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Comment by rdevsrex | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting find, but it's not surprising to find a woman of prominence in that era. Before agriculture really took off, hunter gatherers were pretty egalitarian and a lot of kinship systems were matrilineal.

Also, I think that it's more likely that this person was a shaman, than a chief, but that's just a speculation on my part.

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It should be noted that the identification of inequality/equality with hunter-gatherer/agricultural lifestyles is under attack lately from at least some archaeologists

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/23/the-dawn-of-ev...

hunter gatherers make war with other tribes for the purposes of stealing women. The state of nature is a desperate, miserable circumstance where neither justice or morality can survive.

This is the copper age and the late neolithic, so agricultural, not hunter-gatherer era.

That's a wild generalization. At least some extant hunter-gatherer societies (every Australian Aboriginal tribe) are as far from sex-egalitarian as it can possibly get.

Humans were a lot better before they invented agriculture.

They may well have been matrilineal because prior to IVF etc, you could be certain who the mother was but not the father.

It has its good points but shouldn't be assumed to be an expression of high ideals.

Most likely, quality of life went up for most people thanks to agriculture. Before that, war, abortion, exposing unwanted infants and insisting some people just leave the tribe and not come back were some of the means humans used to keep population levels sustainable and avert mass starvation in hunter-gatherer societies.

>They may well have been matrilineal because prior to IVF etc, you could be certain who the mother was but not the father.

According to research I've read, pre-agricultural societies, and even more recent tribal hunter-gatherer societies, frequently had no concept of monogamy at all, and didn't worry about who people's fathers were, because children were raised by tribes/villages at large. Monogamy was an invention that came about with agriculture, because that's when the concepts of land ownership and inheritance came about.

>Most likely, quality of life went up for most people thanks to agriculture.

Actually, no: human height dropped about 30cm with the introduction of agriculture, because nutrition in an agriculture-based society is much worse than in a hunter-gatherer society. It took many millennia (as in, only very recently) for human height to get back to pre-agricultural levels.

That's at best specific to particular groups and at worst speculation based on what exactly?

( By all means do provide some indication of your research )

Within Australia, so clearly within Australia, traditional pre agricultural hunter gathers are still walking about and can talk for themselves.

Moieties | skin groups | kinship is much more complex than anything you've likely experienced and detailed knowledge of { father, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers } (at the very least) form a determination of who is eligible to marry | mate with who.

It's a system that largely maximises outbreeding and mixing.

See, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship

I notice you didn't rebut my assertion that some portion of the population was murdered or banished (banishment being a thing that can also result in death). So perhaps most people were better off, except those that were murdered and perhaps except those who mourned those who were murdered and missed them.

Also, I'm unaware of hunter-gatherer societies inventing much in the way of technology. Technological progress seems to require settled cultures.

I happen to like modern tech and don't desperately wish I lived in a hunter-gatherer culture.

Yes, apparently one factor that prevented malnutrition from claiming more lives in the pre-agricultural era is that 30% of the population was culled through homicide, leading to the population remaining below the environment's carrying-capacity.

It's certainly odd that such a seemingly important fact(?) doesn't appear at all in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer

You should considering adding that factoid and your backing evidence.

Unfortunately I don't remember source where I read about this and a quick search didn't produce any results. I may have even found the article on HN.

Does it sound like something that would be true and provable for all hunter gatherers across the entire planet for some two million years?

( From first humans to present day hunter gatherers )

Is it true for present day hunter gatherers?

How could it be determined for (say) hunter gatherers in modern western Europe?

Would that be via skulls and bones from major outbreaks of conflict every so often or would it establish a pattern true for all generations, etc?

To be honest it sounds more like missionary type comment on uncivilised savages.

That homicide rates for hunter gatherers are much higher than for people in agrarian and industrial societies is firmly established by the evidence, which is spread out across thousands of years of pre-history and a diverse array of geographical locations.

It is also consistent with what we see in the closest relatives of humans: chimpanzee.

https://archive.li/uP7Ax

> That homicide rates for hunter gatherers are much higher than for people in agrarian and industrial societies is firmly established by the evidence

Cool.

That's what I'm asking for ... do you have any?

( Bear in mind, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, The Boer Wars, Crimea (old and new), Ukraine, et al set the bar on homicide in agrarian and industrial cultures )

Yes, this article has a large number of sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

>30% of the population was culled through homicide, leading to the population

Is that from murder, or war (presumably inter-tribal), or both?

We're not exactly doing much better in modern times. See Russia's war against Ukraine, or the 100M+ killed in WWII.

The source I read said inter-tribal warfare was a major source of homicides, but I can't recall if intra-tribal murder was a major factor as well.

Unfortunately the invention of agriculture had become a necessity after too successful hunting during hundreds of thousands of years had lead to the depletion of the hunted animals.

Had not our ancestors invented agriculture, they would have eventually become extinct, together with their prey.

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