{"id":69,"date":"2019-04-01T13:39:16","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T17:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/?page_id=69"},"modified":"2019-04-01T13:40:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T17:40:01","slug":"a-story-the-way-it-was","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/a-story-the-way-it-was\/","title":{"rendered":"A Story \u2013 the way it was."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Throughout much of mankind\u2019s history life followed a pretty standard model.<\/h3>\n


People lived in small, mobile groups \u2013 we are talking the hunter-gatherer period here.<\/h3>\n


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.<\/h3>\n


Young children learned by watching and emulating their older siblings and the adults \u2013 learning by doing.<\/h3>\n

Older children did the same thing. Young adults did the same thing.<\/h3>\n

The mature adults combined their physical capabilities with their acquired expertise to be the primary providers.<\/h3>\n

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.<\/h3>\n

Some observations:<\/h1>\n

1) Child labor was the norm \u2013 work was school, and school was work \u2013 much of the learning was physical (vs cerebral) \u2013 learn by doing.<\/h3>\n

All the skills acquired during this process were immediately deployable and immediately useful.<\/h3>\n

2) Boys learned what the older boys and men did, and girls learned what the older girls and women did.<\/h3>\n

This was not stereotyping; it simply recognized that on average the two sexes had different strengths and weaknesses in their capability set.<\/h3>\n


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.<\/h3>\n


4) The verbal passing along of language and culture was fundamentally important to the success of the small group.<\/h3>\n

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.<\/h3>\n


5) Individual self-sufficiency was not a viable concept. Group self-sufficiency was the objective.<\/h3>\n

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.<\/h3>\n

Said a different way demand had to be inline with the available supply.<\/h3>\n


6) There was no unemployment in that everyone had skills that were useful to the group.<\/h3>\n


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.<\/h3>\n

If noticed at birth then I imagine these infants were killed or allowed to die.<\/h3>\n

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.<\/h3>\n


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.<\/h3>\n

They were nowhere near masters but they were sufficiently skilled to be treated as young adults rather than children.<\/h3>\n


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.<\/h3>\n


More to come<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout much of mankind\u2019s history life followed a pretty standard model. People lived in small,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/69\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingie.com\/bob\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}