Revisionist history may seem like harmless, feel good child’s play, but the threat it poses (to all other animals at least) is that without hearing the real story, people will never learn from the past.
It’s tempting to want to believe that all that has gone wrong with the human race is the result of being led astray by our technology, and if we could just get back to our caveman roots, everything would be happy and harmonious like it surely was back then. But contrary to contemporary popular belief, that’s a world that never was.
Even the earliest human hunters drove countless species to extinction and exhausted their carrying capacities time and again, ever since plant-eating primates first climbed down from the trees and decided to take up big-game hunting.
The notion of the peaceful savage has long since been disproven, but people want to cling to it rather than accept the truth about human nature. Just look at the dead-animal adornments any warrior or tribal chief wore, and it’s easy to see the roots of trophy hunting.
The thought that any spear-wielding species who took advantage of fire to herd animals toward a cliff or into a box canyon had an innate sense of ecological fairness goes against all that made us human—envy, lust, greed, gluttony, a lack of empathy and an over-blown ego are the kinds of things that ultimately define a hunter, whether the motive for their behavior is sport or subsistence.
Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson summed up the chapter, “Paradise Imagined,” of their book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, thusly, “There is no such thing as paradise, not in the South Seas, not in southern Greece, not anywhere. There never has been. To find a better world we must look not to a romanticized and dishonest dream forever receding into the primitive past, but to a future that rests on a proper understanding of ourselves.”
Humans have achieved an awful lot of success as a species over the years, but judging by our planet-crushing prowess, we may have finally breached our collective britches.
Exposing the Big Game 
The world would be much better off if humans had remained hunters and gatherers and grew some fur to stay warm rather than becoming agriculturists at the Dawn of Civilization primarily in the Fertile Crescent, Middle East, where there was naturally occurring wheat, corn, barley and pigs, cattle, fowl. See the book: Germs, Guns and Steel. At that time we could evolve into farmers and ranchers, bankers, armies and politicians. Then too, with agriculture emphasis, we, as humans declared war on wilderness, flora and fauna. Our populations exploded as did our war on wilderness and wildlife and has accelerated with population growth. Our USA forefathers marched across this land killing everything in sight, pushing back the wilderness, killing the wild, taming the land and rivers, becoming stewards of the land and rivers and oceans and killing it all by animal farming, overfishing the oceans, hunting, pollution. Yes, some of our forebears drove some animals to extinction, but as hunters and gatherers, our impact was tolerable and not leading to the sixth Great Extinction driven by us. A time that never was, yes it was, a better time and a better direction for all life on Earth.
The 6th extinction began while humans were still using stone aged. The problems arose long before “civilization” or agriculture, they started when early humans commenced to steal prey, habitat and carrying capacity from natural predators.
… Another significant post and an eloquent quote by Soren Kierkegaard. I’m going to have to reblog this, though I’ll wait a few days and then borrow the straight jacket.
I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks, Jim, for being unwavering in pointing out the politically incorrect truth.
Oh, I’m sorry, was that politically incorrect–I was just reporting on the truth. That’s why I’ve never been a politian.
Great post, Jim. Will re-post on Facebook pages.
Thanks Will.