This is a great question, but I’m afraid the answer is that, no matter what you read, we don’t know. Not with much confidence, anyway.
There are some broad strokes we’re pretty sure about. But there’s lots of details that we have to speculate and infer. We can’t really extrapolate from modern hunter gatherers because they are atypical in that they are the only hunter gatherers that stayed hunter gatherers after the widespread adoption of agriculture. Same for extant pastoralists (who didn’t convert to ranching).
We face similar problems trying to infer what early humans were like from achaeology and from animal studies. We can make some educated guesses, but the degree of accuracy is low.
I think it’s reasonable to say we know insufficiently much about early humans to help you answer the original debate you were having with sufficient confidence to conclude much from it.
What frontier archeology research is necessary to resolve the question of, e.g., ancestral human reproductive community size, then? I know we’re confused as a civilization. If you don’t think it’s because there’s some great theorist we haven’t caught up with, then what evidence remains uncollected?
I think the evidence simply doesn’t exist and can’t be collected. We might get lucky and find something definitive, but more likely we’ll keep finding tiny clues that can be interpreted multiple ways with low confidence.
This is akin to the problems we face in paleontology. It just doesn’t take very long to lose so much inforamtion that we’re left guessing based on crumbs.
I think ancient DNA analysis is the space to watch here. We’ve all heard about Neanderthal intermixing by now, but it’s only recently become possible to determine e.g. that two skeletons found in the same grave were 2nd cousins on their father’s side, or whatever. It seems like this can tell us a lot about social behavior that would otherwise be obscure.
This is a great question, but I’m afraid the answer is that, no matter what you read, we don’t know. Not with much confidence, anyway.
There are some broad strokes we’re pretty sure about. But there’s lots of details that we have to speculate and infer. We can’t really extrapolate from modern hunter gatherers because they are atypical in that they are the only hunter gatherers that stayed hunter gatherers after the widespread adoption of agriculture. Same for extant pastoralists (who didn’t convert to ranching).
We face similar problems trying to infer what early humans were like from achaeology and from animal studies. We can make some educated guesses, but the degree of accuracy is low.
I think it’s reasonable to say we know insufficiently much about early humans to help you answer the original debate you were having with sufficient confidence to conclude much from it.
What frontier archeology research is necessary to resolve the question of, e.g., ancestral human reproductive community size, then? I know we’re confused as a civilization. If you don’t think it’s because there’s some great theorist we haven’t caught up with, then what evidence remains uncollected?
I think the evidence simply doesn’t exist and can’t be collected. We might get lucky and find something definitive, but more likely we’ll keep finding tiny clues that can be interpreted multiple ways with low confidence.
This is akin to the problems we face in paleontology. It just doesn’t take very long to lose so much inforamtion that we’re left guessing based on crumbs.
I think ancient DNA analysis is the space to watch here. We’ve all heard about Neanderthal intermixing by now, but it’s only recently become possible to determine e.g. that two skeletons found in the same grave were 2nd cousins on their father’s side, or whatever. It seems like this can tell us a lot about social behavior that would otherwise be obscure.