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Re:Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons (2017) by jfoutz on Friday July 28, 2023 @11:28AM (#36908307)
It's been a while since I had an anthropology class. If I remember correctly, it's really tied to how harsh the environment was. So natives in Alaska had to hunt or starve. For equatorial people, the stakes were much lower. There was an abundance of alternatives.

One way to look at it, how much art did they produce? Lots of art? Food was probably pretty easy to come by. Scratch a line on a log? Those folks worked _hard_ to survive.

I'm sure there were lean times for everybody. I'm not trying to say you or parent poster are wrong, I'm saying it's a big world, and all of those things and more were true for somebody, somewhere.

Re:Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons (2017) by civilitty on Friday July 28, 2023 @12:34PM (#36909431)
> One way to look at it, how much art did they produce? Lots of art? Food was probably pretty easy to come by. Scratch a line on a log? Those folks worked _hard_ to survive.

That's really only applicable to desert civilizations and those in colder environments where decomposition is arrested, which were unfortunately the harsher environments. Humans in the tropics are more likely to use wood and other organic materials to produce art, which don't survive for very long.

The oldest wooden art is only 9,500 years old [1] whereas the oldest stone tools are over 3 million years old [2]. The oldest wooden tools, on the other hand, are hundreds of thousands of years old for spears and tens of thousands of years old for axe handles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigir_Idol

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomekwi