Adam Sroka wrote:
> As for your contention that ice age art is superior to modern art, I
> would offer that the only ice age art that has survived is either cave
> drawings or sculpture. What constitutes modern art is so much broader.
> To the best of our knowledge, ice age man didn't have writing. If there
> is any technology that has fundamentally changed the way we think and
> operate it is what you are looking at right now. Modern science, art,
> religion, philosophy, etc. are all based on the written word. Paleo man
> didn't have that as far as we know. What he understood and was exposed
> to was necessarily limited to his immediate surroundings. So, I would
> argue that while he was no less smart than modern man the structure of
> his thought and belief was far more localized.
Speaking of writing, I recall reading that one of the major Greek
philosophers supposedly argued against writing because too much reliance on
writing would lead to less memory ability (for example, before the invention
of writing, instead of relying on history books, at least one person in a
tribe or society had to memorize the entire group's history). It probably
has, but any society that abandons writing technologies will soon find
themselves conquered by those who continue to use them. The same goes for
calculators and computers. Using them has lessened our mental math abilities
(I know it has mine), but abandoning them would cripple our ability to
compete economically and militarily with other nations.
Adam Sroka:
> Furthermore, Native Americans at the time of the Founders were a
> semi-sedentary people who had agriculture and other modern trappings.
> They had these things before the arrival of Europeans.
Most, but not all. The Greenland Eskimos, for example, reportedly remained
essentially hunter-gatherers until the 1980's. Also, the people who became
known as the Plains Indians had become more sedentary and agricultural
before the Europeans arrived, but they returned to a purer
hunting-and-gathering lifestyle when the Spanish introduced the horse to
America.
|
