The Caveman Fallacy

Anyone who talks to me, reads this blog, or has been in a room with me for more than ten minutes knows that I am possibly the world's youngest curmudgeon. So, bear that in mind as you read...well, any of my blog entries.

Okay. So, I have been noticing a trend common in both certain types of marketing and in defending particular lifestyle choices that people make. It is really a form of the Appeal to Nature fallacy, but it's a specific form that, as an anthropologist (and especially as an archaeologist) tends to get under my skin. I tend to refer to it as the Caveman Fallacy - and it is the notion that whatever humans do in our "natural" state is what is best for us physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

Before I get into one of the big problems with this, I should note that dealing with this fallacy is complicated by the fact that there is a kernel of good sense buried deep, deep within the recesses of it's ungainly edifice. Examining our evolutionary past can reveal good, useful, and important information about the problems that cause us grief now. For example, understanding the world of our ancient ancestors can help us to grasp why we process information the way that we do in our modern world. Looking at the food gathering habits of modern hunter-gatherers can help us to look for possible ways to address diseases such as diabetes (though, to be fair, it can also reveal why our ancestors tended to die at a young age and have high rates of infant mortality). So, the notion that looking into the human past can yield valuable information for modern peoples is not an unreasonable one. What makes the Caveman Fallacy a fallacy is both the over-simplification of the human past that goes into it, and the way in which it tends to be applied unthinkingly.

Okay, first off, there is the problem of defining humanity's natural state. Some folks refer to this as the "cave man", but of course the cave man, with his tiger-skin cloak and a club with which to whack his intended prey and mate (often one in the same), is really just a creation of popular culture and doesn't actually describe the true human past. This version of the human past has been used to promote everything from high protein diets to aggressive foreign policy. It's bullshit, and is one side of the 18th/19th century tendency to see all non-Europeans as primitive.

The other version, ascendant in the here and now, is that the natural state of humans is that of innocent farmers (occasionally hunter/gatherers), in balance with nature, living a peaceful and idyllic life, with nothing in the way of disease or hunger. This variation is used to sell everything from herbal supplements to manufactured (but allegedly "native") religions aimed at white folk. This version is also bullshit, and is the flip-side of the 18th/19th century tendency to see all non-Europeans as primitive (or in this case, "noble savages").

With a bit of variation, the Caveman Fallacy routinely groups all past (and some present) humans into one of these two categories.

But the truth of the human past is much, much messier. First off, what the hell is humanity's natural state? Ever since we became our present species, a few hundred thousand years ago, we have been using tools. Technology pre-dates us as a species, and therefore if we are to define a natural state as one in which there is no technology to alter the environment, then humans, by definition, do not have a natural state. Some folks will try to skirt this by pointing to some point in our collective past - mobile bands of hunter-gatherers, sedentary bands of hunter-gatherers, early farmers, early town-dwellers, etc. - as humanity's natural state. However, the claim that any of these are more our natural state than any other point in human history is completely arbitrary. Each stage of human culture has held the seeds of everything that was to come later, and each stage bears the marks of what came before. If we have a different society now than that of our early ancestors, it is because of incremental change beginning with the first hominids (or even earlier), and everything we are now is derived from what we were before. We have always used technology to alter our environment, whether it was made of wood and stone or made of silicon and copper - technology is just as much a part of our evolutionary path as upright walking and depth perception. The truth is that we are just as much in our natural state now as our ancestors in the African Savannah were and this belief that human-manufactured things are unnatural comes purely from the rather arrogant belief that we are separate from the rest of the species on the planet*.

In short, either we have no natural state, OR we are still in our natural state. Any claim otherwise is nothing but the creation of an arbitrary and meaningless label.

The second problem comes when the people using the Caveman Fallacy make their claims about the specifics of the human past. They are typically factually distorted, if not outright false (where I come from, people call such claims "fuckin' lies").

For an extreme example, let's take a claim that I have heard made by many raw food proponents. I have heard many of these folks claim that the introduction of cooked foods into the human diet is responsible for many of our current maladies, and that the use of raw foods led to a shortening of the human lifespan. This is not true in precisely the same way that the surface of the sun is not cold. In fact, cooking predates anatomically modern humans, and while there are some foods that are better for us raw, cooking actually "pre-digests" many foods for us allowing us to get more nutrition from most, and making some that would otherwise be inedible both palatable and nutritious. The paleoanthropology and archaeology both back this conclusion up very firmly, and any claim to the contrary betrays an individual completely out of touch with reality.

Then you have variations on a theme used by both the ravenous meat eaters and the pro-vegetarian folks. These folks both claim that our ancestor's diets were very different from our own, and that we should eat as they did for improved health. It is true that their diets were very different, but to claim that eating as they did would lead to better health is debatable at best - bear in mind that it is very recently in human history (really, with the advent of the modern diet, modern sanitation, and modern medical technology) that human lifespans have nearly doubled and our infant mortality rates have dropped. That being said, looking to our evolutionary past may provide useful information about how we process foods as well as why we crave what we crave, and this may be useful in looking to our current health, provided that we remember that what our ancestors ate was not necessarily the optimal diet either (what with limited food choices and seasonal starvation and all).

The difference between the meaties and the veggies lies not in their basic claim, though, but rather in what they believe the past to be like. The meaties see humans of the past as mighty hunters, killing beasts and eating their meat, keeping lean and healthy through the exercise necessary to catch the animals, and through the intake of animal proteins itself. The veggies, on the other hand, look to the past of human the gatherer (interesting to note that the veggies tend to be more gender inclusive in their view of the human past), and see us as natural herbivores eating off of the landscape without need for animal proteins.

Both of these views contain elements of truth, unfortunately filtered through a thick membrane of ideologically-driven psuedoscience. For the meaties: the human lineage has engaged in meat-eating probably since the time of the Australopithecines, if not before. However, this has probably been a mix of hunting and scavenging, "man the noble hunter" is a myth and nothing more. Meat has been important to human evolution (if you look into how we digest it, it is one of the more nutritious foods a human can eat), but most humans gained the vast majority of dietary calories from vegetable foods.

As for the veggies, everything from the tools that accompany early archaeological sites (pre-dating anatomically modern humans by millions of years) to the evidence from biology and physiology (humans have numerous traits of both carnivores and herbivores, an unusual combination) and from primatology (contrary to what many people believe, other primates - most notably chimpanzees - will eat meat when they can get it) indicate that meat has been a part of the human diet from the beginning. It has been a small part of our diet, but if the archaeology, paleoanthropology, ethnography, and biology are any indication (and, umm, they are), then it has been an important part of our diet even if small.

All of this brings us to the third problem with the caveman fallacy - most of the claims about the past ultimately, even if they were true (and they rarely are), have little to do with today. So what if meat has been important to human diets in the past? With the variety of foods available to most of us, the average person living in the U.S. or Europe can gain all of the nutrition they need from vegetable resources today, and there may even be beneficial side-effects to doing so***. By the same token, even if past humans gained most of their nutrition from vegetable foods, a fair (and non-ideological) assessment of the biological and medical literature shows that including meat as part of our diet makes it easier to maintain a healthy diet (although most of us in the U.S. do tend to overdo it and could stand to consume less meat).

Likewise, claims about how human relations worked in the past, about how our ancient religions worked, etc., even if they are true, must be filtered through modern culture, meaning that the past is not as relevant as the present.

But, it must be remembered that the Caveman Fallacy is different from the examination of our past to look for clues to how we evolved or for keys into underlying elements common to humans. For example, consideration of early human environments, such as the African savanna, may help us to understand why human cognition evolved as it did, or why our senses are calibrated as they are. But this is fundamentally different from saying "X is good, because X is what 'natural' humans did!" That is just plain stupid.








*That being said, an argument can be made that we have used technology in a way that has, or soon will, extend our environment's carrying capacity to its limits, and we may be looking forward to a major population crash. If this happens it will not, however, be proof that our current level of technology is unnatural. On the contrary, it will be proof that we are still very much part of the natural world, and that we are just as subject to resource stress and environmental degredation as everything else.

**There are, however, many exceptions, and unless you are going to claim that hunter-gatherers in vegetable poor environments are somehow less natural than you, you can't claim that humans naturally eat little to no meat.

***As someone who enjoys meat, I take little pleasure in informing my fellow meat-eaters that the reality is that cutting down or eliminating our meat eating will likely have good effects on our environment, as well as our wastelines. However, it won't be the panacaea that many folks seem to think it will be, so while it may be a worthy goal, reducing or eliminating meat consumption will only solve a few problems.

Knights Templar Coming out of the Woodwork!

While I was exiled in western Kern County for my recent large project, I was re-acquainted with the History Channel. At this point in time, most of the History Channel's programming seems to be dedicated to whipping up fears over the impending 2012 non-event and trying to persuade their more gullible viewers that everyone from the old salt Nostradamus to Leonardo DaVinci* was a 100% accurate prophet who foretold the end of the world some time in the next few years.

Indeed, the Hysteria Channel would be a better name.

Buried in between these shows, however, are a few of the more run-of-the-mill psuedohistory shows. Amongst these was a show which "gave the evidence" (more like gave the supposition) that the Knights Templar, after having been persecuted in Europe, escaped to North America. The evidence for such a thing is scant, at best. There's the Kensington Runestone, which is far from having been cleared as a hoax. There's rock art that can be interpreted as indicating medieval armored men or European symbols, but if you are familiar with the rock art of the world you tend to find these claims more than a little lacking. There's some enigmatic structures which wouldn't seem out of place for medieval Europeans, but also are very much of types that the colonists from the 17th century onward were building in North America. Other than that, there are a few legends and bits of local lore that seem intriguing, but don't add up to much - a pile of poor, equivocal and vague evidence does not equal a single piece of good evidence, much less a compelling case (contrary to what Sam Spade might have thought**).

What struck me as I watched this was not how ludicrous it was, but rather how frustratingly close the folks on the program were coming without ever quite hitting on the subtle reason why archaeologists and historians don't take them seriously.

These folks have taken a few pieces of messy and unclear evidence, reached their conclusion, and then tried to make their case not by amassing further evidence and working out the proper context of their materials, but rather by ignoring the flaws in their current evidence and building up a case for possibility and mistaking that for probability or even certainty.

What is frustrating about this is that the basic scenario - that a small group of Europeans wandered into the Americas before Columbus - is not all that far-out. We know that the Vikings did it, so the technology and know-how was present in Europe. But if anyone other than the Vikings came over, we have yet to find clear evidence of them in the Americas and they were awfully silent about it in their own written record***. So, we are left with a distinct possibility, one that seems so tantalizing, with absolutely no solid evidence to back it up.

One of the more curious things about the people on the show is that they consistently state thing such as "the archaeological establishment doesn't want you to know about THIS!" I have written before about why that is not true. However, one thing that I left out of the previous discussion is that, contrary to what many of the proponents of these claims say, we wouldn't have to re-write history or prehistory if the claims were proven true.

You see, even if the Knights Templar made it to North America, they did very little that changed the lives of the people living here at the time. They also did very little to change Europe. If they had any significant influence in either place, then there would be much more evidence laying about in the form of changes to the archaeological and alterations to the historic records. If they did make it here, that would be interesting, and it might answer some questions about European history, but at most it would require a very mild tweaking of our histories, and more likely it would be relegated to an interesting but ultimately unimportant footnote.

It would still be good for the career of whoever proved it. After all, it would provide sensationalism enough to sell books and television shows, not to mention motivate funding agencies, and it might provide some interesting information about how humans adapt to unusual landscapes. However, these would still be minor, if glitzy, contributions to both archaeology and history. A small amount of information would be added, but little (if anything) would be re-written.

And that is another element that makes these folks frustrating. In addition to mistaking their wishes and assumptions for facts and data, they also overstate the importance of their alleged findings. And yet, all the while, they accuse us of arrogance. Go figure.





*The Leonardo DaVinci one was particularly hilarious. In it, the producers used a reference in one of his diaries to a nightmare he had as a child coupled with vague water imagery in a couple of his paintings to "prove" that he had predicted a global flood that would destroy humanity.

**Okay, he wasn't looking at evidence but rather reasons to act. Besides, that passage from the Maltese Falcon was pretty damn good, and revealed more about his character than anything else in the book. What does this have to do with prehistoric North America? I haven't a clue, just ignore me.

***One person on the show asserted that "everyone knew about the Americas and were coming here routinely before Columbus!" Really? They were awfully silent about it if they were coming, which one would think that some scribe or another would bother to jot down. Not to mention that, for a continent of people who knew where the continents of the Earth really were, they had some awfully peculiar ideas about the size and nature of the world.

A Little After-Halloween Treat

For those of you recovering from last night's festivities, here' a special little something from the Seanachai:

My Superstitions - Dice

I like to think that I am a very rational person, that I base my actions on good reasoning and hard data.

But the simple fact of the matter is that I engage in a few superstitious behaviors. These are behaviors that even I think are silly, and that I know to be pointless, and yet I engage in them and feel as if they are good and sensible, even while intellectually knowing how foolish they are.

Case in point: dice. I am superstitious about dice.

Okay, a little background is in order to make this all make some sort of sense. My name is Matthew and I...I...[deep breath]...I am a gamer. And not someone who sits in front of an X-Box or Wii and presses buttons. No, I am a role-playing game enthusiast. I enjoy sitting around with my friends, pretending that we are adventurers out to slay dragons

Okay, I've said it, I feel better now, like a great weight has been lifted from my chest.

Now, contrary to popular belief, we don't dress up in costumes, we don't run around with plastic swords, and we don't address each other as "my lord" and "my lady" - people who do that are called LARPers (LARP for Live Action Role Playing) and even the geekier tabletop gamers tend to think that the LARP scene is a little strange.

No, we're tabletop gamers, we gather 'round the eponymous table, papers with our character's descriptions and statistics in front of of, and we play out the game using dice to resolve situations with uncertain outcomes.

There is a lot of dice rolling in the average game. Enough that many players jokingly refer to these games as "roll playing" rather than "role playing" games.

And that is where my superstition comes in.

See, in most truly random distribution of numbers, there will be streaks where the numbers are high, and streaks where the numbers are low. It has nothing to do with the way that the numbers are generated (provided that the number generation is truly random), it's just the way that random distributions work. The NPR show Radiolab even has a segment on this in which a mathematician is able to determine which list of numbers was truly randomly generated and which was created to look randomly generated by noting that the truly random list had more streaks of the same number in it.

And so it is around the gaming table. Every gamer knows that there will be a point in every evening in which they seem to be on fire - making every roll that they need to and failing few, if any, rolls - and others when they seem to have a losing streak, consistently failing rolls and making successful rolls just enough to get their hopes up to have them dashed again.

This is exactly what one would expect from a random distribution of numbers, you know, like the kind of distribution that one gets from rolling dice. I have even tested this, thinking that maybe there are characteristics of the dice that might make them more likely to roll one way or another, but when I chart my dice-rolling experiments (good lord, I am a geek, it's a wonder anyone listens to me), I find that they consistently act in the way predicted by random chance.

But, as the saying (which I have been unable to find the source of) goes, luck is probability taken personally, and as much as I am aware that my streaks of good or bad rolls are simply random, it feels like the universe is screwing around with me. I know that it's random chance and there's nothing for it, but I feel like I should be able to influence it in some way.

And so I try to influence it. I have a large number of dice (though not a huge number, like many of the other players that I know), and when I hit a streak in which I am rolling poorly, I switch to another die or set of dice. Of course, I usually continue to roll poorly, which makes this attempt to influence fate into an exercise in frustration, but at least for the moment I feel like I have done something useful. When I am playing a game (such as the older versions of Dungeons and Dragons* or GURPS) in which for some types of rolls a high number is good, and a low number is good for others, I'll even keep track of which dice seem to be consistently rolling high or low and designate those dice for those types of rolls.

And do I roll any differently than anyone else at the table? No, of course not. I don't even roll any differently than on those occasions when I only have one set of dice to roll and therefore can't switch them around. The evidence proves that I am not doing anything that could change the outcome of my games, and I know that. But I still feel like I am doing something to change the outcome.

I have witnessed other superstitions as well. I used to play with two guys who would roll their dice for a good 15-30 minutes straight before gameplay started in order to "get rid of the bad rolls." I know other people who will only buy dice in certain colors. And I know people who will only use dice that have had a ritual done over them.

Does any of this actually help? Most people will acknowledge that it doesn't actually do anything other than make them feel better, and they treat the thing with a rather tongue-in-cheek attitude. However, some folks claim that it does help them, but actually watching their gameplay demonstrates otherwise.

And, perhaps that is why so many people cling to superstitious behaviors, because many folks won't except that something that feels like its working really isn't doing any good.

Well, at least it's good to know that I am not alone. The blogger noisms has also posted about dice superstitions.



*Incidentally, a common scenario or "adventure" used in Dungeons and Dragons is the dungeon crawl - in which the player characters move around in some sort of interior maze, usually caverns, a castle, or the eponymous dungeon, killing monsters and stealing their loot. This has led to one of the host of the podcast Fear the Boot to describe it as "Home Invasion: The Role-Playing Game."

Oh, The Place You'll Go

Just a quick post, I took this photo while in the field yesterday and I think that it illustrates two things:

1) The odd beauty of some of the places that I go (yeah, sometimes I have a pretty cool job).

2) The fact that, when you get away from maintained roads, it gets pretty isolated.



This is in northwest Kern County, about 10 miles north of the town of McKittrick.

Frustration and Acceptance With Irrationality

Do you ever have the urge to point someone towards reality, but realize that it is pointless?

I was in the grocery store yesterday. In the dairy aisle I noticed a fellow, probably in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a red shirt with the words “Arrest Me” in large print, and then something written below in small print. I couldn’t make out what it said, and I couldn’t get close enough to read it without appearing to be the rather nosy person that I am.

A few minutes later, I was at the front, buying my groceries, and the fellow got into line behind me. I turned around, and saw that the complete text of his shirt was “Arrest Me – I prayed in school today.” Ahhh, yes. I hadn’t seen one of these shirts for a little while, but I had seen them before.

There is a small, but very vocal, minority of Christians who believe that the rest of the world is quite literally out to get them. They believe that everything that doesn’t go exactly their way is a form of persecution rather than just a sign that our society is owned by everyone, that everyone has equal rights and privileges, and not just their particular sect. In this particular case, these folks have taken the fact that public schools, as government institutions, are not allowed to force students to pray, and have extrapolated from this that students praying on their own is illegal.

Of course, this is nonsense. While there have been a few isolated incidents of over-zealous administrators wrongly punishing students for religious expression, these events have been newsworthy because of their rarity. If they were as common as some would have you believe then there would be no point in putting them on the news.

And perhaps this guy in the grocery store would have accepted that had it been pointed out to him. However, I have learned through long experience that when someone takes a position that is so at odds with reality, it’s typically completely pointless to try to talk them out of it. As the saying goes – you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into. This annoys me, the truth of the matter is so fucking obvious to anyone who bothers to actually look rather than just play the “I’m so persecuted” card that I find it difficult to accept that people don’t see it.

The same is true for young-Earth creationists, the anti-medicine brigade, hardened political partisans, and anyone else who holds hard and fast to a particular questionable set of propositions. And yet, people don’t see that reality doesn't line up with their particular presuppositions, most of these people can’t be made to see it, and I have to get used to that fact regardless of how much it may irk me.

More Neil DeGrasse Tyson Fun

Groovy, now I have a video of Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining the problem behind the philosophy that underlies Intelligent Design creationism, and he also (probably unintentionally) points out the problem with our culture's tendency to buy into the "our natural state is perfect" mentality.