The rise of state and its advantages

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 BCE. 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 people surrounding you. As such, humans formed close-knit communities that would ensure all of them get enough food and remain protected from danger. Sickness on one member of such communities was a concern for all the others. They would divide all what they had and survive through the hardest of times. That is very much unlike the present world, where social interactions have grown quite cold. Not to say that the advancement in civilization was not the best thing. The modern way of life has many advantages but such things as intimate relationships have suffered greatly in depth and quality. The modern humans have to depend on the government and the market for virtually every item they need, be it shelter, food, security, health, education, name it. It is therefore now possible to survive without close association with your extended family (Harari, 2014). But even still, it should be remembered that no human being can exist alone. It maybe that the dimensions of interaction have changed, but the need still remains. Our evolution to the place we are now has been through thousands of years of dependence on tools. The hunter’s power on his spear was greatly multiplied by use of a long swinging stick which served as an extension to the arm. And thus it suffices to say that all tools are basically an extension to our human bodies. The use of tools is what has made us survive through all those years, otherwise we’d have long ago perished (Kelly, 2009).


References
Harari, Y. N. (2014). Were we happier in the stone age? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/were-we-happier-in-the-stone-age
Kelly, K. (2009). The world without technology. Retrieved from https://www.nextnature.net/2009/10/the-world-without-technology/
National Geographic Society. (2018). Civilization. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/civilization/