Life as Our Ancestors Lived It

January 11, 2016 In most of the time human beings have lived on Earth, it was in circumstances very different from those we encounter now. I learned about how people might have lived in Stone Age cultures when I lived in one fifty years ago. I chose to do so in order to examine facial expressions and gestures that could not have been influenced by contact with outsiders or the media. Would they be the same as I had observed in many literate cultures, or would there be new expressions I had never seen before? (They were the same.) Even if I saw familiar expressions and gestures, might they signal entirely different emotions than they did in literate cultures? (They did not.) I knew that time was running out; soon there would be no more isolated cultures uninfluenced by outsiders and the media. The culture within which I lived, the South Fore in the highlands of New Guinea, was overtaken by the media and material culture just two years after my second visit in 1968. The people I studied traveled less than ten miles from the villages into which they were born during their lifetimes. They lived in a series of small villages, each of less than two-hundred persons. There wasn't much privacy, as we know it today. The South Fore people were cannibals eating only people they had cared about. From a public health viewpoint it would have been safer if they had eaten their enemies who died in battle. Battle victims should pass on less lethal germs to those who ate them than loved ones...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news