by observationist | 2025-10-14 23:18:01+00:00
Any sort of tribal situation would result in forced labor, and cultures would have formalized notions of slavery, indentured service, arbitrary terms based on religious or traditional ideas. The tradeoff of survival for forced labor is an economic plight that happens frequently throughout history. Chattel slavery is inherently degrading, but it has ranged from ritualistic and formal to downright horrifically malicious - the idea that hunter gatherers were egalitarian and peaceful is basically the whole "noble savage" trope.

The truth is, we don't have much but speculation and narrative about the people of Gobekle Tepe, and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.

We're going to have to start analyzing humans more skeptically and rationally, as opposed to taking most of the modern historical narratives as gospel.

Modern humans have existed genetically for 300k+ years. At one point about a million years ago, the Early Pleistocene bottleneck had the population of human ancestors under 2000 individuals. 700k years later, the first modern humans were born, and the first situations in which we had the opportunity to establish culture.

We know from the great north american megafauna die off, climate records, and archaelogical evidence that something happened around 13k years ago to basically reset whatever human civilization there was. It took around 3000 years before the "neolithic revolution" , cultures demonstrating mastery of stone tools, pottery, more sedentary lifestyles, specialization, and so forth. It took another 4,000 years to reach the point where we had started creating written records again, started creating monuments and technology sufficiently durable to last to modern days, and then so on and so forth, with relatively uninterrupted and steady progress to the present day, each culture and age building upon the previous.

I think it's silly to think that it's only in this last 12-13,000 year period that we reached any of the cultural and technological milestones, and that every culture previous to that must have been hunter gatherer, because hunter gatherer are the default "feral human" prototype culture.

We bred dogs from wolves successfully around 45k years ago. That would have taken a generation or two in a nomadic context, or one really spectacular single lifetime for a sedentary person. Even so, you think that for the 250k years prior to that, not a single culture developed writing, wheels, pumps, discovered metal forming, or other technologies?

The human population was scarce, and because of that scarcity, the majority stayed in the absolute best, premium locations - beachfront. A vast proportion of settlements would now be well off the coast, and we have indeed discovered artifacts and evidence of such in various places where researchers have looked.

I'd be willing to bet good money that over the last 300k years there are many 10,000 year cycles and catastrophes where civilizations have risen and fallen, many achieving high levels of technology, perhaps even discovering electricity, advanced chemistry, medicine, and so on, but due to catastrophes, small populations, they got reset back to baseline. I'd bet that it didn't happen 30 times, as often as possible during the course of events, but I'll also make the claim that our current peak of civilization isn't the only good run that human race has ever made.

We are probably the only ones that made it to mass production, definitely the only ones that succeeded in scaling up resource extraction to the levels we saw back in the 1800s. I think there are probably caches of artifacts, evidence left out offshore that technology will make visible to us, that will show a much richer tapestry of events and cultures and history than the somewhat limited and biased narrative that modern historians have put forth as definitive.