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Human History Gets a Rewrite
The Atlantic ^ | October 18, 2021 | review by William Deresiewicz

Posted on 10/24/2021 10:17:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv

...That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a "hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state." They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.

The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn't worth the cost... None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: animalhusbandry; calusa; gbeklitepe; gobeklitepe; godsgravesglyphs; huntergatherers; louisiana; povertypoint
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1 posted on 10/24/2021 10:17:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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To: Fractal Trader; StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 1ofmanyfree; 21twelve; 24Karet; ...
Thanks Fractal Trader.

2 posted on 10/24/2021 10:18:10 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Thank you for all your posts FRiend!


3 posted on 10/24/2021 10:32:42 PM PDT by 31R1O
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To: SunkenCiv

helping launch the Occupy movement


4 posted on 10/24/2021 10:48:59 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: 31R1O
My pleasure.

5 posted on 10/24/2021 10:52:18 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: MarvinStinson

LOL


6 posted on 10/24/2021 10:52:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: SunkenCiv; MadMax, the Grinning Reaper; Liz; Slyfox; ridesthemiles; skip2myloo; Grampa Dave

‘got a job at the London School of Economics’

That’s what produced Kissinger and Soros.

Can you say GLOBALIST.


7 posted on 10/24/2021 10:55:13 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: SunkenCiv

blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read—but also as an organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement and coin its slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”


8 posted on 10/24/2021 10:58:01 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: MarvinStinson

Oh, sorry, misunderstood.


9 posted on 10/24/2021 11:08:24 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: SunkenCiv

‘Graeber, a committed anarchist’


10 posted on 10/24/2021 11:09:03 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: MarvinStinson

And a genius, sez the writer.


11 posted on 10/24/2021 11:11:20 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.)
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To: SunkenCiv

And a genius, sez the left wing Atlantic’s left wing writer..


12 posted on 10/25/2021 12:45:25 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: SunkenCiv

Thanks Sunk.
Ordered the pre-release Audible.
Graham Hancock has sparked my interest in pre-Younger Dryass. Just ain’t a lot out there.


13 posted on 10/25/2021 1:21:32 AM PDT by misanthrope (Deranged, sinister, deplorable troll)
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To: SunkenCiv
...That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined.

It’s the height of arrogance by academia to consider those before us as ignorant rubes.

Culturally not being western does not by default mean stupid.

Not being technologically advanced as we are does not mean they were stupid either.

The idiots are the archeologists who make those baseless assumptions.

14 posted on 10/25/2021 1:22:13 AM PDT by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith…)
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To: misanthrope
Try searching with "Younger Dryas".

"Dryass" is sumpin' else. ;)

15 posted on 10/25/2021 1:37:18 AM PDT by Does so (USA is run from 2446 Belmont Rd, NW, DC, (Kalorama). Why else the 9/11 deadline for Afghanistan?)
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To: SunkenCiv

“None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into...”

Note the leftist strawman.


16 posted on 10/25/2021 2:14:40 AM PDT by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: SunkenCiv

SunkenCiv, can you tell us the title and author of the book that is discussed in the article?


17 posted on 10/25/2021 2:38:33 AM PDT by Tax-chick (Nature, art, silence, simplicity, peace. And fungi.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Interesting article but written from a remarkably shallow point of view. What we might expect from an english teacher who didn’t get tenure, and never studied anthropology.


18 posted on 10/25/2021 4:32:48 AM PDT by hinckley buzzard ( Resist the narrative.)
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To: misanthrope
Try this:
It's a revision of Hapgood's earlier Earth's Shifting Crust to which THE Albert Einstein wrote the forward.

ML/NJ

19 posted on 10/25/2021 7:39:52 AM PDT by ml/nj ("If the Representatives of the People betray their Constituents ..." Federalist #28; READ IT!)
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To: misanthrope
For the record, here is the first paragraph of Einstein's Forward:
ML/NJ

20 posted on 10/25/2021 7:59:51 AM PDT by ml/nj ("If the Representatives of the People betray their Constituents ..." Federalist #28; READ IT!)
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