What economists call “sunk costs” are named that to point out that they are a rationalization of emotional attachments, not a part of rational economic calculation.

The rest of your argument would follow … except people aren’t rational. Aren’t now, never have been, and I’d bet very good money that they won’t start being rational any time soon.

Imputing royalty (or ritual murder, as in the British Archaeology article) to a person whose remains are found, just because they are very ancient remains and have some possessions with them, is stretching a little evidence into a vision of the past that seems grand in a conventional history sort of way.

If it takes thousands of man-hours to make the beads for a boy’s funeral … that’s certainly a pretty strong suggestion that this is a less-than-egalitarian setup. The archaeological interpretation of grave goods is an imperfect science, but one that’s been analyzed to hundreds, if not thousands, of volumes. After reading just a few of them, I’m inclined to agree with the usual reading that excessive grave goods are usually a pretty good barometer of status.

Some people have difficulty giving up on sunk costs of the past and taking an option known to be better in terms of the present and future.

Yeah. Seems many folks here are evaluating their own, current “sunk costs” in education, skill sets, diet, relationships, beliefs, investments, etc…

Their sunk costs in civilization itself…

Some people have difficulty giving up on sunk costs of the past and taking an option known to be better in terms of the present and future. The fact that these burials and others in many cultures included grave goods shows that the people who performed them were able to give up on sunk costs, at least at an appropriate time when grieving. They gave up on the possessions of the deceased group member, which they may have put some labor into helping to accumulate. Maybe it was with the motive of letting him or her rest.

Imputing royalty (or ritual murder, as in the British Archaeology article) to a person whose remains are found, just because they are very ancient remains and have some possessions with them, is stretching a little evidence into a vision of the past that seems grand in a conventional history sort of way. Such a biased means cannot be expected to serve good ends, especially if you prefer nomadism to conventional history’s value of civilization. If a skeleton like the Sunghir children with beads had been found and dated to 1000, 2000, or 3000 years ago, with the same artifacts, it would not have been believed to be historically important in the same way and the grave goods would have been attributed to the unimportant trade of some unimportant, illiterate tribe. I don’t think it’s unimportant, I think it’s revelatory, anthropologically and emotionally.

I don’t know if Sunghir was a busy village for a while with a wealthy chief or Big Man, or it was just a camp that was used a lot of times. The Russian webpage says it was a seasonal camp, because there were only surface dwellings, not dug in ones. I don’t buy that argument, because digging in just makes the floor colder , and Sunghir settlers may not have needed a cellar right there.

If the food supply for nomads in an area is high enough to raise population density to a certain point, then settlement at places favored for trade meets or festivals becomes viable. Those who settle down to trade and to store goods for trade are not necessarily disabled themselves, maybe they have a disabled member of their family or socially dedicated foraging band. These early settlers did not need to have any agricultural skills to start, so they are different from what we think of as settlers later in history, and they tend to be overlooked.

Once a person has a fixed location, storing goods becomes possible in quantities far in excess of what a nomadic band would carry or drag from camp to camp. Trade provides a way to accumulate artifacts and a motive for doing so, to have savings for seasonal variations in trade.

The settled lifestyle with caches and hoards of possessions (not yet property, which is a result of agriculture) may lead to a worldview where burial with grave goods is preferred to cremation or other quick forms of return to the energy flow of life on Earth. So then some early settlers, not necessarily all of them, appear to have chosen that new funeral option. It may have been considered especially appropriate when the body was of the member of the band whose disability had motivated the band to settle. By using up stored goods in funerals and burials, early bands may have been giving themselves the option to return to nomadism when their reason for settling was past. If that is the case, then it perfectly explains why all of those early skeletons found with grave goods have defects.

It’s making me teary eyed just thinking about it.

Yeah, I think what I was (trying to ) get at is that the Salmon runs, and that one particular point on the mammoth migration route are not unique… so it almost MUST be the case that there were other societies, all over the place, that also had these issues… but even a single season of ‘over-harvesting’may well have spelled the end for thier aspirations of greatness

So here’s an interesting question. IF we could identify some of those places, and IF there was sufficeint data to figure out a timeline… do you think we would find a sine wave of increasing complexity and die off, or do you think it is possible — given the short timeline — that some of these other possible exceptions ‘learned thier lesson’ and created customes to stabalize thier populations at less-than-optimal (relative to food) levels?

Hey Aaron — Its not that people gravitate to hierarchy and complexity… but ANY animal will generally end up at population levels in balance with thier food supply. If that supply is large enough to enable communities that exceed Dunbar’s Number, then heirarchy naturally develops as a necessary adaption to DEAL WITH more people. From there, its all a question of whether the environment contains a positive feedback loop (agriculture) or a negative feedback loop (foraging).

Janene

Are we never able to resist temptation? Will the fall continue to repeat itself for ever and ever amen?

The other part is, regardless of that, complexity will always rise to the level of energy available in that region. Complexity is a function of energy, and there’s not much you can do to change that.