Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0

Over 9,000 years ago, depending on which group of people we are talking about, the Neolithic or New Stone Age started. You might be wondering what that’s got to do with YOU and I. The short answer: EVERYTHING.

Now, you might think, “Cool. They started making better stone tools back then and now we’re making smart phones, drones and FaceBook, right?”

Right… but not quite… That’s not the whole story.

The transition to the Neolithic profoundly defines us today in ways that are both surprising and can help us to understand much of what’s going on in modern cultures and in our personal lives. We appear to have advanced in one specific kind of technological evolution. Most of us are oblivious to what happened to US, as human beings, biologically.

All over the world there are sites of human habitation and civilizations where the transition from an abundantly-varied hunter-gatherer diet to a diet drastically reduced in variety, and grain-based, is clear. The results are the same worldwide: With grain-based diets human health gets devastated.  In short, we degenerate.

With the consumption of grains we lose six inches of height, 250 cc. of brain capacity, our teeth begin having cavities, we begin being born deformed with, for example, not enough room in our jawbones to accommodate our now-crooked teeth. Skeletons are riddled with bone lesions, evidencing chronic states of poor health and illness. Skeletal deformities appear, arthritis becomes common and pronounced and we get racked by plagues devastating whole populations.

Eventually we evolve new blood and tissue types to better adapt to the toxicity of grains and the consumption of the milk products (and immune factors) of other animals… somewhat… We evolve the capacity to endure while still remaining deformed.

Although we continue to suffer from the toxicity of grain-based and dairy-based diet, with experience humans learned to decrease the damage by fermenting grains for long periods of time. Almost none of these toxicity-reducing methods are used with modern, commercially-produced foods.

We still have not recovered our former Paleolithic vigor. In the last thirty years our health has been further compromised by a host of factors which we will review in other articles. We also haven’t recovered our ancestral intelligence.

What we have evolved, is an exceptionally sophisticated, acculturated version of idiocy which literally means to only be “self-referent,” precisely what the term modern points to; the “just-right-now” time bubble of people without history or connection to the hard lessons learned by our predecessors.

The Neolithic, as well as the modern era, are marked by the technological compensation for our biological degradation.

Something else appears with the Neolithic: rulers and ruled and the “bread and circus” culture of slaves. Tooth enamel studies show that, in stratified, class-based, societies the upper classes eat a very different diet than the ruled. The differences between rulers and slaves are not only political and intellectual, they are profoundly metabolic and biological.

There are also profound cultural components that distinguish Neolithic cultures from previous ones. We will explore these cultural aspects in detail soon.

To contextualize, we have developed very sophisticated technology, like nuclear power plants, for example. That seems intelligent, right? But why do we have so many nuclear power plants in earthquake zones and right on the immediate coastline of places, like Japan, where tsunamis have been hitting for as far back as we can tell? Why is the world now covered with nuclear power plants, like Fukushima, which fail to ON, going into uncontrolled and uncontrollable nuclear fission, when there’s a power shortage?

This reveals an aspect of our “intelligence.” Moderns pride ourselves on our “intelligence.”  It also reflects what’s going on with us Bio-Logically – our relationship to the Logic of LIFE, to common sense, to simply noticing reality and NOT just having “some big idea.” What this so-called “modern intelligence” is doing with nuclear power plants it also does with everything in the entirety of the culture subjected to it, from our water, to our food, to our privacy, to our wealth, etc. Comprehending the changes that came with the Neolithic can help us better comprehend the nature of our modernity.

Biologically, with our entry into the Neolithic era, we degenerated on almost all counts. The Neolithic was so devastating to our health, intelligence and social order that we still remain profoundly impacted and diminished by the changes it wrought.

Becoming aware of that impact allows each one of us to make a fuller spectrum of choices in OUR lives in order to live more fully, and vitally today.

Many of us grew up with the view that we, as humans, have been on a course of endless “progress,” from our brutish paleolithic ancestors all the way up to us.

Understanding the changes that the transition from the so-called Old Stone Age (or Paleolithic) to the New Stone Age (or Neolithic) wrought in our very biology and cellular metabolism contextualizes our modern challenges in surprising ways.

Let me give you one simple and very concrete example of how we fail to comprehend something about ourselves in a way that we would have no problem comprehending it in a horse, a cow, a dog or a cat:

Imagine you go to your local pet shop. You want to buy a dog, say a Rottweiler. So the owner tells you you’re in luck because he’s got a litter of Rottweilers just old enough to wean from their mother and takes you to where the puppies are. They’re beautiful. The owner assures you that the mother Rottweiler won’t bite and you notice she’s friendly and interested in you. You kneel down to pet the litter of pups and, as you stroke them, they nuzzle you. Then you notice something: they all have crooked teeth. You look at the mother and you notice her teeth are also all crooked and she’s got really bad breath.

What would crooked teeth tell you about the overall health, temperament and expense of owning such a dog, or even a cat, a horse or any other animal?

Why do we take it for granted that this would be a bad sign in any animal, but accept this as “normal” in human beings?

In the last five years I’ve been helping people around the world Revitalize their Health, Reawaken their Natural Intelligence, Activate their Wealth and Navigate their Relationship and Cultural Dynamics so that they can Live the Life they Love. When I give workshops on health I start with two simple questions:

• How many of you have ever had cavities? Around 98% have had cavities.

• How many of you have had to have teeth pulled so that your teeth can grow inside your jaw? The overwhelming majority have had to have teeth pulled to “make room” for the rest of their teeth.

Now I’m going to ask you two more curious questions:

• What is it that you know about the health and temperament of horses, cows, dogs, sheep, cats or any animal with teeth that is revealed precisely by their teeth that you learned to ignore about humans?

• What comes up for you when you consider this? What are the reactions, responses, objections, defenses, understandings, and further questions that come up for you when you consider this simple VIEW, (with your EYES, not just your ideas) about what I am talking about?

There is something going on with human beings right now, a level of suffering that we are not going to alleviate by either wishing our way out of it, or by pretending that it isn’t happening, or by pretending that “it’s part of our natural human condition.”

NO, it’s part of SOME PEOPLE’S CURRENT human condition. Once we understand that there are OTHER possible human conditions, starting with the Bio-Logical conditions humans evolved to thrive in, then we start to grasp what kind of CURRENT human condition WE are IN. We discover how to create conditons that are more life-fulfilling.

If we want our LIFE to be fulfilled, we need to know how we are designed, and act in favor of our Living Design and the fullness of our development.

Squirrels, caterpillars, dogs, trees, bees and every other form of Life know how to fulfill their Life in harmony with their Design. So did our ancestors; until the Neolithic.

If we are having a challenge doing something that comes naturally to all Life then we are living at odds with our LIFE. So let’s go to the Neolithic and discover how this happened!

If we were to compress the entirety of humanity’s existence into one, 24-hour day, humans spent almost the entire day, all the way up until 6 minutes to midnight, in the Paleolithic. The archeological findings for this period are clear: people were healthy on all counts, had stable societies and lived lives of EASE, yes, EASE.

In The World Transforms in Natural Intelligence, I wrote about my experience with an Aboriginal elder in Australia and twenty-five other people. For two hours we ATE our way across a landscape in the presence of someone whose knowledge of plants transformed what had seemed to me an inhospitable landscape into an endless buffet. Whereas I, alone and without supplies in that landscape, would certainly be in a survival situation, for our guide it was actually impossible for him to look for food because he was looking at a delicious, nutritious and infinitely-varied buffet of food everywhere he went!

When anthropologists began observing peoples who live paleolithic lifestyles, even in “harsh” environments, like the Kalahari desert, or the desert of Central Australia, they discovered that they only spend two or three hours a day, on average, getting food or making shelter. But don’t think that that means that everybody goes out every day to “punch the clock” and “put in their 2-3 hours daily.” Not at all! Every single person, who goes out and forages or hunts, brings back enough to feed five to six people abundantly. Each individual typically only gets involved in food-gathering or hunting activities every five or six days. The modern person’s concept of ancient life being a “survival situation” is a lie.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins describes our most ancient human ancestors as living in The Original Affluent Society. His study is precisely of those peoples living in the least nutrient dense and continually-inhabited parts of our planet: the Kalahari desert and the Central Australian Desert. He states:

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter’s – in which all the people’s material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.

Indigenous people know where all of their food sources are in the place they inhabit as well as we know where to go to the supermarket, get a hamburger, where the closest “nice” restaurant is, the local coffee shop, the mechanic, where the car wash is, and when that guy who sells fresh peaches and apples sets up his stand on the side of the highway every Fall. They know what grows where, what lives where, what ripens when, to a level of detail that is hard for us to imagine and over a vast expanse of land.

Paleolithic Life is NOT about survival, not even remotely. It’s also not about busyness. Calling Paleolithic people “hunter-gatherers” would be equivalent to calling us “super-marketers.” It ignores the inner and outer lives of these people and their areas of primary interest and activity, which are neither hunting nor gathering, as important as these may be to their lives.

“Paleolithic” is also a misnomer that places the focus on a specific type of stone technology which was not even the primary technology of these ancient peoples. The primary technology of ancient peoples was LIFE itself. Even for hunting and fishing, hunting nets, traps, dead falls, fishing weirs and all kinds of other technology were plant-based. They don’t appear in the archeological record, because they decompose.

The Kiowa people, according to a Kiowa man I spent time with, saw hunting with bows and arrows as cowardly. They would actually run down their prey on foot and tackle it. The average height of Kiowa people was well above six feet tall. Later I read some anthropological treatises that confirmed what this man had told me decades before. I learned a number of things from that man that, at the time, sounded absolutely crazy and off the wall to me. I had to take my own road to discover that what he said was true.

Paleolithic people had megalithic cultures with stone works so enormous and ubiquitous that modern folks can’t even see them: precisely what my teacher told me the first day I met him: “You have never seen. You have never heard. You have never moved.” All I could do was cogitate and agitate in my ideas of the world while remaining oblivious to the actual world I inhabited.

Ancient Peoples used energy as efficiently as possible in order to get maximum enjoyment and appreciation from BEING ALIVE and to realize new dimensions of ALIVENESS. This is what wisdom is in all ancient cultures: it is paying attention to the WAY of life and then living in a way that works WITH the energy already in motion instead of against it. Calling ancient peoples paleolithic and then only looking at arrowheads and spear points is akin to calling them “non-computer man” and pointing out their lack of laptops as defining them.

Ancient peoples used huge megalithic computers whose complexity modern  peoples can barely comprehend. They are called “medicine

grounds.” That’s another story, only inserted to provoke a little opening of the imagination and the notion that ancient peoples were not spending their lives “trying to become us.”

The set of values and ethics that ancient peoples live in are the values and ethics of Aliveness. Before we go all “mystical and Kumbaya fantasy-land primitive,” that includes killing, warring, protecting one’s territory and future generations, exercising hospitality and generosity and many other aspects of Life.

Free people killed anybody trying to capture or abuse them if they were not amenable to working things out. AND they did their best to work things out, often in surprising and brilliant ways. But dangerous predators, including human predators, got dealt with in ways that were decisive rather than in ways that are defective and encourage them to proliferate and to expand and perfect their predation and exploitation.

They didn’t engage in “demonstrations” (of impotence) for thousands of years and complain, beg, bow and scrape to the tyrants overrunning them and selling them and their children into bondage. Bowing, begging, scraping and asking psychopathic tyrants to “give peace a chance” is a decidedly Neolithic and slavish mindset.

Survival and striving as a “way-of-life” came hand-in-hand with so-called “civilization.” Here is how anthropologist Jared Diamond, in his article The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race describes our entry into the Neolithic:

“Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”

What happened?

Agriculture happened. Agres means “field.” Culture is “cultivation,” in Latin. Many of us believe that, before agriculture, ancient peoples lived in wild ecosystems. There was no such thing as “wild” in the paleolithic or in the vocabulary or consciousness of any indigenous peoples I know of.

Humans are an integral part of, and radically altered, almost all ecosystems on earth. We have participated in the evolution of those ecosystems profoundly since the beginning of our presence on earth, and on scales that are hard for us to imagine.

The modern frame of reference for understanding our own human experience is precisely modern, from the Latin modo: “just right now.” We have not only been displaced from our ancestral country. We have also been displaced out of the memory of our own ancestral human capabilities.

Modern consciousness is precisely the consciousness of people without history, without true connection to place and without the means to sustain themselves without placing themselves in servitude, precisely what a “chain of command” is, to a “master.” Traditionally and around the world, the word for this kind of person is simply “slave,” a permanent dependent, a grey-haired child, a human “resource,” reduced to a tool to be used and subjected to another’s will.

In contrast, there are human “beings,” self-led, self-directed and capable of responding skillfully to the challenges and invitations of Life in his homeland. “Indigenous” means “local person.” In Italian it’s paisano which means, literally, “country-fellow.” It’s the same root as pagan, a word which indicates “country-person.”

It’s the guy or gal who knows how to live richly in his place, straight from LIFE. It’s the person who still operates in the Life Intelligence that inhabits her and surrounds her, the person who knows every single form of Life in her “country,” which is not a nation-state but a territory where the Life of that place sustains her Life.

The relationship of the displaced and dispossessed immigrant, say, to Australia would have him go to that place I wrote about in How the World Transforms in Natural Intelligence, where our Aboriginal guide took 25 people and fed us for two hours. He would only see, as I saw initially, inedible plants and an inhospitable environment. Little would he suspect that it is not the environment but his ignorance that is inhospitable.

Out of that ignorance, to survive he would mow down hundreds, if not thousands, of different and highly-nutritious plants in order to plant perhaps ten or twenty different vegetables, like carrots, cabbage, potatoes and onions that he would struggle to keep alive because they are foreign to the life of that place. So he’d get some pesticides to do combat with the Life that is eagerly trying to restore the ecosystem so he can be fed better and more, not less, from the plants indigenous to that place. As a result, he would condemn himself to a life of impoverished nourishment, endless work and constant struggle with “Nature.” To that immigrant it would never occur that other relationships to life, health, wealth and society were possible, and he’d be convinced that he “improved the place.”

He would take the Biblical injunction of “by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread” as an injunction from “God.” Little would he suspect that the sweat of his brow is the injunction of his ignorance, an ignorance sanctified by post-Neolithic religions that tell conquered and enslaved peoples: don’t think on your own and, “do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” This is the sanctification of the stupefied state of peoples stuck in the neolithic relationship to Life all the way to today. It has us stuck in the worst of the Stone age, where our ancient, ancestral intelligence has been reduced to the stupidity getting spread from mind to mind via silicon chips.

What devastated human health with the arrival of the neolithic was the consumption of grass seeds; what we call grains.

Wherever people started eating the seeds of grasses, like wheat, rye, barley, and corn as their staple food human health degenerated. With time, people learned to subject these grains to long fermentation times so as to reduce the toxicity of the grain proteins.

Health DID improve and tremendous, local, indigenous technology WAS developed to mitigate the toxicity of grass seeds. But we still have not recovered our Paleolithic vigor, health and intelligence, not by a long shot.

Grass seeds have a whole host of proteins that make them toxic to animals and thus increase their chances of falling to the ground and growing, rather than being eaten.

There are other seeds, in the natural world, that are actually designed to have their fruit eaten in order for the seed to then get deposited in a nice heap of fertilizer upon the ground to grow. But grain seeds evolved another strategy: toxicity protecting the nutrients that are designed for the growth of the plant and not that of a predator.

Rather than looking at this in a simplistic “good/bad” or “that was then/ this is now” framework, I challenge you to see what other frameworks you can appreciate the dynamics outlined.

As you consider what we’ve covered here just ask yourself, “What would life today look like without the degradation of health and intelligence that we acquired from the Neolithic?” 

YOU could make that real for you and enjoy Vital Health in Five Steps.

Deep Freedom Now is an invitation to Natural Life INTELLIGENCE, a word that comes from the Latin int: “between” + legere: “to read, to choose.”

As we expand our appreciation for and consciousness of a broader spectrum of our human experience, choices and consequences, we begin to broaden the palette of colors, tones, textures, rhythms, shapes, sensations, attentions, intelligences and capacities with which we create our Lives instead of just consuming them out of the general mind massage of mass-produced “culture” and pre-baked “truisms” we’ve adopted or invented because they sound good.

We begin to work with Life first-hand and enrich our Life with Life, for Life, and in Life, learning and daring to Live the Life We Love. We awaken our LIFE Intelligence.

Look, with your eyes, beyond these words and pay attention to the Life around you with what we call your attention to. One easy and very practical way is to become curious about people’s teeth, temperament and health.

Feel free to share what you discover in the comments. Share those of your friends who dare to Love their Life, in Act and in Fact, enough to dare to Live the Life They Love.

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Gather Seeds

Of Wisdom

Which is “Way-Finding”

That We May Each Make Our Way

To Live the Life We LOVE

And to Love the Life We ARE.