Excellent point; however, I would argue they had all the technology they needed.
I've thought about this long an hard for a while after spending time in an Aboriginal community in Northern Australia. A friend of mine explained to me that these people weren't primitives (as considered by some) but rather a highly advanced civilization in which we in the west only slightly understands. He was right.
The lessons I learned there have been burned into my mind and I'm grateful for my experience. This has made me wonder if "modern civilization" took a wrong turn at some point. Clearly we need to back track a little in order to survive.
Australian Aboriginals amongst other great things were:
- Masters of using fire to manage the land (fire stick farming)
- Discovered the hydrofoil (boomerangs).
- Astronomers (the night sky in outback Australia beats any television show)
- Built throwing tools that were highly efficient (woomera)
- Lived sustainably (something we're only just realising needs to be done)
- Made sure everyone in society had a place (totems).
- Implemented important laws to govern the size of the population.
- They lived in peace and harmony with the land.
Sure they didn't have any cannons and guns, atomic bombs or rocket ships, but they didn't have much of the transmittable diseases and mass scale wars and climate change we have now, nor did they initiate the collapse of the eco-system.
Unfortunately certain people thought it was a good idea to try destroy these incredible people and their culture. Thank god they didn't succeed in entirely, because we still have much to learn from them.
I can't speak of Australian Aborigines specifically, but in general, it's not true that primitive tribes are some kind of pacifist pastoralists. Sure, they don't wage large-scale wars - because they don't have the population numbers for that. But they do use violence against each other a lot, and when you adjust it per capita, it's quite on par with "civilized" wars, and even exceeds them sometimes.
"Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t: it’s easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to the inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.”" (GG&S)
What my post said was that traditional Aboriginal society as it was when discovered by Europeans was a sustainable one. Not that the first people to arrive in Australia didn't cause ecological damage.
I've thought about this long an hard for a while after spending time in an Aboriginal community in Northern Australia. A friend of mine explained to me that these people weren't primitives (as considered by some) but rather a highly advanced civilization in which we in the west only slightly understands. He was right.
The lessons I learned there have been burned into my mind and I'm grateful for my experience. This has made me wonder if "modern civilization" took a wrong turn at some point. Clearly we need to back track a little in order to survive.
Australian Aboriginals amongst other great things were:
- Masters of using fire to manage the land (fire stick farming)
- Discovered the hydrofoil (boomerangs).
- Astronomers (the night sky in outback Australia beats any television show)
- Built throwing tools that were highly efficient (woomera)
- Lived sustainably (something we're only just realising needs to be done)
- Made sure everyone in society had a place (totems).
- Implemented important laws to govern the size of the population.
- They lived in peace and harmony with the land.
Sure they didn't have any cannons and guns, atomic bombs or rocket ships, but they didn't have much of the transmittable diseases and mass scale wars and climate change we have now, nor did they initiate the collapse of the eco-system.
Unfortunately certain people thought it was a good idea to try destroy these incredible people and their culture. Thank god they didn't succeed in entirely, because we still have much to learn from them.