/freedu/ - Free Education

First of all, a very broad over-view of the whole period, from around 3 million years ago (when the first stone tools were used by our distant evolutionary ancestors) to around 1000BC.

For some visual context to our complicated family tree

Some interesting information on our early social and economic organization, before we settled and developed agricultural practices.

Interesting piece about early human social organization, and the role of matriarchs.

The historical origins of agriculture and the consequent birth of civilization, as we understand it today.

Around 9000BC the first farming began in the Middle-East area, leading to the first settlements (rather than nomadic hunter-gatherers), the first real divisions of labour in society, the advent of writing, and so on.

Interestingly, the Americas came to agriculture (and its consequent developments) rather late. Geographically isolated from the rest of the increasingly globalized ancient world since the rising sea levels cut off the Bering Strait, and the colder temperatures made that part of the world harder to traverse, the American civilizations developed in a very interesting and unique way.

"Since the 1960s, the consensus among anthropologists, historians, and sociologists has been that early hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed more leisure time than is permitted by capitalist and agrarian societies"

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Hunter-gatherer)

This is a pretty interesting neuroscientific interpretation of the origins of modern human cognition

>Origins of the Modern Mind proposes a three-stage development of human symbolic capacity through culture:

>Mimetic culture: The watershed adaptation allowing humans to function as symbolic and cultural beings was a revolutionary improvement in motor control, the "mimetic skill" required to rehearse and refine the body's movements in a voluntary and systematic way, to remember those rehearsals, and to reproduce them on command. Following this development, Homo erectus assimilated and reconceptualized events to create various prelinguistic symbolic traditions such as rituals, dance, and craft.

>Mythic cultures arose as a result of the acquisition of speech and the invention of symbols. Mimetic representation serves as a preadaptation to this development.

>Technology-supported culture: Finally, the cognitive ecology dominated by ephemeral face-to-face communication has changed for most of us as a result of the external memory-store that reading and writing permit. Computer technology intensifies these changes by offering even more extensive capacities for external storage and retrieval of information.

Video related [20 mins]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_8652_kJDk

"In the field of human genetics, the name Mitochondrial Eve refers to the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA), in a direct, unbroken, maternal line, of all currently living humans, who is estimated to have lived approximately 100,000–200,000 years ago. This is the most recent woman from whom all living humans today descend, in an unbroken line, on their mother’s side, and through the mothers of those mothers, and so on, back until all lines converge on one person. Because all mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) generally is passed from mother to offspring without recombination, all mtDNA in every living person is directly descended from hers by definition, differing only by the mutations that over generations have occurred in the germ cell mtDNA since the conception of the original "Mitochondrial Eve".

Mitochondrial Eve is named after mitochondria and the biblical Eve. Unlike her biblical namesake, she was not the only living human female of her time. However, her female contemporaries, excluding her mother, failed to produce a direct unbroken female line to any living person in the present day.

Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived between 99,000 and 200,000 years ago, most likely in East Africa, when Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically modern humans) were developing as a population distinct from other human sub-species."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

Interesting stuff. We are all related, so recently when you consider evolutionary history.

Interesting article on how class society was created by the advent of agriculture.

Also see http://history-world.org/neolithic1.htm for an interesting run-down on the period and the process, although at times the author blatantly underplays the importance of this societal structural development.

> "The surplus production that agriculture made possible was the key to the

social transformations that made up another dimension of the Neolithic

revolution. Surpluses meant that cultivators could exchange part of their

harvest for the specialized services and productions of noncultivators, such

as toolmakers and weavers. Human communities became differentiated on an

occupational basis. Political and religious leaders arose who eventually

formed elite classes that intermarried and became involved in ruling and

ceremonies on a full-time basis."

But then…

> "But in the Neolithic period the specialized

production of stone tools, weapons, and perhaps pottery was a more important

consequence of the development of agriculture than the formation of elites."

Seriously? The formation of elites was not an important consequence? Pottery was more important? Maybe so…

> "Originally, each household crafted the tools and weapons it required, just as

it wove its own baskets and produced its own clothing. Over time, however,

families or individuals who proved particularly skilled in these tasks began

to manufacture implements beyond their own needs and exchange them for grain,

milk, or meat."

Economic history goes this far back.

>>699

I heard this "muh primitive gummunism" bullshit quite a lot, so I thought I could look at your article.

>Modern man, according to many anthropologists

Great! I love reading stuff from people with no actual background in that field.

>For many thousands of years there was no private property, no money, no working for wages, no stock exchange and no class divisions. People lived with and for one another. It was a system of primitive communism.

Wrong. Some people in the stone age used shells as currency. When you go back further you can't really reconstruct how people lived. So they could have traded, they could have had hierarchies. Nobody knows. If you think the idea of them trading is invalid, so is the claim that they lived in "primitive communism".

>The remnants of it can still be seen in surviving primitive communities such as of the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, the pygmies of the Congo rain forests, Australian aborigines and South American Indians.

Does the author know anything about "primitive communities"? It seems as if he thinks life was better back then. With all the tribal wars and weird cultural beliefs, just as pygmies and tribes in the Amazonas region still have.

>What was produced […] was not the private property of the hunter or the hunting party or of the gatherer(s) but was to be shared out among all the members of the group on an equitable basis.

Source? None. Nobody knows. In some tribes there are quite steep hierarchies, so not everyone gets the same, even if the group is small.

>[settled agricultural communities] meant the end of free access to the means of production that had obtained in hunter-gatherer societies.

Yes, because there never was a mixture of these nomadic and settled lifestyles. Sure. Look at Agropastoralism. In my mother tongue are several words for "half-nomads". This just shows how little the author knows on this subject.

I won't bother to comment the rest of this sophistry.

It's stupid to see this marxism meme forced upon this subject. All the categories marxist think in are of no importance to these communities. Just as social ideas were around before Marx was born, but everytime someone wants to start a social movement marxist are there to claim that it's all their idea.

Marxism failed every time, so now they claim that it worked in societies we hardly know anything about. To claim anything in that regard shows how desperate marxists are.

This is a really good short pamphlet written by Engels in 1876 called "The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man". It is unfinished, and is often published in "Dialectics of Nature", but was intended to be included in a larger work that was never completed.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/

Engels - "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State".

For a fundamental Marxist understanding of the origin and historical development of the most fundamental building blocks of human societies.