Are We Underestimating Hunter Gathers?

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i once spent almost four hours on joe rogan's podcast with graham hancock, who wrote about how stuff just keeps getting older. So my interpretation this is that we underestimated hunter gathers. They are obviously quite capable of doing much more than we thought. It's a sort of a bigotry of low expectations imposed on the past. i gat o nice way to put it. Here they are the best example of bigotry of l i really like that.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

In this conversation, based on the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Shermer speaks with professor of comparative archaeology, David Wengrow, about his pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology that fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.