Great article and sensible approach to ancestry. One point to make.
You said Moreover, the survival of Australian Indigenous people in such a harsh climate and environment was extremely impressive, and required intense social organisation, knowledge and skills.
Are you unaware that the British found the highest levels of infanticide in Australia that they had ever seen and they had seen a lot.
The survival in this environment was not impressive because it rested on the bones of babies, killed to reduce pressure on food resources and often eaten to supplement food resources.
This 'convenient' solution to the problem of food gathering for stone-age hunter-gatherers, combined with the appalling treatment of women as slaves, virtual packhorses useful for sex, is no doubt why aboriginal peoples never managed to evolve beyond stone-age. With no pressure to develope and evolve because numbers were kept low and no power of females to initiate change, they remained at a primitive level of human development.
And since Australia is in many parts, relatively benign, in terms of climate, and environment, it is wrong to spread the broad brush of the few desert peoples across all of the land. There were many parts where it was not hard to survive and there was nothing impressive about aboriginal peoples surviving.
I was aware of the infanticide issue. It’s common across all hunter-gatherer societies. Ideally, they need a five year gap between children, and how to achieve that? The answer is often infanticide. Indeed, I’ve seen arguments that the move to agriculture was driven by mothers who were sick of killing their babies. While agriculture had a net bad effect on people’s health and well-being, it allowed more children to survive, and meant less infanticide, because you were fixed in one place and had (hopefully) steady food supplies. There’s no society where trade offs aren’t present.
Yes, it is common across hunter-gatherer societies but, according to the observations of the British, never at such levels. And yes, women are often a powerful motivational force for change and I have no doubt women in aboriginal cultures, as virtual slaves, had little or no power in that regard. I have read in records of the men eating the best food and tossing scraps first to the dogs and then to the women. Quite how they managed to produce babies is the question. But the human condition is resilient.
Why did agriculture have a net bad effect on people's health and wellbeing? We can see from studying food, and my background is as a food writer, that before mechanisations and over-processing of food, people ate very well. Agriculture meant they had reliable food supplies and generally the flour they used for bread was full of nutrition because it had not been processed. Grains came with their nutrient-rich 'skins'and fruits and vegetables were picked fresh from farm gardens.
Urban living changed a lot of that but, even then, most people in Australia anyway, had enough land to plant fruit trees and set up vegetable gardens.
There is no doubt that reliable food supplies means more children survive and are allowed to live. The British set up hundreds of ration depots across the country to follow and feed aborigines. That would have helped. And building railway lines across Australia also helped because aborigines started begging for money and a baby boom was the result. Children make excellent beggars.
I lived in India for many years and parents often deform their children because they make better beggars. So yes, there are always tradeoffs.
I merely sought to make the point that the many different peoples called aborigines by the British, were not particularly clever or impressive in terms of survival, given the high incidence of infanticide.
Yes. I think we’ve become inured in Western societies to the desperate things people can do when they’re in need. I was going off data which showed that when we first turned to agriculture, we were shorter and had more problems (arthritis from grinding grains, teeth worn down, so forth). We have adapted, because we’re human.
Yes, adaptability is a core human facility. Which is why it is so destructive to encourage people to believe they are victims whether that is in the name of a culture, nationality, religion or whatever.
In psychological terms the inability to move through and process trauma is unhealthy and dysfunctional. Every human alive is descended from the traumatised, persecuted, colonised and abused. The British were violently colonised a dozen times and got over it and made something of themselves and yet in Australia some argue, one colonisation has created dysfunction down through ten generations.
It has not of course because most Australians with aboriginal ancestry are doing fine, as well and sometimes better than the average and the ones struggling are only struggling because unlike the majority, they are not assimilated into the modern world but remain trapped in violent and backward tribal/clan systems.
I grew up poor. Lots of us did. And while kids could be cruel, we did not see ourselves as victims. Quite the opposite. Tough times made us tougher.
Humans (esp of the writerly and/or imaginative type) have a desperate existential need to escape our time, place, bodies, our essential ISness.
That's why we've always posited different universes, from afterlifes to other planets, and other forms like ghosts and spirits (angels purer than us and demons more evil), as well as mythologies and fantasies of a Golden Age, whether behind us deep in the mists of history or up ahead in some vague Promised Land.
To be trapped in the messy imperfect moment seems like an impossible prison sentence—there must be some way out!—and to be just another in a long line of fallible mortal mammals who grappled with the same needs and responded with the same passions, seems cruel and unjust.
Another thing hard to accept is the full scope of human nature: our greed, selfishness, fears, stupidity, capacity for violence, and the way injustice and cruelty seem to be baked into the human condition. Once again, the idealist cries out: There must be a better way! Maybe back when people didn't have guns or wheels or steel or cable news, there was a kinder, better world.
"To be merely men seems humiliating to men," is how Lev Shestov put it.
I’m sure there’s something to this. I write fiction and part of the pleasure of it is imagining different places with different rules, or using mythology and imagination to create a world. But I’m also under no illusions as to both the good and the bad parts of being human. I’m certainly not someone who believes that there was ever some kind of utopian existence. As for dystopias - well, I can imagine them far more easily, generally stemming from the attempts to implement utopian ideals, but forgetting that humans are human.
Hope I am a good Mum - my kids are questioning and thoughtful - but I am not sure how much I had to do with it, they’re just great kids.
Writing fiction (playing w imagination) is definitely a great way to realize how all of us and our world(s) are multifaceted, w good and evil inextricably intertwined, as opposed to the Manichean certitudes of utopians, zealots and others who are uncomfortable in uncertainty aka negative capability.
I rarely have a problem with most people's ideas and/or opinions, but only with the vehemence w which they are held.
"I rarely have a problem with most people's ideas and/or opinions, but only with the vehemence w which they are held." < This is me. Almost always open to discuss!
I find it very sad that some people find it shameful if their ancestors were hunter-gatherers instead of settled farmers; we were all hunter-gatherers far enough back I believe. Thanks for sharing your story.
Exactly! All our ancestors were hunter-gatherers once, and it took considerable ingenuity to survive. Whether our practices changed or not is also very much dictated by our environment, not by how “advanced” we were, or anything of the like. My understanding is that Australia had few arable grains and only one domesticable animals (the dingo, imported). Also, animals that hop aren’t great as beasts of burden! We respond to, and are constrained by, our environments, a proposition which seems simple to me; but the modern fantasy seems to be that if you just believe in yourself hard enough, you’re not constrained by anything.
This reminds me - I need to write a post on the limits of positive thinking, as someone who has always been physically constrained in what I can do, to a greater or lesser degree. I’m not able to become a sprinter or a dancer just because I believe in myself. This is the constraint of reality. I can walk almost like a normal person, with considerable treatment, training and belief in myself? (But when the treatment wears off, the walking peters off too, and I’m back on the walking stick after six months).
And every human alive today is descended from the same relatively small group of distant ancestors. We are one. Modern genetics says there are no races. The only difference is how we live our lives and that is about culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS7KsabTyUU
I find it difficult to understand why condemnation is made of British colonisation and yet many peoples colonised this land long before 1788. In 1788 there were 350-500 different groups, most no more than family clans and not even big enough to be tribes, without a common language and mostly at war with each other. They were descended from different waves of migration and colonisation where, in the stone-age way of things, they wiped out those they found, except, perhaps, a few useful females. As all humans did.
The British sought to help them join the modern world, just as we still do today sending aid to less developed countries.
Positive thinking is powerful but the most positive thinking is when we rejoice in exactly who and what we are, even as we strive to be the best we can be. I suspect you do that already.
Yes, there’s no such thing as “race” in the biological sense. A few years back, I was alerted to a paper which said chimps have biological races, but we do not: Alan R Templeton, ‘Biological Races in Humans’ (2013) 44(3) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 262 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.shpsc.2013.04.010). I’d call what we have “ethnicities”, but even then - as you say, we’re all descended from the same set of hominid ancestors. I do rather like to hope that I have some Neanderthal and Denisovans in my mix. The more mixtures, the better.
Absolutely the more mixture the better. Mongrel dogs are stronger and healthier than pedigrees. Same applies to humans. Too much interbreeding and you create physiological and psychological deformities.
Which is why using IVF for cows and horses will not end well. Nature has her ways.
I agree, the idea that "anyone can do anything if they believe they can" rings nicely when you first hear it but it has unintentionally caused a lot of harm. I think that when society accepts that anyone can do anything they then have to grapple with why everyone is not doing everything. Ultimately it demeans people who have made achievements by saying that anyone could have done them with enough confidence, and unfortunately stigmatizes people who have very different opportunities and abilities. It may even have motivated historical revision; deep inside the author of "Dark Emu" must have interpreted the different society of the Indigenous people as a shameful failing on their part rather than a different way of life, constrained as you say by their environment. Best of luck with your future post.
James C Scott writes great and interesting stuff on the connection between agriculture and rigid, hierarchical, oppressive ancient states. E.g. 'Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States'. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240214/against-the-grain/
Because reliance on grain crops allowed the state to accurately measure and record, and hence control, both its subjects' work, and food provision. Grain requires a crop in a fixed place of fixed area, with year-round work (unlike e.g. tubers, or fish/shellfish). The final product of grain is easily divided and measured by volume or weight, for doling out (unlike e.g. livestock).
Creates God-King societies to extract the surplus - I always think of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And yes, pastoralist societies are quite different. Have you read ‘Walls’ by David Frye? Really interesting discussion of how walls are part of an agricultural society and how it affects society: https://www.amazon.com.au/Walls-History-Civilization-Blood-Brick/dp/0571348416
Great article and sensible approach to ancestry. One point to make.
You said Moreover, the survival of Australian Indigenous people in such a harsh climate and environment was extremely impressive, and required intense social organisation, knowledge and skills.
Are you unaware that the British found the highest levels of infanticide in Australia that they had ever seen and they had seen a lot.
The survival in this environment was not impressive because it rested on the bones of babies, killed to reduce pressure on food resources and often eaten to supplement food resources.
This 'convenient' solution to the problem of food gathering for stone-age hunter-gatherers, combined with the appalling treatment of women as slaves, virtual packhorses useful for sex, is no doubt why aboriginal peoples never managed to evolve beyond stone-age. With no pressure to develope and evolve because numbers were kept low and no power of females to initiate change, they remained at a primitive level of human development.
And since Australia is in many parts, relatively benign, in terms of climate, and environment, it is wrong to spread the broad brush of the few desert peoples across all of the land. There were many parts where it was not hard to survive and there was nothing impressive about aboriginal peoples surviving.
I was aware of the infanticide issue. It’s common across all hunter-gatherer societies. Ideally, they need a five year gap between children, and how to achieve that? The answer is often infanticide. Indeed, I’ve seen arguments that the move to agriculture was driven by mothers who were sick of killing their babies. While agriculture had a net bad effect on people’s health and well-being, it allowed more children to survive, and meant less infanticide, because you were fixed in one place and had (hopefully) steady food supplies. There’s no society where trade offs aren’t present.
Yes, it is common across hunter-gatherer societies but, according to the observations of the British, never at such levels. And yes, women are often a powerful motivational force for change and I have no doubt women in aboriginal cultures, as virtual slaves, had little or no power in that regard. I have read in records of the men eating the best food and tossing scraps first to the dogs and then to the women. Quite how they managed to produce babies is the question. But the human condition is resilient.
Why did agriculture have a net bad effect on people's health and wellbeing? We can see from studying food, and my background is as a food writer, that before mechanisations and over-processing of food, people ate very well. Agriculture meant they had reliable food supplies and generally the flour they used for bread was full of nutrition because it had not been processed. Grains came with their nutrient-rich 'skins'and fruits and vegetables were picked fresh from farm gardens.
Urban living changed a lot of that but, even then, most people in Australia anyway, had enough land to plant fruit trees and set up vegetable gardens.
There is no doubt that reliable food supplies means more children survive and are allowed to live. The British set up hundreds of ration depots across the country to follow and feed aborigines. That would have helped. And building railway lines across Australia also helped because aborigines started begging for money and a baby boom was the result. Children make excellent beggars.
I lived in India for many years and parents often deform their children because they make better beggars. So yes, there are always tradeoffs.
I merely sought to make the point that the many different peoples called aborigines by the British, were not particularly clever or impressive in terms of survival, given the high incidence of infanticide.
Yes. I think we’ve become inured in Western societies to the desperate things people can do when they’re in need. I was going off data which showed that when we first turned to agriculture, we were shorter and had more problems (arthritis from grinding grains, teeth worn down, so forth). We have adapted, because we’re human.
Yes, adaptability is a core human facility. Which is why it is so destructive to encourage people to believe they are victims whether that is in the name of a culture, nationality, religion or whatever.
In psychological terms the inability to move through and process trauma is unhealthy and dysfunctional. Every human alive is descended from the traumatised, persecuted, colonised and abused. The British were violently colonised a dozen times and got over it and made something of themselves and yet in Australia some argue, one colonisation has created dysfunction down through ten generations.
It has not of course because most Australians with aboriginal ancestry are doing fine, as well and sometimes better than the average and the ones struggling are only struggling because unlike the majority, they are not assimilated into the modern world but remain trapped in violent and backward tribal/clan systems.
I grew up poor. Lots of us did. And while kids could be cruel, we did not see ourselves as victims. Quite the opposite. Tough times made us tougher.
Humans (esp of the writerly and/or imaginative type) have a desperate existential need to escape our time, place, bodies, our essential ISness.
That's why we've always posited different universes, from afterlifes to other planets, and other forms like ghosts and spirits (angels purer than us and demons more evil), as well as mythologies and fantasies of a Golden Age, whether behind us deep in the mists of history or up ahead in some vague Promised Land.
To be trapped in the messy imperfect moment seems like an impossible prison sentence—there must be some way out!—and to be just another in a long line of fallible mortal mammals who grappled with the same needs and responded with the same passions, seems cruel and unjust.
Another thing hard to accept is the full scope of human nature: our greed, selfishness, fears, stupidity, capacity for violence, and the way injustice and cruelty seem to be baked into the human condition. Once again, the idealist cries out: There must be a better way! Maybe back when people didn't have guns or wheels or steel or cable news, there was a kinder, better world.
"To be merely men seems humiliating to men," is how Lev Shestov put it.
P.S. you sound like a great mom!
I’m sure there’s something to this. I write fiction and part of the pleasure of it is imagining different places with different rules, or using mythology and imagination to create a world. But I’m also under no illusions as to both the good and the bad parts of being human. I’m certainly not someone who believes that there was ever some kind of utopian existence. As for dystopias - well, I can imagine them far more easily, generally stemming from the attempts to implement utopian ideals, but forgetting that humans are human.
Hope I am a good Mum - my kids are questioning and thoughtful - but I am not sure how much I had to do with it, they’re just great kids.
Writing fiction (playing w imagination) is definitely a great way to realize how all of us and our world(s) are multifaceted, w good and evil inextricably intertwined, as opposed to the Manichean certitudes of utopians, zealots and others who are uncomfortable in uncertainty aka negative capability.
I rarely have a problem with most people's ideas and/or opinions, but only with the vehemence w which they are held.
Thanks again for the great piece...cheers!
"I rarely have a problem with most people's ideas and/or opinions, but only with the vehemence w which they are held." < This is me. Almost always open to discuss!
I find it very sad that some people find it shameful if their ancestors were hunter-gatherers instead of settled farmers; we were all hunter-gatherers far enough back I believe. Thanks for sharing your story.
Exactly! All our ancestors were hunter-gatherers once, and it took considerable ingenuity to survive. Whether our practices changed or not is also very much dictated by our environment, not by how “advanced” we were, or anything of the like. My understanding is that Australia had few arable grains and only one domesticable animals (the dingo, imported). Also, animals that hop aren’t great as beasts of burden! We respond to, and are constrained by, our environments, a proposition which seems simple to me; but the modern fantasy seems to be that if you just believe in yourself hard enough, you’re not constrained by anything.
This reminds me - I need to write a post on the limits of positive thinking, as someone who has always been physically constrained in what I can do, to a greater or lesser degree. I’m not able to become a sprinter or a dancer just because I believe in myself. This is the constraint of reality. I can walk almost like a normal person, with considerable treatment, training and belief in myself? (But when the treatment wears off, the walking peters off too, and I’m back on the walking stick after six months).
And every human alive today is descended from the same relatively small group of distant ancestors. We are one. Modern genetics says there are no races. The only difference is how we live our lives and that is about culture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS7KsabTyUU
I find it difficult to understand why condemnation is made of British colonisation and yet many peoples colonised this land long before 1788. In 1788 there were 350-500 different groups, most no more than family clans and not even big enough to be tribes, without a common language and mostly at war with each other. They were descended from different waves of migration and colonisation where, in the stone-age way of things, they wiped out those they found, except, perhaps, a few useful females. As all humans did.
The British sought to help them join the modern world, just as we still do today sending aid to less developed countries.
Positive thinking is powerful but the most positive thinking is when we rejoice in exactly who and what we are, even as we strive to be the best we can be. I suspect you do that already.
Yes, there’s no such thing as “race” in the biological sense. A few years back, I was alerted to a paper which said chimps have biological races, but we do not: Alan R Templeton, ‘Biological Races in Humans’ (2013) 44(3) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 262 (https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.shpsc.2013.04.010). I’d call what we have “ethnicities”, but even then - as you say, we’re all descended from the same set of hominid ancestors. I do rather like to hope that I have some Neanderthal and Denisovans in my mix. The more mixtures, the better.
Absolutely the more mixture the better. Mongrel dogs are stronger and healthier than pedigrees. Same applies to humans. Too much interbreeding and you create physiological and psychological deformities.
Which is why using IVF for cows and horses will not end well. Nature has her ways.
I agree, the idea that "anyone can do anything if they believe they can" rings nicely when you first hear it but it has unintentionally caused a lot of harm. I think that when society accepts that anyone can do anything they then have to grapple with why everyone is not doing everything. Ultimately it demeans people who have made achievements by saying that anyone could have done them with enough confidence, and unfortunately stigmatizes people who have very different opportunities and abilities. It may even have motivated historical revision; deep inside the author of "Dark Emu" must have interpreted the different society of the Indigenous people as a shameful failing on their part rather than a different way of life, constrained as you say by their environment. Best of luck with your future post.
James C Scott writes great and interesting stuff on the connection between agriculture and rigid, hierarchical, oppressive ancient states. E.g. 'Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States'. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240214/against-the-grain/
Because reliance on grain crops allowed the state to accurately measure and record, and hence control, both its subjects' work, and food provision. Grain requires a crop in a fixed place of fixed area, with year-round work (unlike e.g. tubers, or fish/shellfish). The final product of grain is easily divided and measured by volume or weight, for doling out (unlike e.g. livestock).
Creates God-King societies to extract the surplus - I always think of Mesopotamia and Egypt. And yes, pastoralist societies are quite different. Have you read ‘Walls’ by David Frye? Really interesting discussion of how walls are part of an agricultural society and how it affects society: https://www.amazon.com.au/Walls-History-Civilization-Blood-Brick/dp/0571348416