Lambert: As the cliché goes, „Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.“ Lately, I've been tempted to add, „Except something stupider.“ So, whether repeating the past is a bad thing depends on the past. (So “blamed“ means there's more work than it first seems). In any case, these archaeologists clearly have a more optimistic view, which is good for them.
Written by Jan Rich Frell, Executive Director of the Independent Media Institute and co-founder of the Human Bridges Project. This article was created by human bridge.
The motives that drove archaeologists of the past included a thirst for glory, a taste for treasure, and a desire to enshrine a new political era with the legitimacy of antiquity.
Gradually over the decades, the discipline has matured, acquired an ethical framework, and begun to ask questions about the societies and lifestyles of the people who left its mark. Archaeologists began comparing that evidence to our current lives and began to explore the roots of modern problems, from epidemics and war to inequality. Archaeological research has spread beyond the palaces and cities of a few civilizations to six continents, and the rapidly accumulating evidence for human origins has changed the global landscape and the gradual changes in the human story that guides us. A clock with a length of 6 million years was created to record the . up to now.
The intense work of tens of thousands of archaeologists carefully documenting Earth's past has accumulated and crossed new thresholds with great implications. It is socially useful information that we can use to improve our lives.
The sample size of this great past dwarfs what we once thought of as history. Thanks to advances in technology, data about human stories can be integrated and interacted with the records we keep today.
Many of modern human problems areevolutionary mismatch„Our lifestyles conflict with the biological capabilities we have developed and relied on over millions of years to get here. Heart disease to various forms of addiction and ADHD. The study of human origins and new understanding of human biology, taken together, offers powerful perspectives and roadmaps for addressing some of our greatest challenges.
That synthesis, combined with increasingly detailed knowledge of the archaeological record of human settlement and state formation from its origins to the present, allows us to build from a universalized framework and global datasets. can. This approach can better integrate broader indigenous knowledges and worldviews than Western-based historical models and understandings of human stories that continue to be influential.
Archaeologists, researchers and professors were the first to understand the scale of this opportunity Gary M. Feynman, MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Feynman and an increasing number of his colleagues overturned stereotypes about Mesoamerican society. Many people are cooperative, relatively egalitarian, and have developed an impressive set of frameworks that allow us to compare different aspects of societies from different times and places, including our own. .
Feynman is a prominent advocate of developing better models for interpreting the past and integrating information across time periods and regions on Earth. We are stronger if we can draw on broader parameters, counterexamples, and nuances that thwart the common human instinct to take flights of fancy.
I hope readers can benefit from sharing a conversation about the great archaeological discoveries of our time, the realization that this new data set is a powerful force for the betterment of humanity. I thought about it.
Jan Rich-Frel: Start with a great essay you wrote in 2023.If I may say so, learn from history.” You wrote about “a treasure trove of information that may lead us to a better future.” We are in an era where, thanks to the accumulation of evidence and technology, we have at our fingertips a significant amount of history that humanity has never experienced before. Why is this important?
Gary M. Feynman: As deep historians, we finally have large amounts of multiscale data that allow us to compare different cultural periods, long periods of time, and diverse social formations. In a real sense, through archaeology, we can now begin to appreciate a truly global historical record that is not narrowly limited to literate societies or the European past. For a long time, the classical Mediterranean world and medieval Europe, both known in literature, have been used as proxies for humanity's past. Our past as a species was neither uniform nor linear, and we now know that is not the case.
At the same time, we can now help point the way towards identifying and understanding not only the causes of economic inequality and its alternatives, but also what underpins good governance, collective and cooperative action. I got the model. The social sciences have finally abandoned 200 years of approaches to understanding the past, including the idea that European countries were the pinnacle and final destination of humanity's steady progress. Being locked into a historical framework makes useful comparisons across history nearly impossible.
Rich Frell: Are there many examples of our leaders and rulers daring to learn from something other than selective history?
Feynman: The problem is that for centuries scholars interested in drawing lessons from past history have largely made unwarranted assumptions about the classical world, Europe's recent past, or human nature. We have turned our attention to the model of progressivism that we have adopted. Many leaders who have looked at history through straws have paid a heavy price.
Even more problematic are scenarios that assume that humans are always selfish or that leaders are always autocratic or militaristic. These scenarios ignore the nuances of human nature, including both the potential for selfishness and the ability to cooperate with non-kin on a scale unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Human behavior is always dependent on context, which alone cannot explain human history. Rather, we must explore the parameters, patterns, and variability of institutions and behaviors that explain human differences, diverse pasts, and change.
Contrary to popular opinion, there is no end to the debates and lessons that can be learned from history. Although technology changes, there are broad commonalities and structures in the basic socio-economic mechanisms and relationships that underpin human institutions. We know this about scale, but now we also know about another important aspect: the degree of concentration and decentralization of power.
Of course, pure reliance on education and exposure to democratic institutions and good governance is not enough to make these things stick. The way institutions are funded makes a huge difference, and if that doesn't change, neither will the political reality.
Rich Frell: Never before have we had to learn from and draw on so much history, so the reality is that we need to create mechanisms to start making better use of a more comprehensive history. What is the key starting point?
Feynman: We first need to recognize that history itself is important when explaining humanity's past. Path dependencies, or order of changes, and existing structures are important. In other words, the social sciences are historical sciences, like biology, but without general laws and mechanical explanations like physics. Even though there are no universal laws of history, we can identify some useful probabilities.
How do we do that? First, comparative studies of the past must consider changes in sequence, speed of development, and change. Then, the relationship between historical factors and key variables can be studied under different parameters when comparing different regional sequences of history. One of the great advantages of historiography and archaeology, compared to the recent past, is that the results are known. We already know what happened, and it gives us a chance to understand why.
As we deepen our understanding of humanity's global past, the relationships we see between institutions and factors such as population growth, nucleation, and size will become even stronger. Only through the broad comparative lens enabled by archaeological data can we build a truly global archive of history and heritage.
Then there's the issue of social modeling. Many historical errors have been created by seeing events as driven only by elites. In general, high positions may have more influence than others, but in social formation there are many other groups and groups involved in determining how events unfold. Forces exist. If you are interested in higher accuracy, include a wider range of people and daily life benefits.
Institutions are also part of this mix. Institutions perform functions based on previously embedded histories, which people have to struggle with and sometimes reform.
Most human settlements and social formations are open, and population flows and changes are nearly continuous. This means that membership and belonging in our communities or „society“ is generally fluid, and there are mechanisms to reflect this.
Cultural groups are not homogeneous and cultural characteristics do not change simultaneously. Some aspects of culture resist change, such as worldviews and visions of the universe. Other things can change more easily, such as how people organize politically or what they do for a living.
This is where being able to study the past in detail and in a scaled-up manner using the range of new technologies available, from isotopes and DNA to satellite maps, becomes crucial.
The methodologies of many research fields that use individuals as key indicators have continued to disappoint us as questions expand. This applies to both behavioral ecology and classical economics. Although useful, they are conceptually insufficient to explain the diversity and complexity of the deep past.
Rich Frell: Where do you start when it comes to the education process for future leaders?
Feynman: We need a curriculum for future leaders that expands their perspectives on human behavior and the world's past. If we want to reap the benefits of history, modern Western actions should not be isolated or differentiated from other actions. Proper integration of anthropology, archaeology, and history can soften modernist and Eurocentric biases and strengthen curricula that prepare future leaders.
famous philosophy, political economy Oxford and Cambridge have (PPE) courses that have produced almost every British Prime Minister for decades. grand strategy Courses taught on America's elite campuses are steeped in these theories and assumptions.
Rich Frell: Do you think the PPE and grand strategy crowd knows they're holding an outdated and reductive bag and are going to embrace history and biology, or is this just a knife fight in an alley? Does it have to be?
Feynman: In so many ways, recent policies and beliefs about inequality, globalism, democracy, and immigration emerge from disciplines such as economics, politics, and law that are based on Eurocentric ideas and assumptions. These biases are not surprising, as Western social scientific thought grew in close association with Western colonialism and the path of modern economic development.
But now our mission is to unpack, refine, leverage, and extend the conceptual frame based on what we have learned. The data we collect in archeology, anthropology, and history require an episode of “destructive science.” This is the development of new concepts that are consistent with what we know, extending and integrating theoretical ideas drawn from economics and politics. And they can be tempered by the diversity of practices and institutions recorded by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.