#Neolithic revolution

[banefort]

Not to sound like a broken record talking about nomadic v settled lifestyles in HOTD, but an interesting dynamic that has come of the Daemon-Harrenhal sideplot is between him, the castle, and Alys and Ser Simon Strong, is what they represent as manifestations of the Neolithic agrarian revolution.

Daemon’s time at Harrenhal is spent oscillating between the two factions. Simon represents the foundations of a settled society. He dictates Daemon’s waking hours and daily schedule (against his will), keeps him tied to his political duties, and goes so far as to impel Daemon to guarantee the longevity of Harrenhal by commencing its reconstruction - affirming a settled and regulated lifestyle.

On the flip side Alys represents nomadic life, occupying the halls of the castle much like a ‘ghost’, only affecting circumstance through cerebral happenstances, whilst also showing a marked affection for the natural world and ancient natural structures (Wierwoods), and repeatedly identifies with the natural world via totemism (calling herself a barn owl). She is the history of Westeros and the First Men made manifest, and personifies a nomadic lifestyle which has been lost to to the regions south of the Wall.

By having Daemon constantly tossed between Ser Simon and Alys - settled and nomadic, polytheism versus paganism, agriculture versus shepherding, he occupies a liminal space and is caught between the refractions of history, and through his tumultuous residence, is implicitly drawn to question the true strength of monarchy, settled lifestyles, and all forms of contemporary power structures; for Alys, and her associated phantasmagorical neolithic ways, are clearly established to have had a far more substantial and cerebral impact on Daemon’s psyche than Ser Simon, who, while Daemon does entertain, he visibly holds no regard for, as opposed to Alys, who he is both wary and keen for. This is substantiated by his being shown to feel conflict and guilt over his perpetuation of Targaryen ethnocentric incest, his failure to fulfill his duties to his faction (be it the Blacks or his children/wife), amongst others, following his arrival at Harrenhal, suggesting that through her presence as an all-encompassing totem of nomadic conducts, his deep-rooted pride in Targaryen legacy, “the establishment” and all things modern, rapidly unwind. The paths of his - and all other citizens’, ancestors calls to him from an intangible, psychosomatic place. His contemporary comforts are all but stripped bare in some primal, unbidden rush to follow in their footsteps.

[ashwasdefinitelyhere]

do you think ancient neurodivergent people were like “my special interest is barley” during the neolithic revolution

or something

[health-tips-23]

What Happened During The Neolithic Revolution? | Facts and History Of N...

[nikolasongsa]

When tillage begins, other arts follow. Thus, peasants are the founders of human civilization.

(Daniel Webster, American statesman, 1782-1852).

[historyfiles]

Kebaran Culture: the Palaeolithic's regionally-dominant Levantine Aurignacian made a transition into the Kebaran or Kebarian culture, the very start of the path towards farming.

[inspofromancientworld]

The Neolithic began at different times, depending on how and when the warming of the Holocene made agriculture viable. While there is some evidence of humans deliberately planting seeds prior to the beginning of the First Agricultural Revolution (another name for the Neolithic), it wasn't until the Holocene that it was practical to shift from a hunter-gatherer type society to a settled agrarian one. Not all people chose to settle, though, such as those in Sub-Sahara Africa and Australia, and there is evidence of people moving between settled and nomadic life styles, depending on local climate. This was the beginning of the type of society that we're more familiar with.[image text] [slide 1] Neolithic about 10,000 BCE to 2000 BCE

Key features: farming, animal domestication, settlements (also known as the Neolithic Revolution or the First Agricultural Revolution

Lasted through the Protodynastic period in Egypt (about 3150 BCE) and the rise of the pre-Shang Erlitou culture in China (about 2000 BCE)

The climate changes of the Younger Dryas cold climate changed to the warmer Holocene

Happened in many places at once, leading to local varieties of plants and animals

Crops in the Levant and Fertile Crescent included wheat, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and flax. In much of Asia, the predominant crop was rice. In the New world, maize and potatoes were the predominant crops.

Animals that were domesticated include dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs

[slide 2]

Pottery became much more common as people started living in settlements, appearing at different times in each area, often with distinct patterns and decorations being used in an area

Goblekli Tepe build around 9500 BCE - may be the oldest human built center of worship used by nomadic peoples

Remains of figs in Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) dated 9400 BCE- oldest evidence of human cultivated food as figs couldn't be pollinated by insects, but reproduced via cuttings

In Sub-Saharan Africa, development tended toward pastoralism, following herds, rather than settlements.

Crop domestication occurred by 4500 BCE (the Formative Stage) in Mesoamerica, possibly starting as early as 11,000-10,000 BCE (the Archaic Era)

In Australia, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle largely continued until the arrival of the Europeans in 1788 CE, though there is evidence for 'fire farming,' deliberately setting fires to clear underbrush, to open forests for the growth of grasslands, to encourage plants to produce a green flush, to attract and to drive game for hunting

[end image text]

[ibijau]

hi!!! i hope it's ok to ask, but i was wondering if you could share your favourite things you've learnt so far in your book abt the neolithic?

I'm going through it very slow and I just started it, so I'm still going through the intro for now

The thing that has struck me the hardest is the just mentioned idea that we were predators when we were hunter-gatherers, and we're still predators now that we have agriculture, it's just preying at a much, much wider scale.

The same intro also suggested that the type of plant and animals we domesticated in various part of the world had a notable effect on the cultures that developed around them bc those plants and animals have different need that required a different approach to keeping them

I'm just 14 pages in and I'm really, really excited to see what they're gonna be saying once they start really developing their ideas and findings

I'm also reading another book on a close topic and the intro was like yeah agriculture is cool but it's really the capacity to stock stuff that has been most impactful on humans and I'm also excited to see that argument developped

[strawberry-seal77]

[gremlinist]

certified post hunter gatherer here

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

pain and misery

[sanjerina]

Not to go off, but:

- structural, racial, and financial inequalities make it next to impossible for some parents to parent effectively (because they’re working six jobs and/or are in prison and/or are chronically ill);

- their kids go to understaffed and underfunded schools who are expected to provide not just education but also child care, mentoring, mediation, and twelve other unfunded mandates to support their students;

- the kids wind up trying to parent themselves and counsel their friends in schools that are not following through on their IEPs, not providing effective classroom management, and not able to keep sufficient adults around for supervision — and schools are thence full of dysregulated children. many of them high as balls, who do not feel safe;

- and our health insurance companies give me and my colleagues in community mental health like 8-12 therapy sessions to fix alllll of that and refer them out to community supports that either don’t take public insurance or straight up don’t exist.

(Plus we still don’t agree on best practices for teaching people to safely use television and the internet, much less these damn smartphones, and our brains are still running hardware from 150,000 years before the Neolithic Revolution.)

So not to kvetch or anything? but I think the rich assholes who have been profiteering off of the aforementioned inequalities should be obligated to spend a few billion dollars to fund some smart people who have been trying to actually fix, like, literally any part of this.

I ranted yesterday at the end of this post about C-PTSD about the extensive damage chronic stress and chaos does to brains. We have set up a system in which this damage is almost unavoidable for a vast number of people, and it’s only snowballing out of control as the generational trauma continues to rack up. (This shit was already endemic when I was a kid, and I’m old enough to be some of these kids’ grandparents.)

We continue to ask more out of workers, more out of children, and more out of their schools, and while thank GOD people are finally talking openly about the impact on mental health, community mental health centers designed to patch you up and send you back for more systemic damage are … not gonna be enough.

Like, it’s something! Therapy will and can and does help! But if you are sensing the game is rigged, I am here to validate the shit out of that for you.

And yet. And yet. We go on. Gotta haul on that moral arc and bend it. 💛

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 16: Ancient History VII and Earlier

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

I am particularly in need of more specific non-European suggestions in particular, but all suggestions are welcome.

[banefort]

Already seen a lot of people use the Cain and Abel archetype to describe Aegon and Aemond’s fratricidal relationship, when more importantly I’d argue that they represent an inversion of the trope.

Traditionally, the tale represents settled lifestyles (Cain the farmer) overcoming nomadic Neolithic customs (Abel the shepherd) through the allegory of fraternal murder- aka, the Cainist cultural revolution defeating Abel’s tradition. Given Aemond is the one who, possessed by jealousy over his brother and a desire for control, turns to fratricide, one would expect him to be characterized as the homicidal Cain-figure, and Aegon as the unsuspecting Abel-figure. However, due to Aemond’s continual fulfillment of tradition and the status quo, and reliance upon Valyrian tradition as the basis for his claim, ideologically-speaking he’s a closer match to Abel. Not to mention, given he also flaunts the qualities which his father continually attempted to emulate (dragon-rider, scholar, fluent Valyrian speaker, pious, etc) - he closer matches the image of the father’s ‘prized son’, we can argue that the Viserys-Aemond bond closer matches the God-Abel dynamic.

Conversely, Aegon is constantly affirmed to be a break from ruling tradition - from a psychological standpoint he departs from the archetypal image of the ruler by being shown to be melancholic and tempestuous, not to mention alienated from his paternal culture and language; whilst from an ideological standpoint, he openly argues against the practice of Valyrian sibling incest and advocates for an embrace of monarchial socialism, departing from the wishes of his advisors, and the traditional customs of the kingdom. Thus, Aegon embodies a cultural revolution, and aligns better with Cain.

The Cain-Abel reading of Aegon and Aemond’s actions doesn’t work out because their fratricidal actions align Aemond with Cain as an antagonist, and Aegon with Abel as a victim - but their ideologies match Aemond with Abel as traditionalists, and Aegon with Cain as revolutionaries. One can make the argument that the analogy still works, due to it being a deliberate inversion of the tale, with tradition striking down any act of upheaval, as opposed to revolution destroying tradition, but I feel that there isn’t enough evidence to support that decision. Naturally, creatives always reflect on Cain and Abel to some extent due to its prevalence as a touchstone of fratricide in the arts, but due to caveats like the action-ideology dissonance and the lack of a father figure endorsing Aemond (or either of them for that matter), amongst others, I think it’s a tenuous stance on its own.

[eezdalf]

We should also consider if the inhabitants of the mega-sites consciously managed their ecosystem to avoid large-scale deforestation... Archaeological studies of their economy suggest a pattern of small-scale gardening, often taking place within the bounds of the settlement, combined with the keeping of livestock, cultivation of orchards, and a wide spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. The diversity is actually remarkable, as is its sustainability. As well as wheat, barley, and pulses, the citizens' plant diet included apples, pears, cherries, sloes, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots. Mega-site dwellers were hunters of red deer, roe deer, and wild boar as well as farmers and foresters. It was 'play farming' on a grand scale: an urban populous supporting itself through small-scale cultivation and herding, combined with an extraordinary array of wild foods. This way of life was by no means 'simple'. As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from springs in the eastern Carpathians and the Black Sea littoral. Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools. A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans. There is no firm consensus from archaeologists about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. A surplus was definitely produced, and with it ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over the eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites.

a description of talianki (located in modern day ukraine), a neolithic site from 5,700 years ago (inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 bc) from the dawn of everything by davids: graeber and wengrow

once again this book is fantastic - and one of its main theses is that "the agricultural revolution" and some of the conclusions we draw from it are, largely, not true.

the development of farming in human societies is a much much longer and more "playful" process than popular narratives would have us believe. 'agricultural revolution' suggests an on/off switch almost. and the way it's usually taught sees agriculture being "invented" and then spreading like wildfire to take over the globe - only then allowing for true cities and the "necessary evils" they entail. this simply isn't true. an urban, farming society is not automatically doomed to bureaucracy, inequality, and exploitation.

all across the world the archaeological evidence points to the domestication of plants taking literal thousands of years longer than it "ought to." and then, even when the domestication of a wild plant was complete there isn't an immediate rise of huge fields and class stratification (as the popular narrative goes). again - in the magnitude of multiple thousands of years. we have generations upon generations of humans with farming know-how who don't immediately begin a march of politics and inequality precipitated by farming.

agriculture isn't humanity's curse no matter what the memes and capitalists say. we are not doomed to our current ways - we can imagine, we can build, we can create new ways of being. the past is the present is the past. and fuck you capitalism and doomed "human nature" debates. and read the dawn of everything <3

[historyfiles]

New Banner Feature: Neolithic Farming Revolution Explore the gradual adoption of Neolithic farming in the Near East, as a hunter-gatherer lifestyle gave way to the future.