Thursday, October 05, 2006

The Caveman and "Sequential Tasking"

Remember when I wrote that caveman only had two requirements in the community? I wrote that a caveman's jobs were to supply food to the community and assist in creating more cavebabies. I also wrote about the differences between cavemen and women. Now for a longer explanation.

Cavemen were hunter-gatherers. Their job was to supply the community with food. If the community didn't have food, all would die. So cavemen developed special skills to hunt for and gather the most, and best food for their community.

In the lines below you will see the word, "we". When I write that I am referring to ancient cavemen and modern cavemen, like myself.

Here are some of the traits ancient cavemen had that you still see in us modern cavemen:

Quietness. It's very hard to stalk prey when your conversing with other cavemen. The prey didn't appreciate human voices nearby. Berries, grains, fruits, and vegtables don't have ears, so why talk when you are around them? It just wastes energy need to supply food to the community.

Keen eyesight. Those of us that were the hunters needed to find food sources from great distances.

Sequential task management. Growing food required us to plan, cultivate, gather, and transport food to the community. If we didn't develop the skills needed to grow food, there wouldn't have been a me to write this blog and there wouldn't have been a you to read it.

Concentration on one thing at a time. This trait has gotten us in a whole bunch of trouble with the multi-taskers. They don't understand it. Please let me explain.
When we went out to hunt for prey, we needed total concentration on the task at hand. We HAD to find, kill and transport prey back to the community. So we established plans to seek out, stalk, and kill the food we needed. That concentration required us to sit still for long periods of time, quietly surveying the landscape. We may have had to wait many hours or days to have the opportunity to get the prey. We had to be focused on the task at hand, very focused.
For the gatherers like me, we needed to have a set of guidelines that had to be followed strictly to provide the best food for the community. We had to forego distractions to develop the skills to become farmers and "ranchers".

Engineering skills. To provide food, we had to develope the tools required for the hunt and the sowing. We taught ourselves how to make weapons, not to kill each other, but to kill the prey we needed.

There are more skills we have that are different that cavewomens' skills. More further along in the future.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm still enjoying your blog. Please tell me you have plans to keep writing.