Annalee Newitz — Neanderthals were distilling tar 200 thousand years ago in Europe

These early humans were using tar to make tools long before Homo sapiens did.

Beginning of technology.

Ars Technica
Neanderthals were distilling tar 200 thousand years ago in Europe
Annalee Newitz

Paul Rosenberg — Breaking point: America approaching a period of disintegration, argues anthropologist Peter Turchin

Anthropologist Peter Turchin's "Ages of Discord" provides a crucial decoder ring for Trump-era social strife.

“The American polity today has a lot in common with the Antebellum America of the 1850s; with Ancien Régime France on the eve of the French Revolution; with Stuart England during the 1630s; and innumerable other historical societies,” Turchin writes. “However, unlike historical societies, we are in a unique position to take steps that could allow us to escape the worst. Societal breakdown and ensuing waves of violence can be avoided by collective, cooperative action.”….

“Structural‐demographic theory represents complex (state‐level) human societies as systems with three main compartments (the general population, the elites, and the state) interacting with each other and with sociopolitical instability via a web of nonlinear feedbacks,” Turchin writes. Their relationship, as described and measured in the theory, is summarized in this figure:

“Ages of Discord” also tests this theory against the example of American history, with special attention to turning points in different trends, which show a remarkable degree of coherence.

One table lists 29 proxies representing 15 variables, all but one of which — life expectancy — reversed direction within about a decade of 1970. These include three proxies of labor oversupply; two of economic and health well-being; three of social well-being and economic inequality; two of elite overproduction, intra-elite competition and intra-elite cooperation; three of cooperation and equity; and one of intra-elite fragmentation, patriotism, state legitimacy, state capacity and sociopolitical instability.

In short, Turchin finds that it wasn’t just similar social trends that changed together; trends from every aspect of the model changed direction around the same time.

Salon
Breaking point: America approaching a period of disintegration, argues anthropologist Peter Turchin
Paul Rosenberg

Simon Powers — Agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago was key to the rise of ancient despots

For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies, eating wild plants and animals. Inequality in these groups is thought to have been very low, with evidence suggesting food and other resources were shared equally between all individuals. In fact, in thehunter-gatherer societies that still exist today we see that all individuals have a say in group decision making. Although some individuals may act as leaders in the sense of guiding discussions, they cannot force others to follow them. 

But it seems that with the beginning of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, this changed. An elite class began to monopolise resources and were able to command the labour of others to do things, such as build monuments in their honour. So how was it that egalitarian societies, where all men were equal, transitioned into hierarchical societies where despots reigned?...

How early "anarcho-capitalism" may have led to stratified hierarchical society based on ownership and control.

The Raw Story
Agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago was key to the rise of ancient despots
Simon Powers, University of Lausanne

Peter Turchin — Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays

Complex human societies, including our own, are fragile. They are held together by an invisible web of mutual trust and social cooperation. This web can fray easily, resulting in a wave of political instability, internal conflict and, sometimes, outright social collapse.
Analysis of past societies shows that these destabilizing historical trends develop slowly, last many decades, and are slow to subside.

The Roman Empire, Imperial China and medieval and early-modern England and France suffered such cycles, to cite a few examples. In the U.S., the last long period of instability began in the 1850s and lasted through the Gilded Age and the “violent 1910s.”

We now see the same forces in the contemporary U.S. Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades.

The roots of the current American predicament go back to the 1970s, when wages of workers stopped keeping pace with their productivity. The two curves diverged: Productivity continued to rise, as wages stagnated. The “great divergence” between the fortunes of the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent is much discussed, yet its implications for long-term political disorder are underappreciated. Battles such as the recent government shutdown are only one manifestation of what is likely to be a decade-long period....

Bloomberg
Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays
Peter Turchin | Vice President of the Evolution Institute and Professor of Biology and Anthropology at the University of Connecticut

David Graeber — They’re Enslaving You With Debt

Debt has been weaponized “pretty much continually” for the last four or five millennia by “people who have access to the ability to make credit,” anthropologist, Occupy activist and anarchist David Graeber said on the “Keiser Report” TV show in late April.

“This is the great social crisis of antiquity,” he continued. “If you go back to people like Aristotle, Hammurabi, Confucius—when they imagined the great social crisis, weaponized debt was what they had in mind. That this tiny percentage of the population would essentially enslave everybody else. They would start losing their flocks, their fields, eventually they would have to start selling members of their family or even themselves into slavery. And the way I always put it—if Aristotle were alive today, he would probably see the distinction between being so deeply in debt that you have to sell yourself to work for others and being so deeply in debt that you have to rent yourself to work for others as something of a legalistic distinction.”

Truthdig
David Graeber: They’re Enslaving You With Debt
Max Keiser interview

Lord Keynes — Mises Flunks Evolution 101

Mises: "The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”

Reading too much Hobbes and not enough life science.

Social Democracy for the 21st Century
Mises Flunks Evolution 101
Lord Keynes

Ethan Watters — There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way human behavior and culture is understood.

AlterNet
There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?
Ethan Watters | Pacific Standard

Here's a comment I made at FB on a similar matter.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to elucidate in his later philosophical works on on the logic of ordinary language, in particular Philosophical Investigations, language use is embedded in context. Human beings are part of that context and therefore cannot stand outside it and observe it. We have to observe it from inside and attempt to see to the best our ability now language operates in expression.

When we look at ordinary language use, we find a lot of things going on at once, which technical uses seek to simplify, in that while rich, ordinary language is not always precise. But technical languages are not rich enough to convey emotion, either. So there is a trade off between "matter and manner," logic and rhetoric, reason and emotion, for instance.

One of the most striking aspects of investigating language is that logic analysis reveals many things that are not usually noticed but which are extremely relevant. E.g., the way one uses ordinary language reveals that certain expressions that appear to be descriptive are actually playing a foundational role as norms, such as basic criteria, often ontological, epistemological, ethical and even esthetic.

In this way, one's use of language reveals a "worldview" or "world picture (Weltbild) that characterizes a "form of life" (Lebensform) as shared context. Thus, we could say that ordinary language has hidden assumptions embedded in it and just because they are shared even by large numbers doesn't guarantee their ontological or epistemological status.

Historically, many of these norms and criteria have been disproved or replaced for other reasons. Very often the scientific understanding of the time contributes significantly to a world view that later changes, as when the earth-centric view was switched for a heliocentric view, and the predominantly religious world view gave way to the chiefly scientific one. Historically the popular world view of a large number of fairly well educated members of a group also lags the state of the art scientific opinion, although there there may be significant disagreement among experts, e.g., the interpretation of QM is hardly a settled matter because it is not scientific but metaphysical.

Wittgenstein regarded the proper role of philosophy to be logical critique. Thus, philosophy becomes properly a logical exercise in determining the assumptions underlying a world view by examining the type of role they play in the "language games" in which they figure as rules. One could compare this to the institutional approach in economics and the cultural approach in sociology v. the "natural" approach that assumes.

In this sense Phil is correct about being wary of the use of science, e.g., in the case of evolutionary theory to justify eugenics, or social Darwinism in political economy. But that is a different issue from a theory as an explanatory and predictive instrument.

What Phil is really more concerned with is how the scientific community functions as a social and political institution and on what basis. To presume it is just science may not be true to the facts. The ability to use knowledge yields power, and there are many ways to use knowledge. Neoclassical economics is used to justify neoliberalism in political economy, for instance, but neoclassical economics is based on neoliberal assumptions that economics as a "science" does not justify, modeling assumptions not being treated as theoretical hypotheses. So the reasoning is circular.