u/Stolzenfels123

I was recently thinking about the obvious fact that there couldn't have been a Frenchman 20,000 years ago, because there was no such thing as Frenchness as a social construct. This made me question my assumption about atheism. I always assumed that the very first gods must have had their doubters. That is to say, as soon as religiosity and spirituality became part of human culture, so too must have skepticism and disbelief. But I'm now questioning whether that's really correct.

What if atheism is like being French, in the sense that there was no "atheist" 20,000 years ago because it simply didn't exist as a social category, and was therefore outside the range of concepts people had available? Would people in the Paleolithic have simply accepted spirits, deities, or sacred places as being real, like trees, mountains, or rivers, without it being conceivable that they might not be? Or is it more likely that skepticism emerged alongside religious belief from the very beginning?

Obviously this is a highly speculative question, but I'm curious what anthropology tells us about the possibility of a lack of spirituality or religiosity in prehistoric societies, and whether "atheism" is even a meaningful concept to apply to such contexts.

Obviously, this is an extremely broad question, but I was hoping to get a few thoroughly explained examples of how such encounters usually went when people from societies without a writing system, or with a writing system too different from the one being introduced (such as the quipu), reacted to and perceived the newly introduced writing system. I was inspired to ask this after learning about how Atawallpa allegedly reacted to being given the Bible by the Spaniards before the ambush as an ultimatum, although I am not sure how accurate that story is. In any case, it is just one example, whereas I am looking for broader societal responses. How did these encounters generally go from the perspective of the societies encountering the new writing system?

Obviously, this is an extremely broad question, but I was hoping to get a few thoroughly explained examples of how such encounters usually went when people from societies without a writing system, or with a writing system too different from the one being introduced (such as the quipu), reacted to and perceived the newly introduced writing system. I was inspired to ask this after learning about how Atawallpa allegedly reacted to being given the Bible by the Spaniards before the ambush as an ultimatum, although I am not sure how accurate that story is. In any case, it is just one example, whereas I am looking for broader societal responses. How did these encounters generally go from the perspective of the societies encountering the new writing system?

There are a lot of talking points floating around today about how scientists and experts supposedly made catastrophic forecasts pertaining to climate change in the 90s and 00s, and that these have not materialized. So, I wanted to learn about what the actual scientific consensus regarding climate change was by the 2000s, let's say 2006 (since that's 20 years ago). By that point, how well did we understand anthropogenic climate change, and what did scientists and experts believe the state of the world would be climatically in the 2020s? What were the main expectations and areas of scientific consensus at the time? How measured or catastrophic, actually, were the forecasts?

There are a lot of talking points floating around today about how scientists and experts supposedly made catastrophic forecasts pertaining to climate change in the 90s and 00s, and that these have not materialized. So, I wanted to learn about what the actual scientific consensus regarding climate change was by the 2000s, let's say 2006 (since that's 20 years ago). By that point, how well did we understand anthropogenic climate change, and what did scientists and experts believe the state of the world would be climatically in the 2020s? What were the main expectations and areas of scientific consensus at the time? How measured or catastrophic, actually, were the forecasts?

I remember learning several years ago that we are uncertain what species the Denisovans are. I wanted to know if we now have a better idea and can make an educated guess even if we don't know for sure. Are there any candidate species from the fossils we've found that paleoanthropologists are confident or optimistic as being that of the Denisovans?

In a well-known letter, Benjamin Franklin famously made the claim that Indigenous American children raised among Europeans would often return to Indigenous communities if given the chance, whereas European captives who had lived among Indigenous Americans frequently became attached to Indigenous society and preferred it to colonial life, sometimes returning even after being ransomed. Essentially, he is claiming that both Indigenous Americans raised in settler society and Europeans raised in Indigenous societies end up preferring Indigenous societies as a trend.

How accurate was Franklin's assessment? Was this a genuine and widespread phenomenon in colonial North America, or was Franklin inaccurately generalizing from a limited number of anecdotes?

Source: Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, 9 May 1753, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, pp. 481–482.