Homo sapiens /
Homo ignorans
antonym for sapiens
(Alberto Yagos, teacher
ignorans = doesn't know.)

discussions/essays may be embedded in contexts.
context: humans are massively stupid
- context: we were playing with the idea that we humans are monumentally stupid. It's not "Homo sapiens", its Anthros hxazo : no mate, that's Homo stupio or, ah, H. ignorans

"matrilineal" societies   /   patrilineal

"primitive"/ modern

primitive (stages)

~ hunter/gather v agricultural

~ agricultural : cattle v crops

heritance of property : male or female

hunter/gathers are sort of fluid matri/patri
cattle people wander, are nomadic / pastoral peoples are partilineal

farming peoples are often patrilineal, but may be matrilineal
we must look closely at these (relatively few) societies

modern (civilized) peoples : for thousands of years (in middle east for 8, maybe 10 thousand years, though in Britain there are some might say 3000ish years ago) "civilized" societies have been patrilineal. However, there is a widely held belief that in Western Europe there matriliny was practiced among the peoples preceding the invading "Europeans" tribes ... and there is a very large mythic body of belief that early Britain/protoEuropean cultures were matriarchal!

So there is a hypothesis here (not what we were specifically discussing here, well, I guess I sort of bundles into our discussion) : in Western Europe, at least, some old/ancient societies were matrilineal : a mythic belief with many followers, and agnostics. (They were suppressed by the patriarchy)

(But I've missed something here, so far, that's rather important {and it's absence may have been one of the things that so trigger Luq}
You can bet you that ...)
      not all patrilinies were toxic, malignant... there were probably many that were noble, fathering systems... but again you can bet you that the great conquering patriarchal empires made mince of these...

Then again, your average patriarchy is going to be a mix of better and worse... Marcus Aurelius as well as Caligula

so the major thesis here is that martilineal and/or matriarchal societies are built around honouring motherhood and the sisterhood, and that they are nurturing, cooperative, sane/sapient societies... Homo sapiens

but that aggressive, bullying patrilineal/patriarchal societies have taken over the world and it is nasty, distructive, tooth and nail (group/class) tryany... Homo ignorans ... that we live in.

central to this thesis is that matrileal societies are benign (and that patrileal societies tend toward malignant) : there are, famously, Polynesian and Melanesian examples of matrilinies that can be looked at: the Trobriand Islanders of Malinovski, the Somoa of Mead... and...

a key factor in the construction of a culture is whether it is uxorilocal or (can't find the antonym for uxor/wife)

\

so here comes the "men again" poem

               bully v. sissy v. confident(unspoiled?) v. insecure ?
                                         nurturing          v.        selfish ?

8 match stick problem ( = "walking camels") (look briefly at this refererce)
i.e. people, in our modern partiarchical societies can not behave logically in certain simple situations

hypotheses

Matrilineal people would be able to walk camels/to solve this puzzle

Patrilineal people have trouble solving this puzzle

part of our thesis it that this relates to
grabbing, to taking, to pushing forward
the tyrant's option                                       

we have to reference here : "the tyrant option"

to understand the "tyrant's option" we need to look at the behaviour of the social monkeys of Koshimo Island..
   In the 1950s, in order study the behaviour of macaque monkeys on Koshimo Island, some Japanese ethologist, left out food, yams, on an observable beach to draw the monkeys there. So they weren't exactly observing behaviour in the wild, but they thought it would be the next best thing. Certainly it was convenient, and it turned out serendipitous. The monkeys started to frequent the beach where the food was left, and then one day one of the monkeys, a young female the ethologist's named Ito, started to wash the sand off of the yams. Soon other young females and juveniles of both sexes started to imitate her, and gradually the behaviour spread through the colony. The older animals, and adult males in general, did not learn the new behaviour. (We see the similar patterns in the spread of innovation in man and in monkeys.)

Some time later the ethologists started leaving rice on the beach. Again a young female, a niece of Ito, came up with an innovation. She scooped up a handful of rice and with it, inevitably, some sand. She took this down to the water with which she was familiar from washing yams. She threw the handful of rice and sand onto the water. The sand sank, and she skimmed the rice from the surface. Again the behaviour spread gradually through the troop as young females and juveniles of both genders copied it. (footnote: actually, wasn't she being a bit dense - she was treating the granular rice like a solid yam. Stupidity can be a mother of invention)

The ethologists also saw a behaviour which I call "the Tyrant's Option".

The Tyrant's Option: The dominant males did not copy the new behaviour, but they'd go into the water when the other monkeys were busy separating rice from sand, and they'd exercise the Tyrant's Option: they'd take what they wanted. They’d wait for another monkey to throw the rice onto the water, and skim the pickings.

The Tyrant's Option - force and threat of force - has been a winning strategy till now. Now with the scale expanded to a global locust plague, the option is running out.

(see also "100th monkey")

N.B. also that tyranny as a "survival" option may work wonderfully at many levels in the short term. (They say Genghis Khan's genes are realy realy wide spread in the human gene pool).
      Cooperative options (e.g. altruism) work more slowly and subtly in evolution : but they are very very important.

The tyrants option (the locust, consumer impulse) threatens the welfare of all creatures, all sentient beings.

and
after millennia of mayhem, things can get tricky
"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition."
as we wait on the "end of days"