After commenting to Dayan about her attitude to sex with other men, Brent says:
"'Sorry. No offense intended.'" (p. 286)
Not good enough. Although Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty claims that a word means whatever he says it means, language is social and we are responsible for the foreseeable effects of our own words whatever intention we might happen to claim.
Colin Lyas, a lecturer in Aesthetics at Lancaster University, put it beautifully: it is not acceptable to introduce a friend by saying, "This is Smith. His mother swims after troop ships. Oh, no offense, old chap!"
Sometimes a dictionary has to follow a definition with "(offensive)," i.e., if you hear this word, then this is what it means but (warning) do not use it. Someone tried to tell me that "wog" is inoffensive simply because it literally means "western oriental gentleman." Whatever it originally meant, it has come to be used offensively and to be understood as such.
Brent also tells a Tahirian that the human race has always possessed organizations to make and enforce policies. It has not. But Brent's thought processes are rigid. The Tahirian comments that human beings possess certain "'...superiorities...'" including in "'...lethal instrumentalities.'" (p. 288) Indeed.
73 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And of course you remember the discussion in "In The Envoy III" about the peculiarities of English. Such as many words having the same sound but different meanings.
My recollection is that "wog" began as a bureaucratic acronym for "worthy Oriental gentleman" and then took on unfortunate and unpleasant meanings.
Well, I think the ultimate origins of the state goes back to families and clans in Stone Age tines and even earlier where cave man and hunter gatherer patriarchs would make decisions and issue orders as needed.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that there was an earlier stage of matrilineal descent.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Possibly, but it never seems to have mattered much. Decisions and orders still had to be make by somebody about hard or dangerous work. I was amused by how, I think in "To Promote General Welfare," Anderson had old Daniel Coffin thinking with amusement how the use of GAVELS to bring to order courts and public assemblies goes back to cave man patriarchs banging a log with his stone ax to get everyone to pay attention to him.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that the earliest stage of social cooperation was not giving orders but giving a lead. Someone who steps forward and is followed by others has no power to coerce them to follow, still less to stand back and order them forward.
Paul.
Sean,
If descent and inheritance were originally matrilineal, then male accumulation of herds and slaves followed by the imposition of patriarchal monogamy with only legitimate sons inheriting property was a world-historical event.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I am still skeptical of your views about "leadership." It does not fit in with how people actually behave. I am not saying leadership roles were as strictly and formally defined as we see them by the time the first urban civilizations arose, but neither do I think they were as loose and vague as you seem to insist they were. I would expect a hunter/gatherer father of a family to be making sure half grown children were doing their proper daily chores. And, if he was a leader of his clan, making arrangements on when and where and how the hunters would seek big game like a mammoth. And THAT still calls for discipline, ability to take orders, and willingness to risk one's life. Iow, FORMALIZED authority.
We don't even know if matrilineal descent and inheritance ever mattered much in human history.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Some nineteenth century research confirmed early matrilineal descent but I do not know what more recent views are. But I think that descent must originally have been matrilineal because there was a time before monogamy when it was not known which man was the father of which child or even maybe that men and sexual intercourse played any role in reproduction.
Of course "leadership" is how people behave. Someone gains a leading role in a social group by having better ideas and by being more persuasive, not by being coercive. A moral lead is given by someone who sets an example which others follow.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm still skeptical on how much matrilineal descent/inheritance mattered in the remote past.
"Moral" leadership is a real thing. But it can't and won't be enough when it comes to handling long lasting or recurring problems. Then more formalized structures will be necessary. It still comes back to that cave man patriarch banging a log with his stone ax and growling: "Shut up, everybody!" (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I am not sure that cave dwellers had patriarchs but of course there are reasons why hierarchies and formal structures did develop.
If, as I still think, the earliest tribal societies had matrilineal descent, then that would have mattered at the time as much as any other set of social relationships and its overthrow by patriarchal monogamy would have been a major upheaval.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
The phrase "cave man patriarch" simply stuck in my mind from old Dan Coffin's whimsical thoughts about them in "To Promote The General Welfare."
And, more seriously, I can see a cave man patriarch as being a mature, serious, experienced, and even a venerable pater familias, by the standards of the Stone Age.
And where's the EVIDENCE for the earliest tribal societies reckoning matrilineal descent?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Ancient Society (1877) by Lewis H. Morgan. I have read other works based on that.
What we should not do is simply project our idea of the father as the head of the family back to the earliest times. Surely the family is an institution that has developed?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but what does more recent scholarship think of such matters? In many ways anthropology in the 19th century was in its infancy and came to conclusions later scholars modified or rejected.
Simply put, the family began because that was the best way a father and mother could provide for themselves and their children. And I believe that goes back to the earliest human history.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
As I said before, I don't know what more recent scholarship says. I do know that there have been changes since the 19th century but I do not think that it is right to project a "father, mother and children" unit right back to the earliest times. That makes all sorts of assumptions. What really happened? People had sex. Women gave birth. Members of a tribe cooperated. What else happened? First (maybe), unrestricted sexuality within a tribe. Secondly, growth of incest taboos with descent reckoned from a common ancestress. Thirdly, the pairing marriage, free and equal, revocable at any time by either side. Fourthly, monogamy as we know it because male property owners wanted to bequeath herds and slaves to identifiable male heirs. That makes sense. I know that all modern anthropologists will not agree with all of that in detail and will add many details that I do not know about but I do not think that they envisage the earliest human generations as married couples raising their children in a way that is familiar to us. That is just reading our experience back onto a completely different context.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I did a little checking up of Lewis H. Morgan. And later scholars do reject many of the details of his work. So I still remain skeptical.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Of course they do but I still don't think that the very first human beings comprised married couples bringing up their own children just like that. The nature of the family has changed throughout history. Families as familiar to us would not have been there even before history.
Paul.
Note the multiple terms for black people in the US, each becoming ‘offensive’ in its turn. The problem obviously isn’t in the words themselves.
You see the same phenomenon with swearwords; each new cycle of euphemism results in a new set of words, which then acquire the old connotations gradually and are supplanted in their turn.
Family forms are partially cultural, and hence subject to change, and partly biological and hence not. Eg., sexual jealousy is inherent, though attitudes towards it are not.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I agree, I doubt there was any kind of formalized marriage before the Old Stone Age. Or, was there? If there was, I would still argue for there being some kind of public agreement a man and woman would live together.
Mr. Stirling: And I'm reminded of how "Negro" used to be the polite term for "Black." It simply means "black" in Spanish.
Yes, family forms are partly cultural, and hence changeable; and partly biological, and not changeable. E.g., two persons of the same sex cannot make a child. Monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry comes to mind.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But, if as is at least possible if not indeed probable, the earliest societies involved communal child rearing, then there was as yet no pairing marriage.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Possible, yes. Altho I think mothers would prefer to nurse only their own babies.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But they might have been able to identify the fathers.
Paul.
Kaor, Puul!
Of course, because fathers would want to know if a child was his or not. And mothers would want to know which male they could have a claim on his help in supporting her and their child.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But I am envisaging a tribal society where child care was communal so a mother would not look to any particular male for support.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But I don't believe there was ever such a communal tribal society. At most, there might well have been extended kinship lines whose members gave each other help or assistance, as needed.
And if I can use Anderson's story "The Little Monster" in this discussion, then it's possible he thought early hominids like the Pithecanthropines of a million years ago already understood the male and female roles in reproduction. Note how the Pith POV character would "pray" to "Old Father."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But this is circular. Human beings are not naturally monogamous. I think that there is evidence that incest taboos grew for good reasons and that monogamy developed but had not been present from the beginning.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And recall what Stirling has said about sexual jealousies. That has to include as well a strong desire to know the parentage of a child. I believe that to at least encourage monogamy.
I think monogamy was the oldest form of marriage for good sound practical reasons. Consider how poorly or precariously most humans lived thru out their history as a race. That would at least favor the use of monogamy, IMO. Polygamy was not practical when a man could not support a harem. I think polygamy had to wail till the invention of agriculture and the rise of urban civilizations (perhaps around 4500 BC?).
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Of course monogamy was earlier than polygamy! The question is how early was any kind of marriage?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
As you may recall, I rather like the Neanderthals. If the scholars are right, the Neanderthals were not only sophisticated hunter/gatherers, they also had an appreciation for beauty, tried to take care of the injured/handicapped, and buried their dead. So, monogamy might well have been known by them.
Ad astra! Sean
Human infants have a prolonged dependency period, which requires support from more than the mother. Human constant sexuality, as opposed to a breeding season, and pair-bonding between men and women, are a natural consequence -as is sexual jealousy, to ensure a man isn’t diverting resources to support someone else’s offspring.
Ditto involvement by aunts and uncles; they have a genetic investment in their siblings’ children too.
And generalized altruism can also play a part, since in a hunter-gatherer band everyone is likely to be related to some degree, directly or through their children.
Note also that polyandry is common only in very harsh environments (where children may need more than one male’s intensive support) and almost always involves closely related males sharing a woman, so that her children will share their genes even if they’re not the father.
The inherited emotional biases can thus be put together in a range of ways depending on circumstances - but not in an infinite variety.
Brent is right : human societies do always have means to make and enforce rules. They just don’t all have the same ones.
Eg., among the Masai and Kikuyu of pre-colonial Kenya, there was no State, no kings, and no chiefs - though individuals differed in status, wealth and influence, and some had power as religious/magical ‘experts’.
But they still fought wars: the armies were made up of young men of the same age group/circumcision class. (Among the Masai, full-time specialists for a decade or so, living in special settlements and unmarried, doing nothing but hunt and fight). They still had courts, presided over by respected elders, with traditional procedures and sentences enforced by public opinion and the threat of expulsion and feud. A d so forth.
Sean,
Theologically speaking, might the Neanderthals have been unFallen or would all hominids have Fallen together?
Paul.
My thought regarding Brent was that the earliest societies did not as yet have a body of armed men set against the rest of society so that there would have been social pressure but there was not yet any institutionalized coercion.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Yet again, you made far clearer and more explicit what I had in mind, on why and how we humans manage our marital/family arrangements. Esp. the point you made about how long human children need caring after, far more so than a mother can provide. Constant sexuality by a woman being a means of helping to make sure a man was willing to be with her. And HE would want to be sure the effort he made accumulating resources would go to helping HIS offspring.
Paul: I actually discussed something very like this with a Catholic priest in a chat room last night! One point he made was that since no full blooded Neanderthals have survived we don't know for sure if they had rational, immortal souls. And so would be in need of salvation if they too had Fallen.
MY personal belief is that Neanderthals (and Pithecanthropines!) were as human as Homo sapiens and also had rational, immortal souls. And since they too had known struggles, suffering, death, etc., I concluded they too had Fallen.
As for your comments about Brent's opinions, recall how Stirling pointed out that even tribes without kings or chiefs (like the Masai and Kikuyu), still had institutionalized coercion. And I would not be surprised such forms of coercion existed in the remote past, among Pithecanthropines!
We have to face facts, ever since primates ceased to be animals and became humans, there has always, in all societies, been some means of exerting coercion. Because it was NECESSARY.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: “public opinion backed by spears” is most definitely coercion - just organized differently than police forces.
It’s a matter of literally lethal unpopularity; plus being cut off from community support is often fatal too, in that sort of setting. It’s more coercive than a State in some respects, since you have much less ability to defy custom and the local consensus without being painfully sanctioned - the neighbors watch you much more closely than secret police usually can.
On the American frontier, where the institutional framework often lagged far behind, “hating out” was used against the unpopular with similar effect.
Mr Stirling,
I agree with that. I realize that I had something different in mind. In a hunting, gathering society when the productivity of labor was so low that one person's labor was enough to support only one person and when it was impossible to store or hoard a surplus,then it was not yet possible for a minority to control and live off the labor of a majority or to use one smaller armed part of society to control another larger unarmed part. Social coercion in that sense could not yet happen but we can read familiar later stages back into earlier stages - like Adam and Eve as a married couple or the Yellow Emperor bestowing literacy and civilization on the Chinese.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I am sure Mr. Stirling can reply far more ably than I can, but I am not satisfied with these remarks of yours. Even before agriculture was invented and the first proto-states arose, there were means of coercion for people who seriously angered relatives, tribesmen, etc. Everything from beating up the offender to shunning him, cutting him off from all help or assistance. There might not have been a king or even a chief, but it was coercion. "Public opinion backed by spears," as Stirling put it.
I am sure even Pithecanthropines soon grasped that a single man or woman by themselves could not accomplish much. A man and woman together, with constant sexuality to help bind them to each other, could accomplish far more together in a cooperative division of labor, than they would separately. And it would spread or grow from that: children, more distant relatives, and neighbors. That would increase the value of what their labor produced, making goods and services more desirable to others. And open the way to specialization.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I said that I agreed that a community could coerce an individual. It was the division of society into economic/social classes that had to come later with the production of a surplus. Then there were armed guards at granaries, armed overseers of slaves, an armed guard around a king etc - armed not against outsiders but against the population.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And those guards were necessary in many cases. I am sure we have had criminals since Pithecanthropine times. Some people WILL steal from granaries, and once you have formalized leaders like chiefs and kings, they will need guards, quite legitimately. The risk of assassination is one of the hazards of being a king, president, or prime minister.
And, of courses, one of the duties of a king and any other leaders is to defend his people against their enemies. So having soldiers will not always be for internal use.
Ad astra! Sean
Having problems posting.
Paul: in fact, in a hunter-gatherer society it's (usually) only necessary for a male adult to work about 4 hours a day to satisfy subsistence needs. So he could support another by working 8 hours a day, pretty much, or he could spend a lot of time loafing, dancing, engaging in arts and crafts, doing his hair, fighting the neighbors, etc.
-- cutting post short to see if length is the problem.
In terms of return per hour of labor, being a hunter-gatherer is considerably more productive than being a neolithic or Bronze Age farmer.
Only in fairly recent times has agriculture become more productive.
Agriculture was always more productive in terms of production -per acre of land-, of course -- that's what let it spread, along with the hugely more numerous, but toil-ridden, stunted, malnourished, disease-ridden people who practiced it.
You got more people, but with much lower standards of nutrition and general health.
Furthermore, while hunter-gatherer societies aren't stratified the way State-level agricultural ones are, they -are- stratified and are far from completely egalitarian.
To begin with, there's gender. Gender divisions of labor differ, but they always exist... and they pretty much also always favor males, too. And women always do at least 50% of the essential work, usually considerably more; it just doesn't get socially valued as much (hence the 'invisibility' of childcare in so many settings).
This is why slavery exists at the hunter-gatherer stage too, and takes the form of kidnapping women, who then exist in the kidnapper's band as low-status drudges and forced breeders.
This is extremely widespread.
The kidnapped woman's -children- usually form full-status members of the band, though. (Not always -- in some it takes generations.)
Recent investigations show that captivity of this sort is ubiquitous. (See www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/659102, for starters.)
The mechanisms for controlling captive adult males in significant numbers usually don't exist at that level of development.
But all societies have arrangements for men to control women. Using "outsider" women just escalates them. This is visible well into historical antiquity.
Note that in Homer, slavery exists for both men and women -- but it's much more common for women, and that the usual practice is to kill all the enemy adult males and keep the women, the female children, and sometimes young male children who can be raised and socialized to obedience. The Linear B texts show that this was indeed the pattern for Mycenaean-era Greeks; there are slaves of both genders, but women are vastly more common and form an important labor force for agriculture and for producing staples like cloth.
That's not a peculiarity of Iron Age or Bronze Age Greeks. Patters of mass killings in graves stretching right back into the Old Stone Age show a consistent pattern, with heaped-up bodies of men, women and children who ancient-DNA analysis show to be related... but the gender distribution shows that females, particularly young females, were more likely to be spared and not end up buried.
Three guesses why.
Later mass slavery of men became common too, but it's a "high-input" method and much rarer. It requires elaborate and sophisticated social mechanisms.
Abducting women made not only personal sense at a hunter-gatherer level, but evolutionary sense too.
The men in question got higher odds of reproductive success.
Their own women got lower ones, but only somewhat, since could unload some of the drudgery on the captives, take some of their output to allow them to care better for their own offspring, and as the saying goes, as long as you've got someone to look down on, you're not on the bottom looking up.
This ties into the way hunter-gatherer systems are stratified among males. Superior access to women, besides being its own reward (males have an incentive to use "scattershot" reproduction, since they potentially have less genetic investment in a single offspring), gave them superior -economic- status as well.
They got the benefits of more female labor. That in turn allowed them to gain personal power as "big men" who could bestow rewards -- perhaps even a woman.
Social evolution simply built on this foundation.
NB: males were predominant in the Atlantic slave trade from Africa but for two reasons.
European buyers wanted males for the brutal labor of growing sugarcane or mining gold or the like.
And African slave-dealers knew that women and children brought higher prices in -African- slave markets.
After the end of the Atlantic trade in the 19th century, African slavers sold more men. They also just killed more male captives.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I greatly enjoyed reading this mini essay. And I have no objections, mostly, to what you wrote here. What did surprise me was that Mycenaean era women did so much of the agricultural work.I would have thought male peasants would do heavy labor like plowing, harvesting, and threshing.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: men usually did things that involved large animals, like plowing with oxen. (Usually not always; and fields were sometimes broken up with mattocks, not plowed.)
However, that's a relatively minor share of the total labor of producing grain with Mycenaean-level technology.
The main labor inputs were cultivation (weeding), and hand-harvesting olives and grapes (both just as doable for women as men), processing them and harvesting grain with a sickle.
The sickle is a unisex tool; it doesn't take great strength, just endurance. You can harvest about 1/4 acre a day, and men don't do it any better than women.
Then the grain has to be bound into sheaves, carried to the threshing floor, and threshed either by driving oxen around over it, or more commonly with a flail. Flails are also unisex.
Then it has to be ground into flour. In those times, this was done with a hand-quern, either a reciprocating one like a Mexian metate, or a rotary one turned by hand.
"Grinding grain" is like "fetching water" -- the quintessial slave-girl work, used as aa poetic trope because it was so universal.
So women could do most of the farming work (which included milking, cheesemaking, etc.); and men were much more likely to make trouble. Even if you had to use slightly more female labor, it would be less of a headache.
Men were used predominantly for things like quarrying and mining -- heavy continuous (not seasonal) labor, and relatively easy to supervise.
The bottleneck in ancient-world grain farming is harvesting.
You could plow and plant much more land than you could reap in the 2-week harvesting window.
(This remained true into the 19th century, btw., though less so; only with the horse-drawn reaper was it finally eliminated.)
The usual solution was to keep a lot more labor than was necessary for anything -but- the harvest, and find it things to do the rest of the year. Women spun and wove in the agricultural off-season, for instance. Grapes and olives and figs and vegetables needed work at different times of the year from grain.
In many places fighting during the harvest season was regarded as barbaric.
Then when the grain came ripe, you threw every available pair of hands into the fields, including people who usually didn't farm.
NB: nomads often -did- attack during harvest; it was one of their advantages that they could do it at no extra cost to themselves.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for filling in some of the gaps and resolving my puzzlement! Now I understand Mycenaean era agricultural work better. Men, usually slaves as well, did the quarrying and mining.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And agricultural societies also had to support full time armies to defend against those nomads attacking during the harvest season.
Ad astra! Sean
Prehistory and history were more complicated than I thought. That I expect.
Kaor, Paul!
There was a vogue, during the lifetimes of Voltaire and Rousseau (and afterwards), to scorn and denigrate the stratified, hierarchical, urbanized, etc., societies seen worldwide, esp. in Europe. There were dreams by men like Rousseau about how much better and "egalitarian" life was in ancient times. The Noble Savage myth. Or the Noble Red Indian legend.
But Stirling's comments on the recent historical studies showing us how brutal life was as far back as the Old Stone Age SHOULD kill off that kind of nonsense. If anything, one conclusion I drew was that life slowly, very slowly, in fits and starts and many set backs, became gradually better for more and more people precisely because of having agriculture, cities, and stratified societies.
Only agricultural, urbanized societies produced men like the Prophets of Israel, the Sages of China, Buddha, the philosophers of Greece and Rome, etc. It was because of them that some men came to believe that people should not be so brutal and callous to one another.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
If we both think that a particular kind of coercion had to exist at a certain stage of social development and could not have existed at earlier stages, then we are essentially in agreement.
A small surplus had to be controlled by a minority because it was as yet too small to be distributed equally. Some members of a leisured class became decadent whereas others, having been freed from manual labor, developed philosophy, science, arts etc. Thus, repression and progress coexisted. We can (try to) advance to a better state rather than imagine regressing to a mythical Golden Age.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I believe we will always need SOME coercion, because of the need to put some control on crime and corruption. Now and into the future.
There are always going to be differences, "inequalities," in the material wealth any of us might have. Because all of us are going to differ in abilities, talents, inclinations, or sheer accident and luck, from each other. Notions about dividing up wealth "equally" are impossible.
I agree on the desirability of gradually advancing and improving on what we have achieved so far. But I also believe people will differ on how best to do that. E.g., I favor the limited state and free enterprise economics. Still others will want a centralized state and socialism. And so on.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
My purpose here was only to dissociate myself from Voltaire and Rousseau.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Oops! Sorry! I have been accused of overthinking matters too many times. (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Testing.
Note: some primitive peoples, in an exaggeration of the default pattern I mentioned, kill off all or most of their girl-children, and rely on abduction/raiding to supply mates.
This effectively appropriates all the labor used in rearing the young woman, as accumulated in her living body.
It also produces a large surplus of young warrior males -- senior warriors, needless to say, get most of the women.
It also encourages cultural forms glorifying violent aggression. It's a sort of reductio ad absurdum; also somewhat risky, since you can't count on winning all the time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have heard of the ghastly custom of killing off all of a tribe's girl children, atlho I don't recall which nation that was. The case I thought of being how ancient Sparta was said to have all children examined at birth and those deemed "unfit" condemned to death by exposure.
Of COURSE, in such a set up, the senior males would snaffle the most women! And a system of this kind would encourage the glorifying of violent aggressiveness, if that was the only way males could get women. And, as you said, quite risky!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the violence has, from a senior male’s point of view, the advantage of culling the young males. There are plenty of young warriors coming up every year, but the number who survive to become polygamous heads of household is much smaller.
This sort of setup is, of course, parasitic; it can’t become general because it’s dependent on raiding groups with more normal demographics.
Later on, most slave economies weren’t self-reproducing either, because slaves had low reproduction rates - those places had ‘burglary economics’, expropriating the effort and cost of rearing children by taking the product without paying anything like the cost.
Eg., in 18th century Jamaica, slaves had a 3% net natural decrease annually. In 19th century Zanzibar it was 20% annually.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Another thought your comments inspired was that this culling of aggressive young warriors in wars with other tribes lessened the number of possible challengers to the older warriors positions in the tribal hierarchy.
Given what you said in earlier comments about how hard, even brutal, labor was on sugar cane plantations, I'm not surprised slave reproduction in Jamaica was so low.
Ad astra! Sean
The US and the 13 Colonies before them were an exception - slaves there had net natural increase from the 1720’s, and by the 19th century had demographics very similar to white rural Southerners. Mortality a bit higher, adult height slightly lower, but not much.
Height is a good proxy for nutrition. Americans then ere about 4 inches taller than Englishmen, and American slaves were about 3 inches taller.
Incidentally, adult children of members of the House of Lotds were 5 inches taller than their working-class contemporaries in the Victorian era.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
If I wanted to be cynical about it I would say many slave owners realized they would get more more work from their slaves if they were adequately fed and reasonably cared for. Far more so than if they were driven mercilessly under the lash.
And I recalled your comments about how terrible was the handling of food in many large European and US cities. There might be plenty of food, but it was often rotten or tainted. So those who could ate food "sent up" from their estates.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that was before the FDA or it’s equivalents. When people grew most of their own food, or bought it from near neighbors, that hadn’t been a problem. When it was produced and processed in bulk and sold anonymously to strangers, things went to hell and it took a long time to fix.
Concern with adulteration was an important part of the rise of things like packaged crackers, proprietary sealed bags of flour, and boxed breakfast cereals. You were more likely to get what you wanted than buying what a storekeeper poured out of an anonymous barrel, and it was less likely to have rat droppings in it.
When Sinclair wrote his famous expose of the Chicago meatpacking plants, “The Jungle”, Teddy Roosevelt was famously rumored to have been reading it over breakfast (*) and to have jumped up and thrown his sausages out the window while shouting “I’ve been poisoned!” and set out to send federal inspectors there immediately.
Btw, how’s “Daggers in Darkness” going?
(*) not impossible - he read two or three books a day most days all his adult life.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Actually, I also thought of the increasing frustration and disgust people had for the foods available to them in the cities, how that led to Sinclair's famous book and standards of quality being imposed by the FDA. And, recently, the History Channel on TV has been running some interesting shows touching on that with "The Foods That Built America" (along with bull twaddle about "ancient aliens").
Oops! I'm ashamed of myself! I've been seriously delinquent in working the notes I made about DAGGERS IN DARKNESS into a more finished and presentable form. I will get back to work on them this weekend!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I’ll be interested to see it. You’re always worth listening to.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks! Coming from a first rank science fiction writer like you that is a real compliment!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, All!
I’m a little behind on the blog, and I’ve just reached this motherlode of discussion. Sean, if you rather like Neanderthals, you might want read KINDRED: NEANDERTHAL LIFE, LOVE, DEATH AND ART, by the paleoanthropologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, which seemed to me to be quite well done.
As to monogamy, polygamy, etc., it is my understanding that hunter-gatherers are likely to be imperfectly monogamous: that is, they normally have one spouse at a time, but there can be exceptions, and a pairing need not be until death do them part; the man and woman involved may switch partners once their child is a couple of years old. Polygamy may be found among the elite in agricultural societies, but also in nomadic or other herding societies, where a sheikh or khan may have a substantial number of wives and concubines. Mr. Stirling has already explained much of what makes this kind of thing possible.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
Kaor, Nicholas!
I am definitely interested in the Neanderthals and Rebecca Wragg Sykes book. Something to look for, or order the next time I go to Barnes and Noble.
Of course I would not expect Pithecanthropines, Neanderthals, Modern Humans, or any humans to be perfectly monogamous. All humans are, rather notoriously, IMPERFECT! And I would not be surprised if pairings of the kind you described sometimes (or often) broke up. Probably because the man wanted a younger, prettier woman. Or the wife might have wanted a more prosperous mate.
Yes, I agree some nomadic tribes or cultures will have polygamy. But I noted how you mentioned a Sheikh or Khan would be the ones to have a harem. Iow, only the ruling elites had the wealth needed for supporting polygamy. I recalled just now how nomads like Abraham and Jacob, in the OT, had multiple wives and concubines. And they were sheikhs!
Ad astra and regards! Sean
“Serial monogamy” is Carly common. The threshold is about four years - the point at which a child doesn't’ need to be carried all the time.
Carly common?
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I think Mr. Stirling meant "clearly" when he typed "carly." But he might have meant "fairly" as well.
Mr. Stirling: I would, in my cynicism that some men might have wanted a younger, prettier woman. And some women would switch to a richer, more prosperous hunter/gatherer.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Thanks. I thought it was some word I didn't know.
Paul.
“Fairly”. Auto-correct is our enema, as the saying goes.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And one wag called the movie THE ENEMY BELOW with the punning THE ENEMA BELOW!
Ad astra! Sean
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