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 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.
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.
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: ____"