Rise of State
As we think on how much we are advanced as compared to our ancestors, one big question lingers: Are we happier than the ancestors? Historians have been known to evade this disturbing question. According to Harari (2014), our judgement of any given religion largely depends on whether it lowered or raised global happiness levels. Some 2.5 million years back, our ancestors purely relied on stone tools. Come 250,000 years ago, they had come up with crude methods of making food palatable, that is with fire. Scavenging without tools is an old survival technique, as is hunting with technology. Two archaeological discoveries prove this. A red deer skeleton dating 100,000 years old had a wooden spear embedded into it, while another similarly old horse had a stone point jammed into its vertebra. Since then, the trend of using tools has accelerated. Virtually every tribe has some form of tools, be it knives of bone, stone hammer or sharpened sticks (Kelly, 2009).
As humans began settling in urban setting and developing more networks, the way of life became more complex, and this is what is referred to as civilization. The earliest civilizations date back to between 4,000 and 3,000...
This is when agriculture and trade escalated, subsequently boosting food security and economic stability. Some people and communities chose to abandon farming and delve into other economic activities of their interest (National Geographic Society, 2018)
Tribes that lived further away from the equator required more advanced technology to fend for themselves. It is definitely easier to fish in a river than the antarctic ocean. These tribes were still able to survive thanks to their ability to improve their tools of work. Genetic evolution would have been much slower were it to be the only means of adapting to new ecological niches. The hunter-gatherer tribes used an average of 6 hours per day to look for food. This however greatly varied from day to day. This is somehow viewed as “very leisurely” by the modern man. Going to the supermarket to shop for food in this modern day may not be viewed as work time. Preparing for a community feast may not also qualify as work time. These few examples show the differences in work time required to live as a hunter gatherer and as modern man (Kelly, 2009).
Survival in the stone-age era could not be possible without other…
