Nerdy Keith

Egalitarian society is an ideal that never lasts because humans participate in maintaining it. What I would call “social entropy” is always at play. Much like energy must be input into a physical system to maintain order, maintaining egalitarian norms requires constant work. Someone must reinforce the values of fairness and shared res…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
A bunch of hippies are smoking weed and chilling out….very calm and egalitarian. One of them opens a box of chocolate cookies. He becomes the leader. Humans just cannot cope without having a leader. And if he (or she) can do the thinking for them too, then the happier they all will be.

It’s sometimes pointed out w…[Read more]

A bunch of hippies are smoking weed and chilling out….very calm and egalitarian. One of them opens a box of chocolate cookies. He becomes the leader. Humans just cannot cope without having a leader. And if he (or she) can do the thinking for them too, then the happier they all will be.

Simon Paynton wrote:
It was probably a free anarchist state, with no hierarchy.  We assume that egalitarianism was the default position, and this is psychologically hard to break as each man and woman is as good as anyone else.

You are delusional. There will always be a power dynamic which results in the populace being divided in…[Read more]

@Reg

Science is coming around to the view that these pre-homo sapiens humans didn’t really fit the traditional “cave man” notion of stupid no account lunks. I mean, if bees and termites can have a social order and organize to create a place to live, why not human beings?

It is remarkable that a flourishing and sophisticated human civilization existed at Gesher Benot Yaʽaqov some 780,000 years ago. They had a controlled use of fire, the ability to organize and hunt and gather a broad spectrum of food types.

What is most remarkable is that ‘only’ 120,000 years earlier, our human lineage had undergone a severe gene…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
I’m sure that other species of human beings were capable of making settlements, if the conditions were temporarily right for it, i.e., if there were rich resources in one place, like next to a waterway or sea.  Culture – why not?  In the sense of making artwork.  I’m not sure they would have had cultural markers to mark the…

[Read more]

What if the first signs of human civilization weren’t measured in thousands of years or even tens of thousands of years? What if archaeologists are finding evidence of human settlements and the rudiments of culture 800,000 years ago? That’s before we believe homo sapiens evolved.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
It looks like we Homo sapiens may be much older species that previously understood to be.

Careful, or we’ll be joining Graham Hancock in talking about a long lost civilization and the so-called “Annunaki.”

You wonder how the Egyptians were able to move such large stones from the quarry site to the construction site?…[Read more]

It looks like we Homo sapiens may be much older species that previously understood to be.

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:
Many of these cultures, so far as we know, didn’t really have an effective way of documenting their knowledge and discoveries, so was astronomy carried on by an oral tradition? We may never know.

Surely they had all sorts of diagrams, and they had Stonehenge, which among other things is aligned with the S…

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Please, nobody mention Graham Hancock or his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse where he misrepresents archaeology and undermines Indigenous heritage.  He tends to creep into these conversations.