„Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones. But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.” We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.“
Komentarai
„”Orthopaedic teaching suggests that long-bone fractures in wild animals are not uncommon and that they can heal naturally.”
“A civilization is any complex society characterized by the development of the state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond signed or spoken languages (namely, writing systems and graphic arts).”
Helping behaviors and rescue behaviors have been observed in some animals, including primates, elephants, and one species of predatory ant. (I think wolf packs care for their injured and elderly to a degree but I couldn’t find a source I was confident in, so that might have been the internet getting carried away when the Alpha stuff got debunked.)
A healed femur is likely a sign that humans are social. But whatever our views on the term “civilization” (and its discontents, heh), I think we can mostly agree that ants and elephants and wolves etc have not established civilizations.
The ant article in particular is interesting: it draws a distinction between types of more common helping/rescuing, and the rarer type observed in the termite-hunting Menaponera analis: rather than just reacting to imminent threats, they carry injured ants back to the nest–even ants that have lost extremities. The study carefully lays out how this is of material benefit to the colony, not the result of any insectoid compassion/empathy:
The rescue behavior in M. analis reduces the foraging costs through a reduced mortality risk…We consider that this behavior could only emerge in species that forage or hunt in groups [emphasis mine] and in a limited spatial domain so that injured individuals are likely detected by other nestmates.
They also reproduce less than other kinds of ants, so for maintaining their population it’s beneficial to bring the injured back and let them get better. The injured ants are almost always able to hunt again.
That’s pretty similar to humans: we tend to be useful for something. As we know, the popular imagination tends to overemphasize the “hunter” part of hunter-gatherer, but someone sitting waiting for a broken leg to heal can still hold a baby, cook, mend things, etc. As archeological evidence, a healed femur might suggest a group’s ability to stay in one place for a few months, but security isn’t the same as civilization. The ants have a nest–is that “civilized?”
Thank you for sending me down this rabbit termite hole.“
„It too easily turns into a useless debate on the meaning of the word “civilization”. It’s a word that 17th century French, and then slightly later the British threw around to imply that certain peoples were less worthy of consideration. Saying that this or that makes one group civilized and another group not civilized too often turns into deeming the “uncivilized” group as being inherently lesser.
In terms of that specific anecdote, whether it’s true that Meade said it or not, I think it’s a little silly. All you really need for a healed femur is a cohesive family group or pack. If a pack or a family are the benchmark of civilization, then the word is essentially meaningless, since we see healed femurs going back to well beyond the dawn of humanity. It wouldn’t surprise me if at least one chimp or mountain gorilla in history has recovered from a broken femur, or for that matter, a wolf or other pack hunter. While in Tanzania once, I saw a lion that was missing it’s left rear foot below the ankle, who the locals knew well – they called him something like Kiguru, which was a shortened nickname for the Swahili word for injured, kujeruhiwa. According to my friend there, he had lost his foot when he was young, and when his brother matured, he didn’t chase him away from the pride along with the other males. So here you have an example of an injury that could easily be life ending for a male lion, which he survived based on Meade’s supposed definition of civilization. If prides of lions are civilized, then the word isn’t useful.
u/BennyBonesOG gave a very thorough and very good response to a similar question around a year ago, which I’d recommend.
Tldr of which is, there are lots of functional definitions of the word, none of which are really that important or useful except for making very general comparison statements.“
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„ But if your point is that we need to define “civilization ” before trying to answer, I agree.
That was my point, but also that the anecdote in OP’s example would have included any group of creatures that could care for one of their number with a critical injury. The lion example was just something I happened to witness first hand, and I’m pretty sure the lion missing his foot would have starved if he wasn’t part of a pride, but I can’t prove that obviously.
My point put another way is that if you define “civilization” too broadly, it’s essentially useless, and if you narrow it, it often stands in as a reason to dismiss “uncivilized” groups, and has been used in the past to justify some very horrible things.“
„It’s not at all clear Margaret Mead ever said this. Gideon Lasco at Sapiens notes that the first print citation was from a book published in 1980 where the quote was attributed to Mead, but there don’t appear to be any other independent attestations and when Mead was asked ‘What is civilization?’, her recorded response was that civilisations have ‘great cities, elaborate division of labor, some form of keeping records’.“