Submitted by Ma3Ke4Li3 t3_12303in in philosophy
Reply to comment by robothistorian in Vivek Venkataraman argues that political equality and proto-democracy were the most common form of political organisation in the "state of nature". These ideals preceded modern liberalism & statehood, and are arguably how humans have lived the majority of our evolution. by Ma3Ke4Li3
I'd rather talk in terms of existence of high concentrations of people. If the level of technology is maintained by a small, 30 person isolated community - then i guess it's the level of technology the above poster is talking about. This is bone, leather, stone tools, an occasional copper or gold knife, and so on.
Bronze is much more high-tech, because it requires 3 different ores, from different regions, which means trade needs to happen, which means there should be cities for sending caravans over to
Well, my response was to query how the poster was determining "levels of technology" and/or what qualifies as "technology" in his/her assessment.
Arguably, "fire", the stirrup, the plough, wood and stone implements, the concept of the lever, the concept of "the wheel" may all be considered to be "technology", indeed foundational technologies that preceded the "Age of Metal".
I should also point out - a fact that you are also aware of - that trade was not contingent on the development/existence of cities. Trade routes existed between pre-urban (and even between nomadic systems) human habitations, which may or may not have been permanent.
Hunter gather societies generally held regular seasonal meetings where multiple groups would converge on a single ritual site, where knowledge, tools, resources and culture could be shared and bartered.
You do not need established cities or caravans
What to you mean? Sure, they "held regular seasonal meetings where multiple groups would converge on a single ritual site" but how that means they did not need caravans?
Do you even know from where the ingridients for bronze were brought from in bronze age? all the way from turkey and afganistan.
How do you imagine hunter-gatherers carrying rocks from afganistan to egypt or middle east for no reason?
Why do you think bronze age had bronze? Because they had resources to direct to metal works. What resources? Food and time for people who dedicated themselves to metalworks. The hunter gatherers just could not invest the required effort for researching how to work metals. Only something like golden nuggets, or maybe sometimes using meteor iron. But there is a catch - there is too little of both for everyone. So gold/iron knife or arrow point remained a local and very treasured tool - but never led to other metals in hunter-gatherer societies
??
You're playing down the extent of the number of groups that would participate, the distances they would travel and the cultural significance these annual festivals had.
You understand that bronze existed before the bronze age? Because in order to successfully complete a sufficient bronze tool you do not need an entire metal works or trade caravans. Hunter gatherer groups absolutely had the time, resources and knowledge to locally produce metal tools as they needed them.
You're falling into the trap of classifying human behaviours under specific periods, bronze wasn't discovered in one place, where the bronze age began, but in many places simultaneously and over time became more significant within human society. Furthermore the existence of bronze age bronze works does not disprove the existence or practice of metal working in an earlier period.
You can build a furnace out of river mud, light it with fuel, and now all you need is the metal, which you probably would have sourced before lighting the fire. The reason bronze was valuable was because it was more ideal than copper, which is primarily the most accessible ore for hunter gatherers, since similarly to gold it can sort of be "found" in the environment. Gathering a specific resource for alloying would be more difficult without centralised population centers or long distance trading, but not impossible as some people would have lived in regions where both resources were accessible, such as Cornwall for example.
Moving away from the idea that human civilisation started when we stopped to build cities is more reflective of the archaeological evidence we have
Yeah, it did, because people smelted the natural copper ores that have tin or arsenic in them.That is not the same as deliberately producing bronze, and the scale of those early bronze artifact production was much smaller.so let's say one place which had those ores on the ground would produce the bronze instruments, whereas all the other places around could not.What would be the impact of that happening? Pretty much negligient.Otherwise, why would actual smelting of different ores start only at around 3000 BCE (when bronze-age civilizations were already there?)
As for downplaying - in my opinion it's you who downplay a drastic change in human civilization that happened with agriculture. Raising crops and cattle allowed for a completely different way of living, with smelting bronze from separate ingridients (so you could combine much more abundant copper with tin and arsenic, instead of looking for a very rare natural combination of both), trade, and food surplus that lead to people being more specialized.
All you hunter-gatherer society fans say is that somehow life in those times was better, because people were all equally living in precarious conditions.
Sure, maybe early settlers in agricultural societies were not that happy with their life, but they had way less problems every year with food shortages, had some kind of state to protect them, and were capable of creating city culture, which we are all part of now.
While hunter-gatherers could be wiped by a hostile tribe at every given moment, every winter-spring could lead to starvation, and the amount of resources to spend on anything except survival was miniscule
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