Throughout much of mankind’s history life followed a pretty standard model.
People lived in small, mobile groups – we are talking the hunter-gatherer period here.
Mother nature provided the resources and manual efforts combined with accumulated wisdom did the harvesting and processing of these resources into what mankind needed on a day-to-day basis.
Young children learned by watching and emulating their older siblings and the adults – learning by doing.
Older children did the same thing. Young adults did the same thing.
The mature adults combined their physical capabilities with their acquired expertise to be the primary providers.
Elders, no longer possessing the required physical skills made less of a physical contribution and were the custodians and conveyors of the acquired wisdom of the group.
Some observations:
1) Child labor was the norm – work was school, and school was work – much of the learning was physical (vs cerebral) – learn by doing.
All the skills acquired during this process were immediately deployable and immediately useful.
2) Boys learned what the older boys and men did, and girls learned what the older girls and women did.
This was not stereotyping; it simply recognized that on average the two sexes had different strengths and weaknesses in their capability set.
3) The production unit was the small group and everyone had a vested interest in helping everyone to learn and/or produce since they all shared in the small group production.
4) The verbal passing along of language and culture was fundamentally important to the success of the small group.
The language and culture of the small groups evolved over time in response to the changing world and to the improved mastery of the group.
5) Individual self-sufficiency was not a viable concept. Group self-sufficiency was the objective.
Using the goldilocks analogy this means they needed just the right amount of physical capacity and just the right amount of the required skills to be self-sufficient within their area of operation.
Said a different way demand had to be inline with the available supply.
6) There was no unemployment in that everyone had skills that were useful to the group.
7) There was, I suspect, little room for defective or deficient people who could not pull their weight or were not projected to become productive members of the group.
If noticed at birth then I imagine these infants were killed or allowed to die.
If noticed later then I expect they were either forced into conformance and a minimum level of contribution or they were banished from the group or left to survive on their own.
8) It is my contention that children arrived at puberty (and adolescence), at a much older age than we see currently in the developed world, with the equivalent of a high school diploma in life.
They were nowhere near masters but they were sufficiently skilled to be treated as young adults rather than children.
9) It is also my contention that these post-puberty adolescents were ready to pair off with the opposite sex and start building families and contribute to the growth of the production unit.
More to come