Archeologists are making prehistory knowable. My despair over people voting against their own interests makes me look further and further back to find where it all went wrong. Aristotle's Rhetoric isn't PC these days but it's still a perfectly useful guide to playing on emotions to fool public opinion, there isn't a twenty three hundred year old trick in his book people don't fall for today.
Colin Renfrew's Prehistory has a nice speculation on the birth of the warrior class. Before the Bronze Age, softer, less durable weapons and tools were made from copper. Otzi the Iceman, the 5300 year old mummy found in the Alps, had a copper axe. This is a thousand years older than any other copper tool yet found. So we can be sure copper was too rare and expensive for ordinary men. He says the copper axe, sword, and shield, along with the horse, formed a "cognitive constellation" that defined a new class of man, a warrior class.
A farmer can't afford these things but a warrior living off many farmers could. This change, or something like it, created a necessary and symbolic separation of classes between simple farmers and their ostentatiously well armed warrior landlords.
He also contrasts Stonehenge with the Pyramids. Stonehenge has no reference to any particular person, it is a monument that joins the divine power of the sun to the peoples that built it. But the Pyramids diverted divine power to the Pharaoh, making a new cognitive constellation for rulers to tower above warriors.
Farmers must keep the farm going despite marauders, rent seekers, bad weather, and loveless marriages. A farm is for life so things need to last: skills, marriages, commercial, and political relationships. The constancy of farming created the culture we still live in. But few of us farm and the warrior class has lost out to the merchant class. Now we leave home, change jobs, outgrow relationships, go back to school. Our lives don't have the constancy of a farmer, they are impermanent, more like Paleolithic hunters. They followed the game, we follow the jobs. They adapted to changing hunting grounds and changing seasons. They couldn't have more things or small children than they could carry. But we still have 30 year mortgages on homes full of stuff and too many of us expect to make a living for life doing the same kind of work.
I think today's professional class are the first wave of becoming more like hunters trying to be prepared for a changing world and are free to be less obedient to rent seekers. Managers and the majority of workers are still like farmers in that they can't leave when things go bad but in a way it's worse because a farm can't be off-shored like jobs can.
Paleolithic hunters who didn't starve and weren't murdered lived better than most farmers afterwards, they were a little taller, they didn't get diseases from livestock or have to plow fields and when they couldn't live off the land they could leave.
In the new world of the squeezed middle between the 1%, offshored, and automated jobs maybe our dormant genes that survived the stone age will activate and pull us through.
