History Forum / General / British History / November 2007

But how do you get your results peer-reviewed and published?
(And before you say it: not by a ghost writer.)

...

It's only an issue for the irredemably literal-minded - creationists and
Richard Dawkins.

In article
<78f42980-afcb-4a3e-885c-6f9150caf6e3@b32g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,

Those responsible for the biotechnology that produced domesticated animals and
wheat would have argued otherwise.

Not necessarily. I've always been struck by the fact that north
American natives seem to have been the only people other than the Jews
to come up with the concept of one God, Manitou, suggests an
intellectual leap that most of early human society seems to have
failed to make.

After all, the whole concept of gods centred around the idea that they
lived in fixed places, like mountains, rocks, trees, etc. One had to
travel to their home to beg favours from them.

From the point of view of people such as slaves captured by Rome, once
they were removed from their homes, they also lost all contact with
their preferred god and any help or comfort he/she/it might have
offered.
This is why the idea of one god who was everywhere had such a profound
effect on religion, as he or she would travel with his adherents,
rather than being for ever lost to them in some remote grove in
Thessaly or wherever.

One God, the essential pillarstone of all the major religions apart
from the Hindu (many gods) and Buddhist (no god) religions, must have
transformed the morale of the ancient world; and the promise of a
paradise where all care and pains were healed must have elecrified the
downtrodden, especially with the advent of the Jesus concept who gave
them the one human comfort that everyone needs; the idea that somebody
cares about what happens to us.

Small wonder that the teaching of Christianity to slaves was banned in
societies like Rome and the US south, because the ultimate focus of
slavery is that the slave abandons all hope of rescue and accepts his
lot.without complaint.

I think it is parochial to dismiss early man as a primitive, grunting
semi-ape. As more and more evidence is uncovered, it becomes clear
that many so-called primitive societies had rich intellectual and
material lives as seen in the Spanish Altamira cave. Indeed, much of
modern millitary survival techniques derive directly from those
cultures which many dismiss as primitive.

Anyone who has watched someone chip razor-sharp flakes from flint is
either overcome by a sense of wonder or is totally lacking in
imagination. Those techniques are still in use today, but is also a
tribute to the intelligence of man that new technology loses little
time in being adapted to local needs. What can match the utilitarian
beauty and efficiency of a Clovis point with which our ancestors
brought down mammoths? To this day, hunters are very careful not to
get too close to an African elephant, despite being armed with a
high-powered express rifle.

http://www.unr.edu/cla/anthro/clovis-point-casts.gif

It is also noteworthy that around 80% of all remedies were originally
herbal, demonstrating a native knowledge and understanding of the
local environment that few possess today. My own wife had a poisoned
finger treated by a native shaman in the Canadian bush with a few
boiled leaves taken from a nearby bush; a cure which drove her
physician back home into rhapsodies when he saw how perfectly the cure
had healed the problem and incidently, also saved her fingernail.

I think that to dismiss genetics and biochemistry as not being being
big hits around the campfire is intellectual arrogance; a common
reaction of city dwellers who have lost all contact with the wild
places. I can find water in a desert and I could poison you without
you being any the wiser by offering you some of the deadly but
attractive-looking berries which abound in certain areas, yet which
act as a perfect, non-harmful bait for fish.

There is a school of thought which contends that mankind took the
wrong step in developing agriculture. The promise of ready food led to
the concentration of populations for safety and the beginning of the
degradation of the environment as the birthrate exploded. Its
consequences can be seen close to home, as witness the Irish and
Highland potato blight and the Highland clan wars over limited
resources.    

It has long been my contention that in the event of a city being
completely destroyed. most of the survivors would be dead within a
week, despite being surrounded by everything need to survive with a
degree of comfort; knowledge  paintstakingly researched by those we
call "primitive". We are the primitives; we have long forgotten the
lessons learned by our ancestors and dismiss them as irrelevent.

I wouldn't take the Bradshaw Foundation as being authoritative on anything.
They are biased by the line they take on the Bradshaw Paintings - which are
highly controversial anyway. They seem to have something of a right-wing
bias - but that may just be down to them being extremely rich people.