Which do you think is closer to the truth? That hunter-gatherer societies were more primitive than ours or....

Question

that they were more developed along different lines?

Answer 1

The latter. Think about it. What would happen to you if you got lost in the forest? Would you be able to shelter yourself? Find food? Safe drinking water? Could you even build a fire if you didn't have a lighter on you?

Hunter-gatherer societies survived quite well for hundreds of thousands of years. In modern ones, people work around twenty hours a week to secure their basic necessities. The rest of the time they could devote to... well, anything. Yeah, they don't have a lot of stuff. They can't. But they do have better diets than most agricultural civilizations. In fact, we are just now attaining the height averages that pre-agricultural revolution peoples had.

We tend to think that we're so much more advanced than h-gs are, but we forget that there are a lot of problems associated with our kind of society that they just don't have. For instance, in the ten thousand or so years since the Agricultural Revolution, we have managed to overpopulate our planet and pollute it almost to the point of complete collapse. H-G societies, for the most part, operate in a balance with their ecosystem. If they don't, they die out. Also, societies that are based on agriculture are subject to blights, famine, and drought in a way that h-g societies aren't. Remember the potato blight of the 1800s? If the Irish of that time had been hunter-gatherers, they would have just eaten something else. But as agriculturalists who relied on the potato, they starved.

This is not to say that hunter-gatherer societies are better than ours, but it's short-sighted to think that they are worse just because we have Playstations and they don't.

Answer 2

. In a hunter gatherer society, there would be no more than 5 or 6 jobs and probably only two to six social ranks. The hunter gatherer divided all people in the world into two or three groups: us, not us, and possibly friends but not us. If they had any doubt that another group was friends, then that other group was enemies. There was very little in the way of degrees of friendliness or degrees of being an enemy. We know that, among many existing hunter gatherer groups, their word for themselves translates only as people. Outsiders are not 'people'. It certainly appears that the hunter gatherer societies confined themselves to fewer and simpler distinctions. That seems to me to equate with being primitive.

Answer 3

Hunter-gatherer societies were not primitive but rather less complex. Their lifestyle was relatively relaxed, they didn't spend vast amounts of time collecting resources. Hunter-gatherer societies were also gender balanced in the sense that each (working) member was considered vital. They were very advanced in terms of collection of food and hunting, things that most of us today can not claim. All societies orginally started out hunting and gathering, it was only until the need for agriculture that permanent settlement arise, therefore our ancestors at some point were hunting and gathering for subsistence. I really believe that the idea of being primitive does not exist in any society, it is merely a matter of need.

Answer 4

i suppose it depends onhow you define primitive; if you define it as the absence of a variety of tools, then hunter-gatherer societies were certainly more primitive than ours
if you define it as the absence of a variety of skilled workers, then again they were far more primitive than us
no matter how i look at it, they were definitely more primitive
any idea what the average life-span was back then?; you were old if you made it to your thirties!
by the way, there are still some hunter-gatherer societies which continue to exist today so they are not a thing of the past and if you compare your society to theirs, you'll see that we are definitely more sophisticated
our societies have all evolved along different lines, modern and prehistoric, primitive and sophisticated, else we'd all be the same

Answer 5

I think a better word might be dominant. Certainly our society is more dominant. Their way of living is older so in that context, it is more primitive. Most hunter gatherer individuals probably know much more about their surrounding environment because they need to to survive. Our society is so specialized that only certain people have a comparable knowledge about specific categories of the environment such as botany. We may have a more sophisticated society but I am not sure it is necessarily a happier one but ours is probably a healthier society with much longer lives.

Answer 6

It was a mixture of both. They traded with other groups for the things they needed. Capitalism. But since the survival of all was dependent on total cooperation, they were socialist. But I do think that socialism came first - the vast majority of human history @290,000 years, humns lived in tightly-bound groups. They looked after their old and sick. Everyone cooperated, and shared what they had. If they hadn't, there wouldn't be any humans.

Answer 7

the society that is feed is always more evolved. You can not have leisure time if you are hungry. You spend all your time finding food.

Once you have plenty of food you can have leisure times. In leisure times you can invent and dream, or evolve

Answer 8

from a genetic and evolutionary point of view they of course where more primitive, but from a survival and adaptations point of view for the times they were superior.

Answer 9

If you have not already, read ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Much written about 'takers' and 'leavers' and which was more civilized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29

Answer 10

If you are talking about present soceity, they were more advanced than ours. We have alot of technology that does the work for us!