I told you that in these months and years I often feel loose in time, sliding backwards many decades and reliving teen fragments or pieces from my thirties as if they were happening Now, in dreams or in half-waking or sometimes even up and fully caffeinated. It happened vividly just before I sat to write this. I was back in a high school journalism class taught by Marvin the First, and I was getting and losing my first real job, as a reporter, for the Courier.
Probably I should be writing about that. There’s a slim chance I will, offline, but for our purposes, as I said, the inner sanctum is currently closed. So instead I’m going to slide further today.
Oldest deliberate fire dates back 400,000 years, and was made by Neanderthals (1.9K views, 6 days ago)
A story which, if true, poses a challenge to my/our ideas about the deep human past. Not a decisive challenge, but an interesting one.
Taming fire used to be part of a whole cluster of nominal advances (including cooked food and Storytelling) comprising the “Great Leap Forward”, theorized to date back about 50 thousand years, and sometimes implied to be the genesis period of ‘fully modern’ humans (whatever that means).
Which in turn meant that the model of humanity’s Eden existed for 40 thousand years, from the GLF until the great fiasco of sedentism, agriculture, rulers, and History commenced.
Some months ago someone asked me, “Well, what is an ancestrally appropriate diet? What did they eat, um, ‘in the beginning’?”. My answer was based on that period of 40 thousand years alone. It still is, but only to a point, because if ‘we’ were cooking for ten times as long as previously thought, that’s a much larger theoretical dataset and might provide a more comprehensively robust answer.
It doesn’t change the fact that a diet heavily skewed toward grains is not as good for you as it is good for the profit margins of kings or whoever rules the granary. But still …
Potentially instructive.
I also think that this story brings Us into much closer kinship with subspecies neanderthalis, although that’s more speculation that Science.
***
There remains the question of: So Fuckin’ What?
This position holds firm in saying ‘maybe you’re exactly right, mr. bigbrain, but I don’t see how it matters. Civilization and/or Your Fiasco happened, and it’s not un-happening, so … what good are all your theories, for purposes of telling us what to do next–how to live?’.
Quite possibly not much good at all. (Except maybe … aesthetically.)
But …
I would contend that if you cast all this knowledge and prehistory aside as useless guesswork …
You’re never again in full good faith going to be Opining Confidently about what Human Nature even is. And …
Your very morality cannot legitimately be rooted in some completely made-up idea of what is Natural, or un-natural.
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The best anarcho-primitivism is not Prescriptive, which is why the most rabid anti-prims insist that all of it must be. It’s very helpful in the construction of straw men. I am calling bullshit on that as a philosophical strategy for the promotion of tough hard-nosed pragmatism and the Oh Well, Nothing’s To Be Done About It Now school.
And the horse James T. Kirk rode in on, too.
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Is recycling purely and simply the Right Thing to do?
How do you know?
How should … I know?
Is it still true if I have to drag my glass 90 miles in order to recycle it, using a fossil-fuel burning engine?
And …
Did I, as a young animal so brimming with bright-eyed integrity, ever really have a chance,
being born into our world, this world, the world as we know it, ten thousand years after the Fall?
The marvins and the fire are whispering to me softly
No not really, mijito
Youre not a victim, but even so
This is the truth of your tragedy
So mote it be.