/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12285417]

Guys i got this book, is it trash or good

[Anonymous No.12285461]

>>12285417
I've heard it's pretty good, but has an annoying chapter that I heard really romanticizes primitivism and the hunter gatherer lifestyle. I find that kind of obnoxious coming from an academic, but I hear the rest of it is a good and engaging introduction to biological anthropology.

[Anonymous No.12285518]

>>12285417
pop tier

>>12285461
>romanticizes primitivism and the hunter gatherer lifestyle. I find that kind of obnoxious coming from an academic
Pinker fanboi spotted. Maybe some people just don't want to be midgets and can embrace that agrarianism was a massive mistake
http://home.iitk.ac.in/~amman/soc474/Resources/sahlins_original_affluent.html


>Disease effects were minor in the Upper Paleolithic except for trauma. In postglacially hot areas, porotic hyperostosis increased in Mesolithic and reached high frequencies in Neolithic to Middle Bronze times. Apparently this resulted mainly from thalassemias, since children show it in long bones as well as their skulls. But porotic hyperostosis in adults had other causes too, probably from iron deficiency from hookworm, amebiasis, or phytate, effect of any of the malarias. The thalassemias necessarily imply falciparum malaria. This disease may be one direct cause of short stature.
>The other pressure limiting stature and probably also fertility in early and developing farming times was deficiency of protein and of iron and zinc from ingestion of too much phytic acid in the diet. In addition, new diseases including epidemics emerged as population increased, indicated by an increase of enamel arrest lines in Middle Bronze Age samples....
>We can conclude that farmers were less healthy than hunters, at least until Classical to Roman times.
-Angel, Lawrence J. (1984) "Health as a crucial factor in the changes from hunting to developed farming in the eastern Mediterranean."

[Anonymous No.12285550]

>>12285518
>at least until Classical to Roman times

And without agrarianism, you could never have written your post. If you wanna go chase animals with rocks, no one is stopping you.

[Anonymous No.12285567]

>>12285550
The state is.

[Anonymous No.12285597]

>>12285567
As the hunters and gatherers moved, so must you.

[Anonymous No.12285684]

>>12285417
its like that idiotic rambling that Kaczynski wrote but its much more neatly packaged
Manipulative, but some parts are at least somewhat insightfull

[Anonymous No.12285820]

>>12285684
wtf? harari is a transhumanist bugman, about as far from kaczynski as you can get

[Anonymous No.12285822]

>>12285518
I understand this isn't the point, and I also agree with >>12285550 but wouldn't you agree that as early mortality decreases it necessarily follows that disease, malnutrition, poor health etc increase?

[Anonymous No.12285986]

>>12285820
>Kaczynski: hurr durr every progress is inherently flawed we should all just fuck off (bcs Im a failed egomaniac)
>Hararri: hurr durr we would be better of had we never stopped picking berries, everything after that is baaad (bcs my academid worldview is telling me its like that)

[Anonymous No.12286020]

>>12285822
Yes, living in dense crowded areas and being forced into doing a massive amount of boring/back breaking repetitive tasks wasn't a rational trade off at the time no matter how "great" things are today

[Anonymous No.12286210]

>>12286020
I realize most early adopters probably were commanded by a big man with enforcers into living this way and rational trade offs probably don't even matter, but it still is a net benefit evolution-wise if you consider that they had greater security in the bad times, and could pump out more kids to propagate genes (even if a higher ratio died as infants)

[Anonymous No.12286625]

>>12285417
Mediocre like everything else before history wipes away the shit.

[Anonymous No.12286644]

>>12286020
What mean is that presence of disease might not be a very good way of contrasting standards of living, if previously the only reason there were none is because they immediately died. I don't know if the characterisations of Harari's arguments itt are accurate, but either way I also received this book for Christmas so I'll find out for myself lol

[Anonymous No.12286657]

i don't know :D

[Anonymous No.12286728]

>>12285417
I liked it.

[Anonymous No.12286836]

>>12285417
(((Yuval Noah Harari)))

[Anonymous No.12286846]

>>12286836
yeah he was a major in the IDF, you dont have to put hooks, everyone knows he's jewish
not that it matters, you fucktard

[Anonymous No.12286930]

>>12285550
>but without X, you wouldn't have the benefit Y

This is a shitty kind of argument.

Imagine a world where people are enslaved by AI overlords, never leaving the room and everything was hyper-automized, no more sicknesses existed and that food is exclusively delivered to you - people would consider walking exhausting, like in that wall-E movie.
Then someone comes along and makes an argument along the lines of
>yeah but if the AI overlords wouldn't have done ABC, then you wouldn't have XYZ

If you can conceptualize your existence in the given framework, then yes of course, not having it naively would seem like a loss.
That's a boxed view

[Anonymous No.12286951]

It's shit. Biased. Alright as a gift to your dad or in the doctor's waiting room. Forgotten in 5 years.

[Anonymous No.12287054]

>>12286930
Did you want an essay comparing every pro and con? Okay, I'll expand. We're on a literature board, it seemed like a natural appeal.

Sure, there's benefits to living a nomadic subsistence-based lifestyle. I remember my anthro professor giving a half hour lecture about how there'd be no class systems if we never established agriculture. But she had fucking lupus and a host of other issues, there's no chance of a person like her even lasting a couple of years. I would've been dead in minutes because of my asthma. Had we both survived, we would've gotten really good at identifying plants, or sneaking up on wildlife. Not much else. And literally one or two people would be responsible for caring for all of the knowledge our tribe has ever collected. I really like knowledge and our ability to freely accumulate it. Guessing most people on this board feel the same.