that. But I just chimed in to say Ruth Stout and Charles Dowding (and to some extent Huw Richards, who made it more affordable) have changed my life and that of my kids. We eat so much more healthy food now.
It never occurred to me that some people would think it was constant effort to survive. I always assumed there was downtime. You gotta eat, sleep, rest in general. As very social animals, humans require time to socialize.
Nobody thinks that; he's just pretending. Same thing about the society with no hierarchy; just not true.
I have, just like some people think the medieval times were the worst thing you could live through, some people have little clue of the tribal past and imagine it as being running and killing 24/7. We as a society are very ignorant when it comes to understand our past
@@hojosconsal9913
Would you rather work more hours per day or increase your daily chance of dying by 1000%? Just like prison, tribal life is mostly boring, but whenever it stops being boring, somebody dies.
He also extrapolates a lot. He took modern hunter gatherers who pretty much lost the competition and were driven of to the shittiest lands as example of how everyone was in the past. When everyone was hunter gatherer there was a lot of death and killings of each other. The tribes don't live the same lives as our ancestors 10k years ago.
Only thing I agree on is the fact that they work less hours: but we exchanged that for more security, better food, better health and other things.
I think we all underappreciate the fact how much our society is based on cooperation. Within one field there is a lot of competition, because we are all taught the idea that we need to be on top to be happy. But between the different fields in our society, almost everything is cooperation. Imagine how your life would like be if you could not use anything that’s been done by another human.
@Shimmy Shai
And then people blame the healthy cooperation for our vices, like the anti-capitalist movement.
A recipe for mental health disaster and poverty...
NOT AN ANTHROPOLIGIST!
But the overarching social narrative often is that we have to compete. Which is just a smoke screen to allow the wealthy at the top to take more and more.
If you grow up 8in the country its a commonly known fact, we all cooperate. Your tractor broke call the neighbor he will help you, and you will help his next time. ETC ETC. The whole "pass it on" movement came from the country. I mean theres nothing unique or special about helping others. In cities where people have lost their ability to see others as humans instead of just numbers is the largest perversion of what it means to be human.
@@dralord1307 I've lived in both - for decades - and people are no different in country or city. We form tribes in both places that pitch in and help and that also compete. I've lived in small towns that are bitterly and fiercely competitive with the neighbouring town. I've seen rural families hold onto bitter, generations long feuds. I've seen city neighbours help each other and almost kill each other over a fence line. It's not an urban- rural split. It has to do with prosperity, history, how land got divided, education, opportunity, all of it. Access to resources matters and a family or neighbourhood culture that teaches people to care and depend on each other. I've lived in some pretty low income areas in cities where people helped each other out all the time.
I've listened to several big history audiobooks and I noticed that several different authors all pointed out that while agriculture made it possible for more people to survive in a small area, they all included a caveat that this doesn't mean the lifestyle of the average person in an agricultural community enjoys a better life than the average person in a hunter/gatherer culture.
Was Sapiens one of those books? That's where I heard the same thing. The health of individuals went downhill too. Dental problems, heart problems, overwork, all from shifting to agriculture and placing grain at the heart of our diets.
Yep - there's a reason why it took 10 thousand - TEN THOUSAND - years, (the entire Neolithic era), to go from initial, basic farming with a few crops, then animals, to the first true cities, (e.g. Ur) (population>~20-25k) - there was an awful lot we needed to gain along the way, and it started, in some respects, with a few steps backwards, and it wouldn't have been that straight forward in development, even if it appears so in distant hindsight.
Inequality skyrocketed too, since with agriculture it's easier for people at the top to control important resources (land).
@@adithyavraajkumar5923 Which is why organized religion was invented.
@@phillippatryndal4255 hunter gatherers have organised religion too.
"Gentling of young men". What an important concept. And we see the consequences of what happens when young men aren't "gentled" and properly socialized to be able to control and channel their aggression in non-harmful ways.
Astute point. Most cultures acknowledge the risks of unchecked agression, while American culture is fiercely (foolishly) resistant to limitations on nearly any "personal freedom," even the destructive ones.
@@asalane20 I say it's a an even split between control freaks and control freaks
As a Bavarian I find it interesting that in our culture we have a concept called "dableckn" which is the mocking of a person who's celebrated during the festivities that honour them.
At your birthday party someone will get up and entertain the party guests with stories about your failures and mischiefs. On my cousin's marriage her friends sang a song about her cheating on her husband some months before the wedding.
When you're mocked that way you're expected to laugh about it together with the guests. If you get angry or sad during the process you show you're not an adult and people will not respect you.
We also do make fun of our leaders on a specific occasion every year where they are invited to watch a play that is created to mock them about their failures, general behaviour and character.
I'm sure many cultures have similar customs to teach people to stay humble and not let being the centre of attention get to their head.
@@asalane20even American acknowledges it but like many cultures aggressive upbringings for young men is common place. I don’t think this has anything to do with personal freedoms but with how people raise their children.
@@asalane20Darwinism isn’t a “worldview.” It’s a relationship with the risen son of Darwin
I studied Anthropology at UT. This is a beautiful video. It echoes many studies that have been going forward about how humans adapt and overcome problems in the world. Society is cooperation.
University of Tennessee Knoxville right?
At least until the water hole has dried up and the only other water in the area is claimed by other groups of cooperative humans who will not be cooperative with the other group because there's not even enough for their own group. Which group has the greater likelihood of surviving until the rains come again? What will the winning group do if the rains don't come? That group (society) will no longer cooperate within itself as it becomes dog eat dog for survival until only two are left when the rains finally come. The story of life on Earth.
Yet we are still living the Reagan/Thatcher “revolution “. “There is no such thing as society.” Margaret Thatcher.
Or exploitation
I thought of Sahlin's Stone Age Economics when I heard the argument :D
Contrary to the experience of these chaps, when I try to ‘bring gentleness’ to my wife’s heart by ridiculing her efforts to feed the family, I have observed it to have a wholly deleterious effect on the unity of the tribe 🤷
How often does your wife hunt and kill giraffes?
That's why he said it's something done among the men not the women lol
Lol. I suppose that just shows context matters.
Well your misdirected… this “bring gentleness” is to used on your adolescent son when he wrecks the car…
“Looks like you didn’t wrap the car completely around that tree, you left a spot”😅
hahaaha 😂
As an egalitarian I truly believe that these still existing communities represent an apex of humanity. When societies grow in numbers the structures that emerge to support them are more insectine in nature than human, with the corresponding strata forming top down.
Yeah I mean those early hunter gatherers were are intersectional non binary anti ableist feminists until agriculture was developed the construct of gender was made up.
I’ll allow you to know
It’s only natural for humans to care for their members and therefor increase their populations because of this. I would say modern societies especially western ones are the apex of humanity.
i am an indigenous man and this was a brilliant video.
The plants and animals give us their names, like sudden exhales of the nose.
Walk with spirit.
shut up please
Aren’t we all indigenous somewhere?
Cool, I am Indigenous to England. A place where my ancestors have been for over 40'000 - 120'000 years, much longer than the recent re occupation of north america 12'000 years ago. You're not that special.
@@Thebonesoftrees The British Isles have not been continuously inhabited for the last 40,000 years. They were uninhabitable for long periods during the Ice Ages. They have only been continuously inhabitable since roughly 12,000 years ago, so your ancestry in England cannot extend further back than that.
@@omp199 Guess what tide pod, anywhere sharing the same latitude would be in the same predicament.
I just felt an outburst of joy every time he pronounced “The Ju/'hoansi.” I don't know why, but this man pronouncing that gave me a childlike joy.
I know that he's pronouncing their name in their native language, which is really cool, but it also sounds like he's blowing kisses at me, which is kind of cute haha
@@asdkotable lol
I felt joy when he described how their society has no hierarchies. That is the dream.
Ju X!💋 hoansi
@@choronos Why would it be the dream? There's a huge difference between living in just one, small tribe and living in a great metropolitan area or in a country.
Hierarchies are needed, otherwise you've got yourself into anarchy.
Thanks for this, enjoy the content on this channel.
... One minor sidebar, only because I'm from PNG one of Australia's neighbors. @ 2:39 when the Aboriginals of Australia are mentioned- the picture is actually showing the Asaro mud men of Goroko in the Eastern Highlands Province of PNG.
Just in case people think this is a cultural practice of indigenous Australian's.
Australia and PNG are close geographically with shared history, but contrast quite significantly both ethnically, culturally and linguistically.
All good.
Good Health and Blessings.
Hi Saffu, I thought the same. I'm just popping in to mention that Aborigine is now not considered appropriate, and First Nations or Aboriginal person is preferred when the specific mob is unknown. All the best :)
Thank you!
Yeah this video is not edited very well I must say. This might explain why they used incorrect pictures.
@@katvelyte thanks for that. Meant to say "Aboriginals of Australia", like was said in the video. (Edited my comment to reflect).
Appreciate the correction.
Good Health and Blessings.
@@katvelyte Where do the words Aubergine and First Nations come from? When i think of First Nations, I think of Mesopotamia. And when i think of Auboriginel, i think of the native Australians that were there before European Australians.
On the whole Hunter gathers have a lot of leisure time, that’s why I find it so funny that people act like it would’ve been impossible for humans to find a way to cut stones straight. Those people only really had to do stuff for 1-2 dozen hours per week and the rest of the time if they were interested in trying to find a way to cut a stone really straight to make something cool? Ya I think if you happened to have someone somewhat smart and they spent dozens or hundreds of hours per week trying to figure that out, they could do it.
Loved this! I was taught that life succeeds not by competition but by partitioning resources so they don't have to compete. For a simplistic example: bee-pollinated plants spread out their flowering times so that they share the bees throughout the growing season.
The idea of competition is also overrated because one species displacing others actually doesn't work well for life in the broader sense, by which I mean the life of ecosystems.
It's like how ecosystems have suffered due to the extirpation of wolves, or due to the introduction of feral pigs and bighead (AKA 'Asian') carp; wolves keep the animals which they hunt -- such as deer and rabbits -- from overpopulating and over-consuming, and feral pigs and bighead carp just overpopulate and over-consume, since there's not much around which is capable of hunting or catching them, except for the relatively small number of people who happen to like doing so.
Such overly 'successful' species such as feral pigs and bighead carp make ecosystems less diverse, with less diverse ecosystems being less healthy, since they are less adaptable to natural, year-to-year fluctuations in factors such as rainfall and temperature, or to diseases and blights.
Your example of flowers sharing bees is a good example of that same thing, because it means that in the end, more kinds of flowers are able to live and grow, and that even if some change were to occur which negatively affected one kind of flower, other flowers could fill the place that it left behind, and bees would still have flowers for nectar. That couldn't happen if just one kind of flower had been very 'successful' and 'out-competed' and displaced all of the other flowers. You would just end up with a weaker ecosystem which was more vulnerable to collapse.
@@jopolniaczek5375 Isn't the collapse of the ecosystem in a way it resetting? Nature has a strange way of returning back to balance, be it through creation or destruction. All it takes is time.
@@adeeshadeegala5900 Sort of. But many can go into desertification. With the reduction of the ecosystems biodiversity, the land rely to heavily on only a few animals which if those animals/fauna were taken out the land could be totally destroyed and thousands of years of care would have to go into reintroducing species into the area. So it's much better not do that on the first place.
I hope you are not attributing intention to flowering plants. Or bees.
@@TheMargarita1948 On one hand, discussing the results of evolutionary processes often sounds like attributing intention because it is using a shorthand instead of explaining in detail every time. On the other hand, I suspect there is way more intelligence going on in the living world then we arrogant humans give credit. How do all the oak trees in a huge forest overproduce acorns in the same year and have a mast year?
"I think it would be good if we could still live in a world where people could experience another way of living and being to the point it makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange" It's just beautiful, Couldn't express it better seriously. Looking at our society and our life today with so many responsibilities,problem, and hell we're going through, it becoming more n more odd to consider it as our fate in this world
Yes I was thinking how relax and humbled I'd be if I had a choice to live like that. Truly awestruck
If anything the pattern of history is things just become more complicated.
yeah.. sounds good and all, but meanwhile people want, playstations, cars, clean water coming out of a tap, etc. This is a nice romanticized view of hunter gatherers but simply finding it nice doesn't mean people would actually rather live there. You could live like that here btw, just progressively start living in the woods and gather food around, you will come back to society.
@@fredericklehoux7160 That simply show that free will is BS
@@fredericklehoux7160 well that’s because we would lack the thousands of years of knowledge/shared experience enjoyed by hunter gatherers… 🤷🏾♂️
That they only work 5 hours a day does not mean Darwin's idea is invalid. Darwin did not mean that competition between animals is a 24/7/365 process. Competition happens in certain patches, i.e. when the hunters-gatherers go out to hunt, or when lions hunt, or elephants go out to eat etc.
i’m studying anthropology at the only university in ireland that has a department of anthropology. i love this video, just as i love anthropology. please make more videos involving the anthropological perspective. thank you for making this :)
Eyoo UCC rise upp
When he mentioned that animals and hunter-gatheres spend most of their time in leisure, it reminded me of two quotes from two different people:
"What do people like to do when they're not being pushed around? They like to swing, they like to have fun, dance, eat good food, etc."
- Alan Watts
"Human beings must use their energies in productive work, and they want to, and they do. The more freely they can act, the more energetically they improve their living conditions, and the less attention they give to anything else. The fact is that Americans pay no attention to Government so long as it does not interfere with them. Normally they never think of it except at election time. Americans are busy; not half of them even know the names of their Congressmen. Ask the next forty persons you meet, if you doubt it."
- Rose Wilder Lane
Really very interesting.
My three take-away insights:
1. we are both incredibly adaptable and culturally intransigent;
2. the use of gentle insults to level and bring humility that will 'gentle young men's hearts' and
3. it would be great if we could be well enough informed, experienced and travelled to the point that it would make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.
3. is more of an call to action to get familiar with and do strange shit so that the familiar experience rejuvenate into something new and strange
yeah....the thing about gentle insults is that they turn into ballbreaking a bit too easily. You have to remember, the caregivers themselves are going to be stressed, hungry, need a smoke, short on sleep, etc. often enough. You can let your kids fail in controlled circumstances to get used to the feeling without hacking them down. They can meet their first bully when you put them in public school.
Even at older age brackets, that whole caveman tall poppy syndrome or crabs in the bucket thing gets old as shit. Fuck every last person who thinks that way. Life is too short for that kind of unrelenting negativity in your life.
Thanks for the comment, by the way. I was hesitating on watching this video because something in this guy's face and voice said he would be a negative toxic asshole.
4. This video is not debunking something.
"Fitness is the quantitative representation of individual reproductive success. It is also equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation, made by the same individuals of the specified genotype or phenotype."
Regardless how it is archived. American Bob who had produced a lot of offspring (and his offspring producing even more) is plain and simple the fitter individual Even if a fat stupid Bob. And they most likely outnumber the few hunter gathers with their Bib gen pool by 1 vs 100000000.
I remember watching a documentary about the Amazon tribes and how they work 3 hours a day and being totally fascinated by how easily they seem to sustain themselves.
Part of the reason the loss of so much of the Amazon is so devastating is because it's a prime example of a cultivated ecosystem. It's not agriculture as such, but it's been carefully watched over by the people who live in it for thousands and thousands of years. If a fruit grows that's easier to eat, its growth is encouraged; if a fruit grows that's poisonous, its plant is killed. Over time, the whole forest becomes full of things that are edible if you know how to eat them, and full of animals brought in by the lush landscape. Many forests were once cultivated like this. Everything edible or useful, as long as you knew where to look.
Did the documentary mention how low a population density this environment and lifestyle could sustain?
@@psychohist Counterpoint: the hunter-gatherer mound communities of the Mississippi such as Cahokia, which included ~120 massive earthworks spanning around 16 square kilometers and supported a population between 10 and 20,000, most of which was developed prior to the introduction of agriculture to the region.
Unlikely that they worked this little, even the studies the claim hunter gatherers only work 3-5 hours a day are only accounting for the time it takes to gather food and nothing else. In comparison modern societies people only work 8-9 hours a week on average to just get enough food. So I’m comparison we still work 8 hours a week to gather food that it takes them 15-20 hours of work to gather.
I strongly doubt that the hunter gathers of any society works less especially significantly less than modern one especially modern western societies.
@@TmanRock9 Nope. Those hours include food and shelter, the necessities. They don't have to pay landlords, who do nothing other than own the building in which they live. They don't have to pay car insurance, or for gas. They don't have bills to pay. Where do you think those extra hours of work would go?
You and others who challenge preco captions have given me confidence that,(barring huge disasters such as nuclear war , lab grown super viruses for example) humanity will survive the ages and our ignorance. We'll make it. We'll improve our thinking. We'll beco.e our best version of ourselves as a species. I didn't always feel this way. Thank you, for sharing your insights.
That's always been my argument against nihilism, yes we've taken steps backwards, no the world will not just ''keep getting better'' by itself, but if we, as human beings actively engage in trying to make this world better, I believe we will.
@@HandleMyBallsRUclips yes but all technological progress has halted around 50 years ago outside of computing. And now even computing has halted progress.
We will not progress again for another 1000 years
This video is a pack of lies and any evolutionary biologist or anyone who really knows about how harsh natural conditions are could tell you that.
@@AverageAlien not sure where you got this from because as far as I can tell technological progress has not halted even in areas outside of computing.
@@TmanRock9 changes with such a big impact as the wheel electricity or computer will take some time but that doesn't mean that there arent still major improvements in all fields.
This reminds me a lot of "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It's definitely something to look at if you find this sort of thing interesting. All about the adaptability of humanity to entirely different cultural environments and the idea that the specific way in which the modern world is organized was in no way inevitable. It has a really positive outlook, too, suggesting that us humans have always been far more capable of change and imagining doing things differently and making the world a better place than we have usually been given credit for.
Rip graeber. a true legend
Possibly the best book I have ever read. (I have been an avid reader for about 65 years.) I have been re-reading it a chapter at a time for about a year.
*scribbles down title and authors* thank you!
I studied anthropology, this is a marvellous example of how studying tribal societies gives us a very different perspective on life
Why are there so few such tribes? Why do they inhabit fringe inhospitable environments? Why are their populations so low?
Human Population only boomed once farming practices took hold throughout the world. When the Bantu came south with Farming and Iron tools, they basically absorbed alot of the Khoi and San. When the Europeans came they wiped them out further with desease. Today most Southwestern Africans have KhoiSan ancestry, but their actual tube numbers are low. This happened ALL over the world!
@@lachlanmcvey7885 because we fucked them lol
I found this really interesting because when I was a kid, 40+ years ago, I watched the 1957 film "The Hunters" about this same group and I think of it often, having just googled its title a couple months ago. Often when I felt put upon by my own job I would think how lucky I am not to be trailing a bleeding giraffe for 4 days, or searching for gourds for drinking water. Now I may have to rethink all that.
Sorry but this feels like poverty porn.
@@Sir_Zombie1ted My comment or the older film? I'm not poor, I just get annoyed that I'm expected to reply to emails 24/7. I'm sure the old film is a product of its time but I don't remember more than the two details I mentioned.
@@BCThunderthud The fact that amidst your hardship, you find comfort in the fact that others have it harder (as per your standards). This in turn makes you feel happy as you deem yourself to be part of the happy few while others (as per you) are having it harder than you.
If you feel put down by your job, think that you are:
1-happy to have a job enabling you to provide, or
2- that nothing lasts forever and that soon you will leave the lousy bunch to go to greener pastures, or even,
3- they can say all the shit they want but haters gon hate, let them hate, eat up that hatred and suffocate on it.
But at the end of the day, I have no right to judge you, I just felt you have the wrong mindset (finding comfort in the fact that others have it rougher than you), when in fact you are to feel good being who you are (you are the best "you" ever, unique in every aspect, do you still need to know others are having it hard to feel good about yourself? NO).
@@Sir_Zombie1ted Yeah, I guess I see what you're saying. I don't think I really framed it around the !Kung specifically, more my own ancestors and a sense of gratitude that my material challenges are so trivial. And I think this video highlights some trade-offs I hadn't considered.
The problem with comparing at the peoples of the Savannah and Western society is that they don't have a winter and we do. A tremendous amount of effort and organisation must go into having enough food and fuel reserves to survive for 3 months without any ability to find food or heat during that time. Also there is autumn and spring to consider. They don't have those either. All in all, living in temperate climates is tough. Don't imagine that you can do that working 15 hours a week!
Not only that, their societies are entirely reliant on ours.
Look what they wear, live in, the tools they use.
None of these products is even slightly contributed to by their efforts or culture.
The man in the video is just trying to peddle socialism and abject poverty as something great.
We know it doesn't work, it has been tried so many times and it always fails.
Then there is population size (and the risk of dying out).
They are far more likely to be wiped out by an event than other people.
These people live in a near-desert lol, which I imagine is harder than living in a place where it's pleasant at least half the year.
@@adithyavraajkumar5923 It isn't actually desert, it's scrub and it's not so bad. I lived for 5 years in Southern Sudan and it's a pretty nice place all year round.
@@benchapple1583 Fair enough. Is it not dry and arid most of the time, though? It seems to me that in temperate climates it should be easy enough to gather food during the spring and summer, and hunt in the fall and winter. We're not talking about subarctic climates here. I find it hard to believe that it would be easier to subsist in savannas and xeric shrub-lands than in, say, southern England.
@@adithyavraajkumar5923 You can see all the plants in the thumbnail- that means water. I spent 5 years in Southern Sudan and it rains (deluge is the right word) every 5 days like clockwork- a convection cycle so I'm told. Subsisting in the savanna should be a lot easier than southern England. The number and variety of birds and animals is simply astonishing. That's why people go on safari there. You aren't constantly battling the cold. Fun fact- without clothes, shelter and heating, you'll die of hypothermia if the temperature is a constant 18 degrees C. That may be hard to believe but it is true. We are tropical monkeys after all.
I think if you look at _our_ lives you also see cooperation at every turn, from family to friends to local clubs and community groups, and we just tend to overlook this when we talk about economics.
Well the issue is also that economics have been mixed in with the political sphere(politics as in polis, a.k.a. interactions with others) and that kinda created this mess.
It would be good it we talked more about our 'polity' rather than just our 'economy' and the fact that we all play a role in it. Imagine if everyone understood that they have a civic as well as a professional life.
Even in our jobs what we produce, for market and for society, is done so cooperatively. I work construction and teamwork and camaraderie is vital to production. This is the natural human tendency. Our problem is that all of that labor and production and cooperation is owned by corporate board rooms, completely detached from the labor, in order to make them richer. I can not imagine a more upside-down way of running a society if egalitarianism, social improvement, and human well-being are our goals.
It was having free time... to just rest, play or daydream.... that allowed the human species to make the leaps forward we have... Farming cut down on the constant need to find food... And as we started to change the very plants and animals to better suit our needs... And build surplus... It wasn't hard work that got us here... It was an abundance of free time...
I agree unfounded leisure (maybe not as unfounded as I once thought) created our modern society.
The problem is the definition of "fittest". We seem to associate wrongly with "fitness", strengh, fight, battle... But it is actually "best fit". So you survive by "fittin in" the best without struggling too much against the enviroment. Less struggles, better life.
And yet these types of societies have been outcompeted by nomadic pastoralists, agricultural civilisations and urban industrialised societies all over the world. So they are not as ‘fit’ as the video makes out.
That's still not right. Fitness in an evolutionary sense is tied to reproduction. The more something reproduces and passes on genes to the next generation, the fitter it is. There are many strategies to increase fitness but being the best adapted to a specific scenario is not the only one. Another scenario is a generalist strategy where a species is not the best adapted at any one thing but does alright in many different circumstances. A species which is highly adapted to one specific niche can quickly go extinct when the environment changes.
@@rakuengrowlithe4654 that is correct, you have to say that larger populations show “fitness”. This is a nearly extinct hunter gatherer tribe. Other societies (nomadic pastoralists, agricultural, urban and industrial) number nearly 8 billion. Which is “fitter”?
Not saying he's totally wrong, but a lot of hunter/gatherers lived in Northern climates where there wasn't nearly as much food just hanging around to be easily picked and the shorter nice weather seasons and potentially brutal winters meant that they had to get stuff done and didn't have a lot of time to just hang out. He's basing his statements on peoples who are basically equatorial or nearly so.
He's also basing his statements on "hunter/gatherer" societies which have access to modern medicine if they need it, possibly state handouts and access to trading stores. They don't have to make everything from scratch as their forebears did. Life is pretty tough when a scratch can get infected and kill you, as can a tooth abscess, and you certainly need to keep the arrows sharp because cooperation can end pretty quickly when you aren't the only tribe around and resources get scarce.
it's not winter 24/7 in Europe and they have dry and cold seasons in Africa.
Can't stay out too long in the heat. You need to get your stuff done in the morning. Me and my father used to do all the farm work in the morning as it was too hot in the middle of the day. It's no different in Europe.
Insulation is a hundred times harder to achieve in winter than in summer. Not to mention the clothes and gear it requires to simply walk outside after snowing
Actually, he bases his observation on a group of hunter/gatherers who were pushed to the margins by more aggressive, warlike tribes. There on the Kalahari desert a remnant of the people who used to roam through a bigger and richer landscape of Africa, have managed to eke out an existence.
My first thoughts re this study of a group of hunter gatherers is that the person who studied them allowed much of his interpretation of the phenomena he observed to be influenced by his own social views. Whilst I recognise this is a constant challenge I expected a more neutral analysis.
1. His focus on competition excluded the behaviours of women!
2. His interpretation of men and their activities ie hunting achievement, suggested that whatever they did, even if it had a positive outcome for the society as a whole, it should not be celebrated as male activities, even when contributing to society are seen as negative in society.
3. This understanding of competition in human groups did not translate well into a challenge to the role of competition in the wider human society. That is because of the sample size and also because of the very limiting effects of the harsh physical environment limiting motivation and opportunity for competition.
The study therefore, in my opinion, doesn't in itself undermine theories using competition explanations of human development. It does however suggest a bais against those theories based on Darwinism on the on the part of the person carrying out the study.
Also these tribes are the ones who actually lost the competition and were driven off to the shitty lands by the tribes who celebrated their males. You can't extrapolate modern h-g tribe and say that everything was that way.
@@muradm7748 Yeah, he completely ignores competition with other tribes, doesn't he? Possibly there isn't much these days, because as you said, they lost. Maybe there's a reason they're on some really crappy land.
@@muradm7748 Truth but they were driven of from much of Southern Africa by the bantu speaking people’s who were farmers and herders. Look at for example the zulu kingdom under Shaka Zulu who carved out a huge African empire in no time.
“It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearin’ milk bone underwear.” -From the 1980s TV sitcom "Cheers"
Aaaaaaabsolutely one of my favourite quotes from Cheers 🤓
It's fascinating to watch an alternative perspective in regards to Darwinism. It gives us a whole sense of understanding about the world.
If evolution is real how long until a "cousin" ancestor of a Raccoon will send me an email?
the problem with Darwinism is, that many people misunderstand it. We understand fitness as something that has to do with dominance and athletisism. But fitness in a darwinian context has nothing to do with that. Fitness means the ability to fit into your environment. And when you live in a social environment, like we humans do, the most fit thing to do is to be social aswell.
@@VoteRFK read a textbook on biology pls
@@TheTpointer
Nice retort genius, seems you understand so well you can't entertain the question. Ya close minded fool lol.
The truth is fine with being questioned, it's the lie that gets angry when challenged.
@@VoteRFK you didn't question the theory. that's why i asked you to read a biology text book. so you can question the real theory and not just a cartoonish version of it!
Been arguing about a similar point for years, though approached from the opposite angle.
When I studied AI, I made a genetic algorithm, which basically models the mathematics of evolution to evolve a solution to a problem. It taught me a few things, beyond that evolution is complicated.
Firstly, it is hard quite hard to define fitness. A simple problem, like finding the shortest route between a set of locations, leads naturally to the conclusion that the length of a route would define the fitness of the solution. Possibly, but for problems as complex as the genetic structure of a living thing? So many variables to be accounted for. Survival of the fittest doesn't really make sense in that context.
Secondly, going back to the simple problem, you would find defining fitness as the shortest route may not work, as the population of solutions that you evolve can easily plateau, all become identical, at which point your algorithm can't progress without more mutation, which is just praying to RNJesus.
This can be understood by picturing all possible solutions as a plane where each axis is a variable in the solution, and height above the plane is the fitness of a solution. Picture a static image of the sea, with waves and troughs fixed in place.
When the algorithm evolves a new generation, it is essentially traveling across this sea. It wants to find the highest point, but it can get stuck in a trough. How can it get out without a push in the right direction, say from mutation? It can't, without a better definition of fitness that prioritizes small progress in the right direction, over large leaps that could be dead ends.
Tldr; evolution is complicated, and survival of the fittest doesn't mean what you think it does.
It’s referring to what fits best for the current environment not necessarily physical fitness.
I've heard that 3D map analogy before. It's really helpful.
@@williambrandondavis6897 that was the intent, but not how most people have taken fittest to mean. But it's still way too simplistic to describe a pseudo random, heuristic process.
@@LimeyLassen it really is a helpful image for several problems. It's called the solution space in AI. Pretty useful for picturing things with more than 3 dimensions, like spacetime.
Also, fitness isn't general, what is fit in one environment could be detrimental in another. Cats aren't fit for Antarctica, but humans are (though technological means, but that's still fitness), if you learn to hunt in a steppe you can't translate your skills to a dense jungle and vice versa. Likewise, knowing which berries are edible in Europe doesn't help in the Amazon. With evolution the fittest is environmental, humans look the way we do because we went out of the jungles into the steppes of East Africa, Chimpansees are more fit for jungle environments than us. Evolution is complex because environment isn't just temperature either, it's also what other organisms are there and how we can adopt to either not get killed by them or kill them (this includes all other organisms including microbes).
1 min into the video and already the premise is ridiculous and unfounded. Darwins Survival of the fittest are adaptations to survival... which includes having 'as much rest as possible' to be able to compete when it matters most. It is about realizing how group and social cooperation ultimately is self-benefitting. Dawin did NOT claim that the most persistently physically aggressive beings in the animal kingdom rose to the top of hierarchies.
Well-said.
Did anyone pick up on the survivorship bias problem in his argument? The SAN is one of the few surviving hunter-gather societies, so they did not "progress" as our ancestors did. I am not sure if their social contract tells us much about the majority of humanity's hunter-gather history. Still I would love to read his book,
Spot on
Anthropologists not knowing anything about general statistics, bias in data and taking things as they are to further their own view points of modern society? That us unthinkable!
@@jorgegomez3224 not to mention sell a few books to the idealists
To be fair, it wasn't Darwin who coined the term "survival of the fittest". Poor Herbert Spencer never gets any credit.
@@chuckles9767 Well, someone remembered him in 2022. That's pretty good.
Suzman is using the term "survival of the fittest" in a very broad way to also mean *social* competition when strictly speaking it only really refers to *biological* competition. So in reality it's not really relevant to discussing the egalitarian social structures of hunter gatherers.
In fact hunter gatherers are known to have been highly competitive with those outside their tribe, whether they are humans or animals. In the past they hunted many large mammal species (megafauna) to extinction just after the last ice age. In other parts of the world they've competed fiercely with other hunter gatherer tribes and fought nearly continuous genocidal wars with them.
You can't live in a hunter gatherer society for few years, or even decades, and assume that this is the way things always have been and always will be, or that it's even representative of how hunter gatherer societies exist elsewhere.
He is also promoting the good old noble savage myth promoted since Marx by communists. And ever time someone visits the 'noble savage' again they don't replicate the results or show that the customs where invented by the researchers.
@Yeah Mac, you have a good point!
However, i am not really sure that our biology does not include social behaviour engraved somewhere there.
I am always humbled by the realisation that wisdom rarely comes from the type of knowledge the western world values. Gentle-ing the hearts of young men should be a practice in every society around the globe.
We "civilized" types too often project our own accustomed and accepted thought and behavior patterns onto all types of human society, and often onto the rest of the natural world as well. Which only blinds us to how other human societies and the natural world really operate.
Some obscure tribe with low population pushed to a fringe inhospitable environment is not the model of success in terms of survival. Where are all the hunter gatherers if this is really the way forward?
@@lachlanmcvey7885 they have been outcompeted BUT they managed to survive tens if not hundreds of thousands of years that way. That has to count for something. Say what you will, but it is an incredibly stable mode of existence.
The invention of agriculture opened pandoras box. Once opened it couldn't be closed. We can't feed 8 billion people with a hunter gatherer lifestyle, we can't return now we are out.
@@dekippiesip I believe you are correct about the stability and sustainability. It is sustainable because the human population can never grow to the point that there is permanent damage to the environment
@@dekippiesip I'd replace the word "stable" with "stagnant".
@@lachlanmcvey7885 No, humans have been ecological serial killers since we figured out pointy stick. When humans got to new places like Australia and the Americas they wiped out most of the large terrestrial animal species. If that's not permanent damage I don't know what is. But once they did that they then lived in relative harmony with nature; whereas modern industrial society could destroy the ecological foundation of it's 8 billion people. But even if humans don't make "Life finds a way"
The story about the manager got my attention.. Some people we encounter might push us into an inquiry just because we feel the need to prove that is not the way to go. The path to truth sometimes starts with a gut feeling( Suzman only mentions it just as a case though).
Thank God there are people like that. With all the insanity in the world it’s nice to know there are a few corners where nothing changes.
those people do not live the same as their forefathers. they keep the same social structure. huge difference.
that's... not true and an essentialist fantasy thi
They aren’t, the video is a lie.
Our world is changing fast even for them. People that have lived in isolation are becoming increasingly in contact with the rest of the world. It's not inherently a bad thing as long as they're not forced apart or exploited
@@dannya1854 not a bad thing? The last humans living the natural life as all of our ancestors did are now being encroached upon by the industrial civ and that ain’t a bad thing?
I have a great amount of respect for that scientist, his knowledge and his research. All in all, pretty solid. But some ideas (and it's implications) feel a little bit of:
1) Let's assume that in nature, cooperation happens 95% of the time and competition happens only 5% of the time. Yes, I can see that being the case, we don't compete "all the time". But guess what: when you have to compete and you lose, you die.
2) Yes, small communities tend to be egalitarian. But if the community grows, that just can't work out. And egalitarianism isn't a general rule: in Central and South America we had tribal societies with strict hierarchy systems.
3) If you have a direct contact between two communities, one of them being egalitarian (so it has to be small) and the other being big or at least larger (so it has to have hierarchy), the big one will cruch the small one. So... is egalitarianism such a good thing after all?
4) So that tribe mocks the most successful hunters just so they can exercise humility. Ok, I get it. But... aren't they just dragging people down by doing that? If no one can rise above the others, then... No one can rise at all. Is that really a good thing? Maybe that mediocre attitude of shutting down individual success explains why that group is so technologically backwards.
I'm not an anthopologist, that's just my two cents on the discussion. Again: big respect for James Suzman.
Maybe being technologically backward isn't really a concern for them. Also maybe they don't feel it's necessary for people to rise within their community. What purpose would rising serve to a hunter gatherer tribe?
@@asiamatron I get what you're saying, but it's like: they won't have any problems whatsoever for just as long as they remain isolated. Or as long as other groups choose to leave them alone, which is not a given. When someone else comes to their land carrying bigger guns, suddenly being technologically backward becomes "a concern".
And defense is just one issue, I could make an argument about many others. Stagnation can't be a good thing, even if I also believe progress without limits can be equally dangerous.
@@xavierneto9044 Yeah I hear what you're saying too.
I'm not sure I wholly agree with #2. Yes, it's easier to govern large societies with a hierarchy. That doesn't mean it's the only way. See for example ancient republics (granted, which weren't 100% egalitarian, but definitely more so than most of the states around them).
And a potential problem with people "rising" is that if one or a few people take total control, that can also lead to stagnation.
“We use it to gentle young men’s hearts” is such a beautiful sentiment and clearly a necessary part of the survival of these cultures. We in the ‘developed’ world could certainly use a cultural practice like this. I think it would profoundly affect the well-being of everyone, and especially in the US, reduce the incidence of violence and radicalism we see growing exponentially. I love this idea, I really wanna explore it further
look at how they are living, they are savages, and you think we would somehow benefit from a culture that fail to civilize. adopt this culture and we will all starve to death since we rely on a culture where 1% work to produce food for the 99%.
Most modern day men had self esteem issues...... So no
@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl most modern men didn't have self esteem issues before the culture changed to pursue these savage ideals. the issue is recent, 100 years ago it wasn't a problem it came about when the socialist implemented their manufactured culture.
While people sometimes need to be humbled and bragging about oneself is not a quality that is desired. This idea seems like it could severely hurt children's self esteem, imagine a kid coming home proud of the mark they got in an exam, only to be humiliated and belittled. Again the contrary of making the child feel superior to his peers is wrong.
If you don't think Western men do it, you're too far removed from the working class. We mock each other endlessly.
There are some inconsistencies and assumptions made, backed up by limited observations while ignoring certain key details we actually see in the video. Ancient society did have leisure time and shared amongst their own tribe/community, but for sure they competed against 'outsiders' and had conflicts resulting in death and worse.
Even economic historians are saying that ppl of the past had much more leisure time. I think modern ppl have been brainwashed to think life was always about work work work.
@@bbbkkk3034 No one was claiming anything else. Doesn't mean they were more peaceful or did not often lead very harsh and in general much shorter lives.
@@chaosmonkey1595 I wasnt saying u claimed anything. It was a generic observation.
I can't tell who I take exception to, the writer of the video title, or James Suzman himself. He didn't debunk anything whatsoever. If anything he reenforced the principal. He showed a group of people, well adapted to their environment, who have a set of traits that provide them with a survival advantage. Did I miss something?
He debunked social Darwinism, which is ironically not a Darwinian creation at all
The point wasn't to discredit Darwin but social darwinism like that espoused by Herbert Spencer.
If I have collected grains and ground them up all day, and someone wanders lazily over to demand their 'demand-share', without doing any work, they would get nothing.
I think Yuval Harari noticed in Sapiens how agricultural revolution brought us humans more work, less nutritious food and hierarchy, slavery and general misery.
Luckily the proof for any of these claims is non-existent.
@@chaosmonkey1595
Not true, there is plenty of evidence. But I doubt you determine truth by looking at evidence.
And yet human population was very low and low growth prior to agriculture. Humans almost went extinct several times during this time. Where are all the hunter gatherer societies? Have they been outcompeted by nomadic pastoralists, agricultural societies and urbanised industrial societies? Why are these perfect egalitarian societies always low population? There is a reason these societies have not thrived. You think it is not miserable to have half your children die or half your tribe die during a drought? Life is not all fun and games in these societies. Nothing stopping you going and living with them.
@@lachlanmcvey7885
The quality of life and health of people living in hunter-gatherer societies was by every measure better than the early agrarian societies. There is plenty of evidence to back this up.
Bones of the dead in archeological sites show that the hunter-gatherers of the time lived longer and had significantly LESS disease.
Do you think life was fun and games in the early agrarian societies? It sucked.
Why are they always low population? Because the local ecosystem can only sustain a low population. It isn't a complicated concept.
Besides who said "perfect egalitarian". The statement was simply "egalitarian".
@@aliquida7132 Yeah I don't recall seeing anyone say that the egalitarian life was perfect. If they did I must have missed it.
Now this man will have to explain why every society that had the chance to leave the hunter-gatherer live ended up taking it.
Exactly. I am not sure i want to live that life still. Yes there is moments of harmony but so does a capitalist, socialist and even a communist structure. Big civlisations moved to farming and competition has evolved for a reason. And for people who say they want to live that life, no one is stopping them to go to wild lands and live off grass and hunt animals "amicably" as described in this video.
I mean that's an already answered question, agricultural societies outperform hunter gathers. Switching doesn't benefit the individuals but societies that didn't switch couldn't compete with the stability of settled societies which allows for population growth even if the average member doesn't live as happily or as long. It's also worth considering groups that didn't switch such as nomadic peoples that occasionally outperformed settled communities
@@johnmackey9878 those nomadic peoples ended up living in settled communities anyway e.g. Mongols and Turks.
Have you heard of farming?
Overpopulation.
I can't help but think that this is "pop anthropology/evolution." Suzman comes into his studies with egalitarian notions so thoroughly baked in that his work is to find examples (the more charming, the better) to make a point that makes us feel guilty to deny.
Similarity, I feel that Jared Diamond was not able to violate his beliefs and venture into areas that would be taboo or torture his core.
Spot-on.
What would be a taboo belief here?
@@ericsierra-franco7802 Sorry brother. This is one year old. I'm not going back through it.
The Plains Indians of the 18th and 19th centuries were a classic example of hunter - gatherer social groups. Neither a single chief nor elite band held authority, successful hunters or warriors or wise men were followed and respected only until their "medicine" failed, the best hunters always killed a little extra game in order to feed those who couldn't hunt and all those who belonged in the tribe were free to leave and return at any time.
Later on, the appropriation of the horse brought corruptive change: those who rode into battle had more advantage and horses became a form of currency in trade.
History, mythology, fiction, and even journalism gravitate toward the spectacular, controversial, dangerous, annoying, frightenin, etc. Ancient people just hanging around and being nice to each other does not normally make for a moving story plot for too many people. I think it is hard to plot an exciting story (History) of people overcoming drought or volcano eruptions or sitting around somewhere waiting for winter to warm up into spring. A good writer could effectively plot this in an exciting way. But, I think most are just not interested.
You, however, did an excellent job of doing just that!
Survival of the friendliest is why we still exist as a species.
fittest is still in action ..... are you fit enough to bond with people, fit enough for understanding or fit enough to love ( mentally) ..... fittest doesn't always means physical it can be other aspect too....
@@sarveshyadav01 actually fitness overall in evolutionary terms literally only means your ability to pass on your genes. That means absolutely anything counts if it increases those odds
Damn we sure were friendly when we butchered and raped to death every other race of humans. Neanderthal, homo erectus ect.
I think most people always think about "hierarchies of power" and not "hierarchies of being reciprical"
Great video. I appreciate James' work.
What an interesting case study! I feel like it's important to say that this tribe isn't just interesting because of the insight they provide about early human society. These ARE modern humans. These are modern people living in a modern society. Driving cars and rampant inequality does not equal modern. These people make a conscious decision to run their society in this way, just like we make a conscious decision to not. This isn't an example of some bygone era that we can never return to. We can learn from them just like they can learn from us.
True.
Perfect comment. wish i could pin this
Thats very true, I have thought this sort of thing before (not exactly) the only downside is that they don't have advanced medical care,, But I have read that people like them do not suffer mental illness as much as we do,
I think it is more that this tribe is a unique exception. I've stayed with other San tribes in the Kalahari. and I can confirm that they do have hierarchies and not everything is shared. I think that this one tribe has a unique system that works for them but from my experience from travelling around the world and visiting remote peoples is that chiefs and leaders exist in even the most basic societies. Sexism and gender differences exist in all sorts of societies and discrimination against disabled people exist in even the most simplistic hunter gatherer tribes.
Except they don't make a conscious decision to run their society this way, and neither do we. We are molded by our environment the practices of those who came before will impact us. This tribe would have tremendous difficulty becoming an industrial society, and we cannot become hunter gatherers again. We have lost the knowledge of how to live like this and destroyed the environments that would support it. But most importantly, without agriculture on an industrial scale, we would never have had 1 billion people, let alone 8 billion. To return to this would mean sacrificing 99.99% of those that currently live today. Would you take those odds?
If it is constructed as to not be a “competition” amongst those of your species, or at least those in your tribe, is there not a “competition” amongst the various species?
The “giraffe” is in a “competition” to survive the hunter’s quest of conquest-the hunter is in a competition of being victorious over the “giraffe’s” innate drive to survive.
Are they not?
I was being outsmarted by a mouse for a few days, then I made some adjustments to the bait…and the mouse took its place on the hierarchy of species.
But was that not a competition?
When not in the pursuit of food, hunter gatherers conserved their energy. As we can see, they are very lean, compact people who don't need a lot to sustain themselves.
Watching the 'Alone' Series helped me understand hunter gatherers. The most important consideration was to reduce excess expenditures of energy. The reason was that they were always trying to get enough calories. They had to match calorie input to with energy output. Modern people looking at a real hunter gatherer might mistake this for people enjoying themselves. They are in a serious effort to try to reduce their energy output as if they make a mistake it could be catastrophic for the community. Rousseau lives. I think there is a little bit of ideology filtering ideas here. Hunter gatherers had a 50% child mortality. They did not store food in any significant way so any days would be their last if they weren't totally on their game.
alone was in the arctic completely different environment which is especially difficult for hunter gathering and the contestants didnt have access to dozens of thousands of years of knowledge on how to survive their environment so dont underestimate the san people
Growing up in western society, I always felt out of tune with it.
I'd spend more time fishing,hunting spear fishing etc. I was generally put down as lazy by those around me.
Yet they would always want their cut, without a reciprocating input.
Later in life I moved out to central Australia for years and then to Arnhem land for a long time. When I finally came back from my new home my outlook had changed on western society. When those from before would come expecting their cut I'd ask for reciprocation . They didn't like it.
When members of my adopted family come from Arnhem land to visit, my blood family members always think they are taking advantage of me.
It's hard for some to get their minds around how other societies work.
Benefits and flaws in all.
My blood mother came and stayed a while with me and my other family in Arnhem land. She has a better understanding now but she would never be able to live that way, just as my other family can't live the western way.
As an anthropology student, once you're able to pronounce Ju/'huansi properly, you're ready. 😂
Its mind blowing/boggling that what hunter-gatherers call "work" is what we call "leisure". it's more like by co-opting Modernity and civilization we abandoned order and inherited chaos.
If you consider order to be entirely at the mercy of the elements, sicknesses, animal migration patterns, with barely any ways to mitigate any of it, sure. It's a simpler life with more leisure but also one that might snuff you or your loved ones out at any point with a far higher likelihood. I would say the trade is literally the opposite. We abandoned chaos and freedom for order and security.
Absolutely false. What a dumbass statement. Hunter gatherers had terribly difficult lives. It was work. Reagrdles of how we changed the environment doesn't mean shit
I don't think so. It is more that we need contrast in our lives.
I live in a place where people traditionally cut peat by hand. Talk to local people in their 20s and 30s and they hate it. They grew up with memories of being forced to go out and help their parents (and grandparents) cut the peat, turn the peats and carry it home.
To me, it is a great break from sitting behind my desk. I'd rather cut peat and carry sacks than go to a gym.
@@chaosmonkey1595 true except that the order and security we have are illusions. We remain at the mercy of the elements just as much as ever. We are at war with the chaos of nature, and then we wonder why it fights back just as hard. It's a war we could never win.
Work is literally what we get paid for. They get paid for walking up hills, that is also a leisure activity for some people. I know professional kangaroo shooters, hunting is their work, this is also leisure for many people. I know professional fisherman and that is their work, fishing is also a popular leisure activity.
I googled how many hours pre-industrial farmers worked, and "The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure" indicates 9 hours/day not including lunch and other breaks. That still sounds more labourius than the ~5 hours for hunters mentioned in this video. So why did we make the switch? I did more googling, and a casual inspection confirms that indeed hunting/gathering is less labour intensive than agricultural societies (obviously I didn't initially believe the claim in this video). So, again, why did we switch? The article i read didn't have a definitive answer, it guessed that it enabled communities to better survive changes in their environment, although we know this did not prevent the mass-extinction of pre-colonized south american civiliizations. So I now believe that hunting/bathering was, on an average day, easier than farming. But now I'm wondering why we, as a species, left it behind for thousands of years long before industrialization.
We switched for the obvious reason that hunter gatherer soviets cannot maintain large populations or build large urban settlements do to lack of resources. Hunter gatherers reach a population cap where their population does not grow due to lack of available resources. This is why tribes generally only number in the hundreds.
Every hunter gatherer Society has fewer people are less infrastructure than any farming society.
Besides it seems most studies only factor in time required to hunt for food and not the time required to gather, pre pair or cook that food nor the time to build a small settlement and maintain that settlement or the time required tending to the injured or sick of your tribe. Then their is the making of tools which tools some time. The few hours a day claim seems to be under estimated and not realistic of the amount of work required for hunter gatherer societies.most studies conclude they worked atleast 40-59 hours a week just getting food and preparing it meaning the likely worked for several more on other necessary tasks. So it’s probably closer to 60-80 hours a week.
After watching this video, I feel as if Mr. Suzman ultimately confirms the very theory he is trying to debunk.
"It isn't a dog-eat-dog world!" he says. "I mean, just look at this tribe in Africa."
You mean, a tribe that ended up not conquering anything?
Before you get your undies in a twist, let me be clear that I'm not making a moral argument. It's still bad to conquer your neighbor. But civilizations that went on to define the modern world we live in didn't live this way. They knew how to work really hard, and in many ways, this is a good thing.
If we're going to summarize it in bumper sticker size, I prefer "Adapt or Die", given that organisms most able to adapt to environmental change are the most likely to proliferate.
I never read Darwin's constant struggle as one amongst individuals, but as a constant struggle of the species on a macro scale. A social species just has an evolutionary advantage within the struggle, when a situation benefits from cooperation.
It's highly misleading to say that hunter-gathers only work for 4-5 hours a day just because they spend 4-5 hours a day looking for food. We work for a lot more things for food. The average American spends only 10% of their income on food, so if you work a 40 hours a work, this anthropologist would say you're only actually working 4 hours a week, which is obviously nonsense.
As a hunter gatherer, every minor chore is a form of work. Making clothes is a lot of work. Maintaining your tools and shelter is a lot of work. Starting a fire to cook by hand is a lot of work. Even getting clean water is work.
The people we see in this video cooperate because their environment offers so little that "war" would be suicide for all. Polynesians were hunter/gatherers too, but they were able to gather enough resources that they could engage in wars.
Very skeptical of his findings. If hunter gatherers live such an easy life, we humans would not have bothered to transit to agriculture. When compared to our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes, who are essentially hunter gathers also, I am again, very skeptical of his clams that there are no "authority" everyone cooperates and lives in harmony. In the book "Chimpanzee politics" for example, we learn that chimpanzees compete intensely for higher social status even to the point of death.
I think fitness, ultimately translates into how many offspring you produce, AKA "fitness in a population level".
If you have more resources (agricultural output), even if these don't provide the highest individual fitness/wellbeing. You can afford to have more children. And so will your children and their families and so on...
It's when, on top of the lower wellbeing generated by an agricultural society, there's surplus production and yet at the same time, lack of certain goods/resources.
That, antagonistic behaviours, inequalities and hierarchies show up.
Only in a perfect world were all demand/need is supplied/covered by someone else, could theoretically reach the same levels of wellbeing in a highly productive and specialized society.
Then read more alternative findings and then compare amongst peer reviewed papers and come to your own conclusion.
We transited to agriculture because the hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only sustain a small population. Effort wasn't the driving factor.
@@aliquida7132 one hypothesis for agriculture was seeking surplus for certain fermented beverages… what a slippery slope that was, surplus -> population growth -> cities -> warfare, etc, just from the want of beer. @Chen Qin he leaves out the kinds of often brutal lengths these tribal groups have to go to limit their populations, they know how many people their land can support, they were frequently at war with their neighbours. Tribes have leaders, usually men, tribal laws around things like marriage and permitted activities by gender, even the food one could eat were ruthlessly enforced. It’s seems many like to romanticise these communities into a sort of ‘woke’ model egalitarianism by ignoring their incredibly ‘oppressive’ gender roles and literal patriarchy (not always but frequently), also there is an incredible irony of people marvelling at a culture of incouraging humility by a class of people that mostly reject their own tradition that is explicitly based around the idea that humility is a virtue and pride something to be avoided at all costs.
This presentation is like a silver teaspoon, beautiful and shallow.
He just mumbles for 10 minutes to prove that a purely egaliterian group is primitive.
I have had the privilege over the past 6 years or so to reside with my hubby in an indigenous village in the Yucatan. I daily see my neighbors plucking plants from the backyard to incorporate into their meals.
This honestly makes more sense in a scientific standpoint as cooperation and symbiosis are constantly needed for survival.
Working together is required to win in the competition, not competition itself. Like the first enemies we face are our own vices, and being able to defeat our vices in order to cooperate allows survival without any problems.
There's a clear misconception about things in the industry, being "cooperation vs competition" when it's technically "competence vs incompetence". We instinctively work with other people to get things done, and we usually don't think about that much because of how busy we are doing it.
Like, no matter how independent you are, you still have friends, family or acquaintances who have your back 24/7.
But that’s what survival of the fittest/ competition is about anyways. Cooperation evolved because those who cooperated out competed those who didn’t allowing species to survive.
I took his as a critique of capitalism.
Cooperation certainly works in small groups, families, and small villages, for instance.
But, once there are large groups, who are geographically separated by, say 100 mi, a system of trade will naturally emerge. Those fishermen, living by the sea want goat meat, and those heardsmen in the mountains want fish. Someone will specialize in producing garments, another gets good at making superior bows & arrows, another makes the best sandles, etc.
Eventually, a standard currency emerges, and that currency represents capitol. The groups that have goods that others want will expect capital in exchange for those goods, so they can afford the goods they need and want.
Capitalism itself is not bad, nor is socialism, nor communism, nor monarchies. In ALL these systems, there will be big winners and big loosers. The big winners ALWAYS have, not just more money, but also more political power. However, if those at the top tiers of these hierarchies could moderated, people at the lower end of the spectrum would be in less need.
Unfortunately, man is flawed, and every system of government and economics is influenced by these flaws.
Capitalism would be perfectly fine, if large players were simply broken up into separate and smaller entities. If this were true, pharmaceutical companies, big tech companies, oil companies, banks, etc., would simply be made smaller and run by different people. This is something we used to do in the US, but rarely do today.
If you think Democrat progressives are the answer, think again. Most of the largest ecconomic players are owned and protected by democrats. That's not to say that Republicans are for breaking them up either.
The same principles could be applied to any of the other political/economic systems, and result in vast improvements. But there are problems with each.
Communism, by definition, gives ownership of business to the government. You can't vote out a communist leadership, so you're at the mercy of their good will, and that good will has been shown to be greatly limited.
Lenin said: The goal of socialism is communism. Socialism leads you to communism, so that's out.
You can't vote out a monarchy, so the best system IS capitalism with limitations on company size.
I know someone is going to say democratic socialism, but it would become communism within 40yrs, so it's not a viable answer either. Only granular capitalism does the trick.
That was a lot to digest. Thank you for the paragraph breaks. A wall of words would have been impossible to read. I appreciate people who are able to articulate their thoughts with clarity.
I have a few minor points to share, in no particular order. Forgive me if I misrepresent or misunderstood a point you made. I'll also try and be brief, if not succinct.
First, capital isn't currency, in and of itself. Money is just a medium of exchange. Capital is the means of production (buildings, factories, tools, intellectual property, skilled labor, etc), especially when said capital is privately owned.
Currency is only considered capital if its invested and working towards a goal. A million dollars buried in your backyard isn't capital, for example. It's just saved money. My econ professor once said that if money doesn't circulate, it's just savings, a stored resource that doesn't benefit society.
Think of currency/ money as blood. For the health of the body, it needs to flow everywhere and be regulated appropriately for maximum health and performance. If the brain were able to decide with greed as a prime motivation that the toes, nose, ears, and one eye don't deserve blood, what happens to the health and performance of the body?
I generally agree that our species is flawed, but what complex creature isn't? However any given society that functions with some degree of efficiency exists through a subtle layer of social conditioning, or social pressures. The education system, media, laws, policies, and whatever defines things as culturally good or deviant behavior.
The U.S., for example, in all its many complex and interwoven facets, functions with intent with wealth, race, and gender as the primary factors for maximum accessibility and success, or a hierarchy of norms based in policy and law that benefit a selection of the society, backed by violence.
There is virtually nothing that happens on a systemic or institutional (macro or micro) level by happenstance or through pure nature.
This "primitive tribe" has achieved balance with their environment and their society needs. Not by accident, but by intentional choices that have hard wired their culture so that it's self replicatinting, ie seemingly occurs naturally.
The phrase "life isn't fair" is an example of a society, promoted by those that control the pressures of said society (wealthy, influence, violence, capital, etc.), to decide that egalitarianism isn't in the best interests of the powerful. A society that isn't fair us by definition uncivil and unjust, but otherwise can functions if the common citizenry is poorly educated and empowered for maximum proficiency in areas of employee obedience and product consumerism.
In a primitive society, personality traits typically considered as personality flaws (greed, narcissism, dishonesty, etc.) aren't supported by the greater society.
In the U.S., these traits are often rewarded and become cultural ideals and even norms that are continually reinforced through popular media as example of what it takes to be successfu.
This is due to and further causes a lack of critical thinking and genuine intellectual honesty based on a skewed perspective of what is normal, good, and right. Any alternative perspective is seen as an attack of the vary identity of those who most benefit for the state of normal, and their loyal followers that believe in the these norms and aspirations with certain social privileges, without any of the actual power and wealth.
@The10thManRules
Well articulated points!
I didn't say it perfectly, but I was describing currency in use as capital. My intended point was that in large systems, you can't very well trade goods for goods. A currency will always emerge, be it coin, gold, or salt, a currency emerges.
At the scale this small group exists (on its own), no ecconomic system is necessary. Even adjacent villages can get by dealing goods for goods. But, large social systems (especially spanning hundreds of miles) have great difficulty dealing goods for goods. That's when currency and a natural form of capitalism will emerge.
100%. You nailed the flaws of human beings!!
I disagree. In communism eventually the government would be the people. So everything would be owned by the people.
Also you haven’t spoken about other systems. What about anarchism? Communalism? You can’t make the conclusion that capitalism is the best when you’ve only compared it to communism
@@solarpunkalana Everything is already owned by "the people" in all these systems. The people will never be perfect that's why no system will ever be perfect.
This is a good video on the sociology of a single hunter gatherer tribe -- a group that has ties that bind them togther and a long history. What is missing is the dynamics of how such tribes interact with each other over hunting grounds or other conflicts. Where climate is mild and food is widely available -- there are few conflicts that would drive change. Where the climate is raw and you have to fight to survive -- things are different.
The Khoisan peoples were spread over a far greater range than they are now, and got squeezed into the South West by competition from other African races and colonial settlers. they know all about fighting to survive.
Survival of the fittest is simply a poetic sentence to describe the diversity of life and how different traits can be either advantageous or disadvantageous depending on the environment. It's relative, a species is neither stronger nor weaker than another, it's just different and unique.
It's not like there are literally individuals who are bullies and individuals who are victims.
That's just a fairytale born from who knows where, describing a world that never existed.
The person who said “it’s a dog eat dog World” doesn’t know anything about dogs
It is not a simple as that. While humans may cooperate within a group with common needs, they can also compete for resources between groups. Above all, humans are survivalists and must adapt to the circumstance by being cooperative and kind or competitive and cruel.
Anthropologists, we have seen, usually color their findings with their personal philosophies. I.e. the queen of anthropology, Margaret Mead. I also wonder how many of he videos in this presentation are stock because here are modern cooking devices, factory-made clothing and similar, items foreign to a hunter gatherer culture, unless they do their gathering at Walmart.
They are modern people, not an isolated uncontacted tribe. I imagine they acquire modern clothing and equipment by trade or some other relationship with nearby urban communities. Members of the tribe may even sometimes leave for a bit, take up an urban job for a bit, and then come back with "spoils". It would have been interesting, in a longer video, to explore their relationship with the more urban society that they clearly don't live entirely separate from. As for your point, all fields of human research encounter this problem. History, anthropology, archaeology, social studies and many other fields will always have the analysis part of their results affected by the values of the time and the people who do the research. But the researchers are also taught how to recognize and account for their inherent biases during the process.
Yes. The way people have been propagandised by the media to think that you only have value as a person if you're working yourself to exhaustion most of the time is a huge part of why modern life is relatively miserable for a lot of people.
Yeah, let's all take a year off and try to become a tribe of hunter gatherers in a world that could support maybe a few hundreds of thousands of such people, maybe a couple millions? If suddenly our technologies were taken away, you would see the Mother of All Competitions for the scarce resources there would then be available I'm afraid.
Yeah, we'll run with that and pretend like that was the point they were trying to make.
There are a lot of huge assertions being made in this video, and the only examples given to back them up come from a single African tribe.
From the limited examples shown in this video, i observed the following:
1) The people pictured have access to the most modern clothing, eliminating the huge time sink of manufacturing clothing. That goes for the initial acquisition of the clothes, and the greatly reduced need to replace said clothes due to the vastly more durable materials and manufacturing techniques.
2) The people pictured had access to mass farmed products like rice. There is no way they were able to farm that pot of rice themselves.
3) The people pictured had access to STEEL tools that were manufactured with the most modern kinds of production.
All 3 of the above points would reduce the total workload of these people by insane amounts. The more effective tools would result in far greater efficiency in each task, and being able to acquire them through trade with modern people means there is incalculable man hours saved in the production of similar tools.
These people are not real hunter gatherers because they have benefited greatly from contact with advanced agrarian/industrial societies. Therefore all points raised to indicate hunter gatherer lifestyle being easier than expected, are nonsense. That is before we even go into the fact they are living in one of the most environmentally beneficial climates for hunter gatherers.
We will never really know how it really was for genuine hunter gatherers unless we had a time machine. The best we can do is observe the ones alive now.
How do you know they had all those things 20 years ago when they were studied?
capitalism is a cancer of the mind
How do you know this isn’t stock footage of a completely different tribe🤯
He did mention other tribal groups around the world that have similar work loads. so, maybe we have a lot to learn from them .
Bowyer, archery instructor and general toxophile here:
Oh my god, the bow of the archer at 2:03 in the video is stunnig! It has perfect tillet for that type of bow. The shooting stance is also remarkable, as we can clearly see the trapezoid muscle on the back doing it's work. Is there any more information on the source of this photograph?
In what way did he debunk anything?
It was meant to be interpreted as survival of the most adaptable. Those who can adapt to changing environmental and societal conditions will live on, while those who cling to the past and ‘how it’s always been done’ will fade away.
The misinterpretation of the word fittest is repeatedly the problem when considering Darwinian evolution. It's often used to imply struggle, battle, and the fight of one against another, when in reality the word in it's old Victorian sense means best adapted, which is also the evolutionary context. It's not that there is the individual struggle to survive but collective altruism is as much a part of evolution as is competition.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
@@sh0001 How exactly?
@@stephenbetley9596 Fitness, in the context of evolutionary biology, refers to Reproductive Fitness. That is, the number of offsprings that an individual has (in a lifetime).
Fittest doesn’t mean the strongest/brightest/cutest etc. though each of those traits could help increase one’s reproductive fitness.
For evolution, it doesn’t matter if we live happy/sad lives. If suffering from a disease (e.g., sickle cell anaemia) could help increase one’s chances of living long enough (e.g., in regions endemic to Malaria) and giving birth, it will get selected.
Unfortunately, we are not designed to live happy lives, though we like leisure.
@@sh0001 That's precisely what I said in the post. The number of progeny is irrelevent. But evolution doesn't happen in a vacuum and collective altruism as Dawkins put it is a crucial part in one individuals progeny surviving while anothers doesn't.
Evolution of altruism is an offshoot of the selfish nature of our genes. Altruism is a behaviour which is helpful in a context. Selfish genes, selfish behaviour also prevail in other contexts. Ultimately, the question of altruism/selfishness circles back to whether the genes get passed on to the next generations. If yes, then good; it’s good to be altruistic; altruism becomes the dominant behaviour. In other cases selfish behaviour could prevail just as well.
I think it's safe to say that the kind of cooperation and egalitarianism described here is a product of group (family, tribe, nation etc.) cohesiveness. When such groups butt against others with whom they lack such a bond, you will often find fierce competition rather than cooperation. It's an in-group vs out-group situation. It takes a lot of time to form strong bonds with other people, other groups. In the mean time, one must survive. That's not to say there aren't efforts made by one or both groups to choose cooperation over competition, but it doesn't always work.
This is something very important that this guy left out. Humans still struggle mightily with the in-group/out-group dynamics. You obviously won't have much competition within your tribe because if you did your tribe would collapse, but if another tribe intrudes on your tribes hunting grounds then you bet there will be competition.
Yeah I think he also really neglected the factor of population size. Small population groups can work in relative harmony and cohesion, but large societies often require hierarchy and structure in a different way.
Why are there so few of these tribes and they have been pushed to inhospitable environments? Is it because they have been pushed their by more competitive groups perhaps?
@@Chickentastic256 this may seem true, but I guarantee if you read The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow you will see that it is not. Large population size does not "lead to" inequality. We choose inequality and we can also choose not to have it.
@@trogdor8942 but the thing is, that through out 99% of humanity/humanoid existence, population density was so low, that there was almost no competition for resources.
Oh fuck I never thought of just eating snow and twigs and wearing a loin cloth for 6 winter months a year!
What allowed humans to be so dominant is cooperation, not pitiless competition.
I think when people refer to competition in nature, they're usually talking about different species. Humans and other pack animals thrive on cooperation. Solitary hunters like tigers are the ones who have to compete. There's always struggle between predator and prey, but for the predator/ that struggle seems pretty peaceful.
I'd love to check out that guy's book.
“For the predator the struggle seems pretty peaceful”
I don't think having leisure time negates the fact that life is a struggle for resources. Leisure is just what you do once you acquire the resources.
This video was really interesting and also answered some questions I'd had about competitive nature. Loved it
I truly see anthropology as the key to unlock the door to the future of human potential. Our 'advancement' as a species has been contingent on our capacity to observe the known world, however our skills in this regard are currently limited to fairly discrete avenues. We are, as a result of our psychological development, inclined toward reductive readings that suit our confirmation bias. Only when the ideas of Hobbes, Malthus and Darwin (great thinkers, but like all thinkers, products of their time & environment) are no longer the only lens through which we collectively understand human behaviour, can we be set free to build the future we are truly capable of.
I enjoy about what he says apart from when he proclaims competition is 'nonsense'. Sure, it is not the equivalent of 10 people running down a race track, but learning how to cooperate with other people (or between species) is merely another mechanism that leads to the survival of your species. The same applies to resting and having leisure time. It may not feel like competition but it is still competition nonetheless. I don't think Darwin etc. ever claimed that competition means you need to work 8 hours a day to survive.
I found this vid to be a bit of a reach tbh. It's almost like he was trying to sell something.
@@AfroGaz71
He's a commie, re-writing nature to support his ideological worldview.
brilliant and insightful. collaboration and interaction as opposed to rivalry, let alone, wars, are the survival and proliferation strategies to be adopted asap. this is the next big thing in all human fields, and a huge challenge to the prevailing cultures of statesmanship, business and social behavior.
No. It should be obvious to both the good doctor and the observer. The doctor has obvious prejudices that affect his hypotheses.
Hunter gatherers still survive in some areas only because their territory has nothing obvious to offer to more competitive societies.
Essentially, they are, so to speak, a society of "world's tallest midgets."
I suggest that people, and you in particular, should be leery of anyone offering comfortable answers. A comfortable answer isn't necessarily a wrong answer, but it merits the same scrutiny as answers you're uncomfortable with.
Essentially, this Dr. has an agenda and it appeals to soft people who never have succeeded against true adversity.
Someone getting your order wrong at the coffeeshop isn't adversity...
they are basicly a family-tribe that adhers to its set of rules.
The one thing overlooked time and time again by idealists looking for a better future is that of migration. Hunter gatherer societies share resources because the group is intimately connected through bloodlines, shared experience and culture. The Ju/'hoansi would not be keen to share resources such as food and knowledge with strangers. Strangers are seen as a threat.
I agree with so much of what he presented here, but there’s a problem: natural selection is all about passing your genes, success means more descendants, not happier societies. the successful societies have hundreds of millions of people, while the unsuccessful have a few thousand. Any anthropologist will tell you those tiny societies are dying, thousands have already disappeared over the last two centuries, and soon they will all be gone. So how adaptive are their cultures to survival? They appear to be least adaptive. It’s the fallacy of composition: the idea that the still existing traditional societies somehow represent all societies in the past is bunkum. high stress societies evolved independently on every continent, it is likely that their ancestors in small groups had a different understanding of work which made them into high stress, massive empires