I consider it a good thing that most humans are willing and wanting to educate about the ills of xenophobia and other maladies. To have entire ethnic groups get wiped out is hard for me to imagine. What crazy times our ancestors lived through.

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rayiner 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To the contrary, I think our education system has so over focused on “xenophobia” and things like that that people are unable to understand the myriad other and more significant social factors that exist between human groups.

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gradus_ad an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reducing prehistoric existential struggle to "xenophobia" is really something...

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tomrod 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

On the contrary - I view today's xenophobia as rooted in fear that a person may hold that their way of life will be wiped out as it has through human history. In other words - if it is built on a rational foundation instead of an emotional foundation, then education can help.

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rayiner 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

If things are as you described it, then isn’t that fear rational? What you seem to be saying is that people should hope that things happen differently this time than it did in history. That seems like the irrational part.

	▲	tomrod 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No. There is also a reasonable fear of needles. It doesn't mean that understanding that needles deliver medicine, and thus doctors use them for medicine, is irrational. The basis may be rational but the continued fear regarding a needle's use is irrational. Great example is in the US, MAGA have decimated their local farming community economies as a consequence of their deportation demands, to the point where farmers flood social media saying people won't work for the wages they are willing to pay since their workforce is either deported, in a concentration camp that won't allow congress oversee, or in fear of living as such. Wanting to have clarity or changes in immigration policy is rational. Treating every immigrant an ex ante criminal, as if all are guilty of rape, murder, or organized crime at rates far exceeding the citizenry (though the reverse is true), and treating them as subhuman through policy and deployment of undertrained secret police, is not rational. It always surprises me when smart people think that xenophobia itself makes for rational policy. It shows major blinders in their personal worldview.
	▲	stymaar 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's exactly as rational as people hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of Covid. Just because some behavior made sense in a prehistoric society doesn't mean it does in a modern one.
	▲	surgical_fire 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		In history things such as slavery, marital rape, and honor killings were the norm. In all places worth living we overcame those, and it was not something done irrationally. Why should xenophobia, racism and such not follow the same path?

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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carefree-bob an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is basically all of human history. I guarantee you that whatever ethnic group you belong to, if they are the dominant group in a region, they got to be that way be slaughtering the previous inhabitants. Modern anthropology has really opened our eyes to this fact, which contradicts a lot of the post-war anthropology that wanted to say that, say, fall of the Roman Empire was mostly peaceful, or the mass disappearance of Early European hunter artifacts was merely the movement of "pots, not people". But with DNA studies we can confirm that no, it's not that everyone started using a different kind of pottery, it's that they were all wiped out by the new group that had their own styles of pottery. The men were slaughtered and women were raped. Same thing for modern day Japanese moving into the islands, or the Bantus migrating into what is now Namibia, or the Aztecs, or basically anyone else. All of history is built on fighting for land to call your own, and killing off the male population that was there before. It's biblical, even - read the book of Joshua.

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tomrod an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Don't get me wrong - I recognize that. And it is still hard for me to imagine!

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chrisco255 an hour ago | parent [-]

Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed. You don't have to traverse hundreds of miles on foot in the face of drought, wildfire, famine, disease, war, etc to find some food source to sustain yourself and some shelter free of attacks by random tribal conflict.

	▲	tomrod 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Hard for you to imagine because you live in a modern society and your next meal is guaranteed. It is easy to reduce people to caricatures when we don't know them. Since we aren't at a happy hour regaling each other over the craziness of lives lived, I'll be brief: there have been periods of life where this assertion wasn't true.

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simianwords an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

completely true. No society is innocent of this. One good example is slavery - I myself was surprised that chattel slavery was common everywhere in the world and it was the west that had the mental capacity to stop it.

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legacynl an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> completely true. No society is innocent of this.

Perhaps in history. But we humans have the ability to think and adjust our behavior. We didn't kill all the horse-people when we invented the car. It's likely that in the future we could be able to move past all the horrible things we do to each other.

	▲	tomrod 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That is my hope. While it won't be utopia, how much better would we be if our small "tribes" grow to be humanity and life in general.
	▲	simianwords 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		sure but i was talking against singling any society out

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3748484848 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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regularization an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really. From the time of the cave paintings at Lubang Serij Saleh 40,000 years ago, as well as 10,000 years before that, up to the beginning of the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago, all evidence is humans lived rather peacefully. As is evidenced also by similar remaining bands over the past centuries until now. The Neolithic revolution and rise of surplus, class societies, warrior castes and such was the beginning of such things. And that only spread over the entire globe over the past 600 years.

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gedy 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

How does this jive with the inland Papuan tribes in Papua New Guinea? They were quite isolated and from what I read they can be just as violent (of course, not on the scale of mechanized slaughter by moderns)

	▲	regularization 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Papuan tribes The smallest definition of a tribe is usually 500 people. They can be 10 tines that size. Tribes did not exist until about 10,000 years ago. They were preceded by hunter-gatherer bands. The inland Papuan group most associated with violence are the Enga, but they are not migratory hunter-gatheree bands. They are farmers who grow sweet potatoes and raise pigs.

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carefree-bob 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It depends on what you mean, as I did not argue that life for the average person in a traditional society was filled with violence.

What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.

Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.

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vintermann an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is just one study, which the website notes goes against consensus, and we have a very sparse view into ancient DNA. Just from knowing Norwegian geography, I'm rather skeptical of full-genocide theories.