You're currently a free subscriber. Upgrade your subscription to get access to the rest of this post and other paid-subscriber only content. Upgrade subscription ..read more

Friendship is kinship by another mother. (This was originally published on-line as a guest blog in the International Culture and Cognition Institute. ) Why is this so important among humans? Well, consider what I found when studying the lives of hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari. I found that all the people were living in multi-family groups – camping parties – consisting of friends – as well as of kinfolk.  Camping parties among the Kua were typical of the kinds of “groups” encountered when you go visit mobile hunter-gatherers. Early researchers called them “bands”.  Networks of mut ..read more

In 2007, a psychiatrist, Martin Brüne, wrote an essay “On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics” published in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, in which he declared: “In the biological literature following Darwin, the term “domestication” became increasingly poorly defined. The criterion of intentional and goal-directed selection, which according to Darwin’s definition was critical for domestication, was largely replaced, at least with respect to humans, by the equation of culture and civilization with domestication.” I want to begin with a symptom of th ..read more

Check out this painting.  Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015 by Australian indigenous artists  Exhibition opens at The Box, Plymouth (and thanks to cousin Clair Drever for drawing my attention to this) Look at the bottom right hand corner – there is a group of people there. You know what this painting looks like to me? It looks like a landscape mosaic. And it was created by the people in the right hand corner… hunter-gatherers use small burns in patches to achieve this. Scientific work in ecosystem dynamics has shown that such “patch dynamic” landscapes maintain a high diversity of ani ..read more

Check out this painting. Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015 by Australian indigenous artists Exhibition opens at The Box, Plymouth * Did humans evolve in a cultural ecology that was successful because it made, of Homo sapiens, and perhaps earlier ancestral forms, a keystone species and significant ecological engineers? Look at the bottom right hand corner – there is a group of people there. You know what this painting looks like to me? It looks like a landscape mosaic. And it was created by the people in the right hand corner… hunter-gatherers use small burns in patches to achieve this. Scien ..read more

Culture as a collective cognitive niche. I suspect that one of the problems is the idea that “science” – the method of testing causal hypotheses to establish models of reality – is a recent invention. This creates the illusion that all cultures, prior to the European “Enlightenment”, were based on superstitious beliefs. The data from anthropology has called this into question: even the most “simple” economic systems, such as hunter-gatherer cultures, are clearly based on knowledge of ecosystems that can only have been the result of cumulative observational data discussed and tested over many ..read more

We humans, the compassionate predator, entered into a contract with a large number of species in the course of the past twenty thousand years (some think longer), and species like the wolf (our domestic dogs), Bos Taurus (domestic cattle), Tarpans (domestic horses of all breeds today) and a legion of others entered the relatively new ecological niche created within the sphere of the world’s first compassionate predator. Many of these species, of both animals and plants, would never have been as successful had they not entered into the contract. Let us not be blinded by the evil results of comm ..read more

Jacqueline Solway: “… the article sensationalizes and sets up straw people at least at the outset. It is our problem, not ‘theirs’ that we see some others as less complex, lacking the full range of human emotion and capacity, and ‘timeless.’ I wish the author had mentioned Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Original, Affluent Society’ (1968) whose words were also taken out of context to concretize the ‘myth.’ Singh, in this article, challenges the idea of an egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer past. He writes: “This is more than just a theory of prehistory. It’s the modern, scientific origin myth. Ye ..read more

In 1972, as I was just about to get married for the first time, I read the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. I decided not to have children, given the long term prospects. In the meantime, while I went to study hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari, a man called Robert Paine, who died two years ago, was developing a model of how positive trophic flows were generated by certain keystone species like sea otters and beavers and wolves. My research, meanwhile, led me to conclude that the hunter-gatherer economy was responsible for the positive trophic flows in the Kalahari – keeping the plant and anim ..read more

THIS is what transformed humanity between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago – the development of a cultural system of environmental management that made the ecosystems of the world into gardens. And we of the “civilized” states, today, mistakenly call this all a “natural wilderness”. This brings forcibly to mind what Ragai, a Kua hunter I knew in the Kalahari, told me one day when I asked why the antelope and other game was unperturbed when they saw us walking past them:  “Only frightened animals are wild”, he explained, “to us, they are tame”. Below are some excerpts from an article by Mark ..read more