Why does Veeky Forums hate Jared Diamond?

that sounds like Gimbautas and so on. I don't think he has said anything like that.

I'm still on the fence as to whether or not that theory is accurate or if it's just dogmatic garbage.

Not to my knowledge. He did write an article for Discover called, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," which argues (correctly!) that hunter-gatherer societies tend to be healthier and more egalitarian (including with respect to gender) than agricultural societies, at least until the modern era. He certainly didn't come up with that idea, though, it's been around in anthropology/archaeology for a long time, and I don't think he's ever claimed hunter-gatherers were peaceful (they weren't) or that they had matriarchies (they didn't).

The article's here, don't want to reread the whole thing at the moment though.
discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

And to be clear, when I say healthier, I mean the people were literally healthier -- longer lives with less health problems. Not that their societies themselves were "healthier" in some floofy undefinable way.

This could be managed in modern societies, all it requires is social engineering. Unfortunately the liberalized world promotes individualism and consumerism.
I don't remember reading that from Diamond, but it sounds like the kind of tripe he would put in his books.
His sequel to Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, reads like a leftist talking point playbook. According to him climate change is the culprit in ending numerous cultures, including Easter Island. The funny part is most anthropologists had already concluded diseases and invasive species killed the island off. I think Diamond merely wants to interject his politics into history, he reminds me of Franz Boas, only Franz initially supported racial science.

>"egalitarian" matriarchies
Oxymoron.
It's commonly accepted however that pre-agriculture societies, which is to say hunter-gatherer societies, were mostly egalitarian.

I think he makes some good points in Guns Germs and Steel, which is by no means a perfect book, but Veeky Forums, which is basically /pol/'s bastard child, hates him because he challenges their ideas of "genetic superiority".

lol no it isn't

primitive communism is a myth parroted by Marxist historians. H-G societies maintained complex hierarchies both before and after the dawn of agriculture.

rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/274/1622/2195

Oh, come off it. At least as many people on here are vehemently anti-/pol/ as go on /pol/, and half my university's anthro dept hated Diamond's guts.

There's /pol/ and retards from 8ch attempting to disseminate opinions here.

It's a *chan board, what do you expect besides "keyboard crusader" autists who deluded themselves into thinking anonymous imageboards are just an excuse to spread ideology?

Well isn't that the obvious intent of his writing Guns, Germs, and Steel, to relegate the achievements of Europe and the failures of Africa to chance, to rewrite history and to erase investigation into genetic determination. If anything the holes you can poke in his arguments are holes in the fabric of our current egalitarian anthropological thought, and through these holes we look into the truth behind the veil, which is neither egalitarian intellectually nor is humanistic.
But it is true, and THAT should be the concern of every self proclaimed scientist- truth.
I wrote this , and while I am not a white supremacist I am a firm believer in genetic determination, and find that Sub-Saharan African genetics and culture are inferior to any other, and this attempt by Diamond to bring down advanced European culture and achievements to chance is intellectually bankrupt and blind.

No, he's absolutely right. Against your single paper I can weigh literally over half a century of anthropological and archaeological research. No, no one credible thinks that H-G societies were (or are) COMPLETELY EGALITARIAN, the claim is that they were relatively egalitarian as compared with agricultural societies -- and that's not a fringe theory parroted by "Marxist historians" (actually what? this isn't even history, it's anthropology) but the accepted consensus in the field with plenty of hard evidence behind it.

Anyway, having scanned it, you haven't even understood the paper you linked, you dumbshit. They're not using the word "hierarchy" in the sense that you're familiar with. They're talking about segmentation, about social stratification -- they're claiming that H-G societies (like all other societies) can also be broken down into discreet, nested social units, of which the individual would be the smallest, then e.g. the family might be the next smallest, then the extended family or band, then the tribe, and so on up the line, with each social unit 'above', encompassing the ones 'below' it, being about 3 times larger than them (although they make no claims so far as I can see as to whether these social units would be drawn based on family/kinship ties, nor do they assign names to them -- the individual/family/band shit I just mentioned is my example, not theirs). Their larger claim (& that of some of the citations they rely on) is that humans seem to have an easier time dealing with each other when we fissure off into groups. They are talking purely about the STRUCTURE of society, and mention absolutely nothing about the equality of any two members in that society.

I don't have time to read that now, but "ctrl+f women" gives no result.
To avoid misunderstandings, I was talking about the power dynamics between the genders, not about egalitarianism as in literally every person is at the same level.
Anyway I'm not an expert, I just like to read stuff on the Internet and I came across the theory of primitive egaliarianism several times.

Correction, that should say "segmentation, NOT social stratification." When I get testy my typing goes to shit apparently.

Dismissing the differences that exist between races and the influence genetics has in the development of societies is delusional, but so is ignoring the role of the environment.

Wouldn't a hierarchy organically grow within a H-G society based upon mate selection- the stronger hunters having better access to a mate and the smarter hunter having better access to group leadership?

>Social hierarchy isn't hierarchy because I said so!

lol try actually reading the paper

>Considerations of group size and social organization in traditional human societies commonly emphasize group foraging (Kelly 1995), cognitive capacity (Dunbar 1993), demographic variance (Wobst 1974) and the various mechanisms such as group fissioning, mass rituals, and POLITICAL HIERARCHIES (Maschner & Bentley 2003) that have evolved as a consequence of the cohesion and tension inherent to living in large populations (Johnson 1982).

While I agree, nations like Japan or Singapore throw a wrench in the belief that environment is the sole, or even a major determinant of societal advancement.

Try actually reading YOUR OWN FUCKING QUOTE before admonishing someone else. Literally just your own fucking quote. Then, perhaps, the sentence after it, and then if you're feeling really crazy, you can scope out a couple of those citations -- at least the abstracts or even just the titles.

While the first three examples are about hunter-gatherers, the one you highlighted quite explicitly isn't (something that's even clearer if you actually bother to track the citation down -- Maschner's study is about power relations in NW Pacific/Alaskan native groups, who are not hunter-gatherers). Let me rephrase that quote for you.

"Here are some of the other lenses researchers have applied when studying social organization in other groups. While that's cool and all, that's not our focus for this paper. Rather, we're going to examine this other thing, and then proceed to write a paper about it without making a single claim about social stratification in hunter-gatherers."

All of which would be very clear if you'd read the paper (and the Zhou et al paper they heavily rely on) instead of just clicking CTRL+F and cherrypicking words that seem relevant to you. Unless you actually have read the paper and you simply lack the background or intelligence to parse what you're reading, which I'm starting to suspect.