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Daily reminder that ALL atrocities are bad. Yes, even of your favorite polity (thelemmy.club)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1795380/daily-reminder-that-all-atrocities-are-bad-yes-even-of-your-favorite-polity

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[–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The DNA presence only confirms that there was interbreeding happening, not what kind of conditions they were happening under. Knowing what I know about our species, especially from the early days, IMO its equally likely that we intermingled via war/conquest (in the form it would have existed for hunter/gatherer societies) and incorporated via slavery. My guess is that history contains examples of both (peaceful and violent exchanges) for each of Neanderthal, homo erectus, and Denisovians, plus maybe others that history isn't as aware of, depending on how diverse hominids got before homo sapiens got settled in everywhere.

Our species is capable of the full spectrum from good to evil and even today we have a large amount of psychopaths in leadership positions.

Though we are the first species to be aware that other species have gone extinct and wonder how much of that was directly because of us. And it's not like any homo sapiens that exist today have any responsibility for what happened to species that went extinct before recorded history began anywhere on this planet.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Slavery wasn't really a thing in pre historic Hunter gatherer society:

    "Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity."

    Source

    Which makes sense, the benefit of slavery is that the master can expropriate all the surplus a person can generate, but hunter gatherers don't really generate surplus. Combine this with the difficulty of keeping someone against there will without a state and people specialized in violence to keep them in line and slavery isn't really that viable.

    In general hunter gatherer tribes were anarchic as consensus and social cohesion were necessary both to make sure you don't starve and to be able to fight off other tribes

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, I don't think they would have been like modern slaves but more like bully/bullied relationships where those at the bottom aren't forced to do labour but get targetted for various forms of abuse, including sexual, which would have sometimes resulted in a child.

    They probably wouldn't be abused by everyone in the group. Other apes like chimps show sympathy to individuals that get picked on by more dominant individuals, so I'd expect some of us were like that back then, too. But other apes also demonstrate that some individuals can just be assholes or otherwise decent but can get in bad moods.

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