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Originally Posted by RandoymRandt  Most tribal cultures have infinitely richer social systems, rituals, and family structures than "urbanites". |
We have a tedency to think modern culture is difficult and complex because of the technologies we use, but its actually much less taxing in many ways. We can survive with a lot less individual effort, which probably makes us rather lazy intellectually.
I'm in the middle of reading about the collapse of civilizations and one of the cultures that is described in detail is the agricultural society of New Guinea. The farming techniques are so complex that it takes decades to learn, starting in childhood. Members of the tribe who go away to school, return to find they don't even have the skills to keep up the family garden. They missed too much information in their absence.
Other pre-literate tribes have intricate systems of social connections and linguistic terms to describe the matrix of how everyone is related to one another. Not to mention an intimate knowledge of their surroundings -- from plants to animals -- that enables them to survive in a hostile eco niche.
Humans today aren't any different in character and intelligence than we were 60,000 years ago or more. Our most recent evolutionary changes have been in defense against disease rather than in morphological changes. What has changed is our culture, but that is ephemeral and all too easily lost.
Given the fragility of our high-tech infrastructure, and how little the average individual knows about basic survival skills, I think those of us in industrial nations are living on borrowed time. We're like a bunch of kids who never had to grow up,
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