You are confusing natural with cultural. There is copious evidence that Human societies - not organisms or paramecium - were far more cooperative than antagonistic or competitive, going back to at least the Neolithic and less evidence of even earlier cooperative cultural norms. Their argument was precisely in answer to your contention, that ‘natural selection’ and everything that goes with it also applies to human cultural groups, and they spent 700+ pages detailing the evidence that it does not.
Just for a tangible examples, the massive stone monuments at Gobekli Tepe were erected by hunter-gatherer groups between 9600 - 8500 BCE. There is simply no conceivable way those groups could have freed up the labor for that project if they were also busy fighting each other for resources. - And there is no evidence anywhere of such groups ‘conquering’ each other and incorporating another group into theirs - the technology available to gather and store food simply wouldn’t allow larger concentrated groups.
A second example are the copious commentaries on European competitive, heirarchial societies made by Native Americans - which the authors can quote because they were made to literate European observers like Jesuit missionaries and were written down and published in Europe. Uniformly, they compare their own cooperative, ‘egalitarian’ societies with the hierarchial, competitive Europeans, to the latter’s detriment.
I do not agree with all their arguments or conclusions, but I do agree that the blanket “everything competes” argument is valid when talking about organisms in isolation, but not wen referring to human cultures because it is simply not supported by physical or historical evidence.
The evidence you mention of primitive heirarchy is, in fact, evidence of the opposite: the heirarchial hunter-gatherer leader (from the historical evidence of the Native American groups) leads by consensus only - he cannot compel anybody to follow his orders. The Jesuits (no strangers to heirarchy!) noted this point continuously: the Americans were all surpassingly good rhetorical orators, because they had to constantly persuade people to follow them, they could not assume it by any structural hierarchial institutions. It has also been observed in these cultures that the cultures themselves can compel behavior through mechanisms like ridicule, shaming, and in extremes ostracism or exile - a cultural ‘death sentence’ - on people who attempted to use heirarchial compulsion or threat to achieve their ends.
All of which is completely aside from the game, which assumes no heirarchy in our villages/towns at all: no church or religious structure other than a small monumental shrine, no government of any kind - not even a sergeant to lead the small military forces either for the town or the raiders. In this respect, at least, FF is Pure Fantasy in assuming a Medieval European background for the settlement without any signs of heirarchy: the culture represented was inherently heirarchial and had been for several thousand years!
You can already do that when you start a game. Go into the advanced settings when you start a new game, you can even type in the code of your favourite map, or select what ever terrain you want. You can also set resources, wildlife and raid ferocity levels to easy/medium/hard.
Do you think humans and human culture is not nature? Humans are a predator pack animal like wolves, and exactly the same we cooperate with members of our pack to get things done.
As for Gobekli Tepe, we know nothing what so ever about the people who built the complex, we have no clue if they were a hunter-gather group, that is pure speculation. Don’t confuse imaginative explanations with facts, we have next to no fact at all.
It’s a bit closer to say that you are the undisputed Totalitarian Dictator of your community, and frankly, it is amusing to see people ask for even more control, like being able to direct every individual in every individual task. This would be handy for the Omnipotent Gamer, but another dive into the realm of complete Fantasy. I think part of the game (for me, anyway) is to deal with the apparently idiotic, individual, uncontrolled actions of the villagers. It needs to be tweaked, because it lurches over into the Too Stupid To Live category, but I think it is much more interesting than complete control all the time would be - but everyone will have a different degree of control that they enjoy most and some degree they find only a source of frustration.
Right, we have no clue, we have heaping mounds of scientific evidence. You should pay attention to the application of science to archeology, which has been advancing by leaps and bounds in the past 50 years. With pollen count analysis and midden investigation we can tell exactly which plants were growing in the area at the time, and whether those plants were planted/domesticated or growing naturally, and exactly what the diet of the people living in the area was. (Full Disclosure: my sister did her PhD thesis on Small Animal Bones identification in middens: they can not only tell you were eating deer, they can tell what the deer you ate was eating, all from a piece of bone the size of your little finger)
In the area of Gobekli Tepe, there was no agriculture: they were hunter-gatherers exclusively, which is one of the reasons the site is considered so important: it was the first unequivical evidence that “small scattered groups” of hunter-gatherers could mass enough workers and organization to build massive stone monuments. Since then, they’ve discovered numerous other ‘hunter-gatherer’ monumental constructions all over western Asia and Europe - including the early constructions at Stonehenge.
No question, humans are physically adapted as omnivores to hunt and gather Meat and efficient hunting requires Group Activity to safely bring down big game without suicidal attrition to the Hunters (which the game shows neatly: one Hunter versus one Boar = No Hunter; 2 - 3 Hunters versus one Boar = Meat). BUT, and this is the basis of the thesis of the book, supported by anthropological and archeological work going back for over a century, the exact way in which humans organize themselves varies wildly: our physical nature imposes certain limits on what we do and need to do - we need food, including meat, we cannot survive long under water, etc, but human culture has no limits (that have been found) except human imagination and the very pragmatic argument of What Works. No matter how apparently insane, crazy, strange some human group’s organization and culture appear, remember the old US Army saying:
“If it is stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid”
I also bought the old argument that humans are essentially Heirarchial in their social structure, but the evidence simply does not support that, and copious evidence from numerous different sources supports far more variety in working human cultures over many centuries.
They haven’t found any evidence that Gobekli Tepe was inhabited on a permanent or even semi permanent basis, to base any assumption on how the builders lived. They don’t even know what purpose it served, but you can safely bet the archeologists will claim it was some kind of temple… seems to be their catch all explanation for every stone placed down by humanity. The only thing they know about it is that it was carefully buried… my personal speculation is because of climate change, made it impossible to exist in that location anymore. My personal speculation on why it was buried was either because they wanted to preserve it in the hope they could return, or because it was dead and that’s what you do with respected dead things. It dates back to the beginning of the current warmer interglacial period when it was a more fertile area than it is now. You can’t base an assumption they were hunter gathers on the lack of evidence. It’s on a par with claiming it’s dark because you’ve got your eyes shut.
Every time you eat something, you are capitalising from the death of the animal/plant you are consuming. Every living organism has no choice but to practice capitalism in order to continue living.
All group cooperation activities have a hierarchy where the many follow the lead of the most knowledgeable or respected. The young take their lead from the old, their parents, grandparents, their teacher. It’s how we learn, and in turn to pass on the knowledge/skill to the next generation. Most primitive tribes have one or more leaders, the elders who are respected for their knowledge and life experiences. There is plenty of evidence that societal structures are hierarchical.
What if they built a trailer park, and nobody came?
While hardly a Paris or Rome by today’s standards, Gobekli Tepe would have been considered ‘the city of light and enlightenment’ when it was constructed, by everyone within at least a 150-mile radius or more.
My money is on GT (what they have uncovered so far) being the Larder/Root Cellar/Storehouse of a hunter/gatherer society, where food stuffs were gathered, processed and stored for safe keeping and longer shelf-life.
Gobelki Tepe isn’t unique or isolated, there are other similar constructions in the area close by. There is also Nevali Cori, Tasli Tepe, Inali Tepe, Urfa Yeni Yol, Hamsan Tepe, Harbetsuvan Tepesi, Karahan Tepe, Basaran Hoyuk, Karahan Tepe, Kocanizam, Sefer Tepe, along with quite a number of others.
If these constructions are settlements, they were not hunter gatherers… there wouldn’t be enough game to hunt or berries to pick.
What food sources the population outgrew to devastate is not recorded.
The land becoming arid because of poor farming practices or over-grazing is not an unreasonable theory, since it is common throughout recorded history.
None of that belies the fact that any source or type of food would need long-term storage enough to get through off-seasons.
The fact that there are many examples of hills or tepe of this type would serve to show how large and advanced the population in the area really was.
How they stored food is not something we are likely to find out with certainty. But common sense solutions would involve having raised, off the ground silos. Much of the primitive world stored their food is such constructions. Unfortunately they were made of wood with a thatch roof and have long since vanished. Rat’s are the biggest enemy with stored food, followed by molds. So by raising them off the ground prevented rats from getting in, and airy so it dried out more preventing molds from developing. It’s not just bad farming practice, ie overgrazing that causes famines, most of them are caused by climate change. Yep, that whole region was densely populated, in Turkey and around the black sea area there are tens of thousands of prehistoric megaliths. Hunter gatherer cultures can’t support dense populations.
Evidence points to GT having been completely buried on purpose, which would mean we don’t know how far down general ground level was while occupied.
Ritual or burial chambers would have yielded some scrap of evidence as such by now.
That much effort put forth by, what for all intents and purposes would still be first-gen agrarian society, for something that didn’t directly have to do with survival?
Storage for perishable food resources of a society advanced enough to master basic agriculture, would show exactly what we see, empty cupboards.
It being buried on purpose is about the only thing they know about it with any certainty. Nothing was found to indicate what the site was used for, so they took everything with them. I would say that the lowest ground level is where the bottom of the megaliths are. That’s not to say there are not subterranean levels as well, they have been discovered else where in the wider region from Macedonia to Turkey, but not discovered in GT to date. They have ground penetrating radar, cavities would have shown up. They have only uncovered about 3% of the site so far.
It was clearly an affluent society that created such extensive works.
Someone took everything and buried it.
It might not necessarily have been those who built it.
The City of the Dead outside of Cairo, Egypt might look similar in 25,000 years if it gets looted by a greedy and belligerent horde who sack its riches, remove, pile and burn its corpses.
That all trace of a conquered people should then be completely buried would have been an angry malice intent on demonstrating its power.
Incipient agriculture was starting in the area of southern Anatolia and to the south in t he Levant and Jericho: it’s just that there is no evidence of cultivated plants in the area of Gobekli Tepe itself.
One possible answer, which has been proposed for both Gobekli Tepe and Poverty Point in the USA (another massive monument complex in an apparent hunter-gatherer economy) is Religion. That both sites provided a ‘Sacred Space’ for seasonal religious ceremonies used by people from the surrounding areas who in return provided food and ‘luxury’ goods (religious offerings?) (Poverty Point in Louisiana had copper objects that came from the upper Great Lakes, apparently all the way down the Mississippi).
Since we don’t know diddly about the religion(s) in question, this is a contention that is impossible to prove or disprove, but it does conveniently provide a reason for massive communal labor in a spot that doesn’t show any signs of being able to support the laboring population - seasonal hunter-gatherers showing up for part of the year to erect another mound or monumental stone, stage some religious ceremony, and then scatter back to following the herds.
The parallels are with Stonehenge, which also apparently saw seasonal concentrations of visitors 3000 years ago and earlier, and the ‘first city’ at Uruk, which was built around two religious sites (Eanna and Kullaba) that started as seasonal and then, as agriculture took hold in the area, became permanent centers for people to concentrate.
As I said, a possible mechanic that explains the ‘facts’ as we know them so far, but really impossible to prove or disprove without any direct religious evidence from the period.
It would be extraordinary if other people took such care in leaving no evidence and burying it. Evidence is always left when a place is attacked and looted. It seems as if the builders decided it was no longer of use, carefully packed everything up leaving no trace of themselves, and then carefully buried the site before leaving. It’s a mystery for sure.
A gathering place doesn’t necessarily have to do with religion, it could be just a designated place to meet periodically to trade goods, exchange ideas, meet the partner of your dreams, etc. We still hold such events today, gatherings of like minded people, festivals. Trouble with that idea is that GT is not isolated, there are many such sites in the immediate region. The main stream concept of a steady progression from hunter gatherers to agrarian cultures, is nothing but wishful thinking. Humanity has built itself up, been destroyed many times over throughout the millennia’s. At least four such cycles of humanity reaching an advanced civilisation, only for them to be destroyed, is evident all over the world.
About 99% of their beliefs were animistic, a study of the animated. They believed that everything had it’s own spirit, and by that I mean ‘sprit of place’, not magic beings. So for example someone they would claim had an eagle spirit, frequently depicted with wings, they are describing a wise person. An eagle can fly high to see the bigger picture from all angles. A person with a wolf spirit is a leader and teacher, etc. A good example…There is a story in Loch Ness, Scotland about a creature that can grab people off the shore or shallows and drag them into deeper water to drown them, called a water horse. A horse is a vehicle than can transport someone from place a to b. The story is describing an undertow, not an actual creature.
Hunter-Gatherer to Argriculture is in many ways not a 'steady progression at all, but a Regression: working far more hours for the same result, losing personal freedom and choice and becoming tied to land and crops in a way that also tried you to the direction of other people. Numerous hunter-gatherers studied in the 20th century in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa all said the same thing: they knew all about agriculture and planting crops to eat, but, thank you very much, they couldn’t see the point as long as their were plants to gather and animals to chase as required. Of course, the greater population density made possible by intensive agriculture meant that the hunter-gatherers were slowly pushed off into marginal areas, but that doesnt seem to have been part of their personal equation when evaluating the life-style they preferred.
