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| Thursday, 5 February 2004 |
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Man in his natural setting by Chandra Edirisuriya It is interesting to see how early men and women lived in their natural setting. Hundred thousand years or so ago they led a completely natural life. This was before the old stone age into which they had entered 50,000 years ago. Their food consisted of fruits, leaves and bark of trees. Of course, like all other mammals human mothers breastfed their infant children. Humans were herbivorous just as their herbivorous counterparts in the animal world who thrive on a diet of plant origin even to this day. Carnivorous animals have cannine teeth to tear and chew the flesh of their prey. Human beings must have been without what we call speech. They had only their hands with which to protect themselves. They led harmonious lives and were satisfied with what nature had to offer to them. They were naked and houseless. They used caves for shelter. Some of these first homes of man have been discovered in the cliff caverns of Spain and France and in Devonshire (Kent's cave), Somerset (Wookey Hole) and Derbyshire (Cresswell caves) in England and elsewhere. Although they were naked at first they later began to wear barks of trees etc to protect themselves from the elements. Humans knew no alcoholic beverages until one day a man wandering in the forest looking for water to drink stumbled upon the water collected in a tree-hole, fermented with grain dropped by birds and drank it. He got intoxicated just as the birds who had consumed it earlier and had fallen under the tree, lifeless. It was in China which had one of the oldest agricultural civilisations that flesh eating started. It began when some farmers found irresistible the flavour of wild pigs who had taken shelter under a hay barn had got roasted after the barn accidently caught fire in the night. It was Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), English explorer and writer who introduced tobacco to England who first smoked tobacco rolled into a cheroot, the forerunner of the cigarette. His servant is said to have poured a bucketful of water on his head, when he first tried smoking, believing that the master was on fire. Consumption of alcohol, flesh eating and smoking tobacco which started as aforesaid have become the bane of mankind which everyone is trying to rid himself of today. No religious teacher or philosopher advocated these practices. It was orgies of wining and dining on the flesh of animals that led to the decadence of Roman civilisation. Prophet Mohammed asked anyone slitting the throat of an animals for flesh to stand on a red hot iron before he did so. In the Gangetic plain that abounded with vegetation where Buddhism arose there was no need to consume animal flesh. Human life in its pristine form in the natural environment of the forest was vice-free and disease-free. Even today tribal people like the Amazon Indians live in such a natural setting. Their's is a germ-free environment unsullied by interference with nature. Crime was unheard of under such conditions of contentment where human beings satisfied their senses in consonance with nature. Crime is a concomitant of the contravention of nature. It is inconceivable how man first committed a crime for in a life of contentment where there was undisturbed opportunity for the uncompetitive appeasement of the senses and there was no need to trespass on the natural rights of another. It was with the gradual abandonment of the natural life due to the greed for the possession of life's needs for oneself that crime arose. In the natural state the process of human procreation was akin to that of animals. Humans also mated according to the laws of nature. Mating was seasonal like in the case of animals. A lady researcher, from the West, on the behaviour of apes in the African jungles observed that male apes in rut who far outnumbered females patiently took turns to mate with the limited number of females available, during one particular season. Human mating habits in the natural environment were hardly different. Among any species of animals family life could be observed. The father elephant tends and fends for the she elephant impregnated by it. The natural father has special affection for the offspring while the herd itself looks after its young. It was with the agricultural society that the natural state changed to one of individual possession. Society became competitive and the rulers even encouraged crimes to bolster production. James A. Michener in his monumental historical novel 'The Source' on Makor, a site in Israel known in modern times as Tell Makor, one of the cradles of civilisation, describes how a farmer who reaped the biggest harvest was made to sacrifice his infant son to appease the god of prosperity, by throwing it into a smouldering pit of fire, in the return for a virgin of 17 as wife for reward. The novel opens with the narration of the life in a co-educational boarding school in Kibbutz makor in modern Israel where couples of teenage boys and girls share one room till they are eighteen years. At 18 everyone goes off to the army. There the girls and boys meet other people their own age and they get married quite normally. The director of the school goes on to say, "The results of our system are striking. No juvenile delinquency. None. A minimum of sexual aberration - our success in marriage far above normal. And when they become adults they have the sturdy drive we have in Israel. I know a lot of psychotics in America who would have been much better off if they had lived that way in their youth. Saved them from a hell of a lot of mental disturbances." |
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