There's a guy in Australia who made some "history" book called the "Dark Emu’ that pushes the idea that Aboriginal Australians were not just hunter gatherers and that they had settlements , agriculture, aquaculture and food storage. His own self proclaimed motivation for writing this fake history is to "rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession"
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous this claim is that the Aboriginals had these type of advanced settlements. The Australian government once had to release a PSA video telling the Aboriginals not to sleep on the road or they might get run over by cars. Does this sound like the kind of people that would have had agriculture, aquaculture and food storage?
As you can expect though, this book got a lot of awards and gets promoted in libraries and schools
The amount of people that I've met that still think the shit in that book was true and repeat it is really shameful and shows how quickly narratives can change when people hear something they want to be true even when every bit of actual evidence shows it to be wrong.
My mother falls into this category. It was mandatory reading for her MTeach (which she never finished) and she fully took the rhetoric onboard…
Though my father is actually worse on matters such as that, apparently because his Abo colleague has “taught him truth and empathy”…
It’s rather depressing, tbh.
The weirdest part of this is that nobody seems to see how this is through the "Colonialist lens" (To use their own terms).
Being built with settlements , agriculture, aquaculture and food storage doesn't make a culture the only way to be. Thinking that way only shows that the person thinking this is thinking that it's the only way to be.
Soon they'll be saying that a well known rural tribe in Amazonian Brazil could count above three, but they were using a complex mathematical system in order to do so.
The worst of the racists are those who have to turn whoever they meet into something of who they think they are. And that's just removing all of their own identity and heritage and painting over it with what you think is yours (Which is also false).
But historians have always been terrible at chronicling history without adding victors' bias. It's even accommodated in their first year anthropologist studies as acceptable error.
IIRC the ""Ethiopian Multiplication"" procedure was originally religion based, but it turns out the reason it works is because it uses a series of base-2 number sets to do large-scale multiplication quickly. It seems to have been a technique that occurred as the result of merchants having to make large commodity calculations quickly.
This process does appear to have at least originated in Egypt, but was apparently stumbled upon in many other places. It's much older than the modern "carry the term" long-multiplication and long-division methods we currently use.
True, but there's also a major benefit of us being able to identify them over time. Plenty of low-artifact cultures are totally lost to us, even dominant ones. All those institutions are super useful and leave a strong mark for us to reference them.
That's kinda why I love the moon landing. That some-bitch is gonna be up there for 100 million years completely undisturbed.
I was speaking of the Pirahã of the Amazon who have one, two and many as their numerical basis.
There's no significance above three in any form for them and trying to make it so just implies that you need to make it so.
It's long been a thing that both Inuit and researchers think that wolves can actually count up to 7.
Which makes sense to me - you want to be able to count your (little) kids. (say, the equivalent of under 5, that really need watching.)
Canines have up to 8 kids per litter, usually 6, so counting to 7 would be adequate.
Humans only have to worry about 2 or maybe 3 little kids at a time.
I don't think that's it. It's pretty standard prior to the modern era for families to have around 5 kids or more.
Childless couples basically didn't exist and the whole 2.3 kids was a small family.
I think they're saying that by the time you're having your fourth kid, your first one is old enough to not need constant supervision.
Yes. The over-fives don't need as much supervision, and the 10 and overs of the tribe in general can look after them, and that's about the time they started to learn basic stuff (how to use a bow to hunt rabbits, how to knap stone, how to sew, whatever.)
Hell, when us free-range gen xers ran in packs, we knew to watch out for each other.
What Grumman said. Over fives will be off mingling with the other kids of the tribe. You only have to keep track of newborn-toddler-"preschooler".
So, what do they do, do they just count in sets of pairs like a base-3 numbering system?... Actually, they probably don't have "zero", so is it a base-2 numbering system that starts with 1? Would they regard "Five" as: "A set comprised of a pair of pairs and one"
It's kind of the point that how they regard things is how they regard things and how we regard them regarding things is how we regard how they regard things.
It's sort of like respecting their pronouns but its not all made up for criminals to take advantage of.
Until it gets shotgunned by a meteor shower.
Eh. It'll still be more preserved than most of the shit we have to dig up.
Which is why we demand they study the culture for two years. The first year will be bad anyway.
This is you explaining why college is over-priced.
Maybe instead of two years (one good, one bad), they should just have one good course.
The fun part about education and making it actually work is that it often requires time, repetition and experience gleaned from those first two. Usually the most common is to make the amateur errors and then learn why you did it.
The notion of "just make one good course" is how we get the opposite college issue. Of churning out degrees with woefully underqualified idiots who were given massive info to cram in before the test and then given a license without a care if they learned a thing.
I don't agree with that. I see the same thing in physics, and it's actually extremely detrimental (and frankly seems like it's emotionally conditioning people to: new information = automatically more true information, which is a Leftist indoctrination concept).
In a bad intro physics course, you'll learn about the "observer effect" where quantum particles flow like a wave until they they are "observed" in which case they kind of "choose" which path they took. Then in a later class, you have to unlearn bad information and be told: "there is no such thing as passive observation at the quantum level." But anyone who didn't take the advanced course (like the BA in Engineering students), was now successfully taught wrong information.
Instead, you must teach good information from the beginning. Yes, I understand and accept that the best way to teach students non-intuitive information is to get them to do an experiment, fail, try it the right way, and get a correct solution. However, that doesn't excuse starting them off with a poor rudimentary understanding that has to be unlearned.
If it really takes that long, stop making 2 one year courses, and make it a 1 two year course. Though, I'll bet it'll take less time if you don't have to unlearn wrong lessons.
I wasn't saying otherwise. You shouldn't teach wrongly, at least not in the long term (a one lecture long example can be effective). But that a fundamental to learning to being forced to confront your own bias, whether that's political or instinctual and then know why you thought it and how it made you wrong. Which means a lot of time letting someone be wrong for a period to make their fall from grace that much more strongly resonating.
For an example, during our Major Research Project semester we were basically given a short intro and then allowed to write survey related to our project. Which then was followed by a month of tearing into them by the professor about how leading and biased they were in specific ways that most people didn't even think about and wouldn't have without being shown a specific example of themselves doing it wrong. I can say for certain it helped me considerably in thinking about how research is conducted and why it is so, which is why I sperg out at so many "studies" that get posted around here, whether I agree with them or not.
Either way, the point isn't that "one bad course" is entirely a good thing. Only that there has to be some balance to give the necessary time and learning from bad experiences the ability to root if we want to actually educate people.
Otherwise we get Degree Mills like DeVry that just rush you through as fast as possible which technically gets you the necessary information but doesn't really accomplish anything.
Anth 101 has an entire section on how badly people screw up. Jokes are told, and we point out the mistakes. Those same students then do it.
It's like telling a guy his girlfriend is crazy, he might agree, but he's not learning by advice.
The bonus question on the final is: "Don't stick your dick in: ____"
If they were so advanced, how did they let the colonists take over all their land?
(Maybe they didn't enforce immigration laws or something)
Was Britain at that point merely Iron Age? It was pretty much the early modern period (Australia was only colonized just after US independence, remember)…
Not that your point is invalid, but I would say that massively downplays the gap, tbh…
Personally, I think its more demeaning to say they were this hugely advanced culture and still were both that easily colonized and reverted to such a low level afterwards.
Like, if they were low tech it makes absolute sense why they were that easily conquered. It doesn't reflect on them morally or spiritually or anything other than simply being outplayed by natural resources and natural selection driving innovation.
But if the field was equal-er, then what excuse do they have for been that easily rolled or their barbaric state after?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA241Lg70fg how can you mention that without then linking to this masterpiece. It was a set of ads, and this one, this one needs to be seen to be believed.
These communists love distorting history to suit their own ends. I wonder what other history has been distorted over the years?
"Only Ukranians were able to break the tough prairie sod" - Canadian textbooks, 1970s.
My own Irish-Welsh great-grandparents broke it in southern Manitoba.
The Tasmanians were so fucking primitive, they were mistaken for non-human apes and hunted accordingly. The English weren't gonna get fooled again after meeting chimps and gorillas in Africa.
In highschool a teacher had us read the book “Mutant Message from Down Under” (google it). That book was later revealed to be a total fiction and the author a fraud.
The appeal of the noble savage is strong.
Ibn Khaldun was an Arab historian and historiographer. He more or less invented (or at least recorded) the idea that civilization is driven by strong tribes and men from hard environments and places, they conquer the rich and fat cities, and within 2-3 generations they are fat and weak, just like those they conquered. He believed very much in the idea of the strength, purity, and nobility of the nomadic Arab tribes.
The appeal of the noble savage is ESPECIALLY strong combined with modern post-slavery post-colonial white guilt.
Glad to say that's the first i've heard of it. Just skimming the wiki on it, the obvious question is where are these houses they built?
since this is telia post, I have to ask, is that author Jewish
Honestly i'm not sure. He has a big nose and his scammy behavior points to him being jewish, but he also came from a working class family(aka his parents are not in typical jewish professions) and tries to larp as aboriginal which seems a bit strange to me (i haven't yet seen jews larp as native american to virtue signal for them for example , they usually pretend to be a White liberal that does it. )
So honestly i don't know. Just to be safe, I'm going to say yes until proven otherwise though.
To be fair, I'd lay in the road too if I lived in Australia.