On Fri, 11 Jan 2013, "Geoff D'Arcy" <geoff.darcy@gmail.com> wrote:
There's a lot of fairly dubious stuff about how nice things supposedly were in hunter-gatherer societies. For starters I can't imagine a society where a woman left her tribe to live with her husband's tribe being any good in terms of the treatment of women.
Yes socially I think only an extreme patriarch would find it attractive. But many hunter gatherer cultures understand the finite nature of environments and how to live sustainably within them. I think this is what the author was nostalgic for in the referenced article.
The thing about hunter-gatherer societies is that there is a more direct link between population and sustainability. If your tribe has a certain area that can feed a certain number of people then you have clear choices to keep the population down or declare war on surrounding tribes - which would be more likely to reduce the population of your own tribe than increase the available land. As we start to exceed our resource capacity we have slower signals, prices of some foods increase, more food is imported, some people change what they eat, etc. It will be well past the point where things get really bad that the average idiot realises that there is a problem. But the up-side is that educating women and giving them choices is the best way of controlling the population. There aren't a lot of women who really want to have more than two children if they have the option of a career, education, and leisure time. I can understand Americans and other people from less developed countries having some nostalgia for hunter-gatherer societies. But people in more developed countries such as Australia really shouldn't. Unlike Americans all Australians have significant health care which makes life a lot better for us than for ancient people. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/