Angels of Our Better Nature that didn’t include any foragers
Can you expand on this or cite? I know there was some controversy or whether some of the groups he described as foragers were foragers, but I’m not sure what you are talking about.
I’ve discussed this with several posters on LW in the past so while searching for my previous citations, I found this much better summary of the issue:
The distinction being made here is that foragers practice immediate-return food acquisition and usually don’t build up much of a surplus; they are nearly always mobile (simply because most biomes vary in their productivity) with the few exceptions who occupy especially-rich areas where they can be sedentary posing some other confounds that may warrant treating them as a distinct type of society (though this is not yet a part of mainstream consensus within the field).
The societies Pinker cited had either been engaged in traditional forms of agriculture or horticulture, which are quite distinct patterns of resource acquisition and social organization, or had experienced pronounced discontinuities with their traditional resource base for some time after colonization (it would essentially be like inferring about a traditional Native American society from a poor reservation community of today).
Can you expand on this or cite? I know there was some controversy or whether some of the groups he described as foragers were foragers, but I’m not sure what you are talking about.
I’ve discussed this with several posters on LW in the past so while searching for my previous citations, I found this much better summary of the issue:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2i6/forager_anthropology/
The distinction being made here is that foragers practice immediate-return food acquisition and usually don’t build up much of a surplus; they are nearly always mobile (simply because most biomes vary in their productivity) with the few exceptions who occupy especially-rich areas where they can be sedentary posing some other confounds that may warrant treating them as a distinct type of society (though this is not yet a part of mainstream consensus within the field).
The societies Pinker cited had either been engaged in traditional forms of agriculture or horticulture, which are quite distinct patterns of resource acquisition and social organization, or had experienced pronounced discontinuities with their traditional resource base for some time after colonization (it would essentially be like inferring about a traditional Native American society from a poor reservation community of today).
Thanks, That’s apparently talking about one of the lists in The Blank Slate rather than Angels, but for purposes of your point works just the same.