Fish and game have been scarce. The Tulat have gone hungry to serve the Cloud People. And now:
"'If we worked any more for the Mammoth Slayers, we would starve.'" (p. 206)
(The Cloud People slay mammoths.)
This issue, already implicit, has become explicit. There has to be a limit to how much the Tulat can be forced to give and Red Wolf, never having collected tribute before, cannot know, except by experience, what that limit is.
Ralph Corwin, the Time Patrol anthropologist, unable to intervene, except minimally, in social interactions, has advised the technologically more advanced masters to give their subjects:
"'...new hooks and spears...'" (ibid.)
- which help but are not enough. Millennia of class conflict begin here and, according to the future history revealed by the Patrol, will continue for many millennia into our future.
Eventually, there will be an Era of Oneness to be followed by the post-human Danellians. Meanwhile, Wanda Tamberly addresses the situation in 13,211 BC.
15 comments:
The Tulat are not credible, alas. Humans have been apex predators since before we were human.
Human beings have been apex predators - except maybe a few like the Tulat who did not survive and were forgotten?
Kaor, Paul!
Only the tough, strong, and lucky survived.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: well, why would they -cease- being apex predators, with all that game around them?
The Tulat are more primitive than Homo Erectus.
In fact, humans probably wiped out the postglacial megafauna, except in Africa, where it co-evolved with us.
They wouldn't cease. They would have to have not been predators. I gather that the evidence is that there were no such groups.
Paul: stable bone isotope ratio analysis indicates that older varieties of hominids after H. Erectus ate mainly meat diets.
Note that before H. Erectus, hominids were not very efficient runners and had digestive systems more like those of chimps. With H. Erectus, you get the modern human body plan -- below the neck, they're very much like us. And the simplified digestive system that can't handle much in the way of the coarse vegetable foods that chimps eat.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
With the proviso that chimps enjoy eating meat, when they can get it. Have any chimps been observed trying to hunt?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes. They ambush small animals fairly often.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That interests me, something to look up.
Ad astra! Sean
Chimps also like tobacco. In the 1960's, my brother David made friends with a chimp in the Nairobi Animal Orphanage. He'd get into the enclosure and hand his cigarette pack and matches to the chim (who was named Chumley).
Chumly would put two cigarettes in his mouth, strike a match, light them both and hand one to my brother -- then they'd sit and smoke the cigarettes together.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha, very amusing! The sort of thing the Chumley we see in PAWN STARS might do.
Ad astra! Sean
Chumley is actually how the name is pronounced. It's -spelled- Cholmondeley.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Almost sure I came across that name somewhere. It seems familiar.
Ad astra! Sean
It's the name of a civil parish in Cheshire, and it's also the family name of a noble family that's been around there for a very long time. Back to the Norman Conquest, in fact.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That's it, "Cholmondeley" is at least part of the name of one of the oldest surviving aristocratic families in the UK.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment