You make some good points, but when you say that Aboriginals are smaller than Maoris do you mean that they are wirier or shorter, because from my experience although there is more variation in the various Aboriginal groups, as opposed to the conquering Maoris, the Aboriginals are on average least as tall. I've even seen old pictures of some Aboriginal groups who could have a NBA basketball team.
She talks about the native americans with almost a tear in her eye - of how they respect nature and never take too much from the land. I'm filled with disdain for people like that. The native Americans were not kind to nature, they were every bit as idiotic as we were and are when it comes to treatment of the planet. Forcing a stampede of potentially hundreds of bison off a cliff often simply to cut out their tongues and tails because you like those bits, that's not respect.
My girlfriends mother, an altogether ignorant and crazy woman is the example of everything that is wrong with humanity. She was raised Catholic and her family tried to force her to abort her child at 16 - which she refused to do. But instead of casting off the shackles of such supersticion, she has slowly, since I met her slipped deeper and deeper into craziness. She believes ghosts haunt her and crystals have healing powers and that these hunter gatherer socities were nature-attuned pyschics.
Very striking to me from my semi-native upbringing and from my extensive reading, especially of interviews with, and law arguments and political speaches by hunter gatherers, is that the line between h/g and farming is nowhere near so distinct as we are led to think. Typically h/g people view the plants and animals in their territory as their crops and herds, sometimes even naming individuals, and often taking concern to cull the weak, remove weeds and predators, and even provide winter fodder.
@TOMHYLE88 There are stages between true hunter gatherers and farmers, such as sedentary h-gs, nomadic herdsmen etc. One big divide is between people who store food and those who don't.
I have a question. It seems to me that in my life there are no hunters, just gatherers. Nobody I know has to go out and kill for meat. Animals are raised and slaughtered for us outside of the normal cycle of nature. We just go to the grocery store and buy what we like. Doesn't that make us gatherers with the hunter aspect removed? Wouldn't that suggest that we are closer to the natural than our ancestors? That was two questions, wasn't it? Crap! I just made it three. Sorry.
@jdf1023 If we have evolved to be hunters, and are now not hunting, that would put us further away from the natural. We still have hunter instincts. All round the world men carve up large joints of meat to serve to guests, even if the meat is from a butcher's and was cooked by women. Men prefer fewer larger meals and women (gatherers) prefer more but smaller meals. Men remain competitive, and are happier to leave the home for long periods. Long distance lorry drivers are almost all men.
@lindybeige May I politely point out that to say anything humanity does is not natural is a direct violation of obvious fact. We are natural beings and therefore anything we do is also nature. Skyscrapers are as natural as a termite mound and...well...i wish i could post a video response
@HazelArchery Yes, this is one way of looking at it. Another is to say that a colour TV is a naturally occurring object, or that a spider's web is not. Unfortunately, if one takes it to an extreme, then the world 'natural' becomes meaningless. No one could from scratch in one lifetime get from the stone age to modern life alone. The works of Man have changed the environment. I think that's a useful distinction.
The mistake is to think that they are any different from us. <-- The best point ever. The more I learn about people the more convinced I become that while the cultures may vary, the people are always basically the same.
@MiRyRE Flawed, and would have been better in 2D. I hope they paid Roger Dean for designing half the animals and landscapes for them. It continued with the all-H-Gs-are-great theme, throwing in all-miners-and-soldiers-are-stupid-and-evil for good measure.
Thank you for this video. I grow tired of the new image of the native hunter gatherer, and that is that he is the pinnacle of man, without any of the present flaws we find ourselves with. And if he had any flaws? Well, they were due to the evil, savage white man who just showed up on his doorstep out of the blue, and somehow telepathically gave him those flaws. Because up until that point, when they were pushed to evil, they were the most outstanding people in the world. Yeah, no. Great video.
i like some of your videos, some i disagree with but what annoys me is that you only respond to people's comments once and then dont respond to their response.
@claynate the hunter-gathers live style do less harm to nature because their population is controlled by constant warfare. reading anthropological account of New Guinea highland natives, the villages and tribes are constantly at war with each other. study comparing death rate due to violent conflicts between hunter-gathers and farming people confirm this is true worldwide. so yes, they do less harm to nature, because they are too busy killing each other.
@ki5567 I think most of the killing is rival males within the tribe killing each other rather than one tribe against its neighbour. Murder rates in some tribes are horrendous.
@ki5567 no its because they dont have a ton of pollutants and garbage and other shit that screws up the environment. wether they kill each other or not. and they know they need their environment to survive so they dont mess it up.
@claynate I imagine 7 billion hunter-gatherers would do quite a bit of irreparable damage to nature. 7 billion humans of any kind will have a huge environmental effect, because that is what humans do. Contrary to what might seem logical, sentience has little respect for ecosystems, be it in the mind of a man in a loincloth with a spear killing the last remaining member of a species, or a man with a bulldozer destroying the Amazon rainforest.
@TheMetalPenguin wether they have respect or not the man with less power cant do as much damage to the ecosystem. i do believe though that many hunter gatherers respect their environments because they know they rely on them.
and yeah 7 billion of any large animal is too many.
@Williamren1 Many hunter-gatherer tribes have their own cultures and customs, which are tailored to benefit living conditions. As long as a stupid person doesn't stray too far from these practices, he or she can easily survive in the wild. Conversely, many of those people are far more lazy then we'll ever be, because they only need to hunt for a day to get food for a week. By contrast, in our modern world we work hard every single day just to get enough money for food every day.
A point in the favor of hunter-gatherers being more "in tune with nature": One can probably presume that any hunter-gatherer society who by chance is mindful of their ecosystem will last longer within that ecosystem, rather than a society that affects their surroundings compareatively more. Given enough time I think that an equilibrium would be formed where the society who minds their impact on the environment more would survive the longest.
@Zeedox Or the one less damaging could expand into the more damaging society's territory (once it has declined due to over-exploitation), and do more damage...
Hmmmm.... the narrative of Rachel Plummer or for that matter just about any material on captives of the Commanches; they might be an isolated fluke, nonetheless the weight of the evidence suggests that habitual barbarism was ritualized and systemic within at least that culture.
Hunter-gatherers needed a larger territory in order to fulfill their needs of calories. They were highly mobile and it is very likely that this caused the extinction of many species, for example the Paleolithic American megafauna extinction. When people became sedentarian, in an initial phase the territories became smaller because they could produce their food on a small region. However in time, populations and grew and more and more forrests were cut down etc.
the point about hunter gatherers is, yes they are people just like us, but their way of life is "in tune" with nature. it doesnt harm nature like our way of life does. and they did learn to care about nature cuz they realize they need it to survive. they are like any other animal. a lion wouldnt think twice about killing a pregnant animal, neither would a hunter gatherer how does that matter? they dont pollute or hurt it like we do. but they cooperate with it.
@umidontno040394 They don't hurt? They have a VERY high murder rate, and a very high infanticide rate. They also use wounded animals to lure other animals out for shooting. They also like starting forest fires. When Cook sailed around Oz, he reported the many forest fires burning all round the coast that the HGs had lit.
@lindybeige who specifically has a "VERY" high murder rate. there are barely any hunter gatherers left. using wounded animals is again just a technique for getting food. so what? so is forest fires. for getting food or for other reasons. the aboriginies used fires to block off exits for kangaroos, wallabies, etc. fires are also good for the environment sometimes.
@lindybeige Those forest fires also helped fertilise the ground with ash and caused many native plant species to germinate and regrow afterwards. Native trees, more often than not, survive bushfires anyway. They also cleared the ground of leaf litter, which can be handy for new plants looking for a place to settle down into the soil. It was more like an unconscious method farming or wildlife management than purely a hunting strategy.
i have been forced to hunt for food due to the economy, and i take what ever comes into my sight picture, Honda's are a bit crunchy but ice cream trucks are just full of goodies:)
I don't exactly know about hunters and their codes of ethics on hunting females, let alone pregnant females, but today a hunter of female animals, especially pregnant ones (or younglings of both sexes) is considered dishonorable. Now, there are special permits for hunting females, but generally in times of population explosion.
hunter gatherers were only useful when you had other people that could gather and hunter with you- other wise, its rather tough work hunting and gathering alone
The Native Americans recognized the rape of nature when the white settlers were killing Buffalo for their fur and tongues. And few if any joined up to profit from the killings.
People are people but look at cultural differences western thought is completely different then eastern thought for example suicide
Avatar its a movie! what movie shows the people that die every day, it would not be an epic if it showed people in the hospital, by the way it mentioned how the NAVI were strong/hard to kill
@ItsYoursTakeIt You mean the same Native Americans who drove great herds of buffalo to their death over cliffs so they could use just a few? Oh yes, those reverent Native Americans, aren't they wonderful.
@TheMetalPenguin even the native americans who "drove great heards of cliffs" managed to keep a nice and steady population for over 10,000 years, and immediately when they got a more efficient way (shooting them from horseback) they used it. the whiteman turned their population from 40 million to the brink of extinction in 100 years
In Avatar, the entire tribe of hunter-gatherers was healthy and in the prime of life, and despite all the tremendously dangerous things they did, we never saw any of them get injured except by guns.
I had to come up with a Sci-Fi explanation of it. The Navi are actually an incredibly advanced civilization, who's technology was so advanced they could revert to the life they found most preferable (Hunter Gatherer), and with their advanced technology they could genetically engineer their whole environment and themselves, removing much of the 'barbarity' of living a hunter gatherer life.
The Noble Savage is a very alluring concept for me, and I have to remember it's bollocks.
I tend to romantasize HG's sometimes but not in the hippie dipie peace love kindof way. As far as I am concerned one of the chief apeals of being an uncivilised savage is the freedom to spear to death anyone who is a totally anoying obnoxouise a-hole. Peace is over rated!
You make some good points, but when you say that Aboriginals are smaller than Maoris do you mean that they are wirier or shorter, because from my experience although there is more variation in the various Aboriginal groups, as opposed to the conquering Maoris, the Aboriginals are on average least as tall. I've even seen old pictures of some Aboriginal groups who could have a NBA basketball team.
wrisr001 2 weeks ago
@wrisr001 Wirier mainly, I suppose, but I've not seen tall Aboriginals, not that I've ever been to Australia.
lindybeige 2 weeks ago
She talks about the native americans with almost a tear in her eye - of how they respect nature and never take too much from the land. I'm filled with disdain for people like that. The native Americans were not kind to nature, they were every bit as idiotic as we were and are when it comes to treatment of the planet. Forcing a stampede of potentially hundreds of bison off a cliff often simply to cut out their tongues and tails because you like those bits, that's not respect.
KonijNx2 4 weeks ago
My girlfriends mother, an altogether ignorant and crazy woman is the example of everything that is wrong with humanity. She was raised Catholic and her family tried to force her to abort her child at 16 - which she refused to do. But instead of casting off the shackles of such supersticion, she has slowly, since I met her slipped deeper and deeper into craziness. She believes ghosts haunt her and crystals have healing powers and that these hunter gatherer socities were nature-attuned pyschics.
KonijNx2 4 weeks ago
Very striking to me from my semi-native upbringing and from my extensive reading, especially of interviews with, and law arguments and political speaches by hunter gatherers, is that the line between h/g and farming is nowhere near so distinct as we are led to think. Typically h/g people view the plants and animals in their territory as their crops and herds, sometimes even naming individuals, and often taking concern to cull the weak, remove weeds and predators, and even provide winter fodder.
TOMHYLE88 1 month ago
@TOMHYLE88 There are stages between true hunter gatherers and farmers, such as sedentary h-gs, nomadic herdsmen etc. One big divide is between people who store food and those who don't.
lindybeige 1 month ago
They are just people like us> Well said as we are all related to each other through Adam & Eve.
1023471965 2 months ago
The buffalo comment made me laugh
TheWhoaDude 3 months ago
What you say about the modern attitudes toward hunter gatherers reminds me of how members of the Romantic movement viewed pastoral societies.
Bankstercide 3 months ago
Guardians of the Universe... i just thought to Queen.
Supercucu123 4 months ago
I have a question. It seems to me that in my life there are no hunters, just gatherers. Nobody I know has to go out and kill for meat. Animals are raised and slaughtered for us outside of the normal cycle of nature. We just go to the grocery store and buy what we like. Doesn't that make us gatherers with the hunter aspect removed? Wouldn't that suggest that we are closer to the natural than our ancestors? That was two questions, wasn't it? Crap! I just made it three. Sorry.
jdf1023 5 months ago
@jdf1023 If we have evolved to be hunters, and are now not hunting, that would put us further away from the natural. We still have hunter instincts. All round the world men carve up large joints of meat to serve to guests, even if the meat is from a butcher's and was cooked by women. Men prefer fewer larger meals and women (gatherers) prefer more but smaller meals. Men remain competitive, and are happier to leave the home for long periods. Long distance lorry drivers are almost all men.
lindybeige 5 months ago 2
@lindybeige May I politely point out that to say anything humanity does is not natural is a direct violation of obvious fact. We are natural beings and therefore anything we do is also nature. Skyscrapers are as natural as a termite mound and...well...i wish i could post a video response
HazelArchery 2 months ago
@HazelArchery Yes, this is one way of looking at it. Another is to say that a colour TV is a naturally occurring object, or that a spider's web is not. Unfortunately, if one takes it to an extreme, then the world 'natural' becomes meaningless. No one could from scratch in one lifetime get from the stone age to modern life alone. The works of Man have changed the environment. I think that's a useful distinction.
lindybeige 2 months ago
The mistake is to think that they are any different from us. <-- The best point ever. The more I learn about people the more convinced I become that while the cultures may vary, the people are always basically the same.
Tuuliska 7 months ago
and not to mention what the first settlers on the Easter Island. They chopped down all the forests on the whole island.
permhaaland 8 months ago
@permhaaland That came to my mind too.
Tuuliska 7 months ago
What did you think of Avatar?
MiRyRE 8 months ago
@MiRyRE Flawed, and would have been better in 2D. I hope they paid Roger Dean for designing half the animals and landscapes for them. It continued with the all-H-Gs-are-great theme, throwing in all-miners-and-soldiers-are-stupid-and-evil for good measure.
lindybeige 8 months ago 5
Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
bewarethegreyghost 8 months ago
Thank you for this video. I grow tired of the new image of the native hunter gatherer, and that is that he is the pinnacle of man, without any of the present flaws we find ourselves with. And if he had any flaws? Well, they were due to the evil, savage white man who just showed up on his doorstep out of the blue, and somehow telepathically gave him those flaws. Because up until that point, when they were pushed to evil, they were the most outstanding people in the world. Yeah, no. Great video.
tomcat2222 9 months ago
Do you hunt?
manowar40 9 months ago
@manowar40 Many years ago I did.
lindybeige 9 months ago
i like some of your videos, some i disagree with but what annoys me is that you only respond to people's comments once and then dont respond to their response.
claynate 10 months ago
@claynate I do sometimes, but I could end up spending my life responding. I let people make their points. My main points I make with videos.
lindybeige 10 months ago
@lindybeige yeah i guess i understand, its different when you are the one making the video you get a ton of people commenting at you.
claynate 10 months ago
@lindybeige and who has the time to respond to every thing
n2488 8 months ago
wether they actually care about their environment or not (which i believe many do because they rely on it), their life style IS in tune with nature.
claynate 11 months ago
@claynate Does 'in tune with nature' mean anything?
lindybeige 11 months ago
@lindybeige what i mean though is that they dont harm nature like modern humans. though i do agree they are overromantized
claynate 11 months ago
@claynate the hunter-gathers live style do less harm to nature because their population is controlled by constant warfare. reading anthropological account of New Guinea highland natives, the villages and tribes are constantly at war with each other. study comparing death rate due to violent conflicts between hunter-gathers and farming people confirm this is true worldwide. so yes, they do less harm to nature, because they are too busy killing each other.
ki5567 11 months ago
@ki5567 I think most of the killing is rival males within the tribe killing each other rather than one tribe against its neighbour. Murder rates in some tribes are horrendous.
lindybeige 11 months ago
@ki5567 no its because they dont have a ton of pollutants and garbage and other shit that screws up the environment. wether they kill each other or not. and they know they need their environment to survive so they dont mess it up.
claynate 10 months ago
@claynate I imagine 7 billion hunter-gatherers would do quite a bit of irreparable damage to nature. 7 billion humans of any kind will have a huge environmental effect, because that is what humans do. Contrary to what might seem logical, sentience has little respect for ecosystems, be it in the mind of a man in a loincloth with a spear killing the last remaining member of a species, or a man with a bulldozer destroying the Amazon rainforest.
TheMetalPenguin 10 months ago
@TheMetalPenguin wether they have respect or not the man with less power cant do as much damage to the ecosystem. i do believe though that many hunter gatherers respect their environments because they know they rely on them.
and yeah 7 billion of any large animal is too many.
claynate 10 months ago
If they are stupid or lazy they die. So they aren't.
Williamren1 1 year ago
@Williamren1 Many hunter-gatherer tribes have their own cultures and customs, which are tailored to benefit living conditions. As long as a stupid person doesn't stray too far from these practices, he or she can easily survive in the wild. Conversely, many of those people are far more lazy then we'll ever be, because they only need to hunt for a day to get food for a week. By contrast, in our modern world we work hard every single day just to get enough money for food every day.
HyLorian 1 year ago
A point in the favor of hunter-gatherers being more "in tune with nature": One can probably presume that any hunter-gatherer society who by chance is mindful of their ecosystem will last longer within that ecosystem, rather than a society that affects their surroundings compareatively more. Given enough time I think that an equilibrium would be formed where the society who minds their impact on the environment more would survive the longest.
Zeedox 1 year ago
@Zeedox Or the one less damaging could expand into the more damaging society's territory (once it has declined due to over-exploitation), and do more damage...
lindybeige 1 year ago
Hmmmm.... the narrative of Rachel Plummer or for that matter just about any material on captives of the Commanches; they might be an isolated fluke, nonetheless the weight of the evidence suggests that habitual barbarism was ritualized and systemic within at least that culture.
pukeachu 1 year ago
Isn't He-Man the guardian of the universe?
IcEye89 1 year ago
you seriously think a farmer has less of an impact on the environment than a hunter gather?
azmanntoz 1 year ago
@azmanntoz I don't recall suggesting this. What is your point?
lindybeige 1 year ago
@azmanntoz
Hunter-gatherers needed a larger territory in order to fulfill their needs of calories. They were highly mobile and it is very likely that this caused the extinction of many species, for example the Paleolithic American megafauna extinction. When people became sedentarian, in an initial phase the territories became smaller because they could produce their food on a small region. However in time, populations and grew and more and more forrests were cut down etc.
BelgianGeneral 1 year ago
the point about hunter gatherers is, yes they are people just like us, but their way of life is "in tune" with nature. it doesnt harm nature like our way of life does. and they did learn to care about nature cuz they realize they need it to survive. they are like any other animal. a lion wouldnt think twice about killing a pregnant animal, neither would a hunter gatherer how does that matter? they dont pollute or hurt it like we do. but they cooperate with it.
umidontno040394 1 year ago
@umidontno040394 They don't hurt? They have a VERY high murder rate, and a very high infanticide rate. They also use wounded animals to lure other animals out for shooting. They also like starting forest fires. When Cook sailed around Oz, he reported the many forest fires burning all round the coast that the HGs had lit.
lindybeige 1 year ago
@lindybeige who specifically has a "VERY" high murder rate. there are barely any hunter gatherers left. using wounded animals is again just a technique for getting food. so what? so is forest fires. for getting food or for other reasons. the aboriginies used fires to block off exits for kangaroos, wallabies, etc. fires are also good for the environment sometimes.
umidontno040394 1 year ago
@lindybeige Those forest fires also helped fertilise the ground with ash and caused many native plant species to germinate and regrow afterwards. Native trees, more often than not, survive bushfires anyway. They also cleared the ground of leaf litter, which can be handy for new plants looking for a place to settle down into the soil. It was more like an unconscious method farming or wildlife management than purely a hunting strategy.
You make good points, though.
EVLWNS 1 year ago
@EVLWNS Yes, new lush growth attracts prey.
lindybeige 1 year ago
i have been forced to hunt for food due to the economy, and i take what ever comes into my sight picture, Honda's are a bit crunchy but ice cream trucks are just full of goodies:)
WoebringerofDoom 1 year ago
I don't exactly know about hunters and their codes of ethics on hunting females, let alone pregnant females, but today a hunter of female animals, especially pregnant ones (or younglings of both sexes) is considered dishonorable. Now, there are special permits for hunting females, but generally in times of population explosion.
Cstrife234 1 year ago
hunter gatherers were only useful when you had other people that could gather and hunter with you- other wise, its rather tough work hunting and gathering alone
1x93cm 1 year ago
The Native Americans recognized the rape of nature when the white settlers were killing Buffalo for their fur and tongues. And few if any joined up to profit from the killings.
People are people but look at cultural differences western thought is completely different then eastern thought for example suicide
Avatar its a movie! what movie shows the people that die every day, it would not be an epic if it showed people in the hospital, by the way it mentioned how the NAVI were strong/hard to kill
ItsYoursTakeIt 2 years ago
@ItsYoursTakeIt You mean the same Native Americans who drove great herds of buffalo to their death over cliffs so they could use just a few? Oh yes, those reverent Native Americans, aren't they wonderful.
TheMetalPenguin 10 months ago
@TheMetalPenguin even the native americans who "drove great heards of cliffs" managed to keep a nice and steady population for over 10,000 years, and immediately when they got a more efficient way (shooting them from horseback) they used it. the whiteman turned their population from 40 million to the brink of extinction in 100 years
claynate 10 months ago
very true ^.^
malevolenceXXXensues 2 years ago
Good God, the movie Avatar is like the opposite on what you said... I did not like the movie too much...
255Knights 2 years ago
In Avatar, the entire tribe of hunter-gatherers was healthy and in the prime of life, and despite all the tremendously dangerous things they did, we never saw any of them get injured except by guns.
lindybeige 2 years ago
Well the only reasonable explanation than could be that if they get wounded life gets to hard, and they die..
NevalWald 2 years ago
LOL that is true.
255Knights 2 years ago
@lindybeige
I had to come up with a Sci-Fi explanation of it. The Navi are actually an incredibly advanced civilization, who's technology was so advanced they could revert to the life they found most preferable (Hunter Gatherer), and with their advanced technology they could genetically engineer their whole environment and themselves, removing much of the 'barbarity' of living a hunter gatherer life.
The Noble Savage is a very alluring concept for me, and I have to remember it's bollocks.
APDurrant 2 years ago
@255Knights
That movie was just bad... Kind of figures how people who liked it seem to be idiots.
pedosintalgon 1 year ago
@pedosintalgon Seems like all the people who didn't like it were ignorant and selfish.
ToyMaster83 1 year ago
Yes, people are people. They're: not apes, not gods, nor are they robots. They're people.
WildeyedWes 2 years ago
Another dose of sanity from across the pond and sorely needed this morning!
rattinox 2 years ago 2
Wow some sense! (Not to say you don't normally make sense, you just about always do)
thugugbob 2 years ago 2
Greetings from New Zealand Lloyd :)
stonehartfloydfan 2 years ago
Greetings. What's a hartf?
lindybeige 2 years ago
stonehartfloyd fan you mean? stone is my name, hart is the name of my girlfriend (ex now) and floydfan is due to me liking floyd :)
stonehartfloydfan 2 years ago
I think his ego was getting away with him thinking that you are a loyd fan. So he was asking you what is a hartf as a joke.
MrMonkeybat 2 years ago
I tend to romantasize HG's sometimes but not in the hippie dipie peace love kindof way. As far as I am concerned one of the chief apeals of being an uncivilised savage is the freedom to spear to death anyone who is a totally anoying obnoxouise a-hole. Peace is over rated!
MrMonkeybat 2 years ago 2
indeed
pigfaceddog 2 years ago
the 'noble savage' mythology goes back to the victorians. at least.
adiousir 2 years ago
Yes, the Victorians did have a romantic streak.
lindybeige 2 years ago
a romantic streak? a moonlit flash? really? surprising for people who covered their piano legs with miniature skirts...
adiousir 2 years ago