Tristan S. Rapp Profile picture
Oct 6, 2021 10 tweets 7 min read Read on X
As a rule, it seems reasonable to contend that any practice which has been historically prevalent among non-agriculturalist groups, and which does not rely upon demonstrably recent technologies, is just as likely to have occurred 50,000 years ago as 500 years ago.
(2) To this category can be counted armour made of materials such as wood or animal hides. The practice of strapping protective material to yourself is hardly rocket-science, and is known to have occurred in hunter-gatherer societies such as the Haida.
(3) Hygenic/aesthetic practices such as complex facial- and body-paint as well as hair-braiding and cropping do not require advanced technology, and are documented from Palaeolithic art as well as modern hunter-gatherers.
(4) Complex maritime exploitation and habitat-management such as clam-gardens are known from historical peoples in the Pacific Northwest dating back more than 3000 years. Societies such as the non-agriculturalist Floridan Calusa exploited aquatic resources on a massive scale.
(5) Evidence of pet-keeping in various forms is ubiquitous in forager-societies across the world, from the raising of orphaned juveniles to the intentional maintenance of semi-domestic game. Melanesians intentionally spread cuscuses to islands for food as early as 20kya.
(6) The Okiek hunter-gathers of Southwestern Kenya create and maintain artificial bee-hives, as well as tending to wild ones. They migrate throughout their area, moving their hives in rhythm with the seasonal flowerings.
(7) Though stone-craftsmanship was comparatively primitive during the Palaeolithic, spears were fashioned with beautifully carved atlatls to increase thrust and throwing-distance.
(8) Into recent times, complex and intricate wooden clubs and spears have been fashioned by stone-limited societies all across the world. Little evidence of such things would be expected to survive to today, but it seems inexplicable to suppose they weren't made.
(9) Despite typical conceptions of non-agriculturalist stone-wielders as living in tiny, socially simple bands, members of ppls as culturally simple as the Mbuti pygmies live in settlements of up to 250 individuals. The Calusa hosted thousands in vast, monumental settlements.
More could be added, but the point is simple: People were not dumber in the late Pleistocene than we are now. A good deal were probably sharper. They didn't dress in dirty rags, they didn't live in caves, their hair didn't fall in wild manes and doubtless they had poets.

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More from @Hieraaetus

Aug 28
Why is it that "primitive horticulturalists" - i.e. peoples such as the Dani of Papua or the Yanomami or Pirahã of South America - seem to tend towards a sort of "atheistic supernaturalism," believing in a world of invisible, often malicious spirits, but without any higher, organising powers, whilst both more sophisticated cultures *and* more primitive hunter-gathers seem to tend towards theistic cosmologies?

What happens in the jungle vegetable gardens?Image
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This is a genuinely strange phenomenon - there is a remarkable coalescence between the "style" of cosmology found among Papuans, Amazonians and certain Congolese tribes, all extremely distantly related but united by a common climate and lifestyle. Yet this "vegetable garden spirituality," though highly consistent among similar rainforest-dwelling Neolithics, is markedly aberrant compared to what we see both among true hunter-gatherers and more complex societies.Image
"Hunter-gatherer-grade cultures," from the various Aboriginal tribes to the San Bushmen, the Hadza and various North American peoples tend to have "higher-level" theistic cosmologies, i.e. cosmologies with clear mono- or polytheistic figures exercising demiurgic functions, though (usually) less strongly developed than in complex, urban societies.Image
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Read 6 tweets
Aug 28
The area of what was once Gaul went through a truly remarkable process of ethnogenesis in the period between 1-600 AD.

From a barely romanized, still essentially Iron Age Celtic culture to Christian, Germanized Gallo-Romans, all the while retaining mostly the same ancestry. Image
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Most people probably don't realize - I certainly didn't, originally - that the Gaulish language was still widely spoken throughout Gallia at the time of the Frankish conquest. It was the *Franks*, ironically, who completed the "Romanization" process. Image
This sort of thing is not too uncommon, actually - you have an initial tension between a colonized and a colonizer group, which may persist for generations until a *third* group conquers both, thus relativizing and diminishing the original conflict and hastening assimilation.
Read 5 tweets
May 6
A striking takeaway of the last 10 years of the aDNA revolution - from the Indo-Europeans, to the Bantu, to the Swahili, to the Japanese - is that you might sooner trust a toddler to pick out a 50-meter target with a revolver than an archaeologist to identify an ancient migration Image
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It should be self-evident that we cannot simply derive from this a reverse principle, and conclude that wherever contemporary archaeologists denied a purported migration, it really did take place - yet the scope of the discrediting is remarkable.
What are we to make of as-yet unresolved fine-grained questions, such as the Dorian invasion, the Hebrew conquest of Canaan or other traditional narratives long contested by the now-dubious consensus? Again, we cannot simply default to the inverse conclusion, but one wonders. Image
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Read 5 tweets
Apr 7
"Real, unembellished history" according to quite a number of historians seems to consist largely of ppl sitting around, munching bread and porridge, between periodic bursts of fighting over miscellaneous economic factors. Image
>Knight is recorded as composing a poem to persuade his captor lord to free him:
"Bet that happened lol"
>King gives a stirring speech before battle:
"Sure that happened"
>Viking is heads out to Constantinople, motivated by a dream:
"Definitely not embellished mhm" Image
Never underestimate a dusty historian's ability to regard as improbable literally any display of human spontaneity, whimsy or unconditioned willpower.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 3
This is only half true. Rwanda is a cohesive, fairly well-run and (by regional standards) prosperous and stable country. The Congo, it is true, is essentially not a real state, hence why the massive size disparity between it and Rwanda confers no military advantage.
It is an interesting quirk of the global export of the nation state system that we aren't really able to account for "unorganized regions" anymore. With the exception of Antarctica, every plot of land *must* be attached to a specific polity with a government and a flag.
This works well enough in some parts of the world, but it obviously fails elsewhere, where the reality on the ground simply fails to match the internationally recognised construct. The Darién Gap is only "part" of Panama and Colombia in the most tenuously nominal sense. Image
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Read 6 tweets
Feb 11
There is a phenomenon I've noticed a lot in many contemporary walks of life - term it "introductionism": ppl never actually reading primary literature, or watching classical movies, or engaging directly with high art, but interacting with everything through "accessible" mediums Image
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In a world of limited time, I've come around to the realisation that 8/10 times, instead of reading a book ABOUT Shakespeare, read Shakespeare. Read Plato. Just read that book you want to get to, don't read endless books ABOUT reading that book. Image
"You can just do things", but for literature and the other arts.

Sure, you might need some help to interpret, say, Aristotle or Hegel - so maybe get a complimentary book to help you, or read a brief introduction to the core concepts, but *do not* then stop there.
Read 4 tweets

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