Video

• Tyler Kimble’s Yu Koyo Peya is a powerful and complete introduction to Peak Oil and how it ties into primitivist thought.
• Nina Paley’s Wit & Wisdom of Cancer and The Stork both deal with overpopulation in, shall we say, unique fashion.

Audio

• The Anthropik Podcast is a weekly podcast produced by the Tribe of Anthropik, featuring telephone interviews with authors, artists, movers and shakers of primitivism, the New Tribal Revolution, and sustainability. See podcast.anthropik.com for feeds, episodes, and everything else involved.
• Radio interview with Jason Godesky with Joy Hought of Heretic Fig, on her KUCI talk show, “The Politics of Food.”

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Ladd, Brent

Realities of Going Primitive

Sorenson, E. Richard

Preconquest Consciousness

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• Brooks, 2005. “Cultural responses to aridity in the Middle Holocene and increased social complexity”
  The first complex, highly organised, state-level societies emerged in the Afro-Asiatic monsoon belt and northern South America during the 6th and early 5th millennia BP. This was a period of profound climatic and environmental change in these regions and globally, characterised by a weakening of the global monsoon system and widespread aridification in regions that today contain the bulk of the world’s warm deserts. This paper examines trajectories of socio-cultural and environmental change in six key regions in which complex societies emerged during the Middle Holocene: the central Sahara (Libyan Fezzan), Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia (Indus-Sarasvati region), northern China and coastal Peru. Links between environmental and socio-cultural change are explored in the context of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data and a theoretical framework of increasing social complexity as a response to enhanced aridity, driven largely by population agglomeration in environmental refugia characterised by the presence of surface water. Direct evidence of adaptation to increased aridity is evident in the archaeological literature relating to the Sahara and Egypt. In the other regions examined, the data are consistent with the notion that increased social complexity was largely driven by environmental deterioration, although further local-scale archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data are required to clarify the processes involved.
• Burton-Jones, et al, 2002. “Antiquity of Postreproductive Life: Are There Modern Impacts on Hunter-Gatherer Postreproductive Life Spans?”
  Female postreproductive life is a striking feature of human life history and there have been several recent attempts to account for its evolution. But archaeologists estimate that in the past, few individuals lived many postreproductive years. Is postreproductive life a phenotypic outcome of modern conditions, needing no evolutionary account? This article assesses effects of the modern world on hunter-gatherer adult mortality, with special reference to the Hadza. Evidence suggests that such effects are not sufficient to deny the existence of substantial life expectancy at the end of the childbearing career. Data from contemporary hunter-gatherers (Ache, !Kung, Hadza) match longevity extrapolated from regressions of lifespan on body and brain weight. Twenty or so vigorous years between the end of reproduction and the onset of significant senescence does require an explanation.
• Cordain, et al, 2000. “Plant-Animal Subsistence Ratios and Macronutrient Energy Estimations in Worldwide Hunter-Gatherer Diets”
  Both anthropologists and nutritionists have long recognized that the diets of modern-day hunter-gatherers may represent a reference standard for modern human nutrition and a model for defense against certain diseases of affluence. Because the hunter-gatherer way of life is now probably extinct in its purely un-Westernized form, nutritionists and anthropologists must rely on indirect procedures to reconstruct the traditional diet of preagricultural humans. In this analysis, we incorporate the most recent ethnographic compilation of plant-to-animal economic subsistence patterns of hunter-gatherers to estimate likely dietary macronutrient intakes (% of energy) for environmentally diverse hunter-gatherer populations. Furthermore, we show how differences in the percentage of body fat in prey animals would alter protein intakes in hunter-gatherers and how a maximal protein ceiling influences the selection of other macronutrients. Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45–65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (56–65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19–35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22–40% of energy).
• Greer, 2005. “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse.”
  The collapse of complex human societies remains poorly understood and current theories fail to model important features of historical examples of collapse. Relationships among resources, capital, waste, and production form the basis for an ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital. Societies facing such crises after having depleted essential resources risk catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste. This model allows key features of historical examples of collapse to be accounted for, and suggests parallels between successional processes in nonhuman ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies. (More from Greer at his website, The Archdruid Report)
• Hardin, 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
  I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
• Hopfenberg and Pimentel, 2001. “Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply.”
  Human population growth has typically been seen as the primary causative factor of other ecologically destructive phenomena. Current human disease epidemics are explored as a function of population size. That human population growth is itself a phenomenon with clearly identifiable ecological/biological causes has been overlooked. Here, human population growth is discussed as being subject to the same dynamic processes as the population growth of other species. Contrary to the widely held belief that food production must be increased to feed the growing population, experimental and correlational data indicate that human population growth varies as a function of food availability. By increasing food production for humans, at the expense of other species, the biologically determined effect has been, and continues to be, an increase in the human population. Understanding the relationship between food increases and population increases is proposed as a necessary first step in addressing this global problem. Resistance to this perspective is briefly discussed in terms of cultural bias in science.
• Hopfenberg, 2003. “Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability.”
  Simple mathematical models have illustrated the relationship between human carrying capacity and population growth. In this study, food supply is proposed as the variable which best accounts for the human carrying capacity. The logistic equation, using food supply data as a variable carrying capacity, yields population estimates which are in accord with actual population numbers. That food supply data adequately fits the logistic model of human population dynamics provides evidence that, consistent with ecological notions typically applied only to nonhuman species, human population increases are a function of increased food availability.
• Kaplan, et al, 2000. “A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity.”
  Human life histories, as compared to those of other primates and mammals, have at least four distinctive characteristics: an exceptionally long lifespan, an extended period of juvenile dependence, support of reproduction by older post-reproductive individuals, and male support of reproduction through the provisioning of females and their offspring. Another distinctive feature of our species is a large brain, with its associated psychological attributes: increased capacities for learning, cognition, and insight. In this paper, we propose a theory that unites and organizes these observations and generates many theoretical and empirical predictions. We present some tests of those predictions and outline new predictions that can be tested in future research by comparative biologists, archeologists, paleontologists, biological anthropologists, demographers, geneticists, and cultural anthropologists.
• Lee, 1969. “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari”
  Richard Lee’s classic account of the !Kung practice of “cursing the meat.”
• Marufu, et al, 2004. “The 2003 North American Electrical Blackout: An Accidental Experiment in Atmospheric Chemistry.”
  The August 2003 North American electrical blackout provided a unique opportunity to quantify directly the contribution of power plants to regional haze and O₃. Airborne observations over central Pennsylvania on August 15, 2003 ~24 h into the blackout, revealed large reductions in SO₂ (>90%), O₃ and light scattered by particles (70%) relative to measurements outside the blackout region and over the same location when power plants were operating normally. CO and light absorbing particles were unaffected. Low level O₃ decreased by 38 ppbv and the visual range increased by >40 km. This clean air benefit was realized over much of the eastern U.S. Reported SO₂ and NO_x emissions from upwind power plants were down to 34 and 20% of normal, respectively. The improvement in air quality provides evidence that transported emissions from power plants hundreds of km upwind play a dominant role in regional haze and O₃ production.
• Meritt, 2001. “The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase.”
  Mark Meritt’s master’s thesis provides a firm scientific basis for Daniel Quinn’s philosophical novel, Ishmael. This and other projects are also presented at his website, Potluck.com.
• Ruddiman, 2003. The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.”
  The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun 150 to 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 and CH4 at rates sufficient to alter their compositions in the atmosphere. A different hypothesis is posed here: anthropogenic emissions of these gases first altered atmospheric concentrations thousands of years ago. This hypothesis is based on three arguments. (1) Cyclic variations in CO₂ and CH₄ driven by Earth-orbital changes during the last 350,000 years predict decreases throughout the Holocene, but the CO2 trend began an anomalous increase 8000 years ago, and the CH₄ trend did so 5000 years ago. (2) Published explanations for these mid- to late-Holocene gas increases based on natural forcing can be rejected based on paleoclimatic evidence. (3) A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of ∼0.8 â—¦ C and roughly 2 â—¦ C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO₂ oscillations of ∼10 ppm in the last 1000 years are too large to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia. Forest regrowth on abandoned farms sequestered enough carbon to account for the observed CO₂ decreases. Plague-driven CO₂ changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300–1900 AD).
• Schleidt & Shalter, 2003. “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids”
  Dogs and wolves are part of the rich palette of predators and scavengers that co-evolved with herding ungulates about 10 Ma BP (million years before present). During the Ice Age, the gray wolf, Canis lupus, became the top predator of Eurasia. Able to keep pace with herds of migratory ungulates wolves became the first mammalian “pastoralists.” Apes evolved as a small cluster of inconspicuous tree-dwelling and fruit-eating primates. Our own species separated from chimpanzee-like ancestors in Africa around 6 Ma BP and—apparently in the wider context of the global climate changes of the Ice Age—walked as true humans (Homo erectus) into the open savanna. Thus an agile tree climber transformed into a swift, cursorial running ape, with the potential for adopting the migratory life style that had become essential for the inhabitants of the savanna and steppe. In the absence of fruit trees, early humans turned into omnivorous gatherers and scavengers. They moved into the steppe of Eurasia and became skilled hunters. Sometime during the last Ice Age, our ancestors teamed up with pastoralist wolves. First, presumably, some humans adopted the wolves’ life style as herd followers and herders of reindeer and other hoofed animals. Wolves and humans had found their match. We propose that first contacts between wolves and humans were truly mutual, and that the subsequent changes in both wolves and humans are understood best as co-evolution.
• Winkelman, 2002. “Shamanism as Neurotheology and Evolutionary Psychology.”
  Universals of shamanism reflect innate brain processes and representational systems and fundamental aspectsof consciousness. Shamanic universals involve psychophysiological dynamics of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and visionary experiences, metaphoric representations produced through integration of innate representational modules, and rituals that produce psychophysiological healing responses. ASCs reflect natural brain processes involving systemic integrative conditions.Universal shamanic representations (e.g., animism, animal allies, and soul flight) use cross-modal integration of specialized innate
  modules and reflect fundamental aspects of the psychodynamics of self. These prelinguistic emotional, social, and mental processes use presentational symbolism that reflects fundamental structures of consciousness. Therapeutic aspects of shamanism involve the psychophysiological effectsof ASCs, ritual and community evocation of neurotransmitter responses,and the functions of spirit concepts in representing and manipulating individual and group psychodynamics. The shamanic paradigm’s psychobiological foundations explain the origins and cross-cultural distribution of shamanism, its modern manifestations, and the continued applicability of shamanic practices.
• Godesky, 2000. “War & Society.”
  It is generally agreed that the manner in which a group fights has everything to do with the way they live. This paper argues that there are two fundamentally and qualitatively different approaches to warfare: “primitive� and “civilized� warfare. The paper begins with a cursory look at “primitive� warfare around the world, emphasizing the work of Lawrence Keeley (1996) and William Eckhardt (1992), and coming to the conclusion that, although economic gains may be accrued coincidentally, the primary focus of “primitve� warfare is psychological. The bulk of the paper is spent comparing ten different state-level civilizations: five from Mesoamerica (the Olmecs, the Mayan kingdoms, Teotihuacan, the Toltec Empire and Aztec Empire) and five from Europe and Africa (the Egyptian kingdom, the Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Spanish Empire). With no viable cultural diffusion, the similarities discussed can only be attributed to their shared subsistence technology. Thus, there is no “Noble Savage,� but a rather, a systemic difference in the two lifestyles. This paper takes a materialist approach, assuming that the cultural and ideological adapt to the material needs of the group. In contrast to “primitive� warfare, “civilized� warfare is centered on economic gains, although psychological benefits may be accrued coincidentally. The paper concludes with a discussion of the evolutionary stability of the two approaches.
• Godesky, 2001. “Food & Power: Hierarchy Formation & the Agricultural Revolution.”
  The Agricultural Revolution was produced by an inextricably intertwined combination of climatic, ecological and social factors, driven forward by the ambitions of “Big Men� and emergent elites. The climatic conditions caused by the end of the Pleistocene allowed for the rise of these elites, who created agriculture in order to produce the surpluses they required to create and maintain their power. Far from being the “natural destiny of mankind,� as we often portray it, then, agriculture is simply another evolutionary experiment in the history of our species, brought about by the same sort of coalescence of factors as so many other cultural adaptations. It is an extraordinarily new experiment at that, and one which, despite the insistence of our memes, is far from proven.
• Godesky, 2002. “Subversion Incarnate: Asceticism as Political Resistance in Roman Judea, 6 - 66 CE.”
  While nationalism and colonialism are often conceptualized as strictly modern phenomena, the conflict between Roman culture and Jewish values which took place in the Roman colony of Judea led to the rise of a Jewish identity which might be considered nationalist. Resistance to the Romans centered around Shaye Cohen’s triad of “Temple, Torah and Scripture.� The emphasis each of these places on the body led to a great deal of somaticized subversion, particularly taking the form of asceticsm. This paper begins with a synopsis of the historical events leading up to Judea’s domination by the Romans, and argues that the conflict between Jerusalem and Rome sprang from fundamentally oppositional views of society. After an overview of the place the body takes in Roman and Jewish thought, the paper deals with the place of eschatology, healings, celibacy, and food in first-century Jewish asceticism, and how it was an attack on Roman civilization—and sometimes, on the founding principles of civilization itself.