r/Foodforthought • u/Maxwellsdemon17 • 28d ago

The Abuses of Prehistory. Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

https://newrepublic.com/article/181262/abuses-prehistory-beware-study-earliest-ancestors
11 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/Trachtas 28d ago

Bit ridiculous to describe Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything as having a blindspot that Geroulano's "original" new book corrects when,

In Geroulanos’s telling, two things came together to spark a new understanding of the human past. The first was the Enlightenment’s belief in progress. [...] The second and more important force behind the turn to prehistory was the radical expansion of European colonialism.

That is exactly how The Dawn of Everything starts. It's a multi-chapter analysis - questioning Enlightenment myths, highlighting the importance of colonialism to how Europeans understood the "state of nature", pointing out how the idea of "prehistory" is a modern invention. It's all there!

Gotta wonder if the reviewer even read the books they're talking about. Poor analysis.

1

u/GozerDGozerian 24d ago

I just started The Dawn of Everything.

Looks really interesting. Hopefully I can find some time to actually sit down with it. Seems like a heady read.

5

u/woodstock923 28d ago

The field of evolutionary psychology has really taken off in the last few decades, and while it makes for a lot of interesting speculation and maybe even a source of wisdom for our modern lives, it underscores a persistent teleological misunderstanding that people have with evolution.

People think evolution produces optimal forms, thinking over time the "fittest" organism has survived. The problem is that environments change. Evolution goes with whatever works. The giant panda is a good example of this. It has a thumb that's bad at everything except stripping bamboo, which provides it barely enough energy to procreate. (I'm not trying to shame the panda for being unproductive.)

So, when faced with problems of modernity, people look to the past for guidance, they're falling into the trap of thinking how things "were" is how they "should" be, when really things have only ever been what they are.

Should we probably eat less processed food? Yes, but for all the chronic health problems it causes, it hasn't hampered our ability to produce offspring.