This has been circulating the birb-site. It's about specific adaptations Homo Sapiens has for persistence-hunting. Specifically, how we're engineered to chase our prey until they fall down from heat-prostration. This explains much of our psyche.
@sysadmin1138 I remember this one from the 80s. We do an awful lot of gathering for a specialised persistence-hunter, even if you don't believe culture is the best way to explain "our" pysche(s).
@ghost_bird A lot of those endurance adaptations apply to persistence-hunting plants as well, down to actual farming.
@sysadmin1138 So more a persistence gatherer, then? (I think this is worth highlighting because there's lot of cultural baggage in the insistence on the importance of hunting.)
@ghost_bird The two probably came mostly together. It takes a long time to fell a tree using stone tools, and yet so many ancient cultures did that. A lot. And used fire as a method of agriculture. Persistence-anything requires long-term planning. Stone tools require endurance in application.
@sysadmin1138 So an interesting question for me, then, is - why focus on hunting if the two came together? And if we focus on gathering, do the explanations of much of our psyche still actually work?
@ghost_bird My suspicion on that is that hunting is seen as a noble/apex behavior, where gathering is a prey behavior. I say it explains things in our psyche because "if you keep at it, there will be a reward" (or its cousin, "if you look hard enough, there will be a trick that will make it easier") drive so much of our motivation complexes. I suspect ambush-predators would have different motivation systems.
@ghost_bird Hah. Hunter is noble/predator. Gatherer is peasant/prey. Humanity can kill anything, therefore we were hunters before farmers, QED.
THAT is why I think hunter-mythology dominates the narrative.
That and we didn't start farming until 6,000 BC(*), before then we just followed the herds(**).
When in truth, we're opportunistic eaters. With a penchant for tipping the scales in our favor.
(*) not actually true, but we spent decades teaching that line.
(**) just as wrong.
@sysadmin1138 "Opportunistic eaters" sounds more right - I was thinking that the first permanent settlements are associated with wetlands, which are bad places for persistence hunting.
@sysadmin1138 As for noble/predator peasant/prey... hm. The significance of hunting varies a lot across cultures and even when there are nobles and it's considered a noble pursuit it has different meanings.
@ghost_bird You're applying a multicultural framework to a discourse that decidedly wasn't. The racist and classist Victorians dominated the English-language discourse when these concepts started coming up. The 'hunters are better than gatherers' idea is a hangover, one we've largely forgotten the origins of and are rightfully interrogating.
@ghost_bird (I think we largely agree in the details, but disagree on presentation. That infographic was not interrogated enough, for sure.)
@sysadmin1138 You think it's hardwired and not just patriarchy assigning greater value to masculine-coded activities and using those to build stories that justify the status quo?