Thread

1. culi · 1790642109 · focus · HN ↗

   More evidence for David Graeber and David Wengrow's reading of the site.

   Between Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Cahokia, and other sites we have pretty good evidence of complex urban societies that did not rely on agriculture. And even in these few sites we have abundant evidence of diversity of social structures from radically egalitarian to hierarchical

   The linear narrative of the evolution of human societies is dead

   1. lumost · 1790643968 · focus · HN ↗

      Out of curiosity couldn’t this also mean that we are missing the agriculture? Or that the practices they used were very different from today.

      1. onlyrealcuzzo · 1790645126 · focus · HN ↗

         At a large enough scale and a short enough time horizon, you're not going to miss it.

         I don't think anyone is saying they FOR SURE didn't cultivate a couple flowers and magic mushrooms.

         If they were an agricultural society resembling anything like the ones we see later, there are several things you'd expect to find.

         1. OliveronData · 1790680540 · focus · HN ↗

            Earliest fossil for homo sapiens is 315000 years old, earliest neanderthal fossils are 430000 years. Keep in mind these are fossils and they need certain conditions to fossilize to begin with.

            That's a huge range of time. And the evidence that we can find is very limited. This has nothing to do with what we expect to find when we have so thoroughly documented that humans were exceptionally capable of reusing pretty much anything.

            So I don't buy the certainty that there was no agricultural society. We simply cannot know that anywhere past 100k years. We can say there were no globally spread agriculture, because that would have had a much higher chance to leave some evidence, but that isn't the same thing. An agricultural society doesn't have to be global or be dominant to exist.

      2. throwaway27448 · 1790654442 · focus · HN ↗

         "The Dawn of Everything"'s interpretation of this is that we only relied on (sedentary) agriculture when we were forced to because of climate change, overpopulation, or threat of violence from other local peoples, so there are several thousand years between evidence of capability and necessity.
      3. avadodin · 1790673847 · focus · HN ↗

         I don't think so.

         We have a good idea of when and where the crops were domesticated.

         10kya on was a time of climate change. It is plausible that they were just so blessed in terms of food that they could waste their time creating new problems for themselves.

         > Grg in all his evil has amassed 8000 wild wheat berries but I myself have only gathered 400. Is this fair? How about everyone provides 100 berries to the one that goes to beat him in the head for the common good?

         1. pygy_ · 1790676320 · focus · HN ↗

            That was more likely a protection racket.

            The neolithic revolution also caused a bottleneck in the diversity of the Y chromosomes.

            9 out of ten men at the time didn't have the opportunity to reproduce, while the happy fews were highly polygynous.

            This can't have happened peacefully.

            1. jltsiren · 1790680873 · focus · HN ↗

               The population bottleneck was far less dramatic, as it happened over centuries.

               When population growth is effectively 0, the size of the male lineage of the average man is approximately 1 in each generation. But random variation means that the male lineages of most men don't survive that many generations.

               Now imagine a stratified society, where elite men have more children than commoners and social status is largely hereditary from father to son. The average elite man will have >1 sons surviving into adulthood, while the average commoner will have fewer than one adult son. Repeat that over many generations, and lineages that started from an elite man will likely spread, while lineages starting from a commoner will likely go extinct.

               1. vintermann · 1790696766 · focus · HN ↗

                  I agree, but I think you too underestimate how random it is. The impact of being "elite" is probably tiny compared to the impact from chance, and at least historically, those in the "elite" genetically speaking weren't the ones at the very top. Kings live risky lives, as do sons of kings. A successful merchant able to provide a trades education to each of his 8 sons, would probably have far more Y-line descendants than a contemporary king.

                  And in the last couple of hundred years, even that "elite" (middle class) had a huge "disadvantage" in getting Y line descendants: they were early into the demographic transition, when everyone started having far fewer kids. Going from 11 kids to 3 kids 2-3 generations earlier meant that a lot of our elites (in the traditional sense) basically missed the population explosion in the last 150 years!

                  It's much smarter to ask, "where were they when the population explosion happened" than to prematurely imagine harem slaves.

         2. NotSuspicious · 1790683572 · focus · HN ↗

            We have evidence of crop cultivation going back much further than 10kya. I would imagine they just used a different cereal than wheat. The Ohalo II site in Palestine shows cereal cultivation (Barley and Millet) 23kya. While it would certainly be interesting to have evidence of a non-cereal-cultivating metropole, the evidence doesn't quite bear that out.
      4. empath75 · 1790693037 · focus · HN ↗

         There was a long period of time that people engaged in _accidental_ agriculture, where they collected seeds and foods to eat and sort of accidentally spread them around along migration pathways, so they probably had "fields" of edible plants around to some extent, but they probably wouldn't show up in the archeology.
   2. ggm · 1790645533 · focus · HN ↗

      > More evidence for David Graeber

      What little I know of the disputes around Graeber suggest this is not going to end his isolation in the wider community of archeologists, economists, sociologists.

      1. culi · 1790701721 · focus · HN ↗

         Well other than being dead, I'm not sure what you mean. Graeber is the anthropologist (and the guy who organized Occupy). Wengrow is the archeologist.

         My take on the different fields:

         - anthropology: a central figure. Like all central figures, he can be polarizing

         - archeology: a big collaborator but has never pretended to be an archeologist

         - economics: celebrated by behavioral economists, rejected by neoclassical ones

         - sociology: pretty widely celebrated and cited

         1. ggm · 1790732631 · focus · HN ↗

            Do you think any of the fields above will change their opinions on Graeber based on this kind of re-appraisal of the ground at Göbeklitepe? That's my point. What people think about his work is not an even field, it depends on the context and your stance in things like economics.

            being dead doesn't alter how people feel about the work of an academic. If you reject their premises, the extent to which new work validates them or not is often moot. Fred Hoyle was isolated in his lifetime and taken "not seriously" as an astronomer by many because he did a lot of science popularisation and because he held outsider-views on things close to panspermia. Subsequent work which suggests his view that a lot of earths water could come from cometary sources hasn't really significantly altered how people feel about him, because it's grounded in him being irascible, hard and complicated. I would suspect the same is true of Graeber. BTW these people are often adored (rightly so!) by their students because they take time to treat them well, talk to them as people, validate them. It's not that they're inherently bad teachers, bad sources it's that they become isolated inside their fields because they take polemical positions, or are off the main path.

      2. applicative · 1790724755 · focus · HN ↗

         He's been dead for years now.

         1. ggm · 1790732342 · focus · HN ↗

            Isolation in the sense of "is not held in high regard in his community" which works dead or alive. I see now that it's more nuanced (from another comment), Graeber was in several communities, and is viewed differently depending on context. Maybe I should have stuck to "is a polarising figure"
   3. protocolture · 1790652755 · focus · HN ↗

      >The linear narrative of the evolution of human societies is dead

      This is I guess one of the bigger problems with Graeber, like when he was attacking Silicon Valley he demonstrated he had absolutely no idea what he was arguing against.

      Likewise, armchair reading of human social development has never appeared to be linear to me. Palace Economy > Crash > Temple Economy > Crash seems pretty damn standard. I was watching an old documentary on the socioeconomic development of Egypt and it looks like they discovered and rediscovered several important social and economic reforms, that were then lost and rediscovered by themselves and other societies over and over again.

      The question is, was Graeber an idiot and just didn't know what he was talking about or was Graeber just another grifter like Hancock who relies on misrepresenting other peoples arguments for financial gain.

      1. 6P58r3MXJSLi · 1790675086 · focus · HN ↗

         "linear" here means that the usual narrative is

         hunter-gatherers → agriculture → permanent settlements → cities → states → civilization

         the usual reasoning is

         agriculture → surplus → settlement → religion/monumental architecture

         it's not at all about civilizations and/or empires collapsing and being reborn in different shapes or social and economic reforms being rediscovered, that already implies some highly sofisticated form of society, while places like Göbekli Tepe predates the pyramids by 5.000 years

         1. protocolture · 1790719805 · focus · HN ↗

            Again I don't see the comparison being made?

            Like we known hunter gatherers had social hierarchy, settlements and crafts.

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritagedaily.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;preserved-10500-year-old-stone-age-hunter-gatherer-settlement-discovered&#x2F;145983" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritagedaily.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;preserved-10500-year-o...

            “These aren’t people that were struggling to survive. They were people confident in their understanding of this landscape, and of the behaviours and habitats of different animal species that lived there,” added Gray.

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ui.adsabs.harvard.edu&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2020ArchP..27..329T&#x2F;abstract" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ui.adsabs.harvard.edu&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2020ArchP..27..329T&#x2F;abstra...

            &quot;Their social organization was complex and can even be compared with that of the Levantine Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) farming society.&quot;

            It seems like Graeber was fighting a strawman?

            1. applicative · 1790728315 · focus · HN ↗

               The book is Wengrow and Graeber. Your references post date their work - Graeber has been dead for years. Much of the material under discussion is in this 2015 essay.[^1] In fact of course settled hunter gatherers, so to call them, have been known for decades, e.g. Jomon Japan; this isn&#x27;t the issue anywhere.

               Some of the spectacular phenomena and constructions they attempt to explain depend on non-settlement for much of the year. But in temperate regions even in the eurasian ice age we find seasonal congregation of huge populations in conditions of temporary abundance e.g. salmon runs, seasonal migration of game through narrow alpine chasms, etc. A leading motif is that in these congregations surprising phenomena can emerge e.g. insane stone works, temporary political structure, etc. Thus also the discussion of ice-age burials like that in Sunghir Russia 30,000 years ago a couple boys buried with &quot;10,000 hand-carved mammoth ivory beads, fox teeth pendants, and finely crafted mammoth ivory spears&quot;

               [^1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eprints.lse.ac.uk&#x2F;62756&#x2F;1&#x2F;__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Graeber%2C%20D_Farewell%20to%20childhood_Graeber_Farewell%20to%20childhood_2015.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eprints.lse.ac.uk&#x2F;62756&#x2F;1&#x2F;__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRAR...

               1. protocolture · 1790735480 · focus · HN ↗

                  &gt;Graeber has been dead for years.

                  Yeah I have been trying to &quot;was&quot; him as much as possible.

                  &gt;Your references post date their work

                  Yep but theres no conspiracy to hide these facts that only the brave Graeber can explain through the medium of book sales.

                  &gt;Jomon Japan

                  Yeah I am faintly remembering something about their giant burial cairns or something.

   4. namenotrequired · 1790673944 · focus · HN ↗

      I don’t disagree with your overall point but I’m confused what the evidence is in this case, could you explain?

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