It's Amazing We Know Anything

Listening to yet another podcast correcting what we used to think we knew about prehistory, I reflected again that it is amazing we know anything.  Or do we?  I suppose we gradually learn what things are not true, and that is something.

Some professional anthropologists even today, and nearly all of them not so long ago believed that primitive hunter-gatherers must be much like hunter-gatherers of the present era. Yet the situations are different.  Today's crew are in most cases consigned to those environments that others don't want.  They live on the margins of agricultural lands, of farmers or herders.  Foragers are a category between, but also exploit various niches. Even in those situations farther from agro-pastoralists, as in the deeper Amazon or upper Papua New Guinea, the hunter-gatheres have knowledge of them.  They have goods to trade, or trade for and so are integrated into those economies, even at a distance. 

CS Lewis pointed this out decades ago, that we have no business assuming the modern H-G's are at all like the older ones.  they might be a developed improvement; they might be a deterioration; they might be simply different. He made fun of HG Well's pretending to know about primitive tribes and their hierarchy. When there was a powerful chief "no one was allowed to touch his spear."  Well how on earth are we to know such a thing? Ridiculous. And while Wells was perhaps extreme in his being poetic about it in this way, even the professionals make up the most amazing things about prehistoric peoples on the basis of little or no evidence.  They were more peaceful than us, or more violent. Women were held in greater esteem, or worse. The shared things equally or they competed for food even with siblings, children, and mates. They had great respect for nature/their prey/their captured opponents or they had callous contempt.

We don't even know what environments they favored. Many are now under the ocean and unexplored. The environments that remained inhabited were repurposed: plowed under, built upon, burned over regularly. We are certain of their stability and reverence for the ancestors who lived there for centuries - until we find a boat or their DNA shows they came from 500 miles away. They had beer, they didn't have beer. Their origin stories were of central importance to them...except when we find that the people who didn't have nosey Europeans asking them what their origin stories were didn't seem to care about that so much.

The lives of our parents are something of a mystery to us, I don't know why we think we understand the thinking of reassembled bones with a set of antlers buried with them. I have recently posted that we make categories in order to break them, and it wasn't so long ago that I had fun with the idea of the tribe that made grandfather's thigh into a flute. It would perhaps be best if we did not allow students, especially in anthropology, to read any theories at all, and certainly not to hold any opinions or take a side in a controversy.  Because once we have accepted a theory, it takes more energy to get rid of it than to acquire it in the first place. St. John's, the Great Books College in Maryland, teaches human knowledge, including science starting with what was believed in ancient times, replacing it every year with what science/literature/philosophy taught in the succeeding era.  I completely get the idea and I think it is inspired.  OTOH, I don't know of great scientists and philosophers coming out of that program. We may be so completely wired to hold onto our ideas that if you take that away from us we just find something else to be a bitter clinger about. 

Which causes me to humorously note that Obama did have a point about bitter clingers.  Where he went wrong was in believing he doesn't do the same things just as much, or more.  We are all Bitter Clingers, with varying degrees of insight.