Thanks for posting the videos. Two thoughts that came from watching that:
1. It is really interesting that we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.
2. Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.
They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died. Compare with e.g. battles in the ancient Mediterranean, where the fighting would have continued until one side panics and tries to flee, and the winning side kills anyone who can't run away fast enough. Now maybe they're simply bad at warfare, but I think a more likely explanation is that they're intentionally not escalating to that level of violence and mostly stay at a standoff distance where fatalities are unlikely. The narrator also calls it a "formal battle" at one point.
In any case, I don't think you can ascribe much of their bow-and-arrow tactics to base instincts.
I took an anthropology class that focused heavily on the Papua New Guinea highlanders and they fight a ritualized tit-for-tat warfare where they rarely kill and when they do, it’s essentially tribal revenge for the last kill. Almost every male participates and they specifically avoid high intensity warfare because the cost could effectively kill a tribe’s agricultural output.
Note though that even in the Mediterranean, routes where most of the enemy was killed were relatively rare.
In battle yes. In sieges it was much more common, along with the murder/enslavement of all or the majority of the non fighting population.
Sometimes this sort of ritualised combat is a way for young men to show off their bravery without too much chance getting killed. Probably also helps with tribal cohesion. And I assume reduce the chance of full-on, lets kill everyone in the tribe, violence between groups.
"They had had a long battle with what looks to be hundreds of participants and there were a few wounded, but nobody died."
Observe the weapons. Most of them are sharpened sticks and they had a limited supply. Less deadly than swords and no mass manufacturing of weapons either.
The spears would be lucky to penetrate the ribcage. But they could go through the gut or throat, and if they were embedded in a thigh, they could easily cause sepsis.
You can easily kill someone with a fire-hardened pointed stick or a wooden club, if you really want to. I think it is just that they don't want to.
In the battle footage there is little or no hand to hand conflict, and the spears are thrown by hand (from what I remember): no catapults or sheathes to launch them from. At one point, someone removes a spear from his leg, and while it does look nasty, it doesn't look like a fatal injury unless sepsis etc gets in. I'm sure they did have battle clubs, but those aren't used much in this battle. (This may be partly because the battle is in rough/hilly terrain and it is easier to launch spears at people from a distance than run over to them.)
Guns began to enter the region in the 70s and 80s in large numbers, which apparently changed the dynamic. Today's Port Moresby, the most modern part of the island, is apparently much more dangerous than these areas were.
You’d have to catch them first. If you watch the video there almost zero hand to hand combat. Their arrows don’t seem to have stabilizers either.
Obviously if this was filmed on video someone could have given one side a machine gun. Would’ve they used it or would have they still opted to maintain the tradition and fight the old way. The battle may have other reasons besides 100% dominating or wiping out the opponent.
Sadly, guns have entered these conflicts since that film was recorded, and there have been far more fatalities. They've changed the dynamic and not for the better. Central government doesn't seem to have much control over big portions of PNG. Language and remoteness are two major barriers to that.
To be fair, I wish the whole world was much "worse" at warfare in the same way as they are. We'd probably be a much happier world overall. Or at the very least less destructive.
That's because very primitive humans still have a bicameral mind, i.e. things appear to them as auditory hallucinations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
"a bicameral mentality was the "normal and ubiquitous state" of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, at the end of the Bronze Age"
I'm pretty sure Julian Jaynes' work is entirely hypothetical and is thought if as just an interesting idea rather than actually having any semblance of truth to it... unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
> unless you actually believe the Greeks were amongst the first humans to truly emerge with consciousness which seems farfetched to me
To the extent that human consciousness can be described from within itself as something distinct from a pan-consciousness of all things, is it farfetched to consider it as not existing until it did emerge? In what artifacts could someone discern the threshold at which consciousness arose?
You read Snow Crash and missed that it was fiction.
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You are aware that this is the theory of a single crank, and not supported by any modern scientific thought, yes?
not my downvote, my feelings were not hurt at all
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd <obviously do what the mainstream would do>." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
3. Handing a people that can not progress, exponential tech, without which they regress, but which also kills them all when they regress, is a trapdoor function worthy of St.Fermi .
In addition, please check out Sentinelese tribe from the North Sentinel Islands in India [1]. It is more mindblogging than this, in my opinion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
Not even close.
I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.
And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.
>Our modern society has not progressed at all from any of these base instincts, and in some cases & applications we have gotten worse.
Not at all surprising given that base instincts come from genetics and genes take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to change significantly.
Agreed. My theory about our "great filter" event is that our technological advancement proceeds so much faster than our genetics, and that will be our ruin.
To put in plain terms, we keep inventing far better "spears" (including kinetic, bio, and chemical) that allow one to kill many, while still behaving like cavemen.
Great filters are how genetics change. When you have two societies, one that kills itself and one that doesn't, that is how the world genetics shift more towards avoiding societal self-killing.
In my opinion,it is more about culture than it is genetics, although I do think genetics are modified by culture in the long term.
Possibly, but look at modern times. It takes years to build social constructs that might guide us towards cooperation and non-violence. Yet, those can be overturned in an instant by a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain, which i believe we all have.
I have given this more thought, but too late to edit. I would like to add a very important specific fact of the modern day.
Thanks to the Balkanization of our media landscape, and social media targetting: "a slick turn of phrase that appeals to our base instincts/caveman brain" can be tailored just for you. It has never been easier to make us behave in crazy ways.
I genuinely believe that the existing incarnation of "social media" could lead to the death of billions of humans.
Yes, I think you're overall right on your description of what is happening, but I disagree somehow with your analysis. My reading of that is that social media 'accelerate' culture, and some of it is towards hateful, violent way. It's not that we come 'back' to animal instincts, it's that some new, emergent cultures push towards violence.
To your other point, I have a friend who thinks social media and online porn drive fetishism, and that fetishism drive a lot of the new 'illiterate' political movements. I don't think I totally agree with him on the illiterate part (I mean, Renaud Camus certainly managed to read Maurras before paraphrasing him, in an objectively worse way, sure, but still), but I have trouble arguing against his other points. He also thinks that this fetishism taken too far will push people towards a death cult, and kill millions
> I do think genetics are modified by culture in the long term.
For example, "self-domestication" by executing or ostracizing individuals that don’t fit into the culture.
You don't really need to go that far. Alimentation changes are enough to force genetic change. Or if you want to go the darwinist/anthropologic way: "https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/yes-homo-mammals-keep-evolvi..."
They are only modified if there is some form of selection though, like for example some people say of the Dutch and their height.
In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.
I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.
Yeah, i'm pretty sure observational studies after natural disasters (those who followed up Katerina especially) showed that it wasn't really the case. Yes, you have looters everywhere (Even in Japan), but most people help their neighbours (or even strangers if those looks non-threatening). Only when you have a central authority figure present and a lot of people you see riot and aggression, hence the reason why in most countries that need help, aid distribution is as decentralized as possible nowadays (centralized distribution is a _really_ good way of having people killed in the mass anyway).
Is it more or less scary of the filter event was the creation of plate tectonics and the phosphorous cycle?
You are however under no obligation to grant your instincts unrestricted access to the pilot seat.
> we live on a planet that has such a society, along side one that had built nuclear weapons, and was soon to walk on the moon.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson
And we are not the ones that live in the future... This two pre-bronze age tribes live in it, the future we all will experience with collapse of our natural world and our civilization.
Do you think they're more likely to survive global warming than a relatively technologically developed nation?
Probably, actually. “Primitive” societies survived the ice age. Modern societies depend on a relatively fragile system of infrastructure and many of the individuals in modern society are utterly dependent on it. Technology only works within its rightful context, and 99% of it is completely useless after infrastructural collapse.
Meanwhile, premodern societies depend on the ecosystem as a whole which tends to adapt over time; the individuals in such societies are more self sufficient in terms of ability to survive the elements.
So it’s just as likely those not dependent on modern technology will do fine against the vicissitudes of climate change as much as those who are dependent on it. At least in terms of ability to survive. At least, their expectations of survival baseline won’t change nearly as much in the face of natural disaster.
Yeah but because we have so much ressources and people we also have all in all quite some survival nerds, who could learn from all the tribes in the world and have the starting bonus of high tech. Things wpuld be fough with a society collapse, but the knowledge is out and will survive, except mass nuclear holocaust that totally amd drastically changes the climate. But then those tribes would struggle, too, if their sweet potato does not grow anymore.