Well, not all of us, just the non-African sector of the species. It seems that humans of European and Asian descent have between 1 and 4 per cent of our genes from Homo neanderthalensis. If we are of African descent we have no Neanderthal genes.
The story seems to be that about 500,000 years ago Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis separated out from a common ancestor. The Neanderthals lived (I won’t exactly say “flourished”) in Eurasia whereas we stuck to Africa. But it appears that the band of Homo sapiens who left Africa at least 45,000 years ago picked up some Neanderthal genes on the way. That’s all of us who are non-African. But not all Neanderthals have our genes.
There could still have been and almost certainly was interbreeding at certain points after that. Some specimens are classified as hybrids. But genetically we are virtually the same. If you randomly select two human beings they will share 99.9% of their DNA. If you do the same for a human and a Neanderthal they’ll share 99.8%. Wikipedia says 99.5 to nearly 99.9% identical.
In Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth: an argument for hope he tells us that if you grab a bunch of 30 chimps from somewhere in Africa there will be more genetic diversity among them than there is in the entire human race. That’s because we suffered a genetic choke about 70,000 years ago when there were only between 2,000 and 10,000 left somewhere in Africa.
As an aside, Flannery tells us that everyone alive is descended from a single male who lived 60,000 years ago. Then if you follow the mitochondrial DNA we are all descended from a single female 150,000 years ago. That seems like three chokes to me. I’ve heard elsewhere that all Europeans can be traced back to six females, who must all have had Neanderthal genes. We’ll never know what went on in a palm grove somewhere in the Middle east.
Now I didn’t get all that information about our Neanderthal inheritance from Flannery, who seems to have missed it. That came from an article by Robert Adler in the New Scientist Are you really smarter than a Neanderthal? (behind the paywall). I googled the first few words of the text and found the article in full here. Even the boxes are included at the end, we just lack a few images.
It’s all based on an astonishing bit of science:
In May 2010, a team led by Richard Green from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reported an astonishing feat. From fossilised bone fragments of three Neanderthals who lived 40,000 years ago in what is now Croatia, they reassembled 60 per cent of the Neanderthal genome and made the first detailed genetic comparison of Neanderthals and modern humans (Science, vol 328, p 710).
This was reported in the New Scientist at the time.
The question as to whether Neanderthals were smarter or dumber than us is not resolved by the new research, nor is the true story of why the Neanderthals went extinct. My own untutored suspicion is that they were comparably smart, but lacked a bit in flexibility of adaptation and planning. The Wikipedia article has a map showing the range of the Neanderthals:
Map showing range of neanderthals
It seems there were never all that many of them, they eked out an existence near the edge of the ice. They were largely carnivorous, but did discover how to cook vegetables. They were buffeted by climate change and competing with Homo sapiens. Whether we did them in, out-competed them and drove them out or genetically absorbed them is not clear. I’d suspect some of each. Wikipedia gives a map of how our range advanced and theirs receded:
Changing range of humans and Neanderthals over the generations
The Neanderthal range is shown in light grey in terms of generations ago according to mitochondrial DNA evidence.
On smarts, Flannery reckons we have perhaps become dumber since inventing agriculture and civilisation.
Jared Diamond reckons that the invention of agriculture was The worst mistake in the history of the human race. A bit tongue in cheek there, methinks, but he is emphasising significant negatives. Agriculture reduced our nutritional variety, reduced our physical size and our life expectancy. More than that, it gave us starvation, warfare, and tyranny. Now Flannery tells us it reduced our brain size as well – 10% in the case of men and 14% in the case of women.
I know that bigger is not always better, but changes of that order must be a bit of a worry. The notion is that pre-agricultural humans had to use all their brain power to live and prosper. In organised society we can get along quite well by narrowing the focus and using a small part of our abilities.
There is a lot more in Flannery, which irrespective of it’s main thesis is an interesting read.
But overall the Holocene has suited us well. A pity we are messing it up.
LOL!
And now we see it: 19th racial ‘science’ comes back to haunt Europeans.
As an aside to your aside, everyone being descended from a single female does not imply a population bottleneck. Mitochondrial ‘Eve’ was alive with a number of other humans (see wiki for more detail)
Stephen I didn’t say population choke, I said genetic choke. But yes, I can see now from your Wikipedia link that it doesn’t imply a genetic choke either, merely that one woman’s genes were successful in mixing throughout.
“Jared Diamond reckons that the invention of agriculture was The worst mistake in the history of the human race. It reduced reduced our physical size. Now Flannery tells us it reduced our brain size as well – 10% in the case of men and 14% in the case of women.”
Our reduced physical size relates to our reduced brain size as a lot of our brain capacity is taken up dealing with functional aspects of our body. You don’t need as much brain power to move a smaller muscle.
A couple of typos: Changing range of humans and Neanderthals over the generations; irrespective of it
’s main {…}Substantively:
He might have added, property, the rule of law, scope for lifestyle choice, relief from irrational fear, effective shelter from the elements, the possibility of diverse community, relief from arbitrary rule to that list.
From the point of view of the species, assuming a species can have a POV, it was a raging success. 10,000 to 6.8bn? The numbers don’t lie.
Even from the POV of individuals, the proportion who live past the age of the oldest Younger Dryas humans would be huge.
All cultures are a package — a risk trade. With systematic agriculture and animal husbandry comes disease. The surplus makes it possible to have social property, property-based rule, land tenure, systematic coercion and outright barbarism, intellectual, cultural and political elites with all that implies for good and ill. Without settled agriculture, there could have been no science, or literature or much of anything that would make life meaningful.
The ascent of humanity via settled agriculture, and thus to what we now take as self-evident for dignified existence was not of course an active choice by any particular human, yet those forces, set in motion were the embryo of goods we should never contemplate sacrificing, for all of the terrible costs.
Ever seen this Fran?
Now will they believe that i was drawing on the chalk with a blackboard?
Fran, fixed, I think.
I was more concerned about the startling reduction in our brain size than the other effects, good, bad or indifferent, stemming from agriculture and civilisation.
Yes I have heard of Mabo, Jules. What’s your point?
Brian said:
Transistorization has massively reduced {say like the random spruiker} the size of PCs since the ENIAC but our contemporary PCs are incomparably better.
The measure of worth is not brain size but brain function. If we have lost bits that are of no contemporary use, but have learned, though collaboration, to make better use of what we are left with, then that’s OK. There’s some evidence that there still remains scope to make better use of our brains.
Looking at the people in charge, that seems obvious.
oh dear: Transistorization has massively reduced {say like the random spruik
ker} the size of PCs since the ENIAC but our contemporary PCs areincomparbalyincomparably better.[Fixed, and a couple others as well - Brian]
I don’t think it was organised agriculture that gave rise to social property, property-based rule, and land tenure. Thats all.
Jules said:
You’re using recognition of Native Title to make a socio-cultural claim about all of human history? That’s breathtaking if it’s an attempt at serious analysis rather than a tongue-in-cheek jab.
Well yeah I am actually, cos the Mabo decision (which isn’t Native Title, its a court decision that opened the way for the creation of a legal definition of property called “native title” and its recognition under Australian Law,) implies all of those things in a “pre agricultural” society. Native title as we understand it requires them actually.
So basically to claim that those didn’t exist before organised agriculture, because organised agriculture gave rise to them, flies in the face of the obvious evidence.
Slight correction here.
This applies only if we are of “pure” African descent.
For example, Mohammed Ali, a person classified as “of African descent”, also has European ancestors.
Those folk are likely to have been part Neanderthal.
More generally, Neanderthal probably also originated in Africa much earlier than homo sapiens.
Anatomically modern humans were around for at least 90,000 years before the advent of agriculture and 19th and 20th C non-agricultural societies had/have knowledge systems and traditions as complex as modern Western literature or science. I’m sure Fran didn’t mean to say all these people found that their lives lacked meaning. In fact perhaps the opposite is true. Anyway in a pre-literate society there would seem to be selection for mental agility to handle religion, politics, social relations and technical and ecological knowledge in one’s own head or in communicating to others. So the impact of the invention of writing on reducing brain function is an interesting thought (You can imagine Early Bronze Age mums “I’m not having you sit around the hut all day reading those bloody clay tablets!”).
Re Neanderthal-modern human comparisons it used to be thought Neanderthals lacked the capacity to speak as we do, hence brain function was affected, but I am not sure where the debate stands at present.
Correction to the first bit – non-ag. peoples had knowledge systems etc as complex as any individual may experience today. It’s the sum of all that accumulated knowledge that makes a difference, most of which we don’t experience individually. Shorter version – hypothetically speaking, we’re dumber individually now, but smarter collectively.
Jules said:
Hardly. All these things did develop out of settled agriculture, and while the courts did come to recognise a form of title to land use this is hardly the same thing as claiming that this form of tenure created social property, or property-based rule. There was not, as far as we can tell, any property-based elite amongst Australian indigenes and certainly no social property or codified legal rubric around it. Indeed, there weren’t even secure non-oral records of births or deaths. Such things were superfluous precisely because the indigenes were hunter-gatherers. No property was to pass. Communities were small enough for all disputes to be settled directly amongst the parties and so forth.
Once societies become complex and the bonds between individuals become attenuated by distance, dialect, lifestyle etc. then some other agency accepted by most must intervene to resolve disputes in ways that don’t lead to deaths or the community must divide. Settled agriculture made it possible to acquire and hold significant property, and to produce a surplus that could support people not directly involved in food production. It meant rules over water needed to be devised and taxes paid to rulers. It entailed writing and mathematics. Of course this underpinned land tenure and social property.
There’s no getting away from that.
Katz @ 15, yes, I meant “pure” African descent. We are getting all mixed up now.
The family tree illustration attached to the New Scientist article suggests that H. heidelbergensis and H. sapiens evolved from early hominids like H. habilis and H. ergaster about 500,000 years ago in Africa. H. heidelbergensis moved out to Europe and H.neanderthalensis evolved there. On that basis H.neanderthalensis was never in Africa.
While all that was going on H. erectus was very much in Asia and spawned H. floriensis, which of course was the last other hominid to go.
Fran, I think there a number of errors in your claims. Keen (2004: Aboriginal economy & society : Australia at the threshold of colonisation. Oxford Uni Press, Melbourne) has a good summary of 7 sample societies around Australia. Not all these things are said there, but Aboriginal Australians had, for starters: elites, based on gender, age, descent and birth (the last two governing access to and use of land); non-oral records of events (paintings and engravings encoded with various levels of meaning); attenuated bonds between individuals (eg trans-continental exchange between distant groups unacquainted with each other, based on mutually understood rituals); mutually-accepted institutions and conventions designed to ease transitions and disputes; inheritance (eg land rights might pass to blood relatives); production of surpluses to support people not involved in food production (eg large ceremonial gatherings).
There is no question that these modern pre-literate non-agricultural societies used concepts of property (though it may not have been readily tradeable). While there is little evidence that such complexities existed more than 10,000 years ago in Europe or anywhere else, I don’t think that we can reject the idea. There is evidence of symbolic long-distance exchange in Europe and Australia from 30-50,000 years ago, so perhaps elements of the above existed then too. Braininess has a long history.
This has gotten somewhat off thread and out of my area of expertise but possibly, the development of writing relates to taxation/tributes and commerce (as we understand them and as they developed in SW Asia, China and Central America), the rise of power structures controlling resources in those places, and the need to keep track of things.
In the Jared Diamond piece he says:
With a height reduction approaching 10% it would be unusual if the brain cavity remained the same.
John D @ 16 and 17, I think you are close to what Flannery is saying, based on the research of others, naturally.
It’s well established that we use different parts of the brain for different functions. The notion is that pre-agricultural people made use of their whole brains in the course of normal life in a way that we don’t have to in a specialised, ‘civilised’ world.
Rather than the scope of knowledge dealt with it may be easier and more appropriate to think in terms of Howard Gardiner’s multiple intelligences.
These are said to relate to physical parts of the brain and are present in all cultures. As a species our brains evolved to cope with particular kinds of functions/activities, and that in a hunter/gatherer setting.
Another study has sequenced the nDna of a group now called the Denisovans (from Denisova cave, Siberia) an extinct population of Pleistocene humans who have about 4% similarity with modern Melanesians. See a great overview at John Hawk’s weblog: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisova-nuclear-genome-reich-2010.html
What a remarkable 12 months it has been for human palaeogenetics.
What Joe D said basically.
“There was not, as far as we can tell, any property-based elite amongst Australian indigenes and certainly no social property or codified legal rubric around it.”
Well Bill Neidje wrote a book explaining some of the Gagadju peoples “codified legal rubric”. So I beg to differ.
Thanks, su @ 22.
John D, on speech I can’t pick up where I read it, but there seems to be a thought that Neanderthals had speech, but couldn’t make the full range of modern sounds, although this still seems to be speculative.
The contention was that when humans interacted with Neanderthals human speech was also limited and evolved into the modern form later. I doubt this as it would require parallel development all over the world.
Brian@24, su@22 neglected to mention a post on John Hawks website a day or so ago that deals with just that. The Neandertals and Denisovans had the same genes that are supposed to give us language, which strongly suggests that it dates back maybe 400 000 years, before the three groups split.
I think that the proposal that Neandertal speech organs were such that they couldn’t make some of the sounds we do has been largely disproved since. In any case, a few missing phonemes doesn’t mean what you can say is in any way limited — is Hawaiian, with 13 phonemes, any less expressive than Ubekh, with eighty-some?
There were a couple of decent documentaries about human evolution on Aunty last year and one of them (I think it may have been the one in which John Hawk appeared) went into the foxp2 gene and language. I’ll try and track down the name, it’s worth a look.
I think it was The Neanderthal Code. Some bright spark was paid to come up with that horrible title.
I read an article a while back concerning the speculations of an Australian academic — sorry, can’t remember his name — who wondered whether troll and ogre fables might not have been originally due to ancient encounters with H. neanderthalensis.
He suggested that the latter may have been a fearsome predator of early humans, ambushing isolated individuals or raiding human groups at night. I don’t think there was any particular evidence for this, but it was an interesting speculation. Maybe one day they’ll find gnawed human bones at a Neanderthal site!
Modern trolls prefer instead to turn up on leftie blogs demanding proof for the existence of AGW! =)
Hunter gatherers can “own” or not own different things than we do. For example, the Aborigines I was familiar with had a very high sense of ownership of their names to the extent that there was no sharing of names and someone mistakenly calling a baby somebody else’s name would have been a very serious transgression. The point I am making is that aborigines have a seriously foreign culture and transferring our concepts of ownership, class and power can be fraught.
Jules
You know that I am going to want something a little more tangible than that. Codified legal rubrics are by definition, recorded in some permanent and well specified way.
What social property are we discussing and in what sense did the codified legal rubrics confer enforceable rights on the holders of the property? Where was/is this recorded?
Joe D
Perhaps you could develop this point because I can’t imagine what this could refer to.
Objects like beads of marine shell, or ochre, of no economic use, are found in some archaeological sites many km from their nearest possible source. In the Middle Palaeolithic, 500-70,000 years ago (~Neanderthal), such objects are found about 100 km or so, at most, from source. In the Upper Palaeolithic (70-10,000 years ago; ~us) they are up to 400 km or so from source. In the Kimberly beads of marine shell dated c.41,000 years old are 500 km from their nearest source. People went to some trouble to move small quantities of material long distances: one group or individual could make such a journey but it is more likely given estimated population sizes and required territories (this is of course subject to some debate) that the objects crossed territorial boundaries, implying mutual recognition between different groups of the symbolic value of a non-utilitarian object. Exchanging these things, if imbued with some value, might have helped cement inter-group alliances, for instance. My point is that this sort of thing suggests that Upper Palaeolithic people were basically modern. The biggest revolutions were not inventions like agriculture (important as they are for all sorts of benefits) but the development of things like symbolism and spoken language – at times and in ways that are not well understood!
Fair enough, I dunno if this’ll satisfy you, but anything more detailed might take a little time.
Bill Niedjie wrote a book, probably Australia’s Kakadu Man in which he described some of his peoples law. Not lore. Law.
The book I’m referring to is probably the 1987 one I think, there was a 2002 book using the spelling Gagadju or whatever the correct spelling is. I haven’t seen that book. However there may be other documents by him that I am muddling too. Either way all of this stuff was at SCU in the late 90s and 2000.
So anyway he refers to various paintings around his country. Those painting were symbolic representations of the rights and responsibilities of the people of his country.
They referred to hunting rights, possibly mining rights (access to ochre for ceremonies primarily) tho its been over 10 years since I read this so I may be confusing that with something else. They also referred to ceremonial rights and responsibilities, what we might term intellectual property, and a system of enforcement for those rights and of those responsibilities.
This had particular importance because of the prominent role of ceremony in the social life of his people.
These particular paintings were renewed constantly and were referred to when young men were initiated into manhood and became responsible for maintaining the responsibilities and exercising the rights he was entitled to.
As far as I know they are still there.
So you can go and look at the painting if you want.
It might make about as much sense to you as a bound copy of the Commonwealth Law Reports would to Bill Niedjie’s great great great great grandad. But you can still look at it.
The painting I am referring to is one in particular that I remember was shown in the book along with some explanation. It was a series of concentric circles and some squiggles or dots I think.
I know thats probably not a precise or easily verifiable argument, based on late night ramblings, poor memory and thats about it. Sorry, but still:
The book and the paintings and the legal system they refer to all exist.
John Atkinson @ 25, I googled and found this John Hawks post. It seems the peoples in PNG and Bougainville have up to 8% genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans. That’s starting to become quite significant as a variation from purely African populations.
Towards the end of the post:
The suggestion is that we are entering a period of significant flux in knowledge of human origins.
This later post addresses the issue of the emergence of language and places it “prior to 250,000-400,000 years ago”. In other words, the Middle Pleistocene, or even the “a novel adaptive environment for communication in humans during the early to mid-Middle Pleistocene”.
Brian where do you think art fits in all of this?
Sorry Jules but a series of paintings on walls describing something figuratively knowable by a handful of people is not a codified legal rubric with enforceable rights over social property.
Stephen @ 2,
Virgin birth?
Fran @30 “You know that I am going to want something a little more tangible than that. Codified legal rubrics are by definition, recorded in some permanent and well specified way.”
Around Cairns the Bama (people) had Bulurru, which probably represents what you are asking for. However, out of its cultural context, it is a difficult concept to elaborate on. Just as it is difficult for illiterate societies to fathom the law of literate people.
Bulurru ‘ruled’ every aspect of Bama live. To understand indigenous ‘law’ it is important to realise, that most illiterate societies have relied on mnemonics to deal with complexities such as law. These are the stories learned by initiates. Further, totems and significant places or sources of ‘storywaters’, can be seen as the physical representation of mnemonically embedded law, the sources. Such is the Bama way as there are very few permanent paintings or engravings.
So next time you see a platypus or a particular plant flowering at a particular time or you look at a hill in your locality, you probably look at a codified legal rubric of the local indigenous.
Jules, art would not be possible without some sort reflexive consciousness. So are burial rites, such as the ochre found in the Lake Mungo burials. ‘The prehistory of mind’ by Steven Mithen makes a good read on this.
In relation to language, it would be interesting to find out when Broca’s and Wernicke’s area emerged in the human brain. My guess is it probably coincided with the above mentioned practices.
Terra nullius much?
Ootz @40, there may be evidence emerging that some African elephants have some sort of burial rite thing going on…
Fran – “Sorry Jules but a series of paintings on walls describing something figuratively knowable by a handful of people is not a codified legal rubric with enforceable rights over social property.”
What evidence would satisfy you?
Carvings that describe physical boundaries? Carvings on a portable object that is inherited? Carvings that identify the inheritor as having certain rights and obligations?
The problem for this discussion is that anyone who can answer your questions in the kind of explicit details I suspect you would need to satisfy your curiosity would actually be in breach of those ‘codified legal rubrics’ if they answered your question.
I hadn’t heard of john Hawks before yesterday. I find he did an interesting post on “Did humans face extinction 70,000 years ago?” back in May 2008 when the theory first hit the deck.
His answer – well no, not on the evidence available:
On a technical level it’s a bit beyond me, but I find him quite impressive. When he went looking for evidence he found that a crucial paper was one where he himself had been the lead author. Apparently others saw stuff in it that he didn’t see.
I wonder whether there has been a response by the authors of the theory.
So much of the above sounds like an attempt to show that indigenous peoples had established distinctive cultural practice, which is beyond serious demur.
The design and development of legal rubrics around access to social property is a specific subset of cultural practice. Fairly obviously, if there is either no social property, or it plays at most a peripheral role in the life of a community, the need to codify access and usage is unlikely to be very tight.
I’m far from an expert on indigenous property rights but I get the impression that country is very much bound up with identity. In fact I repeatedly hear people saying that they belong to the country rather than the other way around.
More generally I get the impression that H. sapiens is fundamentally and essentially territorial and that this is just as true of nomads as it is of more settled peoples.
In modern ‘civilised’ societies there are certainly people who are somewhat detached from any particular place. There is a question as to whether this is to their detriment.
Sorry Fran that was a bit harsh. I really can’t expect you to take poor attempt at providing “evidence” seriously right now. Cos disjointed ramblings about some book really are no basis for a formal discussion.
None the less.
The Gagadju people were a non literate people with a legal system that was symbolically recorded and used to determine the rights and responsibilities of the individuals subject to gagadju sovereignty.
But personally I think you should perhaps read that thing Mark B wrote about an ethics of dialogue, and the ensuing discussion.
Cos it appears to me that you are saying pre literate cultures are incapable of the sort of cultural development that post literate cultures take for granted. Thats not even a noble savage argument, its a primative savage one.
Fran – “The design and development of legal rubrics around access to social property is a specific subset of cultural practice. Fairly obviously, if there is either no social property, or it plays at most a peripheral role in the life of a community, the need to codify access and usage is unlikely to be very tight.”
Okay. I’ve just got to ask are you serious with this?
Fran, it is quite obvious that you are exceedingly well educated and eloquent, but it would be a mistake to say that because information has not reached your own eyes and ears in a way that you recognise to be valid, does not mean that that information does not exist.
And can you define social property.
I looked for a specific def in butterworths and couldn’t find one.
I also apologise for how inarticulate I am with this. I hope you get what I mean from the above.
I’m out of here.
furious balancing
There is that, I missed it before.
Brian, the relationship between country and an individual is incredibly deep. In many ways it is closer to the concept of family or fellow citizens than landscape.
On its own tho thats not enough to define a legal system.
Its ironic that indigenous communities are in Australia are referred to as nomadic. Every day we travel around our communities fulfilling our rights and responsibilities. We leave our home territory and go get food, do work, pay bills, serve on juries, go to dances dinners, gigs and sporting events, and return later.
No one calls that nomadic. Indigenous Australians followed similar patterns of movement, just over longer periods of time than a day. If I spend 3 days away from home out of every five camping while I plant trees, moving from one site to another over the course of the planting season that doesn’t necessarily make me nomadic, but I probably still cover the same distances as Nomadic people.
Perhaps that qualifies as peripatetic nomadism tho.
Fran, I think your definitions are either too loose, or you underestimate properties of most if not all modern societies (with agriculture or otherwise).
Something figuratively knowable: do you mean “not literal”, ie the meaning is not obvious, abstract. Would apply to any group that makes art, or symbols, ie probably all moden humans. Writing began as symbols.
Codified: (Aboriginal) art is laden with code, some of which governs behaviour, but perhaps you mean enacted law as per Western legal code. Yes, that implies writing. But what is the difference between law enacted through ritual and law enacted through written documents? A person still has to be taught to understand the latter; writing just makes transmission of knowledge faster and more accurate. So the difference is just scale, or accessibility to numbers of people.
Rubric: Rules? Directions? Yes, if you know the meaning of the art or the ritual. See previous commenters.
Enforceable rights: very much so in Aboriginal society (deterrents existed).
Social property: Not sure what “social” is meant to imply, but as indicated above non-agricultural societies have property. However perhaps you mean something tradeable for currency: that is a narrower definition IMO.
Your comment on a handful of people gets back to the point that the difference between then and now is one of scale. Because of the scale of our society some of us can access an enormous range of services, knowledge and goods, which none who enjoy them would trade for an Upper Palaeolithic lifestyle. It remains to be seen if we can extend all of the benefits to the large part of our species that does not enjoy them, and still not wreck things. Fortunately, if it all comes apart and we have to end the mass-population experiment, in evolutionary terms our brains only just went past the Upper Palaeolithic at the last corner and some of us should be make it back
Fran, re your last comment: property (in the form of inherited and allotted individual and group territories governing access to resources, spiritual obligations, identity) was important in Aboriginal society, so that implies a need to “codify access and usage”.
Joe D @ 52, in case you don’t know you have close off the HTML tags by inserting an / before the “blockquote”.
Brian@44:
I think you’ll find John Hawks’ blog well worth following — and not just with respect to issues of hominid genetics. (For the couple of days I’ve been engaged in an email exchange with John regarding his post on whether life in 2011 is more free than it was in 100 000 BC.)
Another interesting (but more technical) blog on anthropological genetics is Dienekes’ (dienekes.blogspot.com)
Around about this time each year he posts an entertaining set of predictions for the coming year. Last year’s featured a fine bit of snark about the Toba Catastrophe theory which turned out to be quite topical because when Eyjafjallajokull erupted, people did indeed start mentioning both Mt Tambora and Toba.
Jules asked:
Property/assets used to produce tradeable goods or services, by analog with social labour.
Joe D
Codified things have the attribute of meaning very similar and specific things to all people, and to the extent there is room for subjectivity, contain usages for narrowing this still further. The page on which this text appears is full of “code” which is interpreted by a browser, which then formats and places the text with certain attributes in a predictable way. HTML is codified. MIME allows images and audio to be sent over a text based medium because it too is codified. Similarly, our laws too are very specific about obligations and rights and although they remain open to interpretation, the scope to do this is far more narrow than, for example a diagram suggesting the presence of a surface with a low coefficient of friction. This in turn is much less open to interpretation the Ciba-Geigy or NIKE logos, notwithstanding that these are both the subject of trademark protection which is itself codified.
My commentary on the causal relationship between the development of settled agriculture and contemporary “western” culture should not be taken as an attempt to evaluate comparatively, the worth in some broad sense of indigenes or their cultures on the one hand and that of western societies on the other. Even if I had good data on the usages of pre-European contact societies, I can’t imagine how I could do this, since, evidently, I am a product of the systems of valuing that are part of industrial and urban society. Trying to place myself into the position of one of, for example the Darug people in 1788 and working out whether the culture was feasible and if so what its weaknesses were seems to me an impossible and absurd counter-factual.
I do get the impression that some of the responses above, while motivated by a worthy desire to reject western ethnocentrism, rather allow it in through the backdoor, by trying to show that indigenous practice(s) was/were analogous to valued western practices and thus capable of being valuable in western eyes. That, it seems to me, misses the point, at least if one is inclined to accept that indigenous culture has intrinsic worth, regardless of how we westerners may value it.
Fran
I think the point has been well and truly missed.
I intended no value judgements. I was trying to show that much of what we do has a lot in common with other societies. In a much more general sense than what you say above, all people interpret symbols using codes. Codes themselves aren’t open to much interpretation, by definition. I’m suggesting universal similarities exist if we accept general definitions (eg not all codes are written down), you’re coming up with very specific examples peculiar to industrialised nation states in the modern era.
However, you did state that agriculture, an invention of some societies, was needed for a host of behaviours which prompted others and me to suggest that these behaviours are in fact common to many if not all modern societies. That is not some kind of value judgement. The behaviours attributed to various groups are not meant to be good or bad, I’m just suggesting that’s what modern humans do.
I can’t see the relevance of the last sentence of your second para, but I can assure you that researchers are spending productive time working out what Australian cultures were doing in 1788 and other times before then. Your use of the term “feasibility” baffles me (they were feasible, self-evidently).
But Fran its a ridiculous conceit to assume that law is only a valued western practice.
Atlas of SA
Half way down it describes some trade routes that entered South Australia and the products that were traded. Ok that seems to satisfy the definition of social property for me.
Dunno how you feel about it.
Back to legal stuff.
I don’t see how “some painting on some wall” cannot be a codified legal rubric, if it a symbol system with specific meaning relating to the rights and responsibilities of people under the sovereignty of an institution they all recognise.
This was the case with the gagadju people.
Thats crap Fran. What we are, well I am, saying is that the tendency to create civilised systems of law is a human property not a post agricultural one. If it wasn’t then every culture on earth wouldn’t have a concept of law. I haven’t surveyed every one ever but I’d be willing to bet some high stakes that they all do. I’ve yet to come aross one that doesn’t.
I have indigenous friends who say that the refusal to recognise their laws is simply another attempt to de legitimise the idea that they are mature, responsible, adult and human.
And capable of making decisions and taking responsibilty for themselves.
“Their law” stands on its own and is legitimate for its own sake, not cos of my recognition.
Perhaps we’re saying indigenous practices are analogous valued human practice because, by definition they are human.
Of course its easier to exploit and abuse other people and their resources if you don’t recognise the way they regulate ownership and the other rights or responsibilities of their community.
Jules said:
One suspects there have been rules attached to human interaction for as long as humans have interacted. Indeed, even my four dogs have their own rules. One can call these “laws” if one wants, but “law” in its western sense is a system that is specfied explicitly clauses by clause. It has at its centre notions of enforceable claims, a notion of the private and the public, and a system of tracking of results, precedent and usages intended to put arbitrators at arms’ length from disputants.
While the concept of law in that sense may be immanent in all humans, it’s only instantiated when the context in which such a thing is useful and technically possible arises.
I note your use of the phrase civilised systems of law. This is problematic, given the terms of this discussion, but it is telling that in attempting to put your case, you thought it apt all the same. This was rather my point above — that we westerners find it hard to escape our cultural context, and if we do, to bring what we learn back into that context. Some things just don’t map across.
Gotcha.
I did that deliberately, because it was a phrase that I first heard from an Indigenous Australian Elder. Referring to his own culture.
Along the lines “How up yourselves are you lot thinking you have some monopoly on civilisation and organisation.”
They weren’t his words tho, he was a bit gentler and more understanding.
Personally I find the conceit that we consider ourselves civilised in the West amusing at times and horrifying at others. And wrong.
“One suspects there have been rules attached to human interaction for as long as humans have interacted. Indeed, even my four dogs have their own rules. One can call these “laws” if one wants, but “law” in its western sense is a system that is specfied explicitly clauses by clause.”
Yes, thats a law in its western sense.
All you’ve shown Jules is that you don’t really understand the word “civilisation” and ironically make my point.
You “got” yourself.
PS:
1. Attributing the term to an Aboriginal elder doesn’t habilitate it for your preferred usage.
2.Even more ironically, if that’s possible here, it might just be that the Aboriginal elder was using it in its denotative sense but this slid past you as you focused on the purely connotative aspects of the term.
oops:
putely[purely][Fixed]
Great post Brian.
Fran I love your sharp, funny and acerbic comments etc but on this one you need some gentle education…& to put the EU box linear and bingo to one side for the moment…
Start here, read Josephine Flood’s ‘Archeology of Austalian Dreamtime’ Agus & Robertson. Will give you a drift and no bum steer to what the above posters are on about from a ‘local’ (and global) perspective.
Travel: Mootwingee; near Broken Hill for a perspective on EU and ‘others’ ‘property’.
Do take the dead end road to the locked farmer’s gate; on your right is a slate triangle shaped hill; go and investigate; note petroglyphs etc. NB afternoon light.
PS mind the cobb & cos nails screws etc. And the fireplaces & handtools. Oh & the seashells on top of the sandstone escarpment.
I always find this a good antidote to too much head up bum sociology.
PPS Brian next paleo genetics post: Who jumped the fence? My dad didn’t; shit maybe mum…
Fran –
Yes indeed, I can’t imagine how you could do it either. Which is why it was disingenuous to ask [repeatedly] for information so that it could be measured against your notion of “social property”. I don’t particularly agree with the terms you have established for the discussion, but my argument isn’t with that, it’s simply that when you say this:
“There was not, as far as we can tell, any property-based elite amongst Australian indigenes and certainly no social property or codified legal rubric around it.”
I find much to disagree with. [and I don't particularly like the use of "we".]
Speaking plain English would help.
How have I shown that? You can’t just say that without demonstrating it. And please do so I can refute it, cos otherwise you will miss the point I was making. More to the point define civilisation and then show the west actually is one.
Can you see the strange loop in that? (You just habilitated habilitate for your own usage, so whats good for the goose.)
And I think the point he was making still stands. You are illustrating it with your insistence that law is a written, “western” thing.
Er no.
The two things are both things and stand on their own terms.
They are pre and post invasion civilised systems of law.
The baggage that goes with them is irrelevent. In fact the baggage is the distraction that gave rise to the problem in the first place.
Cos they are both systems of law.
In Flood’s ‘Archeology of Austalian Dreamtime’, mentioned by Codger, from memory, there is a mitochondrial genetic study listed, which states that the Australian Aboriginal split off genetically from the rest round about 70ka. That would place it in time of Flannery’s genetic choke. Anymore light on this, since these were early days of genetic research in the beginning of the 80s?
Also smooth faced type such as the Tasmanian and Rainforest Indigenous apparently were much earlier arrivals and apparently differ genetically to the later arrivals, the rough face, such as Nungars and desert people. Is there any new evidence in that regards and any presence of Neanderthal genes found in Australian Aboriginal gene pool?
Ootz @ 67, I’m not an expert, but Flannery says the megafauna were gone by 45,000BP, several thousand years after the Aborigines arrived. Most seem to put the arrival about then, apart from intriguing evidence of stone tools at Rottnest Is from 70,000BP.
There are some other early Aboriginal sites dating from before 50,000BP.
I also read somewhere that the earlier date suits the human genome evidence better.
There is also the possibility that early sites are now under water from sea level rise.
I’ve seen no explicit statement that the Aborigines have the Neanderthal genes, only that the Melanesians in PNG do.
Someone asked upthread, where does this leave art?
The short answer is, where it was before, I think.
This article concludes:
I’d be surprised if art didn’t go way back further in human history. I read somewhere recently (Flannery, I think) about female chimps using sticks as bay dolls before they have their first. Gardiner’s multiple intelligences has music as one of nine intelligences.
It’s pretty fundamental to being human, I think.
Yeah I agree Brian (it was me who asked) especially about music, which is … I dunno, I used to joke with friends that the only proofs God existed were sex, drugs and rock’n'roll, but we expanded that to include all music.
Art is a fundamentally human thing, well making “art” (including music) is a fundamental human thing, tho the art may well have been around before us.
I know this probably sounds a bit insane, but frogs and crickets certainly seem to be jamming when they go off at night around here. It’d be interesting to record them one day, mess around with it a bit and see what comes out.
Pattern recognition is probably a pre mammalian thing and somehow tied up with it.
On the codified law discussion,
There is a big difference between oral law and literal law, but they are both complex and comprehensive laws. Oral law is transmitted and generalised through spoken word, song, dance, visual images etc. Literal law is transmitted and generalised one-dimensionally through text.
Oral law lives in the heart of a person. Literal law lives in a book.
Often oral law and culture is described as pre-literal just as hunter gatherer societies are described as pre-agricultural or pre-civilisation. The assumption is that oral law (and tribal society in general) is a lesser forerunner of a better, higher evolved and smarter system of literal law and civilisation. But this is just ethno-centrism.
The brain is a marvellous thing. If it is not doing a specific thing, such as reading, it is busy doing something else. As society that does not read and write is not cognitively limited but is busy applying their consciousness to some other part of their environment.
Conversely, when the brain is focused on a particular thing, such as reading, it tends to neglect or even be blind to other areas of cognitive activity. When a mode of cognitive activity (like reading) is habitually repeated and embedded as a cultural norm, other cognitive activity atrophies.
Australian Aboriginal culture, consciousness and modes of law is perhaps the most evolved social construction on the planet. Until 1770, it did not experience tens of thousands of years of war, dislocation and social oppression that the ancestry of western civilisation did. Aboriginal society actually did evolve over thousands of years rather than being cyclically smashed back to ground zero as, for example, European society did.
An interesting juxtaposition – land ownership.
Australian land law is based on the Torrens system of land title registration, that is a “landowner” does not actually own a piece of land but only owns a title (piece of paper) to that land, which is defined by lines on a map (piece of paper). All interests and liabilities are not in any way attached to the land but only to the registered title.
Aboriginal land law is based on where a family has traditionally been born and where they have been buried. The decomposed bodies of family ancestors and the blood shed at ancestors childbirth that goes to the earth is the defining symbol (or code) that determines interests and liabilities attached to land.
Two very different forms of land title but the literal law is not deeper, broader or more comprehensive than the oral law.
jules, pattern recognition yes, but I suspect that at a minimum you’d also need mirror neurons and imagination. I’d hesitate to call the language mimicking of birds art.
Furious balancing:
You confuse the empirical with the “ideological” when you say:
I claimed that settled agriculture was the first step in the causal chain leading to what may broadly be called “western society”. Jules challenged that by suggesting that at least some of the artefacts of western culture, specifically a codified legal rubric around social property had developed out of hunter gatherer societies such as the indigenes on the Australian landmass, and thus that such things are innate. That’s a question open to direct evidentiary examination. Do hunter gatherers have social property and an associated codified legal rubric or not?
How worthy of examination such things are and whether they tell us anything useful beyond the resolution of the question at hand is a quite separate matter, and one as I’ve said, that is not something I imagine would be answerable.
Jules quoted me:
The term civilisation has both denotative and connotative content. In its denotative sense, “civilised systems of law” refer to the rights and obligations of citizens, towards each other and the state power as guarantor of these rights and obligations. The Latin civis meant townsman and thus by extension civitatem cam to mean community of citizens. In its historical denotative sense, civilisation and urbanisation were interchangeable. (In Latin urbs was the term for city and civis referred to the city dweller). The creation of groups of people connected other than by close family bonds and not directly dependent on the land made some form of governance remote from the land necessary. Formal rules binding the dwellers in cities arose along with classes of people who did no farming at all but were administrators. Because the rules were complex they needed to be documented and so writing was required. This binding by a common law enforceable by a state became part of the notion of civilisation. The work of Justinian, for example, the Corpus Juris Civilis shows clearly the link between civilisation as a concept and a codified legal rubric.
While one can argue, if one is a structuralist (eg Althusser), that “ideology” is already immanent within such notions of civilisation in its connotative sense, it is easy to see how the concept of civilisation took on a more expressly ideological. By the time Smith was writing Wealth of Nations it was bound up closely with the idea of progress and the ascent of man, and as the antithesis of the barbaric and the primitive and the pre-discursive “natural”. It was a self-serving rationale for the rule of the relatively wealthy over everyone else and became inter alia, a rationale for the genocidal dealing by the European invaders/occupiers of the Australian land mass with the indigenes.
This context makes it problematic to use the term civilisation in discussion of this type at all, for it assumes what is at issue — the relationships between culture, law, settlement pattern and human reasons and their values. This is especially so when one uses the phrase civilised systems of law. This is doubtless why Brian above encloses civilised with quotes.
Jules quoted me:
You will need to develop this if there’s a point to this remark.
Joe D said:
??? Oh dear. I claimed settled sgriculture was/is at the foundation of all “modern” societies. This isn’t controversial. Diamond, mentioned above, simply repeats the consensus on this. The question was whether the end products of settled agriculure — amongst them codified legal rubrics around social property, inhere in humans and are reproduced regardless of the advent of settled agriculture or if settled agriculture was in practice a neccessary condition for them.
Of course. I’ve never suggested otherwise and have expressly stipulated it.
OK. Modern, in the context of a discussion about human evolution, can mean a lot of things. I should have been more explicit. By modern society I mean any society of the modern era, let’s say the last 200 years. That includes people who in various remote places of little interest to colonial powers, such as the Amazon, the Kalahari Desert and parts of Australia were, as recently as the mid-20th century, were essentially non-agricultural, yet in terms of social organisation (and ownership of land), just as complex as any other mob. Modern also has an evolutionary sense, eg “early modern humans” go back c.100,000 years or more (but we know little about social organisation at that time).
Making value judgements is what I thought you said someone else was doing, possibly me. I wasn’t accusing you of that.
That is an impressive amount of research on the meaning of the words civilised and civilisation, but the dictionary definition (at least Concise Oxford) does not mention settlement pattern or basis of economic production (it pretty much just implies one is “cultured” ). As you say, Europeans and their descendents have used the term to seperate themselves from others, but that connotation in my personal experience is less often meant today, and it is a bit redundant if one is comparing modern societies (ie all groups are equally civilised since they are equally “cultured”). Urbanised is a more specific term perhaps for what you mean.
Brian at 68 – IMO the megafauna question isn’t settled, though Flannery has gone hard on extinction by 46,000 years ago. See anything by Judith Field and Steve Wroe for details of contradicting evidence and counter-arguments – anyway, time of megafaunal extinction is not an indicator of timing of human arrival in Australia.
Rottnest – the 70,000 date was actually quickly revised down to 20,000 by others, but as can happen, the revision didn’t make the news. Still, the island’s stratigraphy has a lot of interest and work is continuing.
In terms of other earlier sites, there are two sites in Arnhemland in the 50,000s, albeit disputed by some, and Lake Gregory in NW Aus, just over 50k, so >50,000 is still very possible.
Ootz at 67 and Brian at 68, The possibility of multiple arrivals is frequently discussed but there is little evidence of introductions of fauna or flora that might be assocated with new arrivals, and Mungo people living c.40,000 years ago look like modern Aboriginal people, ie anatomically modern humans. Even the arrival of the dingo much later could be as result of trade or exchange rather than a companion to new arrivals. Incidentally Australia may have “filled up” quite quickly after first arrival, meaning that later arrivals might have had a tough time, and that sites almost as early as first arrival (within a millennium or two) could be located inland.
Genetic approaches could be interesting but I’m not up to speed on latest work. If the Australian population had been isolated the presence of pre-modern human DNA (Wikipedia points out that that’s all the researchers say it is BTW) in people of wholly Aboriginal Australian descent might indicate something about origins, though if any genetic mixing occurred on the way here from Africa, it may be impossible to tell. We probably don’t have enough DNA from different people at those times. The mitochondrial work in the 80s suggests a very early split of Australian lineages but needed to be calibrated against well-dated fossil evidence.
Someone asked about art. Not sure what the latest work in Africa is but for what it’s worth some 10 years ago a worn piece of ochre implying use in decoration/art had been dated to >70,000 years. Elsewhere in Europe and Aus personal ornamentation seems to be in place by 40,000 years ago in several places and paintings by 30,000.
BTW first arrival in Australia is argued to be a pretty signfiicant event in human evolution – building boats and organising a viable colonising population is a sign of a high level of organisation and language. Ian Davidson who made this claim further states that it is one of the first “modern” achievements since he argues that Australia did not get colonised by accident.
No I wouldn’t call it art either, but I do wonder if art is something that developed from there.
But I swear sometimes … if you play a blues harp or ocarina at some birds … it almost seems like they are singing along. (IE anticipating the next notes and playing something that counter points or whatever.)
Why not ask them? Instead of examining them like museum exhibits?
“This context makes it problematic to use the term civilisation in discussion of this type at all, for it assumes what is at issue — the relationships between culture, law, settlement pattern and human reasons and their values.”
Fran thats precisely what I was getting at with the comment about us not being “civilised”. In fact thats kind of what I was getting at all along.
Do you really want me to? Ok the dictionary definition of habilitate refers to 3 different defs. You used it in a sense that is more directly related to its original Latin meaning than any of those. That meaning is itself referring to the exact process you followed.
(the original latin meaning is along the lines of to enable or “make fit” ie adapt for the task. None of the english defs refer to that, although its definitely an understandable interpretation. So to accuse of habilitaing a word you had to habilitate (by your use) the word habilitate. Its really not that important. I just don’t understand why you mentioned it. Whats the relevence of me doing that, and thats assuming I actually did – obviously I don’t think I changed or adapted the meaning of the term from what that old fella meant.)
PS I’m an unemployed farm worker not an academic or a linguist. From where I sit its easy to see the use of that sort of language as an attempt to limit my ability to engage in the discussion. Using language to disempower people isn’t nice.
Ootz at 67- a link to some similar studies.
.
“The Genographic Project seeks to resolve the fine details of who begat whom, and the intricate history of cultural takeovers and mergers over the past 60,000 years.
Wells’ visit to Australia was made, in part, to seek the participation of Australian Aboriginal groups. He believes that the original Australians hold the key to developing a comprehensive picture of the earliest phases of the African diaspora.
During his own journey in pursuit of the Y chromosome story in the late 1990s, Wells took blood samples from males of Dravidian ancestry in southern India. The Dravidians were among India’s earliest colonists; they now live among the descendants of a later wave of Sanskrit speakers — like Latin and ancient Greek, Sanskrit is an a branch of the Indo-European ‘mother tongue’, more closely related to modern English and French than to Dravidian.
Wells was looking for a genetic marker called M130, the most ancient, non-African, Y-chromosome marker. It is rare in Dravidians, but quite common in Australian Aboriginal males — and, intriguingly, in the Na Dene peoples of the Pacific north-west of North America.”
.
“Wells’ suspicion that M130 might have survived, at very low frequency, in southern coastal regions of India, was proven correct
The first African emigres left a durable calling card on the coastal migratory route between Africa and Australia.
The M130 story exemplifies the rich and potentially astonishing trove of stories that Wells believes reside in the genes of living and ancient human beings. Augmenting and complementing the genetic data, the similarities in living and dead languages promise to extend the human story well beyond the earliest written records from 5000 to 6000 years ago, perhaps as far back as 100,000 years.”
http://www.lifescientist.com.au/article/131860/dr_wells_genetic_crusade/
Jules quoted me as follows:
then continued
You’re the one asserting a counter-intuitive affirmative. You should supply the evidence, if there is any.
Jules quoted me further:
then continued
That seems hard to accept, in context. There was no distance or qualification in your usage of “civilised systems of law”. I was the one who put the question of cultural specificity at the centre of the discussion.
Jules quoted me further yet:
then continued
The meanings span the arc between metaphoric and the literal. The rendering fit sense is in the common word rehabilitation but I was using it to describe your attempt to get away with using the problematic “civilisation” based purely on the imprimatur of an Aboriginal elder. The word, you hoped, would be made fit by being clothed in new “subaltern” garb — the words of an indigene, much as people of colour in the US can use the term n****r whereas the term is deprecated amongst those of European descent.
Well it isn’t any such thing on my part. This is my usual register when composing formal text. I wish to be sensitive to nuance when I post. I assume people here are either sufficiently educated or willing to become so. I don’t talk down to people* and in any event they have access to the internet if I use a term with which they aren’t familiar. I accept that you may not have had an extensive formal education, but learning entails getting outside your comfort zone. You don’t appear to be incapable of learning new things and playing the disempowerment card ill-becomes self-respecting people, IMO.
*Obviously when in front of a classroom I adjust my register to what is cognitively apt
Fran – “I accept that you may not have had an extensive formal education, but learning entails getting outside your comfort zone. ”
And I accept that you may have had a too formal education, but learning entails getting out of your comfort zone. It isn’t going to happen on an internet blog while you are composing formal text. Good luck.
“I accept that you may not have had an extensive formal education, but learning entails getting outside your comfort zone. ”
What a patronising, pompous and pretentious remark. Jules has offered much evidence to support her argument. I suggest that if you can’t understand what she’s talking about you should move outside your comfort zone and learn something new. And I’d love to see you tell an Indigenous person that they don’t have a quantifiable system of law.
Fran from way back @ 5:
“Without settled agriculture, there could have been no science, or literature or much of anything that would make life meaningful.”
Perhapos Furious, I should have used a smiley because at that stage I was responding directly to Diamond’s tongue-in-cheek “worst mistake” claim by borrowing the argument he puts in Collapse. My negative reference to a phrase I used in that post “ascent of [hu]man[ity]” later on {#73} should have made that clear.
Fine said:
If you are going to quote me, get it right.
What evidence would that be?
Why do people keep saying her?
Fran I’ve got friends, who are practising hunter gathers. Some do it tho they get most of their food in the supermarket simply to keep it alive as a part of who they are and where they come from, some live in parts of Australia where it makes up a significant proportion of their diet.
I have one friend, well extended family actually by his definition tho its tenuous. Its true, our bloodlines are “twice removed” (is that the term?) by marriage (not even that, a de facto relationship but apparantly that still counts), so its not biological family, but try telling him that. He’s a paractising hunter gather, from a long standing culture, the last indigenous people with any independence in his nation. He has spoken in the UN on behalf his people, and yet can sit around a fire and sing John Denver songs in a way that breaks your heart and fills it up again. (John Denver FFS.)
So I have asked them “Whats it mean to you?”
To me that trumps evidence.
And your insistence that people I love cos of how they opened their heart to me don’t qualify, well is vexing. And factually wrong.
It doesn’t need to be complicated beyond that. Doing so in this very instance attempts to “disempower” them. It doesn’t succeed cos frankly this is the comment section of a blog, and only one persons doing it anyway, but historically … well we all know the story.
YEah, I did that with an unfamiliar word, habilitate, but I have the tools and the access without the formal education (well without finishing it), I do know how to do stuff… but anyway … I’m obviously not disempowered by it. I’m just calling you on it.
Because the vast majority of people I know and consider friends have not much formal education. I don’t hang around with idiots tho, they are thoughtful intelligent people. They speak plainly.
ONe complaint about “you lefty types, ok not you jules, but all the rest of you,” is that as soon as we start losing an argument we go on about all this bullshit! There’s a piece by Brian here about getting an ethics of dialogue. I’d say the first step is not retreating into Jargon when people question you. Thats what priesthoods do and quite frankly we have had enough of them to last an eternity.
From where I sit you seem incapable of accepting an argument on its merits and have devolved the discussion into a semantic nitpick about terms with someone who doesn’t use those terms, and is often unfamiliar with them, for no other reason than you don’t want to accept that the phrase “codified legal rubric” doesn’t apply to pre or non agricultural cultures.
Codified – symbolic and specific enough to be clear and consistent and have a culture (or sub culture in some circumstances) wide meaning, and flexible enough to be applied in a wide variety of situations without losing that specific clearly defined meaning.
Legal – pertaining to law
rubric – Frankly by this stage I no longer care cos funnily enough the word comes from red chalk or red ochre, and reflected that laws were written in red. Probably to make them stand out, to give them authority or whatever.
Now thats whats happening with Bill Neidjie’s painting, I Dunno what they used for it, maybe ochre from thousands of miles and various language boundaries away.
Anyway the irony it burns and all that. Words mean what they mean when you try and say they don’t. Don’t forget those very used were used in a context that implies pre agricultural people are barbaric in that they act like Lord Humungus and his maurauders in Mad Max 2 within people who could read this blog’s lifetime.
Those wounds haven’t healed and they won’t on your terms.
Seriously I’d expect to, and have heard similar sentiments expressed in pubs in Casino and countless similar towns (want a list?), and the situation has turned ugly very quickly.
Maybe you don’t mean to use your words with the same consequences that other people once did. But your stubborn insistence that the implications are different is wrong.
As is the idea that codified, recorded, accessible legal systems began with agriculture as we know or understand it.
Its on one level a question of human dignity, but on another its a real political issue right now because around the world indigenous people are suffering at the hands of “their own”governments and international concerns that ignore their rights.
Right now.
Ozzy Osbourne’s genome has neanderthal
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ozzy-osbourne-genome
“Given the swimming pools of booze I’ve guzzled over the years—not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol…you name it—there’s really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.”
Fran, get outside your comfort zone and listen to what Jules has to say. It’s not my job to educate you, or explain the comments of another poster.
A comment thread in a post is like a conversation. This takes two people making an effort to communicate with each other. Not one person deciding on what sort of language should be used and chastising the other for not communicating in the same style.
Murph thanks for 79, I found Will’s Genographic project over at the National Geographic site.
In relation to art and other ‘sophisticated abstract’ human activities, there must have been a cognitive major leap forward. For example while a ‘modern’ voice box may have provided early humans to voice language as we know it and indeed mimic ‘language’ without the complementary language center in the brain non of this voicing would have made any literal sense. So my argument would be if a people has language it can codify property and ownership. So this whole argument around whether Australian Indigenous have/had such practices has led us to unproductive sophistry. There are far more relevant issues in context of Brian’s post and the discussion re Diamond’s tongue-in-cheek “worst mistake”, appears to me the underlying value and believe system of pre and post agricultural societies of which any code is just a representation of.
Fran – “My negative reference to a phrase I used in that post “ascent of [hu]man[ity]” later on {#73} should have made that clear.”
Fran, quite frankly you’ve shifted the goal posts on this discussion so much that well before #73 has just seemed like convoluted arse-covering.
Just backtracking:
You asked: “That’s a question open to direct evidentiary examination. Do hunter gatherers have social property and an associated codified legal rubric or not? ”
Several people here have indicated that the answer is simply yes, you seem unwilling to accept that. To be honest I’m gobsmacked that anyone could think otherwise. So just to clarify your position – are you disputing that Aboriginal people were involved in trade? Or are you disputing that there were ‘codified legal rubrics’ for that trade?
There is ample evidence of both – again, I’m surprised that anyone would dispute it. One who lectures people on their lack of education shouldn’t need to be told how to use a search engine.
Look up Aboriginal mining and trading, particularly that of ochre. Access to commodities were limited to certain individuals/elites, transgressions were punished. Look it up. If all else fails go to northern SA and find out for yourself. Those people who have done so themselves should know that it’s inappropriate to speak about it in any detail without permission.
Jared Diamond’s main contention was that agriculture led to the greater production of quantities of food, but a reduction of nutritional variety, with a consequent reduction in body size and life expectancy. That’s the main point in the context of this post. When I included the other, for a geographer more speculative bits, I had a twinge that this could lead to thread derailment, which one might argue it has.
We’ve been around the mulberry bush a number of times on that now, and I’d be happy if we called a halt. I don’t want to close the thread.
Ootz, I’m out of my patch, but I think the usual story is that there was a great leap forward about 40,000 years ago in the production of symbolic creative works usually considered art.
I’d bet any money that singing and dancing went way back before that and it’s a fair bet that body decoration did too. Hard to know as it’s difficult to find traces of that activity now.
The problem with art as in painting is that the materials may not last the test of time, so perhaps we’ll never know with any accuracy when it all started.
Furious Balancing …
I’m well aware of these matters but none of the documents I’ve seen would qualify the practices as implying a legal rubric around social property.
Certainly they could be described as entailing customary law, but as the arrangements seem to be, perforce, ad hoc, and not well-specified, I’d need something more the descriptions of ochre mining and trade I’ve seen.
eg http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/1997/28.html
There seem to be no descriptions of the kind one would normally find in anthropology about differentiation within groups associated with ochre harvest or of changes in the culture of clans associated with the practices, which would be evidence of something more robust than simple barter-like activity.
It’s hard to escape the view that if it wasn’t worth recording in any precise way, then perhaps the activity was peripheral to the life of the clans doing it.
Fine said:
I didn’t “chastise” Jules. He(?) can speak as he(?) likes. He(?) was actually trying to chastise me for using academic language as part of an attempt to trade on his(?) educational disempowerment to win a point.
Jules’s language was imprecise. He(?) was relying on that imprecision to buttress a point. That dictated precise language in response.
He, is a he. I wouldn’t normally mention it or care but some time ago here someone told me that a mentally ill female called jules used to post and they thought we were the same person. I think they were referring to me before I got my mighty kangas cloud spirit gravitar.
Its intrigued me ever since. i always feel like I come across as the loud angry bogan (old skool) I am so … yeah anyway it doesn’t matter its just funny.
My Language was imprecise?
Look I’ve said all I can say on this.
Brian is right. We won’t reach any consensus.
And honestly I find the subject of art and human evolution far more interesting (tho maybe less important). And probably more pertinent to Brian’s article.
Its the sort of topic I could sit around over a bottle of rum and rave about all night. There are so many ways to approach it.
Jules, the way I see Brian wanting us to approach it is from a resource management point of view. So let me ‘reframe’ the by now worn out legal argument.
Fran, I am just reading a draft copy of ‘Conspiracy of Silence – Queensland’s Frontier Killing-Times’ in which your argument does not reflect very well. Uncounted thousands, Black and White, have lost their life on the sharp end of your legal point. You are out of your depth (and you know it too), there is ample evidence that there were complex and extensive trading and sharing of resources practiced which required some sophisticated way of recording and ruling on. The example given in the book mentioned above is the triannual ‘sharing’ of Boombarran Ngummin in the Bunya Mountains. Further, from memory the pitury trade routes spread from somewhere near the Qld-NT border to the coast across many Nations and these are well documented. Around here the Bama certainly had extensive trade and a sophisticated law system. I’ll happily point you into the right direction should you insist.
What I would agree with you on, is that your writen down law codex is far more based on anthropocentric axioms and the Bama perhaps more on ecocentric axioms. And here too I would beg to differ with Brian and Jarred’s assumption that the quantity of food agriculture produced lead to the reduction in size. It was more likely this change in the value system that was probably afforded by invention of agriculture.
In Environmental Psychology the anxiom of ‘your’ anthropocentric law, in relation to the use of natural reasources, is often, ethnocetrically, refered to as the Judeo Christian value system and inadvertingly blaming religion. Further, it is well documented that Aboriginal have a different sense and experience of them ‘self’. The Royal Commission acknowledged as so, in relation to isolation cells and suicide. As well as there is Brian’s earlier s reference to the extraordinary ‘connectedness’ of Aboriginal to ‘their’ land, which again is well documented.
I have seen it argued by ‘Deep Ecology’ proponents that we need to move away from this anthropocentric thinking in relation resource management. I remember some researchI read in that regards, if you’d like to follow it up.
Brian – Blombos Cave in S. Africa contains the ochre fragment in a 75,000 year old layer, that I mentioned earlier, and it is not just supposed to have wear marks, but incised abstract designs. It’s also stratigraphically associated with shell beads. Such things were never found with Neanderthals, incidentally. The oldest known anatomically modern humans are about 100,000 years old.
As the archaeological record becomes increasingly fragmented with age, finding the very earliest of anything is always going to be unlikely. But at least the Blombos evidence suggests the minimum age of African art (not to mention some sophisticated stone-knapping techniques), and as shell and ochre are quite durable materials we should expect to find more of them if they exist anywhere else.
The earliest Australian sites are the best evidence of the relatively rapid movement of modern humans across southern Asia and also contain a fair proportion of evidence for art. If these happen as part of the same package, in that rapid colonisation across many unfamiliar environments (plus boat travel across some pretty treacherous waters at the end of the trip) is also a modern type achievement (planning depth, conceptualisation, complex information exchange), it seems like a later revolution at 50,000, plus or minus 10,000 years ago. The very limited evidence from S. Asia includes possible ochre artefacts in Pakistan from c.75k. The paper I’ve just gleaned this from (Balme et al 2009) suggests that art, the rapid movement of modern humans and language are all bound up together, so if the emerging Asian evidence is correct, the whole modern human package might have emerged in the 100,000 to 75,000 year window and spread across Eurasia and to Australia over the following 10-30,000 years. Somehow as you noted these people picked up pre-modern non-African DNA, so the multi-regionalists must be excited.
I can email you a copy of that paper if you are interested. It should be at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint (Quaternary International) look for vol. 202 (2009) pp 59–68 if you want to check the abstract.
I dunno if this fits here, or its worth mentioning. Think of it as a data point and decide for yourselves if its useful.
AFAIK This info can be in the public domain, but I think the story is sposed to have accreditation before you tell it. I can’t remember right now who told it. I’ll sus it out and see if I can chase up the relevant details. Sometimes its a bit tricky. Anyway I apologise in advance for forgetting who told it.
The bundjalung people of Northern NSW have a story about 3 brothers arriving on the coast, at Evans Head, after a calamity that destroyed the old world or the centre world or something. The place was inhabited by something, or someone when they got here, but I dunno how much of that I want to tell.
Thats all.
It might not seem like much.
AFAIK its the only indigenous australian arrival story. All the rest appear to imply that the blackfellas have always been here. (I kind of believe this politically and morally, regardless of the scientific evidence, but the two views aren’t mutually exclusive imo. It just needs some mental gymnastics.)
If this is true I find it interesting.
I’m not saying they escaped atlantis or anything but there are a lot of volcanoes not that far north of Australia, and they have been known to erupt with devastating force North of here.
I haven’t checked every story in the country, and would never have noticed but for a fella who was planning to go on and do archaeology.
He pointed it out to me and said it was something that always struck him as odd. I don’t think he meant to imply they were the first here or anything either. He was a very smart man and he’d lived an amazing life before he went to uni, in his late 40s or early 50s.
Honestly I don’t know the stories of the kimberly region or the cape and the gulf well enough but my friend may have gone on to research it.
26 June 2011. I think it is time for Brian (my mother’s First Cousin) to have his DNA tested. I had my Autosomal DNA tested early this year and the brand-new POPULATION FINDER test says I am 96% Western Europe and 4% South Asia. So I got Aunty X (Brian’s full First Cousin) to have hers tested and she is 93% Western Europe and 7% Middle East.
So, considering X’s (and Brian’s father’s) ancestors came from what is today Poland, one of X’s great-great-grandparents must have been full-Jewish (the Middle East DNA didn’t show up in my result because it was too small, roughly halving with each generation, reinforcing the need for the oldest surviving generation to be tested immediately). My late Aunty Y (X’s sister) had her mitochondrial DNA tested 6 years ago (our family has its fair share of amateur scientists) and in the direct-female line Y’s prehistoric ancestors lived in north-central Europe, exactly where Y’s mother’s mother’s mother emigrated from.
So, how about it, Brian? Just go to the FTDNA website and have 710 thousand locations on the junk DNA of your Autosomal chromosomes tested for a modest amount of money. And also have your Y-chromosome (which is non-autosomal) tested, too, so we can find out where the BA(umlaut)HNISCH ancestor in the direct-male line came from in prehistoric times (I had my Y-DNA tested 6 years ago and the results confirmed that my direct-male ancestor moved to NW Europe after the Ice Sheets retreated). You can have your mitochondrial DNA tested, too, since men inherit mtDNA from their mothers but do not pass it along to their children. Visit FTDNA and study the FAQs for clarifications, etc. I recommend it.
From Noel Cameron-Baehnisch in Angaston, South Australia.
[Noel, I've just depersonalised this one a bit - Brian]
Noel, I’ve responded on the current thread where the conversation is now taking place.
Cheers