Читать книгу Natural Environments and Human Health - Alan W Ewert - Страница 24

The third stage occurred when humans moved from a primarily nomadic hunting and gathering society to an agricultural one. Toward the end of the behavioral modernity stage people began to harvest wild grains, which may have helped to lead to farming. This development was possible because the climate became more temperate and therefore people and animals could shed their nomadic lifestyle, build permanent homes, and accumulate material goods. The evolution of symbolic reasoning helped people have the ability to form cooperative relationships, which contributed to larger settlements. Along with permanent homes came the ability to save grain for winter or as insurance in case of a drought or other weather-related challenges. During this stage the social structure changed and people could differentiate into different occupations. There was a growth in population, putting people in closer contact than in earlier stages.

The propensity toward cooperation that was the most likely characteristic of the beginning of this stage encouraged reciprocal actions, though sometime during this stage a great shift in beliefs about power and control and the natural world seemed to occur. Leaders of some settlements controlled the group activities while other settlements continued to be egalitarian. There seemed to be a split where some people continued with the cooperation and care notions that included the natural world, while another WorldView evolved to be the dominant Western culture that understood agriculture in terms of power and control, and used food surpluses not only to survive but also to dominate other humans. Both of these WorldViews are motivated by self-preservation even though the way to go about self-preservation is close to opposite. Flinders (2002/2003) said that people who continued with the values-of-belonging maintained their intimacy with nature and retreated from cultures based on aggressiveness, cunning, and greed.

Human brains have a great deal of diversity in how they interpret sensory information and two people experiencing the same event easily can learn different pieces of information and life lessons. This is why police detectives expect people who saw the same event to have different stories about what happened, and why they are concerned about lying when stories are exactly the same. When children are about 2 years old and again in their teens there is prolific brain activity and neuronal wiring. This is when life experiences turn into belief systems from which we operate. Therefore, for some humans the fear of scarcity led to a perceived need to dominate, while for other humans this concern led them to cooperate and share.

Those who took the opportunity to dominate also believed that nature’s primary purpose was to be conquered and cultivated. Society became hierarchical with kings, merchants, farmers and slaves. People could hoard food and use it as power or a weapon and they had to protect the land and material property they had, hence the movement towards warfare. This ability to accumulate and use material wealth as power gave rise to the belief that materialism is good, and launched a preoccupation with symbols of wealth rather than actual measures of health. Neuroscience tells us that humans are herd animals and as such often do what leaders say. Herd behavior has been identified by philosophers, economists, psychologists, sociologists, and marketers. Freud called it crowd psychology and Jung called it the collective unconsciousness; Nietzsche called it a herd instinct while Kierkegaard called it the crowd or herd morality. The book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War popularized the term herd behavior (Trotter, 1914). Markets depend on the theory that enough members of a group want to mimic group members of a higher status, which is why companies hire these people to be pictured using products they are selling.

There is debate about the first archeological evidence of warfare; some references say a battle of some type occurred about 14,000 years ago. Evidence of a battle at Mesopotamia was dated to about 5000 years ago, the same time period that evidence of large-scale military engagements has been found in Syria. Bows, maces, and slings were the common weapons found through the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Warfare and the agricultural stage appear related because it was near or during the agricultural stage that warfare seemed to begin. Warfare has the same foundation of power and control that grew in many agrarian communities.

Some cultures never used agriculture and remained hunter–gatherers such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Batek people living in forests of Peninsular Malaysia. They also remained peaceful and cooperative people who travel in small bands tied spiritually and materially to their land. Indigenous Australians have occupied regions of northwest Australia for at least 30,000 years. A predominantly peaceful group relying on dreams to guide their day-to-day survival, they did not cultivate crops or maintain permanent settlements. A number of other Australian indigenous people maintain a WorldView that retains a close relationship with nature in practice as well as considering their dreams part of their reality. Closely connected to nature, they embrace natural phenomena and life as part of a vast and intricate system. Having dream time and a harmonious existence with nature is the foundation of their WorldView. They have maintained this WorldView even though the English colonizers introduced a WorldView inclusive of warfare, material accumulation, and dominance over nature and other humans. While some people label this indigenous WorldView as primitive or label Australian indigenous people as primitive—as an example, they did not know about metal until it was introduced to them in the late 1700s—their spiritual and physical relationship with nature maintained the biological diversity in their environment.

The Nharo Bushmen are another example of people who maintained a sustainable relationship with their environment until recent invasion by Europeans. Even today they want to keep their culture and continue to raise their children on the land as part of the land (Apelian, 2013). As Apelian said, they ‘hold true connection—to self, each other, and the land around them’ (p. 13). Medina’s (2008) conclusion that human brains are wired to learn experientially continues to be practiced in Bushman communities to the extent allowed by law.

The way of life in these cultures, guided by their WorldView of close connection with and respect for nature, is sustainable within our current knowledge of natural processes. Embedded in their cultures and language are their traditional wisdom and practices that honor the reciprocity between people and their natural surroundings.