01-17-2008, 12:00 AM
Great about the jobs, Bob.
Friends with money are better than the other kind.
The technique is not to conjecture about prehistoric people so much, as it is to make obervations of modern humans in natural environments.
Genuinely feral human beings still dot the globe in isolated communities, even though they've been diminished.
We set a standard for defining a feral community. That standard is that they have to live directly from nature.
They have to eat what they find or kill, and build their shelters from naturally occuring materials.
Then we look around the globe and see what we have.
No one can know for sure whether prehistoric man believed in spirits and had magical relationships with animals.
What we know, is that when modern people live directly from nature, they unanimously practice animism and totemism. Which is a belief that everything has a literal spirit and the practice of entering into magical identification with animals.
The spirits of tribal animism are not energetic abstractions. They're components of the natural world, and they have to be worked with and around.
When they say a tree has a spirit, they don't mean a Christian styled soul. Or like "the spirit within you" They mean there's a sprite that haunts the tree. They might leave it food. It might steal their soul.
If there's a conjecture about prehistoric people here, maybe it's this; That if it were possible to live from nature without animism and totemism, someone would have done it by now.
Friends with money are better than the other kind.
The technique is not to conjecture about prehistoric people so much, as it is to make obervations of modern humans in natural environments.
Genuinely feral human beings still dot the globe in isolated communities, even though they've been diminished.
We set a standard for defining a feral community. That standard is that they have to live directly from nature.
They have to eat what they find or kill, and build their shelters from naturally occuring materials.
Then we look around the globe and see what we have.
No one can know for sure whether prehistoric man believed in spirits and had magical relationships with animals.
What we know, is that when modern people live directly from nature, they unanimously practice animism and totemism. Which is a belief that everything has a literal spirit and the practice of entering into magical identification with animals.
The spirits of tribal animism are not energetic abstractions. They're components of the natural world, and they have to be worked with and around.
When they say a tree has a spirit, they don't mean a Christian styled soul. Or like "the spirit within you" They mean there's a sprite that haunts the tree. They might leave it food. It might steal their soul.
If there's a conjecture about prehistoric people here, maybe it's this; That if it were possible to live from nature without animism and totemism, someone would have done it by now.