Hairy Cavemen
Filed under: Uncategorized — Giulianna Maria Lamanna @ 8:15 PM
Ah, the hairy caveman: primitive man in his natural form, unkempt, long-haired, long-bearded, and with unibrows galore. I think the idea is that early man (and, by extension, man without civilization, as modern primitive peoples live very much the way our Paleolithic ancestors did) was too stupid to properly groom himself, resulting in hair like an early 90’s grunge rocker and beards like ZZ Top. The only problem with this ubiquitous stereotype, aside from the question of how we ever managed to hunt anything with hair falling into our eyes all the time, is its complete lack of evidence.
No, just because you don’t have access to a beauty salon or metal razors, that does not mean you are incapable of ever cutting your hair. Let’s take the Mohawk as an example. And by Mohawk, I could mean either the hairstyle or the Haudenoshaunee nation. Consider that. The Mohawk believed that their hair connected them to the Creator, and so they’d shave off almost all their hair–leaving only a strip on top–before going off to war because they were ashamed and didn’t want the Creator to see. However, the Mohawk weren’t the only people to make use of this hairstyle; not only did the Mahicans and Wyandot wear it too, but Clonycavan man, an Iron Age mummy excavated from an Irish peat bog, sported the hair style as well–and with gel, no less.
So how did pre-punk primitives remove hair to create this funky ‘do?
There is evidence that 20,000 years ago sharpened rocks & shells were used for shaving by hunter-gatherer tribes. Since then (& likely long before) almost every culture in history has practiced the removal of facial & body hair. Native Americans used matching pairs of clamshells to pull out hairs one by one. Sumerians used tweezers, and the Egyptians had razors made of bronze. In the Arabian practice of “threading,” a cotton string was used to encircle hairs one at a time and pull them out. 1
If “threading” sounds strangely familiar to you, that’s because it’s coming back into vogue.
Here’s another interesting tidbit: tribes that lived on the Amazon River would use the jaws of dead piranhas (with the flesh removed, of course) as scissors and razors. To this day, the local word for scissors is “piranha.” And if you’ve ever seen pictures of Amazonian tribespeople, you already know that they sport bowl cuts so evenly cut and meticulously neat as to send the early Beatles into a fit of jealous rage.
So never fear: primitive living does not necessitate furryness. Unshaven hippie boys, you no longer have any excuse.
No, it means having to shave using the jaws of piranhas.
Uh, worse.
Comment by Rapewaffle — 19 November 2007 @ 10:29 PM
You missed using a swiftly applied flame to singe the hair. Middle eastern barbers still use this to trim the fine fluffy hairs on the earlobe.
If the primitivist lifestyle is so appealing then why are there so few people doing it for real anymore? Sentinelese Andaman islanders and numerous very small south american tribes seem to be the only ones left. The south american tribes seem to be generally at risk of extermination by loggers. The Spinifex tribe in Australia are returning to their land but I can’t find specific mention if they still rely on outside support. Northern aboriginal communities are generally still in contact with traditional practices but usually rely on outside inputs also (and our scummy government just wiped out most of their hard won land rights). I thought there would be some in Borneo and Irian Jaya but they appear to be traditional agriculturalists (”horticulturalists” if you must split hairs”). The San/Kung etc seem to have been evicted from their traditional lands (diamonds/oil/tourism) and sent to a new area that they consider to be a wasteland (so much for being able to scrounge food from anywhere).
Why arent the homeless giving up the underpasses and wandering into the nation’s great state forests to feast and shape their eyebrows? Are there any well documented historical examples of a predominantly agricultural society that transformed back into a HGer one?
I found one mention on wiki for slash and burn forest people, but does this hold for collapse of more complex societies?:
“In the Brazilian rainforest, groups which recently or continue to rely on hunting and gathering techniques seem to have adopted this lifestyle, abandoning most agriculture, as a way to escape colonial control and as a result of the introduction of European diseases reducing their populations to levels where agriculture became difficult.”
I think we are getting trapped in a false dichotomy here that doesnt exist anywhere in the real world. Most people today rely on technology and agriculture and hunting and gathering in varying proportions. Those proportions will certainly change in the future, and having a variety of skills may come in handy.
All this romanticising of the primitivist past is vaguely interesting but has no direct bearing on what our personal immediate futures will be like. The same factors that drove HGers to the edge of extinction in the last few hundred years are going to be around for decades at least. Depletion of petroleum energy sources and climate change are going to make people more desperately competitive for resources, and that may make the HG lifestyle even harder. Beyond a hundred years out you may be betting on the right strategy in some bioregions, but I reckon agriculture (and everything else) will hang on in some form for our lifetimes.
Collapse sure sounds dramatic, but history shows that it is painfully slow and drawn out, and it normally takes generations. If we are at the peak now we may only live to see more degradation rather than “collapse”.
Comment by void_genesis — 20 November 2007 @ 3:10 AM
People adapt to their environment, and if they know no other way, will stay there unless they have to do. If a catastrophe forces the homeless from under their bridges and into the wilderness, they’ll go, and they’ll probably die, having no idea how to live and forage.
Let’s not overlook the deeply corrosive practices in modern education, tailoring the population for mass corporate serfdom (documented by John Taylor Gatto), either, and the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (book by that name).
Comment by Edwin Gossmore — 21 November 2007 @ 7:14 AM
While I agree with void_genesis that this site romantises hunter gatherers to an extreme extent, I dispute that hunting and gathering isn’t the way of the future. While the !Kung have been evicted from their best lands, they are still able to survive, arn’t they? The Shosone indians complained that the Blackfeet were chasing them off the plains and forcing them to live like bears in the mountains. So while they obviously survived, it wasn’t the optimal situation.
Of the same reason, in an environmentally destroyed world, hunter gatherers will survive. They move through a huge territory, eating what there is to eat, be it rats and stray dogs. Agriculture is prone to draught, floods etc… Moving around from place to place is also a way of escaping the strife there will be over food in most places of the world.
The key to be able to do this is abnormal skill and experience with living off the land. You can not step out into the wilds the day of YOUR local collapse and expect to survive. In our society we are like children, we don’t know anything about this. Everything has to be relearned, and it’s too much to learn in the month it takes to starve to death.
PS! I do believe in a quick collapse, since animal populations usually move to a treshold and then collapse down to perhaps 5% of the original numbers. This treshold is reached when you are eating up the resource base (read: What should have made the food next year.). This is currently happening all over the world at this time. Most places we are probably even in the final stages of this degradation. Examples of what is happening is: Topsoil depletion and fish stocks dwindling.
Comment by Torjus Gaaren — 22 November 2007 @ 3:28 PM
Um … there (by and large) aren’t any left because they got exterminated by much more numerous agriculturalists. This is well known and documented. Why there are so few foragers left has not been a matter of choice. The Plains Indians never ‘chose’ to abandon their lifestyle. They were forced out of it. But interestingly, plenty of white people were willing to abandon ‘civilized’ life for the life of the American Indians.
Comment by Eric — 23 November 2007 @ 8:27 AM
Torjus and Void:
Please point to any specific statement that exhibits this “romanticizing” that you describe.
I don’t see it. And I don’t appreciate the dismissiveness of the label. I think it lacks intellectual honesty, hiding an emotional response behind an accusation of sentimentality in another.
Gross.
Comment by Willem — 23 November 2007 @ 11:07 PM
That is certainly the voice of ignorance, “Rapewaffle.” These same tribes have been offered metal scissors like you or I use; they turned them down, simply because they don’t cut as well. The pirhana teeth are sharper; the scissors are more likely to simply catch your hair, making the whole process much more painful. Of course, not knowing this, you would make the comment above. But someone who’s aware of this fact would see that immediately as the sign of someone commenting on a subject they know nothing about.
How can you pose this question, and then proceed to answer it? If you build a society from the top down for no other purpose than to destroy everything it comes into contact with, then when it comes into contact with societies designed for such mundane purposes as giving humans a place to live, or even allowing humans to live comfortably, the outcome should hardly be surprising. Does that point to the superior comfort offered to societies that are designed solely to destroy everything else, or does it suggest that things designed to destroy get very good at destroying? As Eric noted, given that every primitive group in recorded history has chosen to fight to the death, and face genocidal annihilation, in preference to civilization, rather belies the point you’re trying to make with that evidence that everybody somehow “preferred” it.
Because, as “everybody knows,” cities offer safety, comfort, and security, while the wilds are dangerous, with no shelter or food. Facts have nothing to do with it; if you can’t imagine the alternative, it doesn’t exist.
Innumerable; the Hopi, the Maya and the Illinewek just to name the most obvious examples from just one continent. What’s rare is anything else. Since Rome left a periphery ecologically intact, medieval kingdoms sprang up in Western Europe, in what had been the periphery of the Roman Empire. That’s one of the very few examples of the collapse of an agricultural society, where it was not succeeded by a hunter-gatherer society.
Would you care to cite a source for this? It looks like a quotation from something. Without knowing the context, it’s simple balderdash. If I had to guess, though, I’d guess you’re getting this from a work along the lines of 1491 in content, if not in intended audience. And while this is true, it’s not the statement you seem to think it is. Prior to European contact, we’re talking about horticultural tribes, not agricultural civilization; they did suffer a massive collapse after the events of 1492, but to try to suggest that this somehow denies their place on the forager-horticultural spectrum is ignorant at best, or disingenuous at worst. Primitive societies can collapse, after all; Tainter uses the example of the Ik in Uganda.
Hunting and gathering plays almost no role in the lives or economies of most of the earth’s 6.5 billion people. But there is an enormous divide between horticulture and agriculture in approach, technique, outcome, social structure, religious and philosophical beliefs, population, and most of all, ecological relationship. They are opposites.
I’d like to repeat Willem’s request: please point to one thing that has been romanticized. This line of “argument” simply enrages me. It is the worst type of intellectual dishonesty and cowardice. Rather than meet the facts with actual arguments, you simply tar the conclusions as “romanticizing of the primitivist past.” Prove it. Show me one thing here that has been romanticized. Simply that the evidence contradicts your uninformed Hobbesian stereotypes of primitive life does not make it “romanticized.” These are the facts. This is how primitive people live. That’s a simple matter of ethnographic fact. If that flies in the face of your preconceived prejuidices, then that is a matter you will have to sort through one way or another for yourself, but that does not make the facts of primitive life “romanticized.” Provide an argument, or, more crudely, put up or shut up.
We’re not discussing the innate, racial traits of the “Noble Savage.” What we’re talking about here is the direct consequence of living a hunter-gatherer way of life. If you live like a hunter-gatherer, then these have the most direct bearing on your personal, immediate future possible.
Normally, an assessment like this would be astonishingly short-sighted, but since I know for a fact that you have read the arguments against this and have never been able to put up an argument against them, this goes beyond that to the realm of carefully cultivated and willful ignorance. To reiterate once again, there are regions in the world right now where hunter-gatherer life is perfectly possible. Yes, in 200 years, you will no doubt be able to still find something on the globe that could be reasonably called a city. But, as has happened in every past collapse that has ever happened, the major indicator of collapse is contraction. The areas where hunter-gatherer life is possible will grow. The continuation of agriculture and petroleum use will become increasingly limited in geographical scope. There’s no point harvesting trees from a forest that’s so far away from any city that you don’t have the gas to bring the wood back. We’re living at the high water mark of civilization. Those pockets that exist now will grow, and new pockets will open up. The world is not some perfect, uniform sphere where the impacts are spread out equally. Desperate farmers trying to make plants grow out of the exurbs of Washington, D.C. will have no impact on people hunting and gathering in the Adirondacks.
You are a poor student of history, for history shows precisely the opposite. Historians may be able to look back and trace a long decline and fall, but those living through it always, invariably, experience such events as a sudden collapse. St. Jerome said “the whole world died” in a single night. The Maya city-states went from total control of their lands to ruins inside of a decade. Again and again, every example history has to provide shows that the “degradation” you speak of is an academic exercise appreciated only by historians and archaeologists, with no relevance whatsoever to the experience of those living through it.
Finally, as you well know, these arguments have already been answered dozens of times over at the Anthropik Network, particularly in the Thirty Theses. You are not raising new objections, you are simply reiterating the same arguments that have been shot down over and over again. I do not appreciate this constant bogging-down, not with any kind of genuine contribution, but simply repeating the same arguments. Even if you were to at least respond to the criticisms made, that would at least advance the discussion and we could have an actual debate about these matters. But simply repeating what has already been discredited does nothing but grind things to a halt. Giuli’s doing something very important here by discrediting the misconceptions and myths about primitive life. Your incessant recapitulation of them, without any evidence to support you, certainly speaks to how important that task is. But I must insist that if you are going to continue to simply repeat the same disproven misconceptions over and over again like this, that you at least do so on the appropriate thesis on Anthropik, so that the rest of us can move on from this nonsense.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 November 2007 @ 8:35 PM
The key thing that hasnt been reflected upon is how potential HGers and agriculturalists/technologists might interact.
History seems to show that HGers only maintain a competitive advantage over agriculturalists in the most marginal environments. The middle east/fertile cresent had an ecological collapse long ago but people didnt revert to HGing. Ditto for Rome and pretty much all the examples of collapses societies. The pattern seems to decomplexify but not to the extent of going back to a pure HGer level.
My main point is that even with a massive collapse/dieoff agricultural humans probably wont just vanish. If they dont then how will their ongoing presence affect potential HGers?
Comment by void_genesis — 25 November 2007 @ 8:51 PM
Indeed it has, at great length. The “neo-feudal” scenario has been debunked in no less than three articles on Anthropik, and at least two have centered on the notion of the “desperate, raiding farmers.” In one of his recent posts, even Greer discussed this, and while he and I often have our differences, he nailed it: there is simply no historical precedent for this fantasy of the rapacious, desperate farmers despoiling the countryside.
That’s not what it shows at all. Even in those environments, they have no military advantage. In a military conflict, primitive people lose every time. Their societies are built for human survival and comfort, not military conquest. So in opposition against societies built for war, they lose. HGers continue to survive in the most marginal environments today because farmers could not live there. They often tried to invade anyway, but HGers simply melted back, waited for the farms to fail and the farmers to give up, and then came back out. If we were talking about a military conflict, there would be no discussion. But we’re not talking about a military conflict; we’re talking about the contraction of civilization, opening up larger and larger pockets as the map opens back up.
They did not have an ecological collapse, they destroyed the ecology, slowly and steadily, over time. There is a major difference. So when their own fields became largely infertile, they still had neighbors that they could trade with. To this day, life in the Middle East persists primarily on the basis of trade with more fertile neighbors.
Firstly, again, not the same for Rome. Rome did not collapse primarily due to ecological stressors; it choked on its own complexity. It even left large parts of Italy’s ecology intact, though the shifting emphasis towards Western Europe in the Middle Ages testifies to the ecological toll of the Roman Empire, nevertheless. Where civilization continued was precisely the periphery that Rome had left more-or-less unexploited.
As for “pretty much all the examples of collapses [sic] societies,” that is simply not true in the least. When Easter Island collapsed, hunter-gatherers emerged. When the ancestral Pueblo civilizations collaped, the Pueblo Indians emerged. When Cahokia collapsed, the Illinewek emerged. When the Mayan city-states collapsed, hunter-gatherers emerged (Cortez passed just by the ruins of ancient Mayan cities without noticing them, because they had been so completely reclaimed by the jungle). In fact, the only counter-examples you can find come from the history of Western civilization, and in every case, the example is the same: the core collapses, and the periphery rises. Yes, you can point to minor activity in the old core, but only because it is subsidized heavily through trade with the new productive core. Notice, the Middle East became primarily a trading center after the collapse of the various Bronze and Iron Age civilizations; Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, too, became primarily a trading center. Britain and the Western European powers became primarily trading centers after the discovery of the New World.
That’s not what the pattern shows at all, but that would require actual examination of the pattern, rather than the half-hearted gloss you provide above. Collapse drops complexity to the next possible level of complexity. If the ecological basis exists for continuing an agricultural society, then you will have a new agricultural society. This is what happened along the peripheries of some Western civilizations. If you have destroyed the ecological basis for agriculture, as in most cases, then you will collapse back to something on the forager-horticultural spectrum. This has been the argument we’ve made since day one, and we’ve combined it with the fact that we have not left the ecological basis for a future bout of agriculture intact. So, like most cases of collapse, you will see some mixture of hunting, gathering and permaculture emerge.
Negligibly. Even today, you can find places where you could live as a hunter-gatherer, with little interruption from civilized people. Will farmers come raiding? That would be an unprecedented response to a common stressor. Why would you raid the wretches and savages who obviously have no food and are starving even more than you? Will they fan out and despoil the countryside? Again, that would be an unprecedented response to a common stressor. People flock to the cities in times of crisis and hardship. The countryside simply harbors greater adversity. There is no historical precedent for these fantasies, regardless of their popularity, but that lack of precedence does not arise because of the uniqueness of the conditions. We have seen many, many collapses where people have faced the very same problems, and they always react the same way. It’s just that that reaction doesn’t match the expectations of this common fantasy.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 25 November 2007 @ 9:20 PM
Damn. Speaking as a hairy hippie-boy, you’ve got me. but now what? I’m genetically northern european, where my facial hair is an asset, but now live in a land where facial-shaving wasn’t necessary.
What do I do?
What about body hair? Any info on historical shaving patterns for ‘down there’?
Aww, I’m just kidding. Great food for thought. I’ll be hairy for life! I really do appreciate these posts, they flesh out the thought process beyond skinning deer and killing trolls.
p.s. feeding the trolls make them fatter, not smarter.
Comment by TonyZ — 26 November 2007 @ 12:36 AM
Thanks Guili. It gladdens my heart to know I can still feel smooth and beautiful after gillette dies :). Now how did primitive people get rid of stretch marks?
Comment by Vicky — 26 November 2007 @ 11:36 AM
Well said Jason; I knew that guy was in for a paddling from you after I read his post.
When will they learn?
Comment by Dermot — 26 November 2007 @ 8:34 PM
I like my beard…but scissors do keep it from looking too ZZ-top-ish.
Comment by Bubba — 27 November 2007 @ 11:40 AM
Are you really arguing that the middle east, italy and britain would have not been able to support smaller agricultural societies post peak/collapse without trade? What exactly were these impoverished regions trading with for food?
Heads up on an interesting new book I found also that you may want to read. People, plants & Genes by Denis J. Murphy by Oxford Press. I think it provides a more up to date and detailed insight into the process, motivations and costs/benefits of moving into an agricultural lifestyle.
The main points that stand out are that evidence for humans consuming grains is being pushed out to 50,000-200,000 years ago and that what we think of as hunter gatherers world wide in fact carefully manipulated their ecosystems to enhance them for human survival (I think weakening your notion of it being possible to thrive in any unmanaged weedscape or “wilderness”). They also argue that fertile crescent intensive agriculture arose during the astonishingly severe climate change of the younger dryas as a more viable alternative to HGing (that disappeared in the area at that time).
And just because I am yet to be completely convinced by your positions and I am not afraid to ask questions that doesnt make me a troll. I come to this site to be informed and to reflect on my own views like anyone else.
Comment by void_genesis — 27 November 2007 @ 11:15 PM
YES! That’s precisely what I’ve said, explicitly, over and over again.
The Arabs traded spices, rugs, and also prospered from the trade between Europe and China long the Silk Road. Italy really only began to take off after Rome again in the Renaissance, when, after the Crusades, it began to get part of those same markets. Prior to that, most of Italy’s wealth came in the form of tribute to the Pope. By the time of Elizabeth, most of England’s wealth came from trading goods from the New World, and later its other colonies. It was well-known to English aristocrats by the Victorian era that it was the colonies that kept England alive.
Only very recently has it become common for food to play a big role in trade. Not so long ago, it would be so difficult to keep food from spoiling on any kind of appreciable journey that its usefulness to trade was almost nil. The exception was cereal grain, because it kept longer.
This boggles my mind. Have you even read the arguments you’re responding to? That’s my premise. We’ve been writing extensively about the impact that foragers have on shaping their environment. As for the consumption of grain, that’s another thing we’ve been including from the very beginning. But grain consumption (particularly as a “starvation food,” used particularly in winter) is a very different thing from the staple consumption we’ve employed since the Neolithic.
My notion of wilderness??? I have written whole articles, long articles, about this very subject. This is the most egregious of strawmen. How could you possibly follow this up? Convince Al Gore to give up his constant climate skepticism with some new evidence that the global temperature might actually be going up?
That’s been the standard understanding for decades now. It’s one of my most taken-for-granted premeses. I make reference to that constantly.
No, that’s not what makes you a troll. Continually reciting the same arguments that we’ve continually put down, but never responding to those criticisms—just repeating the same points, over and over and over and over … I won’t call you a troll, but it’s certainly some enraging behavior. You’re obviously not listening to anything we say in response, so what kind of conversation can possibly take place?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 November 2007 @ 5:42 PM
The difference between prior civ. collapse and the impending one is that there is currently very little optimal land upon which to build a new civilization. This is why you cannot use previous failed civs as proxy evidence, or some model you can just plug into. what is going to happen wont be romantic, fun or anything resembling anything you or I could possibly envision. If it were I would be a prophet not a student.
Comment by Levi — 28 November 2007 @ 9:57 PM
Most previous collapses had very little optimal land upon which to build a new civilization–that’s precisely the point. Only a few previous collapses had that; all of them in Western history, and all of them the most difficult and painful collapses we’ve endured.
The best guide to the future is always the past. There’s very little that’s genuinely unique about our collapse. Most claims about its uniqueness come from simply incorrect claims about the past, like this one. Yet even in the most difficult collapses, where room still existed for a future civilization, it happened precisely because most people were better off for it. The idea that collapse is some terrible calamity is the romantic view.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 November 2007 @ 7:18 AM
Your argument that the people of the middle east relied on trade in area specific spices and textiles to enhance the complexity of their society is fair enough. So probably they needed to rely on the forests of europe and india to smelt their metal indirectly. But surely they still produced most or at least some of their own food pre-industrial revolution. But my main point is that in the absence of trade they may have continued to live some kind of simplified sedentary agricultural lives using the same stone tools they started out with, provided the basic climate stayed the same, eventually coming to an equilibrium with their environment.
But the main problem (or at least difference) with humans is that they don’t face the consequences of their actions as rapidly as other animals because we keep shifting our tactics. This isnt just a trait of agricultural humans. We started our road of expansion by becoming apex predators. As we experienced/induced the extinction of most of the world’s megafauna we avoided facing limits to our expansion by shifting into a more plant based diet (including grains where they were available).
The excavations of Maori moa hunting grounds in New Zealand give a glimpse into the behaviour of humans at the time as they expanded across the globe. The sites show mountains of half eaten barbequed meat- a stunning waste when compared to how we value meat now days (at least outside feedlot nations). When our wild plant food resources became strained we turned to “permaculture/horticulture” and then agriculture. As we approached the limits of agriculture and colonisation we tapped into fossil fuels, and recently nuclear fuels. We are currently groping around in the dark for a new adaptive strategy. Several are on offer, maybe one will come through (before or after a major collapse) or maybe not.
If you can track down the book I suggested I would still recommend it. The broad picture that emerges for me is that humans everywhere in the paleolithic were already behaviourally primed for agriculture once the necessary climatic conditions fell into place. The same process happened in at least five independent regions around the world. You can’t consider a coincidence like that and still contend that agriculture is an abberation. Humans must have already been long interacting with the environment in a way that set us up to take on more intensive agriculture when conditions allowed it. The books main conclusion is that agriculture/civilisation is dependent on the stable climate and that probably wont last forever, pushing us back into HGing of sorts, but that agriculture could start again from scratch one day during another stable period. The only wild card is man made climate change that could push us out of the previously complexity limiting cool-dry glacial periods (though into what climate remains to be seen, but a wetter/warmer one could foster complexity in the long run).
“It was well-known to English aristocrats by the Victorian era that it was the colonies that kept England alive.”
I would contend that the colonies kept the aristocrats alive. Potato eating irish peasantry got by well enough without the new world’s contribution. Though the obvious flaw in that statement was that the potato was a new world crop. So trade in genetic information was and still is invaluable for agriculture, but the old world wasnt importing ship loads of potatos (or wheat) to feed the poor. Perhaps modern agriculture even without fossil fuels is now a very different creature to what it started out with (bigger potential genetic diversity, greater insight into plant breeding, and the bottomless pandoras box of GM).
“Only very recently has it become common for food to play a big role in trade. Not so long ago, it would be so difficult to keep food from spoiling on any kind of appreciable journey that its usefulness to trade was almost nil. The exception was cereal grain, because it kept longer.”
Exactly my point- though even managing something like getting shiploads of grain across the mediterranean from egypt to rome was a rare occurance. Before the industrial revolution long distance trade was limited to high value goods, most of which had high embedded energy (metals, glass, ceramics, textiles) but those tended to be the ones that were important for maintaining a societies complexity and aggresive competitiveness, not necessarily its agricultural viability at basic neolithic levels.
On grains being eaten for longer into human history- I have provided links before that document Australian Aborigines got 50-80% of their energy intake from grains. They were eaten worldwide in many areas without substantial winters or droughts- anywhere where grains grow in relative abundance. The idea they were only foods of last resort is unsupported.
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1996/v3-228.html
“Although Australian plants generally produce small seeds they are produced in large quantities. In arid Australia, seed supply is widely available, somewhat predictable and dependable (Flood 1990). These plant products form the dietary staple in that they represent greater than 50% of the total diet and often would constitute 70% to 80%.”
Other so called paleo foods like acorns require equally complex and careful processing due to having a significant arsenal of chemical defenses that need to be removed. The book I recommended suggests the crops we selected for staples were mostly singled out for their ability to undergo rapid concerted genetic change to suit agriculture (wide interspecies crosses to make new species and colocalised genes for selection of desirable traits).
My point on “wilderness” is that HGing humans survived as careful and conscious environment modifiers in contrast to your apparent position (correct me if my impression is wrong) that with enough retraining it is possible for humans to thrive in a previously unmanaged and recently abandoned environment (as would be first encountered after a civilisational collapse). As such I think comparisons between the lifestyles of historic and well established HGers and potential post collapse HGers are of limited use. It is from this my impression of romanticism comes from given your website’s recent focus on HG luxury.
Please point out other criticisms/responses you made in your reply that I didnt respond to. The last few paragraphs seemed to lack any specific point.
A idea to throw into the mix too if you arent too overstimulated already (just to counter that I am only rehashing cliches here).
Could civilisations/agriculture (intensifications of human society) be compared to trees? Originally there were only low growing mosses in a harsh environment. As conditions shifted and became more accomodating and genes were shuffled taller trees emerged. They monopolised access to light (food) and amassed the flows of water and nutrients from the soil, pushing the mosses out into remaining harsher regions. By filtering the light through multiple levels of leaves they harnessed a greater proportion of the available energy than the mosses did. As a tree grows taller it reaches a limit of height dependent on how supportive the conditions are, its growth slowing near the apex of its potential. If conditions stay the same eventually parasites and hangers on will weaken its structure and it will fall. If conditions change its demise will be hastened, and the whole forest may disappear. If conditions shift back again the trees will return. Trees come and go in space and time. Compared to the cells in the moss the tree’s leaves are starved of water and its roots are starved of oxygen, but collectively they are stronger under gentler conditions.
I seriously question the value of casting civilisation as evil or as a disaster. I believe a person’s experience of existance is of equal overall value no matter what their life is like. I wouldn’t go out of my way to change places with an “elite”-they have as many problems to deal with as anyone. At any rate it is impossible to really quantify if one life is better than another- we only get one. Can we even rely on impressions of people who moved from one lifestyle to another? Civilised/settled HGers are usually marginalised, and rewilded westerners can’t claim to be totally accepted or view their new world with unbiased eyes (eg country kids long for city life and vice versa). Its easy to want what you have never had and probably on a deep level never will. Is it possible to appreciate the life you already have and simultaneously keep a very open mind about your possible personal future? Is it healthier to accept primitivism without rejecting civilisation? Why can’t both be good?
Comment by void_genesis — 3 December 2007 @ 4:17 AM
Hey Jason
Don’t know where is best to post this but there is a new PNAS paper that shows that human evolution accellerated massively around 10, 000 years ago. A few open access links are discussing it…
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626343.900-modern-times-causing-human-evolution-to-accelerate.html
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/12/accelerated-human-evolution.html
What is your take on it?
Comment by void_genesis — 16 December 2007 @ 6:52 PM
This is really a discussion better suited for Anthropik than here. The Anthropik main site indulges this kind of basic discussion; the Fabulous Forager is a more advanced course that takes these questions for granted.
But we’ve discussed this previously, I believe in the Thirty Theses. Earlier studies suggesting the same conclusion were used to buttress my argument about what a radical shift we’ve undergone in lifestyle, which would predict an accelerated period of human evolution, since the more radical the shift in lifestyle, the more things there are that need adapting to. We need this kind of accelerated adaptation just to make it viable, but as I showed in that previous work, we’re still far, far from adapted. Take the case of lactose tolerance. As late as the Roman empire, medical texts were listing cow’s milk as a purgative. Yes, the lactose-toleration mutation from Sweden and the Middle East allows us to drink cow’s milk without immediately vomitting, but we’re still helpless against the long-term effects of drinking milk (see Thesis #20, I believe). Which is to say, yes, we have begun adapting to agriculture, as you’d expect, and being a mere 10k years into the process, we’ve begun to scratch the surface of that endeavor. If we can dedicate another 100,000 years or so, we might even produce a human who isn’t made chronically ill by civilized life. But the fact remains that we are still essentially Pleistocene animals, struggling to adapt to a radically anti-human way of life.
Really, the findings aren’t stunning at all if you expect humans to behave like any other animal—which is precisely why so many people find this so stunning. According to the technophilic fantasy, technology removed us from evolution. But that’s precisely why I’ve been saying this for years now.
It required trade to maintain just the simplified sedentary agricultural life they had. Yes, they grew their own food, but it took far more energy input than it yielded in output. Their society could only achieve equilibrium by importing energy from their neighbors indirectly, largely through trade. In the absence of trade, what would make up for the deficit created when, for instance, the energy content of wheat grown in Iraq provided for only half (or less) of the energy it took to grow the wheat in the first place?
Your point is simple assertion, without evidence. In actual fact, we do have plenty of examples that match the criteria of your prediction, where they exhausted the soil, and where there was not sufficient trade networks or neighbors producing agricultural surplus to buoy them when they could no longer support themselves agriculturally. The problem is, not one of them supports your conjecture: they all collapsed, some to horticulture, most to hunting and gathering. Examples include Chaco Canyon and even Cahokia, which did have extensive trade networks, but they were simply not enough to prop their society up.
Garbage in, garbage out. We’ve discussed the failings of the “Overkill” theory ad nauseum on Anthropik, so that’s hardly worth rehashing yet again. There’s a break between the megafauna extinction and the Agricultural Revolution in which you could fit the entire history of agriculture several times over, so positing a causal relationship between them, while popular in some circles, is positively spurious.
No, they really don’t. That’s one of the most naive arguments Jared Diamond ever advanced. Islands are not continents. Stability is a function of diversity, which islands severely lack. Islands are far more susceptible to the ecological perturbations of new predators than continents. The fact remains that the evidence for the “Overkill” theory is utterly lacking. The timing is wrong, the geography is wrong, and the fossil evidence just isn’t there. What the evidence does point to is that alpha predators have far-ranging effects on their environments. Humans did not cause a wave of megafauna extinctions as they spread. We certainly disturbed some delicate island ecologies, and we might even have tipped things against some animals teetering on the brink of extinction, but the megafauna extinctions had more to do with the changing ecology of the beginning of the Holocene than human activity. The spread of humans around the world was simply caused by, and part of, those overall ecological changes.
Except, apparently, for the gap 2-3 times longer than the entire history of agriculture, when apparently we subsisted purely on speculation? This theory is popular, I’ll grant you, but baseless. The extinction of the megafauna occurred most visibly in places where agriculture was forced on the native populations only in historical times. Agriculture developed precisely in those areas where the most megafauna survived, and it did so tens of thousands of years after the last begin-Holocene megafaunal extinctions.
That is the common view, yes, but one that simply does not hold up to scrutiny. We’ve already seen the failure of the “Overkill” hypothesis. Now, you are at least correct in pointing out that agriculture appeared at least five times around the world simultaneously, but it is absolutely an abberation. Not a behavioral aberration, mind you, but an ecological one. It arose in various places around the world in a fairly small period of time because it is, first and foremost, an ecological abberation, and once global climatic conditions were set, it was certain to occur in multiple places, not just one.
This actually proves rather conclusively that we are talking about an ecological abberation, rather than a behavioral abberation. Unlike many, I posit that behavior has not significantly changed in certain core respects. The distinction of “physically” vs. “behaviorally modern humans” is probably one of the worst notions in modern anthropology. We have “behaviorally non-modern humans” apparently alive and well today. Consider what Malcolm Gladwell relates in “None of the Above:”
My supposition is this: that humans, and indeed any other animal, will generally do whatever is in their best interest to do. Customs, traditions, ethics, cultures, values and norms can change quickly and easily to match what is most advantageous at the moment, so those who do so will get ahead, and those who do not will be left behind. In this, human behavior has not changed at all. What behaviors we have changed have been the specifics of living in an agricultural world. There was never any mutation of human behavior that made us start farming; farming became possible, and those who changed their values to become better farmers, conquered their neighbors. Simple as that. The changes in human behavior, values and culture are symptoms, not causes, of the ecological abberation that made farming possible. That abberation opened up a niche, and like any new niche that appears in nature, it was filled. Simple as that.
Does that make the constellation of particular ecological and geographical factors that coincided to create the Agricultural Revolution any less rare? No. Something weird happened, ecologically, and humans reacted to it the way humans react to such things. Agriculture is absolutely an abberation—what else could you possibly call it?
Agriculture is not a question of intensity, but rather, the nature of your ecological impact. The tribes that created the Amazon rain forest interacted with their environment with an intensity at least equal to the farmers who turned the vast cedar forests of the Fertile Crescent into the blasted wastelands of modern Iraq, but the nature of their impact could hardly be more divergent.
Based on the usual assumption that agriculture is primarily a matter of human desire and ambition, more or less divorced from the environment, I’m sure. But notice, even in that popular rendition of the theory (and it provides the basis for nearly all post-apocalyptic fiction, you’ll notice), you’re talking about a “stable period.” What is meant by this? The Pleistocene ice age was a stable period, but you wouldn’t be able to practice agriculture. We’ve taken the particular climate of the Holocene as normative, as if the earth must always return to that baseline. But an interglacial is an exception (even to the ice age it’s part of), not the rule. The “stable period” that allows for agriculture is an abberation! Will it occur again? Almost certainly—in several million years.
Far be it from me to try to defend English policies towards the Irish, particularly my own ancestors among them, but that’s hardly the whole story. Irish peasantry were among those who saw the least benefit from England’s colonies, but even they were heavily subsidized, not much in the way of food, but they still received support via the nobles (albeit less than the nobles promised) that made their situation (barely) livable.
Not really. The pool of domesticable species remains shallow and tiny: a handful of species, most of them closely related or filling nearly identical niches. The cross-pollination of different, previously isolated zones has had some impact, yes, but it has done nothing to address the underlying problem of just how shallow the domesticated ecology is.
Not that rare; Egypt provided Italy with the majority of its food supply throughout the imperial period.
That statement reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of neolithic energy economics. When it takes more energy to make food than the food itself provides, several obstacles must be overcome. The most important obstacle to neolithic-level farming is one of incentive: for any group that could subsist at such a level, it will always be more advantageous for them to switch to either horticulture or hunting and gathering. There is no benefit provided to the agrarian community by maintaining an agrarian lifestyle; all potential benefits go solely to the elites. The importance of trade to such communities is that it provides the status goods necessary to provide the incentive to continuing agriculture: namely, the peasants will continue toiling, dying younger, and having less food, because while it does nothing for them, it does allow the elites to maintain power and status. And since any peasants who don’t like it get executed, the system continues, even though it is in no one’s interest to do so.
Your link goes to “Acacia in Australia: Ethnobotany and Potential Food Crop,” published in Progress in New Crops. It is, essentially, an advertisement. I cite Scott Cane’s study of “Australian Aboriginal Subsistence in the Western Desert,” (Human Ecology, VoL 15, No. 4, 1987) (Note: a peer-reviewed, academic journal, rather than an advertisement), which notes in its conclusion:
(A special thanks to “Shane S.” in Australia for bringing this article to my attention last summer.) Your advertisement bases its claims on Hiatt’s 1978 study, which has simply not stood the test of time. His previous calculations have been completely overturned, and even Cane’s assessment above has seen much revisitation. I’m not going to provide a complete bibliography here, but I would suggest that at least a cursory visit to your nearest library may be in order before you try to label the mainstream view of where grain fits into the forager diet as “unsupported.”
That is the mainstream view, yes. It doesn’t sound like your book actually discusses anything new or even particularly interesting, so far.
Well, if you’re referring to the benefits of having inherited a hunter-gatherer life from previous hunter-gatherers, the benefits do not end simply at inheriting a land that hunter-gatherers have lived in. But we can also look at how every species “manages” the land; for instance, how natural watersheds are largely the products of beavers. It simply depends on which species’ point of view we care to take at the moment. Nobody suggested that reviving a hunter-gatherer way of life autochthonously would be an easy endeavor, but it’s certainly no harder than trying to keep going the way we have been.
This is a new blog, seperate from Anthropik’s main site. This site is not “recently” focused on HG luxury; it is from its very inception focused on that. But your logic still does not follow. Yes, it will take time to re-establish an HG way of life, to become native and traditional. Yet this is an ongoing process even in HG communities. Even today, I have a vast head-start trying to become native to the Tuppeek-hanne, compared to Hopi Indians trying to adapt to whatever land we felt like giving them for their reservations. There’s nothing romantic about it. Becoming native and traditional means a lot more than simply learning how to get by; it means learning how to thrive, how to do those things that make life enjoyable and fulfilling, rather than simply providing the next breath. In that we have a new set of circumstances, yes, living examples of hunter-gatherers are of limited use. But in terms of difficulty getting by, most of us already have greater ecological wealth to deal with than what we’ve left most of the world’s surviving hunter-gatherers. If they can make it in the Kalahari, the Australian Outback, and the Arctic, then what problem can I really expect to have along the Clarion to surpass those? Even as diminished as it is, it’s still a far richer ecology than any of those places. It’s still paradise, and it still provides me with everything I’ll ever need.
Your analogy seems to compare height to complexity. Even so, your analogy falls apart on all the points that matter. Old growth forests stabilize not just with enormous complexity, but they also stabilize with optimal diversity. While they do crowd out some plants that need a great deal of sunlight (like ferns), they allow the growth of other plants that can only grow in the shade. And because they do not cover everything, there are still places even for sun-loving plants to grow. But civilizations destroy diversity. They enforce a global monoculture, and even absorb personal uniqueness into unrelenting conformity, to better serve the needs of industrial labor. Moreover, as a redwood grows taller, it does not destroy its own ability to survive. The same cannot be said of our civilization. Yes, our civilization must grow, just as a young redwood must grow; but the redwood reaches maturity and stabilizes. As our civilization grows larger, it must grow even larger to maintain itself. If it stops, it dies. But as it continues to grow, it eliminates the foundation of its own survival. This pattern is found in nature, mind you, but not in old growth forests: you’ll find it in tumors.
I’ll point you to Urban Scout’s post, “Hate for Hating Haters,” who expressed my thoughts on this much more succinctly than I possibly could.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 December 2007 @ 12:46 PM
Thanks for your comprehensive and deeply considered reply Jason. I do appreciate the effort, even though I have to conciously keep myself from escalating any percieved acrimony in the exchange.
I’m currently about to get back to work from so I can’t address everything immediately. I’ll mull over it and hopefully respond soon, if not after the annual plastic tree festival. You do know by the way that I am also Shane S? I send you tidbits like that as I find them as I think our current quality of data on the topic of human evolution and ag is still lacking in many areas.
I did want to focus more on the accelerated human evolution data. Their quantification found that we started undergoing evolutionary change at an accelerated level 40, 000 years ago, and reached a rate 30-40 times above that of our longer evolutionary past by 5000 years ago. So conservatively just looking at the last 5000 years we have undergone the equivalent of 5000 x 35 = 175 000 years at deeper paleolithic levels (~20% of our entire species history). If you add in the area under the triangle running back to 40, 000 years with an assumed linear rate of change there is another 35, 000 x 35 x 1/2 =612500 years, totalling 787 500 years equivalent evolution, or about as long as modern humans have been around.
So their results suggest we have undergone close to as much genetic change in the last 10, 000 years as we did in the entire history of our species. This seems like more than scratching the surface. The report only studied changes in genes. Changes in epigenetics are potentially an even more important element.
The rate of evolutionary change isnt just a function of time and selection pressure, but also of population size. By supporting much greater densities of human populations agriculture facilitated the evolutionary changes necessary to allow us to adapt.
Do you have a different way of interpreting the papers result?
Attempted reversion of human groups to the previous lifestyle could involve unanticipated downsides. For example with tolerance of infectious disease there may be a difficult interim period where the diseases of dense populations persist but where the benefits of a broad and dynamic genepool are no longer present to counter-act them. Reversion to a reproduced primitive diet may have shown some documented short term health benefits, but do we really know what all the long term effects across generations of previously agricultural humans will be? For example are agriculturally derived human females sufficiently fertile on a genuine HG style diet? Swings of a few percent either way with such critical traits can mean the difference between a population explosion or rapid extinction.
Comment by void_genesis — 18 December 2007 @ 10:38 PM
I didn’t; thanks for sending me that article. It’s really a much better one than the one you’re linking to here: its data is more recent, and much more reliable.
And doesn’t that alone suggest your quick arithmetic above might be a bit off? After all, we’re still perfectly capable of breeding with the !Kung. Modern hunter-gatherers are not a different species by any stretch of the imagination. We are biologically nearly identical to modern hunter-gatherers. What differences have appeared—lactose-tolerance, larger numbers of antibodies, etc.—are, in the grand scheme of things, trivial.
Largely, no, but we seem to have come to vastly different ideas about the implications of those interpretations, nonetheless. The process of adapting humans to civilization began as soon as civilization began, and naturally such a drastic change would see a period of increased evolutionary activity: it leaves a lot of low-hanging fruit around. People who could drink cow’s milk without throwing up, for instance, would immediately have distinct advantages over their chronically starving peasant neighbors. But ultimately, a truly civilization-adapted human would look more like an ant or a bee, perhaps, and trying to reach something like that from the starting point of, essentially, a chimpanzee, is an extremely long evolutionary road. Adapting to civilization means reversing nearly all the primary characteristics of primate existence evolved over the past 65 million years. Have we begun that transformation? Absolutely. We have become domesticated, there’s no doubt about that. But we still have far more in common with our Pleistocene ancestors than not. We are still primarily adapted to a hunter-gatherer way of life, far moreso than to any kind of agricultural lifestyle. As evidence, I point again to modern hunter-gatherers, as well as to our biological shortcomings to a civilized lifestyle, compared to, for instance, actual granivores like birds, or socially to actually hierarchical species like ants or bees. So, my interpretation of these results is the same as when I cited similar results as evidence in my own argument years ago: yes, we have begun to adapt to this way of life precisely as evolutionary theory would predict, but we have also only begun that process, and it will still be hundreds of thousands of years before we see anything that could reasonably be considered a human adapted to a civilized lifestyle. Until then, we will remain Pleistocene animals out of our element.
Epidemiologically, this makes little sense. Without large, dense populations, epidemic diseases die out. The Black Death ended in Europe mostly because it killed so many that no dense populations continued, which could continue the plague, for instance. Large populations allow for the spread of epidemic diseases, not for their cure; the only benefit provided by dense populations is that after the plague burns through the population, those who survive pass on their antibodies disproportionately. Most Europeans today have a much greater resistance to bubonic plague, because their ancestors were necessarily the ones who happened to survive the Black Death.
After the collapse of civilization, epidemic diseases will undoubtedly still exist. The question will be how will they spread. Hunter-gatherers will enjoy the best immunity that can be provided, even compared to modern, Western medicine: they’ll be isolated. Even if a particular hunter-gatherer band did become infected, it would only provide a very small population for the disease to rip through before it would die out, lacking any others to infect. The spread of ebola is an excellent example: originating in tribal Africa, it did decimate many villages and bands, but because of the lower population density compared to, say, pre-plague Europe, the disease has not yet been able to have the same kind of global impact.
Think of the rise of an epidemic like randomly striking matches. In a sparsely-populated world, you randomly strike a match, and throw it in a bucket of water. In a densely populated world, you randomly strike a match, and throw it in a bucket of kerosene. Protection from epidemic disease is really one of the best arguments for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; in medieval Europe, it provided the sole motivation for many who found that, alone, motivation enough.
It could, but what would the mechanism for this be? We certainly know that on a hunter-gatherer diet, that women are not always fertile. Of course, the general problem is the over-fertility of agriculturally-raised women, so the lower fertility that a paleo diet induces is one of its biggest advantages. Again, the biological differences between us and modern hunter-gatherers is incredibly trivial. The modern-day Swiss milk maid may be able to ingest milk without immediately vomitting, but she still hasn’t adapted to take anything but the most superficial nutritional value from it, nor has she adapted defenses against its side effects. Her biochemistry may have changed in her lifetime to want more sugars, but we are talking about adaptations in a single lifetime, not appreciable genetic changes that would pass from one generation to the next. Even after 10,000 years of accelerated evolution, genetic adaptations to bioregion have had a much bigger impact than adaptations to civilized lifestyles.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 December 2007 @ 1:07 AM
“..we’re still perfectly capable of breeding with the !Kung”
And a polar bear can breed with a grizzly, but I wouldnt be too hopeful that a grizzly would survive well enough to reproduce on an ice flow. “Subspecies” for want of a more elegant term, are capable of remaining cross fertile while adapting to distinct niches. Reproductive isolation is a distinct issue from ecological adaptation. The real question is how deeply adapted agricultural humans are to the agricultural niche. We seem to differ just on where we estimate the depth of the symbiosis to lie. I am mostly agnostic- I think we lack the data needed to make any solid conclusions at present.
“Without large, dense populations, epidemic diseases die out. ”
This makes no sense to me. Diseases like small pox raced through new world peoples and the natives in Australia despite them living at very low average densities. Small tribes still need to maintain regular social and trading contact with the wider community, and many diseases (unlike ebola) can remain infectious for long periods of time. It appears that higher levels of population intensity are needed to create a new pathogen but they are not necessarily required to sustain their spread. I stand by my original point that there may be significant medium term epidemiological hazards in reverting to small reproductive human groups. These effects are also important for the resistance of a species to mundane pathogens and parasites (most of which we know little or nothing about), not just epidemic ones.
Also the black death in Europe killed about a third to half of the people, but it kept reappearing in waves for well over a hundred years. It didnt burn out sufficient density of overall people to support it in one wave. Depending on the nature of the disease and host a larger, more genetically diverse population can be much more resistant to a plague than a smaller spread out one. There isnt a simple linear relationship between population density and the ultimate impact of diseases.
On our responses to diet, and the possibility that agriculturally derived humans are significantly different to hunter gatherers, I would draw on the analogy of many cultivated plants. These are often termed gross feeders and they differ from wild plants in their ability to respond to a higher level of nutrients and water but produce higher outputs in return. Put a wild plant in a gross-feeder’s environment and it may well become soft, bloated and susceptible to disease and insects, if it responds at all. Equally putting a gross-feeder into the wild will see it become stressed and stunted, losing its competitive edge.
Seeing how recent hunter gatherer peoples often suffer greater health problems on an agricultural diet than those with an agricultural heritage makes me suspect that the reverse may be equally true. Our agriculturalist biology may be finely tuned to take in richer resources and direct them to intensified reproduction and immunity. Pushing us too quickly in the other direction may see us lose our competitive edge. So the question isnt just “how far have we come” but also “how quickly can we turn around” regarding “re-wilding”. The faster we try to rewild, and the smaller population we do it with, then the higher the mortality and loss of reproductive fitness in those going through the process. Behavioural adaptation (retraining) can help, but there are limits to everything.
Your story of a mixed group of people drinking cow milk one day and only some not throwing up misses the nuances of how behavioural and genetic adaptation actually tend to happen. To start with people tend to obtain access to a new food source through careful processing (e.g. fermenting cow milk, which makes it edible to those without lactase, or soaked and roasted acorns to cope with tannin content). In a culture that is already consuming a significant amount of processed food then variations that allow tolerance of less processing become advantageous to individuals. Early reports of the Australian aboriginal diet suggested they had higher tolerance of local plant toxins than Europeans for example. A complementary thing happened with the potato. High alkaloid potato species were gathered then cultivated first but were subject to lengthy processing to make them edible (still the case in the Andes). In this case the plant came to the party by developing low alkaloid strains, enhancing the symbiosis with humans. People didnt nibble on poisonous wild and raw potatos for generations until a sweet one was found.
Human ability to adapt behaviourally to use many other species allows us to adopt a strategic position to take advantage of positive evolutionary changes as they occur. We are the first polysymbiotic species on this planet. This mobile ecology may in fact prove to be more resilient to climate change in the long run.
Comment by void_genesis — 19 December 2007 @ 9:01 PM
Thank you for quite neatly illustrating my point. Yes, subspecies are distinct groups on their way towards speciation; they can produce viable offspring, though importantly, their offspring “breed true.” But your comparison is telling. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) most likely speciated from the Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi), generally considered a subspecies of brown bear. The grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) is a different subspecies of brown bear. While grizzlies and Kodiaks can interbreed, grizzlies and polar bears—your example—cannot. They are two different species.
But in humans, we can’t even draw lines of subspecies, at least at present. There may be different subspecies of Homo sapiens in the archaeological record, but none of them survive today. Native Americans, African Bushmen and Australian Aborigines are not distinct species of humans, nor are they even distinct subspecies. We are all Homo sapiens sapiens. We produce offspring with one another with no difficulty; we don’t even breed true. The vast majority of the genetic diversity in our species is well known to be contained inside of Africa, precisely as one would expect if Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, and all non-African specimens descended from a relatively small population that left the original continent. The genetic differences between you or I compared to a Native American or an Australian Aborigine shrink to nothing compared to the genetic diversity that separates a M’buti Pygmy from a !Kung Bushman.
In other words, I’m afraid the facts make pure balderdash out of your speculations. And frankly, besides being rather baseless, it’s also quite alarming in its reminiscent overtones from the bad old days of Ota Benga.
We know for certain that the agricultural lifestyle still makes us sick, and that we’re still healthiest when and to what degree we are able to emulate the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, whether in diet, routine, or nearly any other aspect. I think the data is incredibly consistent and quite solidly points to the rather obvious conclusion that 10,000 years is hardly enough time to even seriously begin the process of turning a chimpanzee into an ant.
They didn’t have very low average densities; read Charles Mann’s 1491. The Americas were actually rather thickly populated, perhaps even more thickly populated than Europe at the same time. But there’s also virulence, or what epidemiologists refer to as “virgin soil.” The European diseases had been in an escalation with European immunities because of their run-away population densities (the American population had grown more steadily, thanks to horticulture, without the constant ravages of plague found in Europe). So the diseases were incredibly virulent, and the American population had no immunity to them whatsoever. Even if they had originally been as depopulated as Europeans recorded after traveling through the post-apocalyptic aftermath of the diseases, the sheer virulence compared to their immunity may have been able to overcome that.
Today, that’s no longer a concern. There’s nowhere on earth where the ravages of centuries of plague haven’t taken their toll and left us with immunities. There’s no more “virgin soil,” and so nothing with that kind of virulence left. Even the most terrible plagues of the modern world are absolutely tame when compared to the impact of smallpox on native America.
Diseases that take a long time to incubate are typically not nearly as virulent.
Mainstream epidemiology disagrees heartily. This is very basic, introductory material in that field: without a sufficient population density, diseases have a harder time spreading, and if they fail to spread, that can often mean their extinction.
In that the bubonic plague will not disappear just because the civilization that spawned it collapsed, yes, you’re absolutely right. However, any hunter-gatherer or even horticultural society will enjoy advantages in stopping the spread of epidemic diseases that we do not have. So in the medium term, yes, you will not have the plague-free paradise of our ancient ancestors. It will take time for epidemic diseases to go entirely extinct. But they will be going extinct. Things will be getting better from the very moment you begin hunting and gathering. But if you’re expecting a magic switch to immediately wipe out all epidemic disease, no, that’s not going to happen. Still, I would say that beginning the process of extincting all epidemic disease is certainly an improvement over the current state of creating new epidemic diseases.
Yes, and there were incidents of bubonic plague before that, as well. The Justinian Plague was even more virulent than the Black Death, and would have been remembered as the most important historical event of its era had it not been overshadowed by the collapse of Rome at the same time. Each time, the survivors left a population with more immunity, so each successive wave was smaller, with smaller and smaller populations of people vulnerable to infection in the first place.
You’re misunderstanding the statement. The Black Death ended when it reached the point where everyone left alive was either immune, or had run off into the hills. It ended essentially because Europeans lived like hunter-gatherers for a season or two. That left no one to infect, so it died out. Yes, later waves came through later, after the population had rebounded, population densities had gone back up, and those immune individuals had had more children, only some of whom inherited that immunity. The next wave came precisely once the factors that had ended the Black Death ceased to exist. But that simply illustrates my point, one you’ll find in any introductory epidemiology textbook: population density is a cause of epidemic disease.
The key there is diversity, not density. Population density increases the incidence of disease. Population diversity increases the odds that an immunity exists and can be propogated. Hunter-gatherer populations are far more diverse than civilized populations, genetically; the two are not necessarily correlated. Civilizations have large, dense, homogeneous populations, providing the perfect combination of everything pathogens need to kill huge numbers of people, and that’s why the history of civilization is filled with waves of pathogens killing huge numbers of people. Hunter-gatherers have small, dispersed, diverse populations, providing the perfect combination of everything that stops the spread of pathogens, and that’s why we cannot find any evidence of any epidemic disease prior to the Agricultural Revolution. You can’t even blame it on lack of evidence; we do extensive archaeological studies of plague victims, so why can’t we find archaeological evidence of earlier epidemics, unless they simply didn’t happen?
Now, you might argue that Pandora’s Box is already opened, and to some extent, that’s true. Living as hunter-gatherers won’t make those epidemics die out overnight. But it will begin to make them die out. Every day that we live as hunter-gatherers, every epidemic disease will grow smaller and weaker, until they go extinct entirely. Hunter-gatherer life won’t make every legacy of civilization blink out overnight; sometimes, it just begins the process of healing that problem, as in this case. Living as a hunter-gatherer won’t ensure perfect health immediately; it will just begin to immediately improve your health vastly.
I am, frankly, a little disgusted by this statement, in the same sense that the story of Ota Benga, referenced above, disgusts me. Displaced hunter-gatherers often suffer greater health problems, yes, but it hardly has much to do with biology. Hunter-gatherers are subsumed into our civilization as the poorest of the poor. Their health problems are the same problems of malnutrition (including affluent malnutrition; malnutrition is not only lack of nutrition, I am using the word precisely here) suffered by the poor throughout civilization. To suggest that the toll of social injustice should be ascribed to genetics or biology is truly nothing less than disgusting. Take a look at the modern U.S. Indian reservation. Are you honestly going to tell me that the health problems suffered by Indians today have more to do with their biological differences, than the ongoing genocide we have placed them in?
That is simply impossible—if anything, it would have to be adapted to take in far poorer resources. Foragers eat a widely varied diet of meat, nuts, berries, tubers, and greens, all of them far more nutritionally-dense than anything even the richest Westerner today enjoys. For instance, once cup of dandelion leaves will provide you with more vitamin C than a whole carton of orange juice, while wild meat avoids nearly all of the health risks discovered in recent decades in corn-fed beef from cows who’ve spent their entire lives in CAFO’s.
But the fact of the matter is, no fine tuning has occurred in our ability to process these foods. We know this for a fact. We barely process corn, for instance; you can see the evidence of this for yourself in your toilet bowl just a few hours after you eat any corn-on-the-cob. Wheat allergy is by far the most common food allergy, and even for those of us who aren’t immediately allergic to wheat, it still causes long-term problems, like cancer. Milk also kills us slowly, even when we are “lactose tolerant.” We are not finely-tuned to these foods; we’re really not tuned to them at all. 10,000 years of accelerated evolution has accomplished an incredible feat: we can just barely swallow these foods, and they won’t immediately kill us. They’ll just kill us slowly, over time. Given the nature of these foods, that is a remarkable evolutionary feat, but to mistake that for “finely tuned adaptation,” or even adequate adaptation at all, is simply absurd.
There’s simply no evidence for this. There is no turning around to worry about. We never got far enough along the road to full domestication to turn around from. Yes, we’ve probably lost up to 10% of our cognitive capacity permanently, but for the most part, we’re physiologically identical to modern hunter-gatherers. Rewilding is, save for some minor details, an entirely behavioral process.
History is littered with accounts of individuals and whole populations rewilding at every opportunity, and never have they suffered the setbacks you speculate about. People have “gone native” or “gone to Croatan” whenever possible, but they’ve never suffered from these problems that you have baselessly imagined. In Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote of the steady loss of Europeans rewilding, noting, “thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!” Benjamin Franklin noted, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” Even today, there are those who “go native” with great ease when presented with the opportunity. Take, for instance, the case of Sabine Kuegler; she lived a wild life from the ages of 7 to 17, though clearly of the exact same genetic stock as you or I. Where were the long-term health impacts for her, or for any of the thousands of domesticated, civilized individuals who have successfully rewilded throughout history without showing any sign of any of these complications that this vaguely racist speculation, with its disturbing echoes of social Darwinism, would predict?
Science is a fairly simple process: the proof of an hypothesis lies in its ability to make accurate predictions. Yours makes predictions, yes, but none of them are true. What does that say about the hypothesis? It’s not a particularly new thought; it was very popular at the turn of the last century, and was one of the founding ideological pillars for movements like the Nazi party in Germany. It’s simply been widely discredited and tossed aside as completely baseless, and utterly without evidence or merit. So for your own intellect as a person, I suppose it is a compliment that you’ve independently retraced the steps of Häckel and other geniuses, but as far as researching the claim and its implications, the first half of the 20th century already largely saw to that work, so we can skip that, reject this whole notion, and move on.
In this particular case, your attention to detail isn’t revealing, but obfuscating. Fermentation, as in yogurt, breaks down the lactose. Lactose-intolerent people can eat yogurt to their heart’s content. The gap from that to drinking cow’s milk is as simple as some people not throwing up. It’s a simple matter of a well-known mutation on chromosome 2.
Exactly. Now, in light of that, how can you defend your previous speculations about the biological barriers to rewilding?
Can you name any species that isn’t polysymbiotic? I don’t know of a single one.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 December 2007 @ 1:16 PM
First off, I’m kind of annoyed with the people who come to these blogs ranting and raving about “romanticizing hunter-gatherers” as if they are saying something original. Rather akin to the guys who visit feminist blogs to address posts about rape-murder and child marriage with a, “But WHAT ABOUT THA MENZ?” Yawn. Puke. Try something new, please.
Secondly, I don’t have a lot of time to go through lots and lots of verbose comments so I apologize if this has already been said. But there are two very obvious reasons why the ancient Middle Eastern cultures that collapsed from agriculture didn’t revert to HG lifestyles.
1. There were no HGs living in their immediate vicinity, and
2. They hadn’t developed anthropology yet.
Do I really need to say this? Do I really need to spell it out? If civilization and industrial technology are really vital to human existence then why are the anti-HGs here not USING IT to answer their own damn stupid questions?
We know these things because if there had been HGs living near the agricultural settlements that collapsed, they would have taken in the survivors and taught them how to live differently, assuming the two groups could learn to get along.
We also know these things because wherever an agricultural civilization has NOT yet wiped out the local HGs, individuals in the agciv who were not benefiting from it abandoned it in favor of living with HGs.
But with agcivs that did not border on HG societies in any way, they either wouldn’t know HGs existed, would be superstitiously afraid of HGs, or would believe HG lifestyles inferior for some reason, so they wouldn’t seek them out.
We had these same issues, and still do to some extent. There’s also the point that just because we have science doesn’t mean we will use it wisely and well–we have biases and sometimes (often) we filter information through those biases, and so completely misinterpret what we’re seeing, particularly with animal (including human) behavior. But where we use science WELL, and can therefore properly understand what we’re seeing, we have the capability of understanding other cultures in a way that’s never been done before where the two cultures in question did not neighbor one another.
So we now have this wonderful chance for a significant number of us to survive our own collapse, despite all the damage we’ve done and all the cultures we’ve destroyed. So it really doesn’t matter what, say, ancient Iraq did when their topsoil washed away. We’re not ancient Iraq, we’re not ancient Egypt, we’re not ancient anything else. We’re us, we operate under materially different circumstances, we have understandings about the world that haven’t existed in any other time or place, and we can do things differently as a result.
Mmkay? All righty then.
Comment by Dana Seilhan — 28 December 2007 @ 2:34 PM
And substitute “anti-HG” with “anti-rewilder” in my previous comment, sorry. I’m trying to write this stuff while being really, really distracted, so for what it’s worth… *shrug*
Comment by Dana Seilhan — 28 December 2007 @ 2:36 PM
Hi Jason- I hope you had a good rest over the break. We have had horrid near cyclonic weather here but I still managed to harvest 300kg of pumpkins among other crops. Apologies for the long post- let me know if cutting things down to dot points would conceivably help.
I was willing to concede you probably would know more about bears given I am in the wrong hemisphere to be familiar, but a little superficial digging showed you were quite wrong here. Grizzlies and polar bears most definitely do interbreed, though I can’t find a definitive source on their hybrid fertility levels. The species concept is a fuzzy and sometimes misleading one. Life does whatever it can get away with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly–polar_bear_hybrid
My main point though was that small genetic changes (too small to cause reproductive isolation) between populations can nevertheless cause distinct differences in their phenotype and ability to fit into a niche. Polar bears and grizzlies can interbreed, but either pure species would not be viable in the other specie’s habitat. By extension small genetic differences in human populations may interfere with their capacity to adopt each other’s lifestyles in less than obvious ways. Scottish people do suffer sunburn in Australia, Africans suffer vitamin D deficiency in Sweden. Is it really racist to acknowledge such things? If so aren’t statements like “an asian and a european are closer genetically than an x african and a y african” also racist?
Current research as you describe has indicated that the gene sequence differences between human populations are not large. But the problem is that those studies miss a lot of the detail in population genetics on several levels. Firstly the data on a base genetic level is far from comprehensive- most of the current broad-scale population studies come from looking at variation in the sequence of the coding region of just a few genes. Entire genomes haven’t been sampled across human populations yet, and probably won’t be for a decade at least.
Secondly we have only just started to appreciate that there is a wide variation in gene copy number within populations. In humans this was recently discovered in a very salient example- gene copy number and expression levels of salivary amylase.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7159/full/449155a.html
In short the number of copies of the gene for salivary amylase (useful in digestion of starch) was found to correlate with the amount of amylase produced, and more interestingly to vary many-fold between different humans, with humans from low starch HG groups having lower gene copy number than HG and ag humans with a high starch diet. The really interesting thing for me was that the distribution in copy number variations in each population indicated that the variation in the trait shifted rapidly and repeatedly throughout human history in response to diet.
Thirdly on human genetic evolution is the issue of non-coding DNA and RNA. Only a small fraction of our genome is read into proteins and enzymes like amylase. The rest of it forms a tangled network of gene products that control gene expression levels that we have only recently started to study. In short we have no real idea what this system does, how varied it is between people and how it might evolve.
Fourthly we know that gene activity is influenced in response to the environment (phenotypic plasticity) but that these changes have effects on the gene activity of subsequent generations (epigenetic change). Morphology, metabolism (ie diet) and immunity seem to be the areas most influenced by this phenomenon. So although your DNA sequence may be identical to an authentic HGer, if your mother ate big macs and potato chips and their mother ate acorns and clams then your individual appearance and responses to your diets and environments could be very different. This is even seen in identical twins where often they look anything but identical.
This brings up an analogy I have been thinking of for a while. Research shows that Japanese people have less knee problems than westerners because of their habit of sitting in a kneeling position on the floor. So you might think that adopting a kneeling position would improve the condition of your knees. Except the behavior changes the growth of the knee during childhood. An unfit westerner adopting the Japanese habit later in life is likely to do more harm than good. The critical window for changing their development has been passed. A similar process is believed to be behind the narrowing of jaws in response to an excessively soft processed diet. Many aspects of our development are guided by our environment and our behavior, so rapidly changing either later in life can have unpredictable effects.
I agree that parts of the Americas probably had population density comparable to Europe at the time that smallpox and other epidemics wiped them out, but what about Australian Aborigines? Not only the relatively populous coastal regions were decimated, but the very sparsely populated central deserts as well. Early explorers often documented horrific smallpox scarring on survivors and tales of high casuality rates coming decades before the first white explorers entered the region. Isolation did not protect these people from epidemics forever. The lesson seems to be that any disease on the same continent will come to you soon enough.
You are correct that a critical factor is immune system naivety to the virulence new pathogen. But this places peripheral HGers at a distinct disadvantage. As is commonly known children are often able to pass through an infectious illness with fewer effects than naïve adults. HG groups living on the same continent as remnant agriculturalists will probably suffer periodic exposure to epidemics, shifting the burden of the disease from relatively resilient children to more vulnerable adults. Add in the relatively low reproductive rates and restricted genetic diversity of small tribes and you have a potential problem with long-term group viability. Diversity is the key, and smaller populations are on average and over time less diverse than large ones (though the recent mix up of humans moving all over the globe does help a little).
Even though ag humans have some improved resistance to many epidemic pathogens these are still serious infections in those who have not yet fought them off (or been vaccinated). And here we come to the obvious problem that smallpox has been eradicated for half a century and is no-longer commonly vaccinated against- that is a terrifying situation of “virgin soil” for virulence to burn through.
On my suggestion that HG groups are hardwired to respond differently to diet you only have to look at the record with respect to myopia, that we now know is related to high blood glucose levels during development.
“While fewer than one per cent of the Inuit and Pacific islanders had myopia early in the last century, these rates have since skyrocketed to as high as 50 per cent.”
http://www.karlloren.com/Diabetes/p49.htm
Different individuals, and by extension different population groups (“races” if you must”), have differing responses to diet, sometimes small, sometimes significant. The data suggests that HGer populations recently introduced to western diets have a more damaging response than western populations, though differing socioeconomic status are undoubtedly part of the overall health status as well. Is that really such a racist and offensive idea? It seems inescapable to me that the reverse is also true- individual westerners will each respond differently to adopting a HG diet, and the full effects will be played out across more than one generation.
I think we can agree that rich and poor are inadequate terms to describe differing diets. If anything a western diet is energy rich and nutrient poor, a HG diet is energy poor but nutrient rich, by comparison.
On barely processing corn- I think you need to stop arguing at the dinner table and chew your food more carefully. Unchewed corn kernels have a waxy coating that protects them from digestive enzymes. And the process of digestion and elimination takes around 24 hours or more.
True wheat allergy is actually not the most common: http://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/index.html
“Although an individual could be allergic to any food, such as fruits, vegetables, and meats, there are eight foods that account for 90% of all food-allergic reactions. These are: milk, egg, peanut, tree nut (walnut, cashew, etc.), fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat.”
Quite a mix of “paleo” and “neo” ingredients there. Depending on source and demographic of sufferers the most common food allergy is reputed to be peanut (neo- in children), egg (paleo?- in children) or shellfish (paleo- in adults). Food intolerances are more complex, but wheat sure is hard to digest for many people if it isn’t fermented (as is most industrial wheat today). I just started doing fermented oat and buckwheat porridges for breakfast- it seemed very tasty and no deleterious effects so far. The B-vitamin boost to energy levels is tangible too. Pure unfermented oat porridge sometimes had a sour taste for me (rancid fats from milling in some batches).
History is littered with accounts of ag-civ individuals becoming incorporated with HGer tribes, and many of them found it to their liking (but far from all of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Fraser). What is lacking is a detailed historic example of a small group of ag-civs successfully setting out to become a new HG tribe together. HGers have reappeared in regions where civilizations have collapsed, but direct descendency between the two populations has never been proven as far as I am aware, leaving the possibility the ag-civs died out and different HGers returned. The same problem exists for changes in height and health with the reverse process of the introduction of agriculture to HGers- can we be certain that the short sickly farmers are actual descendants the tall healthy HGers? So oral history aside, is there any solid genetic evidence of rewilding en masse and from scratch? If genuine HGers are essential to the success of the group in the rewilding process, do you have any mechanism to recruit them into your tribe? What would newbie HGers offer to authentic ones? Are there even any genuine HGers left in North America anyway?
Sabine Kuegler’s story had some interesting detail. The tribe they stayed with “was being decimated by inter-tribal warfare, revenge killings and disease….Doris Kuegler, a nurse, became unofficial midwife to the community, whose women were dying unnecessarily in childbirth. She saved the life of a lame boy called Ohri, who became like a brother to Sabine. When Ohri eventually died of TB. ….. Her mother wanted her to return to Indonesia but she felt too ashamed: to be pregnant but without a man was a serious breach of the tribe’s social code. In the Fayu world there is no such thing as an illegitimate child because sex outside marriage is punishable by death.”.
There is just too much there to start picking at- it speaks for itself. The long term health impacts of her experience were not evident because she was only there ten years, her resistance to local diseases like malaria was likely untested given her parents were medics, she did not reproduce, and apart from all that if she had reproduced it may have been with a genuine HGer, inferring local genetic adaptation to her children. This example lends zero support to your idea that a band of pure ag-civs can independently transform themselves into a new HG tribe and achieve long-term viability.
Void-We are the first polysymbiotic species on this planet.
Jason-Can you name any species that isn’t polysymbiotic? I don’t know of a single one.
Void> There is no narrow definition of symbiosis, so this is a wobbly point to argue around. The narrowest symbiosis (eg endosymbiosis) probably tops out at insects having up to ten microbes living within their tissues, on top of ubiquitous mitochondria etc. Counting the digestive tract and epidermal symbionts is not enlightening as all multicellular organisms have a complex community. Multicellular to multicellular symbiosis usually excludes predator/prey/parasite relationships in food webs and focuses on mutualism, but the borders between them are fuzzy. Taking a classical definition of mutualism humans are indeed exceptional for their ability to develop multiple mutalistic relationships. A typical early agricultural community would carry a few dozen crops and maybe half a dozen animals, and a dozen or so distinct polybiotic cultures for fermentation. Modern ones are a synthesis of the original regional ag biomes and can contain 2-3 times more diversity overall. Add in the weeds, pests and parasites and you are moving away from narrow mutualism but it is a significant part of the diversity of the ag biome. Can you name a species with much more than ten ectosymbiotic mutualistic partners, even allowing for microbes?
For example- A tree may have (being generous with redundancies) :
1. Mycorhyza (universal)
2. Nitrogen fixing agrobacteria (or equivalent) (common but not universal)
3. Pollinator A (common but not universal)
4. Pollinator B (common but not universal)
5. Pollinator C (common but not universal)
6. Fruit disperser A (common but not universal)
7. Fruit disperser B (common but not universal)
8. Ant guard (reward via extrafloral nectaries) (rare)
Secondly to Dana
I apologise, as I have before, if my presence here is unwelcome. Jason is well within his authority to banish me from the site if he wishes to moderate the discussions. But I think it is useful for both sides to examine their assumptions and analysis. The world is most definitely headed toward a major crisis, and radical lifestyle changes are coming. Our planned responses could have life or death consequences. Is it really so tiresome to periodically shake down our ideas and see how sturdy they are?
Dana- 1. There were no HGs living in their immediate vicinity, and
2. They hadn’t developed anthropology yet.
Void>On point one I can only highlight that very few agcivs today have authentic HGers in their immediate vicinity (are there any at all in North America? In Australia the tribes maintain some contact with the old ways but more traditions are lost every year). Those few authentic HG tribes left seem to have a distinct animosity toward agcivs (eg Andaman Islanders) and are unlikely to have any incentive to care for and reeducate us. Does the tribe of anthropik have strong links to your remnant indigenous community?
On point 2 I would suggest that there is only so much that anthropology can currently contribute to successfully adopting a genuine HG lifestyle. For a start the documented information is woefully incomplete- for instance much of the ethnopharmacology of tribes was lost before it could be recorded, and that which was written down is often vague and incomplete. Secondly even if we had a detailed knowledge of how historic HGers lived, we have to be able to apply that to a radically changed environment (through environmental damage and now ongoing climate change). Beyond that putting theory into practice is a far from straight-forward process. Would you kill a venomous snake based on a paragraph of advice? Collect wild honey? Identify and eat an unfamiliar plant? (ala Alex Supertramp).
Dana- So we now have this wonderful chance for a significant number of us to survive our own collapse, despite all the damage we’ve done and all the cultures we’ve destroyed.
Void> Fair enough if there is a distinct, fast collapse. But how will you recognize it when it comes? What is a meaningful trigger for getting the tribe of anthropik out of their suburbs and into the woods together? Have you agreed on what it would be? Or will it be too late to get out or even discuss it by the time an obvious trigger comes? What if there is a slow and drawn out collapse instead over decades?
Perhaps I should remember what they did to Socrates for asking too many stupid questions……
Comment by void_genesis — 9 January 2008 @ 4:18 AM