May 1, 2022 06:52 AM
(This post was last modified: May 1, 2022 07:11 PM by C C.)
Was clovis culture the first sign of humans in the Americas after all?
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/was-...1.10773710
EXCERPT: The Clovis First theory has ruled the paleo-roost for decades, but has been challenged in recent years. Now a new study published in April in PLOS One revisits the conundrum.
[...] Their study is a smack on the cheek for pre-Clovis hope. Several exciting claims have been made in recent years, including the purported discovery of stone tools from about 33,000 years ago in Mexico, and human footprints in New Mexico dating to 23,000 years ago. These and several more discoveries, if accurately dated and identified, would indicate a “pre-Clovis” arrival date – Clovis referring to a paleo-Indian culture in North Africa dating back around 13,000 years, named after the town in New Mexico where the hallmark “Clovis-type” stone tools were first noticed (together with bison bones) in the 1920s.
“I have seen many splashy claims hit the pages of Science and Nature, and 10 years later it is determined that they aren’t what they are initially claimed to be,” Surovell explains.
To be clear: The team is not stating that humans only reached the Americas in the so-called Clovis period. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. They are stating that based on undisturbed sites, there is no evidence of pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas below the continental ice sheet.
[...] The bottom line, the PLOS One paper finishes, is that there are multiple early Beringian sites with undisturbed layers dating to 14,200 to 13,000 years ago, above the ice sheets; and below them – nada, until the Clovis period. But by 13,000 years ago we were definitely in the Americas. And we were butchering its remaining elephantids... (MORE - missing details)
Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-primi...t-is-wrong
EXCERPTS: . . . Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition...
[...] Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. [...] A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’
Historical narratives matter. In his bestseller Humankind (2019), Rutger Bregman took the fact that ‘our ancestors had scarcely any notion of private property’ as evidence of fundamental human goodness...
Primitive communism is appealing. It endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness. But this is precisely why we should question it. If a century and a half of research on humanity has taught us anything, it is to be sceptical of the seductive. From race science to the noble savage, the history of anthropology is cluttered with the corpses of convenient stories, of narratives that misrepresent human diversity to advance ideological aims. Is primitive communism any different?
[...] The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.
More important than its simplicity and narrative resonance, however, is primitive communism’s political expediency. For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature. Yet this storytelling is counterproductive. By drawing a contrast between an angelic past and our greedy present, primitive communism blinds us to the true determinants of trust, freedom and equity. If we want to build better societies, the way forward is neither to live as hunter-gatherers nor to bang the drum of a make-believe state of nature. Rather, it is to work with humans as they are, warts and all... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/was-...1.10773710
EXCERPT: The Clovis First theory has ruled the paleo-roost for decades, but has been challenged in recent years. Now a new study published in April in PLOS One revisits the conundrum.
[...] Their study is a smack on the cheek for pre-Clovis hope. Several exciting claims have been made in recent years, including the purported discovery of stone tools from about 33,000 years ago in Mexico, and human footprints in New Mexico dating to 23,000 years ago. These and several more discoveries, if accurately dated and identified, would indicate a “pre-Clovis” arrival date – Clovis referring to a paleo-Indian culture in North Africa dating back around 13,000 years, named after the town in New Mexico where the hallmark “Clovis-type” stone tools were first noticed (together with bison bones) in the 1920s.
“I have seen many splashy claims hit the pages of Science and Nature, and 10 years later it is determined that they aren’t what they are initially claimed to be,” Surovell explains.
To be clear: The team is not stating that humans only reached the Americas in the so-called Clovis period. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. They are stating that based on undisturbed sites, there is no evidence of pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas below the continental ice sheet.
[...] The bottom line, the PLOS One paper finishes, is that there are multiple early Beringian sites with undisturbed layers dating to 14,200 to 13,000 years ago, above the ice sheets; and below them – nada, until the Clovis period. But by 13,000 years ago we were definitely in the Americas. And we were butchering its remaining elephantids... (MORE - missing details)
Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong
https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-primi...t-is-wrong
EXCERPTS: . . . Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown. Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The organic community splintered under the weight of competition...
[...] Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. [...] A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’
Historical narratives matter. In his bestseller Humankind (2019), Rutger Bregman took the fact that ‘our ancestors had scarcely any notion of private property’ as evidence of fundamental human goodness...
Primitive communism is appealing. It endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness. But this is precisely why we should question it. If a century and a half of research on humanity has taught us anything, it is to be sceptical of the seductive. From race science to the noble savage, the history of anthropology is cluttered with the corpses of convenient stories, of narratives that misrepresent human diversity to advance ideological aims. Is primitive communism any different?
[...] The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.
More important than its simplicity and narrative resonance, however, is primitive communism’s political expediency. For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature. Yet this storytelling is counterproductive. By drawing a contrast between an angelic past and our greedy present, primitive communism blinds us to the true determinants of trust, freedom and equity. If we want to build better societies, the way forward is neither to live as hunter-gatherers nor to bang the drum of a make-believe state of nature. Rather, it is to work with humans as they are, warts and all... (MORE - missing details)