Wed 21 Mar 2007
For several years, my neighbor Kirkpatrick Sale, the anarchist/Luddite/journalist/historian/poet, has been toiling on a book that promotes a variant of the peaceful noble savage hypothesis. Kirk argues that humanity peaked during the Homo erectus era, when we enjoyed harmonious relations with nature and with each other. But climate changes disrupted our arcadian existence some 70,000 years ago, and we became voracious big-game hunters. Our relations with nature and with each other turned violent and predatory, and everything went to hell, leading inexorably to Bush-Cheney-Iraq-environmental-despoilation-the whole-damn-mess. Kirk and I often disagree (I, for instance, am not a Luddite, because I love my laptop and TV more than life itself), but I always find his perspective informed and fascinating. That’s why I had him speak to my “War and Human Nature” class last fall. That’s also why I urge you to check out Kirk’s book, After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination, just published by Duke University Press. As one recent reviewer notes:
“After Eden makes a persuasive case that humankind’s relations with nature fundamentally changed around 70,000 years ago, when our previous way of life as scavengers and foragers was challenged by changes in climate. In response, Homo sapiens adopted a way of life primarily relying on hunting and killing animals, facilitated by a culture that placed humans outside of nature and encouraged the development of ever-more-effective technologies that enabled humans to dominate nature. Sale calls this ‘Sapiens culture,’ in contrast to the earlier culture of Homo erectus, a label Sale construes broadly enough to include the Neandertals of Europe and pre-sapiens humans in Asia and Africa. Sapiens culture enabled humans to multiply in numbers, to spread out and occupy most of the world and to weather subsequent crises — all by further developing technologies of domination over nature. Beginning around 10,000 years ago, humans developed ‘agriculture and the domestication of both plant and animal species,’ Sale writes, ‘the ultimate form of domination, but entirely of a pattern with the previous Sapiens experience.’”
10 Responses to “ Was Homo Erectus Our Peak? ”
Comments:
Leave a Reply
Trackbacks & Pingbacks:
-
Pingback from FIMBULVINTER - anarko-primitivism på svenska :: Tillbaka till Homo Erectus väg… :: May :: 2007
May 7th, 2007 at 11:31 am[...] http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=18 [...]
-
Pingback from FIMBULVINTER - anarko-primitivism på svenska :: Tillbaka till Homo Erectus väg :: May :: 2007
May 7th, 2007 at 11:57 am[...] Was Homo Erectus Our Peak? [...]
March 21st, 2007 at 9:53 am
It’s always a bit hazardous to comment on brief descriptions of books, rather than books themselves, but I really can’t resist: Huh? Are we supposed to revert to the halycon “erectus era”? It’s not as if Homo erectus said, “You know, I think I won’t slaughter that herd of mammoths. I love nature too much.” Homo erectus had a brain two-thirds the size of our own. They never drew a picture. These are profound differences that can’t be ascribed to “culture.” How are we supposed to recapture a way of life of a species that was significantly different than we are at the genetic level? On Duke’s page about the book, there’s a claim that “vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today—in some tribal societies…” I’m assuming we’re speaking of people such as Australian Aborigines and Native Americans. Please not the mass extinctions that they triggered. And finally–the Earth’s climate has been swinging violently for several million years. Why should one eruption at 70kya make all the difference? Sorry, my fact-checking alarm just keeps going off in my head.
March 21st, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Um… if we were environmentally guided toward technological development, then just what braindead process does one follow to conclude that “homoerectus” was our peak?
March 21st, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Kirk argues that humanity peaked during the Homo erectus era
Dentistry.
March 22nd, 2007 at 5:56 am
Before Carl Sagan there was a paradigm known as the technological ascent of man, which most extreme environmentalists see as only “bad”, because they arrogantly *believe* that our actions can possibly be disassociated from the natural physical process.
Free-thinking fools, in other, more-blunt, terms.
Living in a half-real world requires ideologically motivated self-dishonesty.
March 25th, 2007 at 6:56 am
In my latest reincarnation I am channeling a synthesis of the Gaia hypothesis and absolute, non-random, determinism. All of nature actively worked and conspired to raise up the human race. Nature had to do this, because it’s in the plan. Everything is in the plan, awaiting its time.
The plan can’t be changed, is contingent upon nothing, and may well be aiming towards a spectacular new level of evolution in which human intelligence and cybernetic intelligence become as one. Of course, it may well be that the plan will soon have the population of the human race crashing back to about 1,000 individuals, all of whom will be Russians living in the world’s best survival bunker just outside Moscow, but we’ve been through that kind of evolutionary gate before. It’s always for the best.
Gaia is not quite a god herself, but is an expression of a primal, cosmic goal. We can’t change anything, so watch and learn!
March 29th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Carl Zimmer should read the book, find the facts, then we’ll talk.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Reason why is great to be a gay
None of your co-workers has the power to make you cry. It was joke ^_^
April 15th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
After reading through this article, I feel that I really need more information on the topic. Could you suggest some more resources ?