The invention of culture was a huge innovation for Homo sapi ens: creating language and a shared cognitive web of understand ing that transcends any individual's knowledge and life span-and that can be drawn on as needed and passed on to new generations. Cultures divide up expertise: there are midwives and healers, war riors and builders, farmers and weavers. Each of these domains of expertise can be shared, and those who hold the deepest reservoir of understanding in each are the guides and teachers for others.
Native lore has been a crucial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time. Primitive bands in early evolution would have thrived or died depending on their collective intelligence in reading the local ecosystem: to an ticipate key.moments for planting, harvesting, and the like-and so the first calendars came into being.
But as modernity has provided machines to take the place of such lore-compasses, navigational guides, and, eventually, online maps-native people have joined everyone else in relying on them, forgetting their local lore, like wayfinding.
And so it has gone with almost every traditional form of exper tise for attuning to nature's systems. The first contact of a native people with the outside world typically marks the start of a gradual forgetting of their lore.
When I spoke with Lindsey, she was preparing to leave for Southeast Asia to see the Moken, who are sea nomads. Just before the 2004 tsunami swept through the islands they inhabited in the Indian Ocean, the Moken "realized the birds had stopped sing ing and the dolphins were swimming farther out to sea," she told me. "So they all climbed in their boats and traveled to deep ocean, where the tsunami crest was minimal as it passed them. Not one Moken was hurt."
The invention of culture was a huge innovation for Homo sapi ens: creating language and a shared cognitive web of understand ing that transcends any individual's knowledge and life span-and that can be drawn on as needed and passed on to new generations. Cultures divide up expertise: there are midwives and healers, war riors and builders, farmers and weavers. Each of these domains of expertise can be shared, and those who hold the deepest reservoir of understanding in each are the guides and teachers for others.
Native lore has been a crucial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time. Primitive bands in early evolution would have thrived or died depending on their collective intelligence in reading the local ecosystem: to an ticipate key.moments for planting, harvesting, and the like-and so the first calendars came into being.
But as modernity has provided machines to take the place of such lore-compasses, navigational guides, and, eventually, online maps-native people have joined everyone else in relying on them, forgetting their local lore, like wayfinding.
And so it has gone with almost every traditional form of exper tise for attuning to nature's systems. The first contact of a native people with the outside world typically marks the start of a gradual forgetting of their lore.
When I spoke with Lindsey, she was preparing to leave for Southeast Asia to see the Moken, who are sea nomads. Just before the 2004 tsunami swept through the islands they inhabited in the Indian Ocean, the Moken "realized the birds had stopped sing ing and the dolphins were swimming farther out to sea," she told me. "So they all climbed in their boats and traveled to deep ocean, where the tsunami crest was minimal as it passed them. Not one Moken was hurt."
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