"I'll have the roast duck with the mango salsa."
Cheers!
Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.
But the passage that really stopped me short was this:
"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."
That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction." A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who'd just written the lyrics for Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn't doing Pocahontas. "Well, the minute they mentioned it," he said, "I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline." Sure enough, when the film came out, John Smith and his men were the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World. "They prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," warns the medicine man, whereas Chief Powhatan wants everyone to be "guided to a place of peace." Fortunately, Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to "paint with all the colours of the wind."
In reality, Pocahontas's fellow Algonquin Indians were preyed on by the Iroquois, "who took captives home to torture them before death," observes Nicholas Wade en passant. The Iroquois? Surely not. Only a year or two back, the ethnic grievance lobby managed to persuade Congress to pass a resolution that the United States Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation -- which would have been news to the dead white males who wrote it. With Disney movies, one assumes it's just the modishness of showbiz ignoramuses and whatever multiculti theorists they've put on the payroll as consultants. But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. "Most archaeologists," says LeBlanc, "ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.... The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money."
And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn't asking, "Can you break a twenty?" "He also had with him," notes professor Keeley, "a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change." Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.
Not for the first time, the experts turn out to be playing what children call "Opposite Land." There's more truth in Cole Porter's couplet from Find Me A Primitive Man:
I don't mean the kind that belongs to a club But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.
Although Porter was the kind that belongs to a club, the second line accurately conveys his own taste in men. He'd have been very annoyed if Mister Primitive had turned out to be some mellow colours-of-your-windiness hippy-dippy granola-cruncher.
Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."
Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.
I was interested to read Wade's book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren't Muslim last time I checked, but evidently decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims' relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You'll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia's leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man's penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we're not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."
It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.
nttt
It is a sign of societal regression and devolution that this subject requires elucidation. Indeed the very phrase "noble savage," advanced by the pervert Rousseau, has been used ironically for over two hundred years by normal adults who have in fact always known better.
Many of our Indian tribes didn't go to war over resources and hunting grounds. Very often the wars were fought for warrior's honor (bragging rights) and to capture the enemy's women for sex slaves and to make babies for YOUR TRIBE. Larger the tribe the stronger you are to conquer other tribes
It is a sign of societal regression and devolution that this subject requires elucidation. Indeed the very phrase "noble savage," advanced by the pervert Rousseau, has been used ironically for over two hundred years by normal adults who have in fact always known better.
On the contrary, scientists haven't forgotten history, that's for the ignorant and the stupid, as illustrated by the MSM.
Clearly, considering the propensity of human beings to shape their interpretation of evidence based on their personal worldview, one must consider ones associations more thoroughly.
Again, you are misinterpreting journalistic interpretation with history.
Being that Steyn is so brilliant in his ability to torture the logic of others, I am glad he is a believer in Jesus Christ.
Funny that there's no evidence of that in the article. Nor did he mention any Jesus, Christ or otherwise ...
Why do you ping me again?
A logical route of import into the North American continent would be over the fabled Beiring Straight land bridge from Asia.
While the Mandans are perhaps the most northernmost tribe known to raise chickens, they were also raised by tribes in what is now Latin America. The Inca even developed their own breed, the Aracuna who lay pastel colored eggs, generally light blue or green.
Therefore, I think it is a stretch to say the Mandan didn't get the chickens until about the time of Lewis and Clark. French Canadian trader Sieur de la Verendrye in 1738 visited the Mandan and recorded many of their agricultural practices, including poultry, in his dairy. One crackpot theory at the time even claimed the Mandan were the descendants Prince Madoc and his followers who had emigrated to America from Wales circa 1170 because they were so civilized (i.e. like white people).
As a boy growing up in North Dakota, I can remember reading parts of la Verendrye's dairy (translated into English, of course) getting a real chuckle at how advanced these "savages" were. One particular passage about how they huddled together naked under buffalo robes in their communal earth lodges to keep warm during the winter was particularly memorable. la Verendrye pointed this out, it seemed, not for the interest but to prove that despite all, they weren't quite as advanced as Europeans after all.
Restorer's point that disease immunities were not well developed in native peoples is, I think, quite valid. The gene pools were definitely limited by tribalism, a relatively sparse population and a rural lifestyle which offered limited opportunities to stir the gene pool.
"I'll have the roast duck with the mango salsa."
Cheers!
Sorry, but I just can't find any mention of pre-colombian chickens in the Americas. Do you have any links or sources prior to 1700?
Thanks for the ping!
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[Araucana] originated from Chile, Pockets of Araucana can
still be seen in the Amazon Basin and in isolated areas in the high fincas of the
Andes Range. The usual colours are Lavender, Blue, Black/Red, Silver Duckwing,
Golden Duckwing, Blue/Red, Pyle, Crele, Spangled, Cuckoo, Black and White. Also
some non-standard colours. It is a prolific layer of good-sized eggs and a very hardy
bird. When the Spaniards arrived in South America, bringing with them their poultry,
they found that the indigenous Indians had their own breeds which soon crossed
with the imported stock.
http://www.araucana.org.uk/page3.html
We learned the need to be ready to wage war from the native peoples who basically fought, from time, to time, total warfare. They taught the settlers a type of warfare that was not done back in Europe...
Any time you run into a culture that thinks the proper behavior warfare is either the the capture of enemy women and children past the infant stage to enslave/adopt them into the tribe or to outright kill them all, killing of infants, while adult male military captives were expected to show how brave and stoic they were while their enemy's women tortured them to death when you are used to following a fairly ritualized form of warfare that mostly let non-combatants alone, you are going to have some pretty quick adaptation of techniques to protect yourself and your loved ones.
These are the lessons our early settler forefathers learned. It colored, and still colors at least some of our concept about how to use force.
Otherwise, the story is dead on.
You are most welcome! It is posts and threads like these that make me proud to be a FReeper.
They were NOT DECIMATED! far more than 10% of them were carried off by the new diseases. Decimation is the destruction or killing of ten per cent. That is ten out of a hundred. Ninety remain. The Reds practiced decimation back in their Civil War in Russia on units that failed an objective or retreated. An offending unit was formed up, counted off, and every tenth man was shot.
Now don't get me started on "medium/media" ...
Thanks, I didn't know that anyone, ever, beat up on the Iroquois.
On the other hand, I can no longer console myself by thinking that if we (Huron) were defeated, it was by the absolute baddest bunch in the forest.
There is also an interesting account of this family in "The Bedside Book of Bastards" (Hardcover) by historian Dorothy M Johnson, who also wrote the stories on which the movies "Jeremiah Johnson" and "A Man Called Horse" were based. The book is out of print, I believe, but can still be found through Amazon.com
It's a collection of historical accounts of some of history's most notorious "badasses" (/grin), but told with a humorous twist and a sort of Paul Harvey "rest of the story" flair. It also makes a great coffee table book when priggish guests or relatives drop by!
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