[ExI] "an aboriginal human from 70,000 B.C."

[hkhenson]

At 11:44 AM 3/23/2008, you wrote:
>Damien, your prime minister's words were very powerful and deeply 
>touching.  I just hope he can make good on such sentiment.  I 
>recommend Lee Corbin watch the superbly disturbing film, 
>"Rabbit-Proof Fence."  Are there any movies/documentaries you would 
>recommend to those of us trying to understand this problem?

For those less video oriented, there are a number of good articles to 
get the other side of the story.  One I think is highly worth reading 
is here:  http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf

Here is some from Araz Gat's article:

"Ausis our largest, continent-size, 'pure' laboratory of simple 
hunter-gatherers, which before Western arrival was totally unaffected 
by contact with farmers or herders. . . .  the Aborigines . . . were 
in fact 'restricted nomads', or 'centrally based wanderers', confined 
for life to their ancestral home territories.5

"The human - like animal - tendency for maximizing reproduction was 
constantly checked by resource scarcity and competition, largely by 
cospecifics. This competition was partly about nourishment, the basic 
and most critical somatic activity of all living creatures, which 
often causes dramatic fluctuations in their numbers. Resource 
competition, and conflict, is not, however, a given quantity but a 
highly modulated variable. They change over time and place in 
relation to the varying nature of the resources available and of 
human population patterns in diverse ecological habitats (Durham 
1976; Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978; Dawson 1996: 25). The basic 
question, then, is what the factors that act as the main brakes on 
human populations in any particular habitat are; what
the main scarcities, stresses, and hence objects of human 
competition, are. Again, the answer to this question is not fixed but 
varies considerably in relation to the conditions.

In arid and semi-arid environments, like those of Central Australia, 
where human population density was also very low, water holes were 
often the main cause of resource competition and conflict. They were 
obviously critical in times of drought, when whole groups of 
Aborigines are recorded to have perished. For this reason, however, 
there was a tendency to control them even when stress was less 
pressing. For example, as Meggitt recorded (1962: 42), between the 
Walbiri and Waringari hunter-gatherers of the mid-Australian Desert, 
whose population density was as low as one person per 35 square mile, 
relatively large-scale fighting, to the order of 'pitched battles' 
with a 'score or more dead', took place, among other reasons, in 
order to 'occupy' and monopolize wells.

<snip>

As Kimber (1990: 163) writes with respect to Aboriginal Australia:

The red ochre gathering expeditions... were normally all-males 
parties, and although cordial relationships between groups were 
sought, fighting appears to have been a common hazard faced by 
travelling parties. One entire party, with the exception of one man, 
is recorded as having been ambushed and killed in about 1870, whilst 
in about 1874 all but one of a group of 30 men were 'entombed in the 
excavations'.

<snip>

Between groups, the picture is not very different, and is equally 
uniform. Warfare regularly involved stealing of women, who were then 
subjected to multiple rape, or taken for marriage, or both. According 
to Meggitt (1962: 38), if the Walbiri 'were able to surprise the 
enemy camps and kill or drive off the men, they carried away any 
women they found.' Wheeler (1910: 118, 139) specified the following 
motives for the frequent inter- and intra-group Aboriginal fighting: 
'women, murder (most often supposed to be done by magic), and 
territorial trespass.' Warner wrote in his classical study, conducted 
in Arnhem Land in the 1920s (1937: 155): 'Warfare is one of the most 
important social activities of the Murngin people and surrounding 
tribes.' His list of causes for fighting, including 'the stealing of 
women', was not very different from Wheeler's.

<snip>

Among hunter-gatherers, women are often a strong motive for warfare, 
frequently the main motive, but rarely the only one. Again, women are 
such a prominent motive because reproductive opportunities are a very 
strong selective force indeed.

The continent-size Australian laboratory of simple hunter-gatherers 
is, once more, an unmatched source of data, already cited in this 
connection by Darwin ([1871]: 871). Polygamy was legitimate among all 
the Aborigines tribes and highly desired by the men. n).

snip

Polygyny greatly exacerbated women's scarcity and direct and indirect 
male competition and conflict over them. Indeed, a cross-cultural 
study (Otterbein 1994: 103) has found polygyny to be one of the most 
distinctive correlates there is of feuding and internal warfare. 
Female infanticide was another factor contributing to women's 
scarcity and male competition. Although the number of male and female 
babies should be nearly equal at birth (105:100 in favour of the boys),

snip

Among Australian Aboriginal tribes childhood ratios of 125:100 and 
even 138:100 in favour of the boys were recorded (Fison and Holt 1967 
[1880]: 173, 176).

snip

Polygyny and female infanticide thus created women scarcity and 
increased men's competition for them. How was this competition 
resolved? Partly by peaceful, albeit still oppressive means.

snip

Finally, however, there was also open conflict: male death in feuding 
and warfare. The correlation of male violent death and women's 
scarcity has been first pointed out by Warner in his study of the 
north Australian Murngin (1930-1, 1937), and later independently 
re-discovered and greatly elaborated by Divale and Harris (1976). 
During a period of 20 years, Warner (1937: 157-8) estimated death 
rate for the Murngin was 200 men out of a total population of 3000 of 
both sexes, of whom approximately 700 were adult males. This amounts 
to a range of 30 percent of the adult males. Violent mortality among 
the women and children is not mentioned.

snip

In this way, male and female numbers in primitive societies - highly 
tilted in favour of the males in childhood - tend to level out in 
adulthood. Violent conflict is thus one of the principal means 
through which competition over women is both expressed and resolved.

snip

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am not trying to make Australian Aboriginals out as either better 
or worse than other hunter-gather people.  Indeed the material I cut 
about other groups was very similar.  The point is that 
hunter-gatherer life was no bowl of cherries.  Western colonizing 
states came along and imposed their own historically (evolutionary?) 
developed limitations on violence and infanticide--which had the 
predictable effect on population growth in places where the 
environment could not support a larger population in a 
hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Are such peoples worse off or better off than they were pre 
contact?  I could frame the question in terms such as life 
expectancy, but is that even the right metric?  I simply don't know.

There is an important though confusing lesion here for us.  We are 
about to be "invaded" by a society far more powerful than our 
own.  Not space aliens, but the results of our tinkering with 
computers till we get ones smarter than we are.  I hope we fair 
better than the aboriginal peoples western society displaced, but I 
don't even know what metrics godlike AIs would use.  Heck, I can't 
even decide what (if anything) we should do with/for hunter gatherer 
human groups today.  Their individual choices of getting intoxicated 
on gasoline fumes doesn't seem like a really good idea, but who am I 
to make their choices?

I developed this theme further in "The Clinic Seed" where a powerful 
AI directed clinic seduces those it "serves" right out of the 
physical world.  I didn't reach a conclusion about it being a good or 
a bad idea there either.

Keith