Ppl often assume that stone-age cultures must have maintained very simple social organisation, living only in small, nomadic family-tribes. This idea is based in part on actual archaeology, and in part on comparison with modern hunter-gatherers, who largely share this lifestyle.
(2) The logic here seems straight-forward enough - social complexity is a function of resource availability & economic complexity. Hunter-gatherers can only gather small amounts of food, and so can only support small populations. Furthermore, they have to keep moving restock game
(3) The main issue with this conception is that it is wrong.

Most modern-day hunter-gatherers inhabit extremely marginal land - their inability to form and feed complex social structures is just as much a consequence of the land they inhabit as it is of their lifestyle.
(4) This, in turn, is a consequence of the systematic expulsion of hunter-gatherers from more fertile, desirable land by farming peoples, which has been ongoing for millennia.

Most hunter-gatherers for most of history have inhabited substantially better land.
(5) Enter the Calusa. Pre-Columbian inhabitants of what is now southern Florida, the Calusa were a powerful, comparatively centralised kingdom, ruled from their capital of Mound Key near what is now the town of Estero. They were also entirely non-agricultural.
(6) The Calusa defy nearly all our stereotypes about hunter-gatherer peoples. They were socially organised, highly hierarchal, builders of monumental structures and with a unified monarchy and institutional priesthood. All of this maintained almost entirely by fishing.
(7) Well, you may say, surely we would expect substantial archaeological evidence if comparable societies existed in the Palaeolithic?

The answer here, again, is to look at the Calusa. Their kingdom collapsed a scant 300 years ago, yet nearly all material evidence has vanished.
(8) Were we not to know of Mound Key, nor the historical reports by early Spanish travelers, what little came down to us of material artifacts - stone spearheads, fishing-instruments, moss skirts - would paint an incredibly simple material culture. Yet they built megastructures.
(9) What, then, if anything, does this tell us about the Stone Age? Should we envision ice-age kingdoms, organised around artificial islands and mounds by estuaries and lakesides? Maybe. Probably most tribes really were socially simple, but all? It cannot be taken for granted.

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More from @Afrosmilus

19 Sep
The Advent of Japan - a thread

(1) The Japanese archipelago today is one of old, entrenced cultures, political unity & relative ethnic uniformity. Yet the Yamato - the proper name of those often called simply the "Japanese ppl" - are not the only, nor the first on the islands
(2) Crucial to understanding any further discussion of Japan's past is the fact that the Yamato, much like the Celts and Teutons of the British isles, arrived in Japan as migrants & invaders - roughly at the same time the first Celts crossed into Britain, in fact.
(3) To begin our exploration of Japan's creation, we have to go back - far, far back, to the cold and desolate world of the Pleistocene, perhaps 40,000 years ago, when the Japanese archipelago was still connected to the mainland, and the first humans reached the area.
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27 Aug
The Womb of Nations - a thread on Danish history and the survival of ancient tribes in Denmark.

(1) Denmark as we know it today originated as a tribal gestalt - a myriad of different peoples, all closely related but originally distinct, united under the dominant Danes.
2) The movements and invasions of the Viking-Age Danes are of course well known, as is the earlier migration/invasion of Jutes and Angels into England. On the latter I have a thread.
Today, we will be going even further back - to the origins of the Cimbri, Burgundians and more.
(3) "Burgundians" - famous as the Nibelungs of Wagner and Norse legend, their name survives today in the French region of Burgundy. There is one other place their name survives - the Danish island of Bornholm. Likely the cradle of the tribe, its name in Norse was Borgundarhólmr.
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13 Aug
(1) Hwæt! - thread on Hengest & Horsa because I feel like it. The information here will be mostly based on scholarship by J. R. R. Tolkien.

There's so much to discuss that I will necessarily only touch on a fraction of it here. Image
(2) The tale of Hengest & Horsa comes to us from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, where they are famously invited over by Wurtgern (Vortigern), in the Chronicle the king of the Britons, to serve as mercenaries.

They do so, only to turn on the Britons after seeing how weak they are. Image
(3) Many theories have been proposed as to the origins of the story. As both their names are words for "horse", the dominant explanation for years has been that they are a myth - a reflex of the Indo-European horse-twins also seen in the Greco-Roman Castor and Pollux. Image
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