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A History Of Ancient Britain

I doubt there is any evidence for non-settled people keeping slaves. They may exact tribute from people. They may take slaves and trade them. But all these are predicated on there being something for the slaves to do from which you profit, ie producing something

There is evidence of non-settled people capturing/keeping/trading slaves, but we don't have any evidence for this in Britain that I know of. That doesn't mean that it isn't possible, which is all ringo was trying to say.

Nomadic pastoralists (non-settled agriculturalists) have been known to capture, keep and trade slaves, for example, the Tubbu.
 
they had guns on the front of their canoes! hardly mesolithic!
So .... now you mention the Mesolithic, rather than hunter-gatherers.

The Mesolithic (or Epipalaeolithic) is the transition period between the Upper Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age).
Hunter-gatherers are societies whose primary subsistence is foraging, fishing and hunting.
 
that's what the fucking programme was about! for fucksake you're fucking draining.

Oh, I thought the programme was ...
lot's of shots of some long haired twat looking out to sea. and how connected they were with the 'cruel mistress mother nature', and how they saw other animals 'almost as kin' and other made up shit. the camping trip with 'bob the professional caveman' was unintentionally hilarious, as they waded around after fish they couldn't catch then admitted buying a rabbit from a shop. 'professional flint knapper'? twat should have been made redundant two and a half thousand years ago.
At least, that's what you told urban75 the programme was about. Try as I might, I could see no mention of the Mesolithic in that description by by you.
 
I can't believe people are arguing about Mesolithic hunters at 2.35am.


urban rocks!

urban does indeed rock!

The programme looks brilliant: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xchyf

The 'animals almost as kin' isn't made up.
As far as we can make out from the archaeological record and from ethnographic observation of comparable hunter-gather groups, Mesolithic cosmology and ritual, like the Upper Palaeolithic before it, made no divisions between the natural world and the human world.
There are some wonderful examples ... I might dig those up at some point.
 
The 'animals almost as kin' isn't made up.
As far as we can make out from the archaeological record and from ethnographic observation of comparable hunter-gather groups, Mesolithic cosmology and ritual, like the Upper Palaeolithic before it, made no divisions between the natural world and the human world.
There are some wonderful examples ... I might dig those up at some point.
i don't make a division between us and the natural world but i wouldn't go as far as regarding animals as kin. that would put me right off my bacon sandwich.
 
i don't make a division between us and the natural world but i wouldn't go as far as regarding animals as kin. that would put me right off my bacon sandwich.

Have you heard of Michelle Paver's 'Wolf Brother'? http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/wolfbrother
My son loved this when he was younger. It's set in the Mesolithic world of hunter-gatherers.

Bacon sandwich aside, the Mesolithic worldview is considered to have been very different to the Neolithic worldview.
This is an important distinction to make, since the adoption of farming practices, settlement & monument building along with increasing social complexity would have seen the formation of new worldviews that were very different to the worldviews of the preceding Mesolithic lifeways of hunting, foraging and fishing. The most obvious changes are those we can still see in the landscape today - the creation of permanent memorials to the dead.
 
Have you heard of Michelle Paver's 'Wolf Brother'? http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/wolfbrother
My son loved this when he was younger. It's set in the Mesolithic world of hunter-gatherers.

Bacon sandwich aside, the Mesolithic worldview is considered to have been very different to the Neolithic worldview.
This is an important distinction to make, since the adoption of farming practices, settlement, monument building and increasing social complexity would have seen the formation of new worldviews that were very different to the worldviews of the preceding Mesolithic lifeways of hunting, foraging and fishing. These ideological (and technological) changes are generally thought to have come about gradually, rather than suddenly. The most obvious changes are those we can still see in the landscape today - the creation of permanent memorials to the dead.

i like the bit you deleted best.
 
Less obviously, but founded upon concrete material evidence in the archaeological record, are the change in relationship to animals and plants with the introduction of agriculture and pastoralism, a corresponding change in diet and subsistence practices, economy and exchange practices, technological changes in lithics and the appearance of pottery, as well as changes in mobility and settlement patterns. These ideological and technological changes are generally thought to have come about gradually, rather than suddenly and it's thought that hunter-gatherer bands existed alongside agri-pastoralists throughout the transitional period. It's a fascinating journey.
 
and yet you weighed into the argument without reading the thread. and i'm the aggressor?:hmm:

well, yes, you blatantly are. You clearly know fuck all about the period, other than some very basic marxist theory that you can't apply, which is why you are spewing out such vague crap that you, no doubt, think is really sharp and clever.

Shame, cos you're not entirely wrong, but I'm now guessing that that is purely accidental. Chill the fuck out
 
What happened to the Neanderthals? Were they enslaved by their more violent cousins?

evidence suggests they co-existed for some hundreds of years on the iberian peninsular. Bred out rather than extinction through hom sap dominance. IIRC

There's a recent-ish theory based on the finding of one of the last Neanderthal sites to have existed that is to do with Neanderthals' inability to cope with climate change due to their physical and social characterisitics not being as well suited as Sapiens to the environment

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/10/28/survival-of-the-weakest.html
 
What happened to the Neanderthals? Were they enslaved by their more violent cousins?
As I understand it (and I'm not a palaeoanthropologist), there are several models:

. The assimilation model (the interbreeding model, which hypothesises that some interbreeding with modern humans occurred along with extinction of the unassimilated);

. The replacement model (a Neanderthal extinction model, part of the original Out of Africa II model. Characterised by Neanderthal inability to adapt to the changing climate & competition from modern humans, lwhich ed to their extinction by around 30,000-26,000 years ago. Neanderthals 'replaced' by modern humans who represented a second dispersal from out of Africa around 80,000 years ago. Modern humans co-existed alongside Neanderthal populations, eventually replacing them.)

. The perennially unpopular evolutionary model (some non-African Neanderthal populations evolved over hundreds of thousands of years into modern humans, first proposed by C L Brace).

Note Bene: Read about the Out of Africa II model here: http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/paleo/genome.html

Current thinking is:
Neandertals lived in Europe, the Middle East and western Asia until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago. The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool.

“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.

He and other geneticists involved in the effort to compile the complete genetic instruction book of Neandertals didn’t expect to find that Neandertals had left a genetic legacy. Earlier analyses that looked at only a small part of the genome had contradicted the notion that humans and Neandertals intermixed (SN Online: 8/7/08).

“We as a consortium came into this with a very, very strong bias against gene flow,” Reich says. In fact, when he and his colleagues announced the completion of a rough draft of the Neandertal genome a year ago, the researchers said such genetic exchange was unlikely (SN: 3/14/09, p. 5).

But several independent lines of evidence now convince the researchers that humans and Neandertals did interbreed. “The breakthrough here is to show that it could happen and it did happen,” Pääbo says.

The result came as no surprise to some scientists, however. Archaeologists have described ancient skeletons from Europe that had characteristics of both early modern humans and Neandertals; evidence, the researchers say, of interbreeding between the two groups. But until the cataloging of the entire Neanderthal genome, genetic studies could find no evidence to support the idea.

“After all these years the geneticists are coming to the same conclusions that some of us in the field of archaeology and human paleontology have had for a long time,” says João Zilhão, an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Bristol in England. “What can I say? If the geneticists come to this same conclusion, that’s to be expected.”
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/gen..._yields_evidence_of_interbreeding_with_humans

This Guardian article explains it all very well.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/06/neanderthals-dna-humans-genome
 
Thus proving Star Trek right, if a human can fuck it, they will
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/06/neanderthals-dna-humans-genome
Interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals may nonetheless have been rare. Just two Neanderthal females in a group of around a hundred humans would have been enough to leave such a trace in our genome, provided that was the group that gave rise to all modern humans outside Africa.

The study, reported in the journal Science, was greeted by scientists as almost certain confirmation that modern humans and Neanderthals mated when the groups crossed paths. "It certainly tells us something about human nature," said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
 
Apologies if I was a bit short yesterday, was worried about my youngest daughter having surgery today. Despite the occasional toys out of pram moment there's been some interesting and lively debate in this thread. If nothing else it still shows the gulf between academic and field archaeology and the public perception of it. I hope this series progresses a bit more in trying to close the gap because its a subject most people not only are interested in, but are actually a part of. This is what made us what we are. Anyway, carry on.
 
well, yes, you blatantly are. You clearly know fuck all about the period, other than some very basic marxist theory that you can't apply, which is why you are spewing out such vague crap that you, no doubt, think is really sharp and clever.

Shame, cos you're not entirely wrong, but I'm now guessing that that is purely accidental. Chill the fuck out

fuck off you inane cunt. fuck all about the period? fair enough but from the twat who said 'evidence of slavery would have proved the existence of class in britain', possibly one of the least informative or interesting posts on this whole messageboard, it's a bit rich.

not entirely wrong? oh, thank you. thank you for enlightening me. can you tell me which bits are right and which are wrong? that would be very informative i'm sure. maybe it would be the 'interesting' post that you've been saving up.
 
Apologies if I was a bit short yesterday, was worried about my youngest daughter having surgery today. Despite the occasional toys out of pram moment there's been some interesting and lively debate in this thread. If nothing else it still shows the gulf between academic and field archaeology and the public perception of it. I hope this series progresses a bit more in trying to close the gap because its a subject most people not only are interested in, but are actually a part of. This is what made us what we are. Anyway, carry on.
same here. i hope all goes well with the surgery. i enjoyed the argument and as a result learned about the haisa and tlingit people.
 
fine, i'll amend my comments.

My comment was at least factually accurate, unlike pretty much all of yours. You are half remembering some basic marxism from years ago, but are utterly incapable of actually applying it. For Marx slavery was the key factor in the rise of class society, as opposed to merely a stratified one. Someone of your massive intelliegence understands the difference I'm sure.

Personally, I dont entirely agree with Marx, and would place the rise of class in Britain at least two thousand years earlier than that (as I said before), but it is a debatable point. Not a debate you are capable of taking part in tho, so mired are you in your ignorance and ill-temper.

Grow up, or fuck off and have another wank over a pic of Lindsay German.
 
fine, i'll amend my comments.

My comment was at least factually accurate, unlike pretty much all of yours. You are half remembering some basic marxism from years ago, but are utterly incapable of actually applying it. For Marx slavery was the key factor in the rise of class society, as opposed to merely a stratified one. Someone of your massive intelliegence understands the difference I'm sure.

Personally, I dont entirely agree with Marx, and would place the rise of class in Britain at least two thousand years earlier than that (as I said before), but it is a debatable point. Not a debate you are capable of taking part in tho, so mired are you in your ignorance and ill-temper.

Grow up, or fuck off and have another wank over a pic of Lindsay German.

lol. righto, you knowall cunt. first off, the marx aspect, i haven't read anything by marx involving this, or engels, so you're wrong. ill temper? that didn't happen til after two in the morning (insomnia isn't the most cheering).




lindsey german? lol! now we get to the crux of it. this is what is behind the attack, isn't it? my identification as a swappy. for your information german, whilst not personally responsible for my expulsion was at least an important part. so you can't even get your sneery insults right. late eighties sheila mcgregor would have been more accurate.





still saving the interesting post? you bovine twat.
 
as another ex-swappy, i'm hardly going to attack you for that. What I am attacking you for is your ignorance and ill-temper. Both of which were fully in evidence long before 2am.

I note that you still haven't made any comment of substance on the actual topic.
 
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