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+--- Thread: Article The prehistoric psychopath (/thread-17586.html)
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The prehistoric psychopath - C C - Mar 14, 2025
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-prehistoric-psychopath/
EXCERPT: There is longstanding disagreement on this issue among scholars: many hold the cultural assumption that humans are by nature bellicose, but there is also a ‘noble savage’ camp that believe the opposite. Stephen Pinker’s influential 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature tipped the scales by using a data-oriented approach to demonstrate that prehistoric people tended towards extremely high violent death rates, with average rates of violence higher than during the peak years of World War Two.
However, Pinker’s data also showed that prehistoric hunter gatherers seem to have been less violent than prehistoric agriculturalists. This is of critical importance in understanding human history because for 96 percent of our evolutionary history, we were hunter gatherers.
Comprehensive new research has emerged with much more archaeological data on violence in prehistory. Analysis indicates that prehistoric hunter gatherers were considerably less violent than the orthodoxy previously held. This finding also seems to be borne out by ethnographic data on modern hunter gatherers with lifestyles relatively similar to their prehistoric ancestors.
Hunter gatherers were not non-violent noble savages by any stretch of the imagination. They were relatively violent when compared with modern standards and even when compared with rates of violence experienced by other primates and mammals in general. However, we think this is primarily because human conflict is so lethal, not because it happens so often. On the contrary, hunter gatherers typically exhibit non-violent norms, with amoral and atypical sociopaths accounting for a disproportionate share of violence, just as in our own societies today.
Understanding this matters. Our extraordinary capacity to inflict lethal violence on each other is normally held in restraint by the natural aversion most people have to violence. If we fail to cooperate, we are vulnerable to falling into vicious cycles of violence that don’t benefit anyone. But we should be more optimistic about our capacity for peacemaking. Despite living in states of political anarchy, hunter gatherers were normally able to cooperate and exist peacefully together... (MORE - missing details)
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Magical Realist - Mar 15, 2025
Back in those days as a gay caveman I would've been the local tribe's shaman, smearing the hunky hunters with mammoth blood before they head out for their hunt. It's the only way we could be useful back then! lol
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Syne - Mar 15, 2025
Keep your fantasies to yourself.
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Magical Realist - Mar 15, 2025
![[Image: Y9Stm6s.jpeg]](https://i.imgur.com/Y9Stm6s.jpeg)
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Syne - Mar 15, 2025
Yes, we know you're gay.
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Magical Realist - Mar 16, 2025
You're the one who said they had a crush on Johnny Depp..
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Syne - Mar 16, 2025
Quit lying, moron.
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Magical Realist - Mar 17, 2025
Dec 11, 2017
Syne: "I have been partial to Johnny Depp for years. But I've freely admitted to that, and other guys I think are attractive, for decades."
You're such a closet case...see a therapist.
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Syne - Mar 17, 2025
So you believe no man can objectively see that another man is attractive without being gay?
Is that what you're saying? You certainly seemed to back then:
(Dec 12, 2017 01:25 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: Now accept that attraction you have for good looking males.
Can you tell if one woman is objectively more attractive than another? If so, does that make you straight?
If you can't rate the appearance of the sex you are not attracted to, you may be avoiding something.
Also, your illiteracy strikes again. I said "partial to" not "had a crush on." I would hope everyone is partial to fit people with nice symmetry over fat and ugly people.
RE: The prehistoric psychopath - Magical Realist - Mar 17, 2025
Yeah Syne...being attracted to men instead of women is pretty much the whole definition of being a homo. But keep stammering and making dumb excuses for it (partial to Johnny's symmetry? lol ) Nobody would want you to get your Republican party membership revoked for it..