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#huntergatherers
Recording of our excellent talk with #ChrisKnight and #JeromeLewis on 'When Eve Laughed'
A great introduction to our Spring Term, talk by Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis on their forthcoming book
'When Eve Laughed: the Origins of Language'
Greg Cocks The Oldest Three-Dimensional Map In The World Discovered In A Paleolithic Cave Near Paris
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https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/01/the-oldest-three-dimensional-map-in-the-world-discovered-in-a-paleolithic-cave-near-paris/ <-- shared article
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https://doi.org/10.1111/ojoa.12316 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #cave #archeaology #3dmapping #Segognole #quartzitic #sandstone #megaclast #lagdeposit #France #ParisBasin #carving #shelter #water #hydrology #watercourses #hydrology #map #historic #geomorphology #geomorphometry #model #3dmodel #Paleolithic #huntergatherers #NoisysurÉcole #hydrographic #rivercourse #prehistory
I finished reading “Reindeer Moon” by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas last night.
if you like prehistoric fiction, this was a good entry in that genre.
It was very detailed and made me feel like I had time travelled.
#Prehistory #AmReading #HistoricalFiction #HunterGatherers #Bookstodon #Anthropology #Adventure #Books #Paranormal
Exciting new paper here assessing ages for #puberty onset and #menarche among #UpperPalaeolithic #huntergatherers (from Russia, Czechia, Italy).
'Our results revealed that while puberty had begun by 13.5 years of age for the majority of individuals, there was a lot of variability, with the adolescents from Arene Candide (AC1 and AC16), both aged around 16 years when they died, taking several years longer to progress through puberty than their peers. Assessing the age of menarche was challenging due to the paucity of female adolescents, but based on the available evidence, it appears to have occurred between 16 and 17 years of age. For some, full adulthood had been achieved by 17–22 years, similar to the patterns seen in modern wealthy countries and in advance of historic populations living in urbanized environments.'
#adolescence #lifehistory #humanevolution #anthropology #archaeology #burials
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724842400085X?dgcid=raven_sd_via_email
Day 13: our leading scholar #IanWatts takes us to the heart of #Hadza cosmology by following the zigzag trail of the mysterious entity !o!oko, cannibal grandmother and mantis trickster and transformer.
Stories and beliefs associated to the Mantis among the Hadzabe of Tanzania compare with the well-known figure of the Mantis among the /Xam Southern #San #huntergatherers. This suggests great antiquity of the concepts related to #lunar time.
The word itself -- !o!oko -- is probably very ancient with double alveolar-palatal click (pop sound from taking your tongue quickly away from the alveolar ridge). The -ko ending implies femaleness, but this entity has gender fluidity.
#13daysofXmas #RAGtoptalks
#egalitarianism #gender #trickster #IndigenousCosmology
Women's ability to move, as nomadic #huntergatherers, not be trapped by #settlement, able to choose where to live (Draper, Townsend, Dyble et al, demographic effects Page et al) plus women's decision-making on movement based on resources available, general #consensus decision-making (Venkataraman)
https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-ju-hoansi-can-tell-us-about-group-decision-making
An earlier review of 2022 studies on #Neanderthal #family life. Social structure according to #genetics looks like #patrilocal with #females moving out of groups.
We are close to 
per cent certain that #Homosapiens did the exact opposite -- daughters stayed with their mums, and sons-in-law came into the group to do #brideservice. We are so sure here because it's what #African #huntergatherers do. As a result, our lineage flourishes (thanks to grandmothers), Neanderthals dwindled (lack of grandmothers?) and numerous Neanderthal women could have moved into the incoming African origin groups.
#humanorigins #anthropology #Pleistocene #kinship
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2822%2901755-9
Great piece from #BrennaHassett
Rather than being too 'simple' and 'poor' to invent rank, #egalitarian #huntergatherers are 'too complex to allow one person or group of people to take charge'.
(Stupid AI generated image shows almost all men hanging around camp, which is in fact totally unrealistic. As usual where are women, children, grandmothers who would be the heart of the camp?!)
https://slguardian.org/the-hunter-gatherer-guide-to-keeping-society-equal/
Here is Emeka, doing a proper job of sharing meat of a black-fronted duiker, making sure his hunting stays good!
This is real #Inequityaversion
Photo: Jerome Lewis
On the occasion of the death of world famous #Neolithic #archaeologist and Tory peer #ColinRenfrew we have a few things to say.
Looking down at us from the #Cambridge high table, he made some severe misjudgements. His #sapientparadox was an attempt to argue that while #Homosapiens bodies evolved in #Africa, somehow we didn't get smart till we hit #Europe.
Also highly questionable was his attitude to the #cognition of #huntergatherers who, so he said, 'lacked fully developed mind'. According to him, they needed to borrow language from farmers.
We had some big political and social institutional differences with Renfrew. Our own Chris Knight goes through the whole context in a review below
#archaeology #Renfrew #racism #Indigenous #Palaeolithic #humanorigins
JRAI 2002, 8: 807-8
A devastating review by Chris Knight of the Runciman collection 'The Origin of Human Social Institutions'
Interesting piece on the ideas of #sexstrike so troubling the US.
What this misses out is that #sexstrike was how we created human culture! And it was periodic -- not forever! Aligned to the #moon and #menstrualcycles
See 'Blood Relations' on this link
https://libcom.org/article/blood-relations-menstruation-and-origins-culture-chris-knight-complete-book
Sex Strike takes specific forms among #African #huntergatherers, that is #menstrual #taboos and rules about #brideservice which is the work a son-in-law does for his mother-in-law (she is boss) otherwise no nooky!
FREE community #fediscience, please BOOST!
TONIGHT
Everybody welcome, just turn up!
Tues Nov 5, 18:30 
(London UK)
with #HarryJenkinson
LIVE @UCLanthropology
And on ZOOM
'Wild Service--the Human Right to Roam'
LIVE in the Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor of the UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW
ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak
Harry Jenkinson will present the concept of Wild Service: a philosophy of reciprocity with our fellow species, made possible through increased human access to nature.
Humans are a nomadic species. For over 95% of our history, we have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, with nomadism central to understandings of ecological balance. But when we are politically and culturally restricted from nature, we become unable to take care of it. The Right to Roam movement, to which Harry belongs, calls for public access to the English countryside, 92% of which is inaccessible.
Looking at mobility and ecological reciprocity among Indigenous peoples today, Harry will discuss inspirations for Wild Service and draw upon his ethnographic work among Indigenous peoples in the Arctic.
Wild Service offers a renewal of relationships, where we recognise humanity as part of, rather than separate from nature.
Harry will be LIVE in the Daryll Forde, 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, WC1H 0BW.
Please arrive by 6:30pm before doors close. Or join on ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak
@right_2roam
@DoomsdaysCW
from my perspective the only 'original' religion is #Hadza #Epeme which thrives in darkness under a sparkling ethereal Milky Way. The entities of Epeme, a dark moon healing ritual, will of course be described by patriarchal so-called 'world religions' as demons and devils.
But Epeme is two orders of magnitude older than any of these recent inventions by farmers built on gender (and caste) hierarchy.
Only a few dozen or hundreds of people know about Epeme, and I am one of them, at least partly. A tenacious resilient group of #huntergatherers keep it going. In a court of law, I would identify as a celebrant of Epeme. And next year, if my health is good, I have the scintillating prospect of getting back to one of those healing rituals!
In a poignant coda 'What if...', #DoerteWeig offers a creative intervention, inspired in part by Graeber and Wengrow’s invitation to freedom of form and experiment, in part also by the primarily #sociosomatic experience of #egalitarian living. As a fieldworker who has lived among Central African Forest groups, she asks eloquently what it could mean to gift that knowledge to so many people, to educate whole generations of schoolchildren in what it means to be human.
#egalitarian #huntergatherers #CentralAfrica #education #stories #bodies
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.8
In 'Cancelling hunter-gatherers for the cause of 21st C urbanism', anarchist anthropologist #JamesvanLanen critiques what he sees as a gendered structure arising in #TheDawnofEverything.This counterposes brutish, masculinist, prestige-hungry hunters to more communal, matriarchal early women farmers, busy creating an ‘ecology of freedom’. A whole array of lifeways of non-intensifying, egalitarian peoples have been ‘cancelled’ from this ‘new history of humanity’. Yet precisely these indigenous peoples bear the most sustainable cultural knowledge, and are most vulnerable to ethnocide from farmer expansion. Paradoxically Graeber + Wengrow end up advocating statist, urban bureaucracies in creating a fallacious prehistoric ‘left/right’ divide.
#huntergatherers #nonintensifying #egalitarian #transegalitarian #farmers #states #bureaucracy #history
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.7
In 'Architects of change', archaeologist #TanjaSchreiber offers personal experience of Graeber + Wengrow’s book as empowering and emancipatory for her research. Refusal to accept narratives of ‘linear progression from simplicity to complexity’ at once sweeps away the old evolutionist, stageist models that still haunt archaeology (but not really evolutionary anthropology). With a fascinating case study of W Siberian foragers who built fortified settlements over eight millenia, she is able to show long-term oscillation between greater and lesser social inequality. Pushback and contestation over growing inequality may be seen in conscious manipulation of space within the settlements. As ‘“architects” of their own social arrangements’, people of these Siberian communities fostered denser cohabitation, perhaps strengthening communal solidarity to resist inequalities. Analysis of Gini coefficients shows a zigzag in direction of change.
#archaeology #huntergatherers #WesternSiberia #fortifications #socialinequality #Ginicoefficients
https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.4
This diagram depicts the complete #revolution in #human #social organisation. #Baboon sexes virtually overlap (males map onto where females make a living). By total contrast, #Hadza women forage in their space and send men all over the landscape to fetch stuff for them and the kids!
That my friends is the Human Revolution in action!
Every day, Hadza way. The most memorable lecture I took part in my whole working life at Uni of East London was together with a couple of Hadza guys teaching on the 2nd year 'Origins of culture' course. They took us through the extraordinary article by Marshall Sahlins from 1960 on 'Origins of Society'. Sahlins used some quite dodgy data to compare baboon behaviours with human hunter-gatherers. My Hadza friends Athumani and Abeli of course had much greater knowledge of baboons! They had plenty to say (in KiSwahili, I translated for the class) on similarities and differences. There are significant myths for the Hadza thinking of baboons as close relatives who took a different path. Between them, Sahlins -- his neat idea that the revolutionary switch was from sex organising society to society organising sex -- and the Hadza hunters were giving UEL students the best possible education on what made us human. If only I made a recording of that lecture that day (October 2004).
Western scientists led by expert of Hadza studies Brian Wood, are catching up! Co-authors importantly include Hadza scholar Mariamu #Anyawire.
#Hadzabe #huntergatherers #humanrevolution
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0521
Blog: #IndigenousPeoples are the custodians and protectors of our earth
09 August 2024
By Akil Crichlow, et al.
"Over 3.3 billion people are highly vulnerable to climate change, with socioeconomic factors like gender, class, race, clanship, and ethnicity exacerbating this, particularly for women, children in low-income households, and #IndigenousPeoples.
"Therefore, it is critical that an all-of-society approach is strengthened so that we mitigate and adapt to the impacts of a changing climate, recover lost #biodiversity and degraded land, and deploy an #ecosystem-based adaptation model."
[...]
"Across the Atlantic, to #Tanzania in #EastAfrica, pastoralists are another of the Commonwealth’s Indigenous peoples. They include the #Barabaig and the #Maasai, as well as #huntergatherers like the #Hadzabe, #Akiye and #Sandawe.
"These groups lead diverse livelihoods but share a profound connection to the land. However, they face significant challenges regarding land tenure security. Despite the challenges, hope is not lost."
Full article:
https://thecommonwealth.org/news/blog-indigenous-peoples-are-custodians-and-protectors-our-earth