been reading a bit about ancient horticulture vs. agriculture & what's fascinating/scary to me is, well for one, how absolutely *zero* of this was in my schoolbooks on the origins of human societies
and it's not a case of merely "paleoanthropology is hard" b/c in may cases the indigenous ppl we invaded/colonized *were still doing it*, and we cut down their food-forests to make way for fields
(the distinction here is agriculture = farming in fields, rice paddies etc, not necessarily a monoculture but involving reshaping the land vs. horticulture = selectively promoting/removing plants that are / are not useful to humans, so you end up with groves of walnut trees & patches of vegetables that are far more productive than true wilderness)
finally found the first article I read hinting at this: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5409/are-we-city-dwellers-or-hunter-gatherers (made the rounds on Mastodon, critical view here: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/an-anarchist-view-of-human-social-evolution/ )
which is really more about the formation and origins of "society" than anything else
there seems to be a really awkward trend of philosophers or other intellectuals taking scientific findings and mining them for insights, narratives, and a Grand Theory or three, only, by the time such theories make it into anything like mainstream awareness the foundational research has been victimized by the half-life of scientific knowledge & the actual researchers are saying things like "some of that was wrong, and the rest is way more nuanced and complex than our earlier crude models."
(c.f. the guy who coined the phrase "alpha male" studying wolves now disavows the term saying it gives ppl the wrong impression & wolf hierarchy is more complicated than that; "alpha pair" may be less wrong.)
basically if anyone ever comes up to you with a story about how american indian society validates or invalidates some narrative on economics/politics/gender/sexuality/whatever who is not themselves an american indian, you probably shouldn't pay much attention to them
Colonialism
@Lioness I remember only discovering this stuff when I read a book on cultural narratives about nature in University. And yeah, it had absolutely not been covered in any education up til then. x_x
But that book had some really good stuff about how the idea of a pristine, natural America fed into ideas around manifest destiny ('god made this place really convenient, wow!'), and later conservation strategies revolving around keeping areas 'pure and untouched', when those ecosystems had actually been cultivated & maintained to be that way by native tribes, sometimes using controlled fires/etc.
