{"id":5601,"date":"2016-07-12T11:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-12T15:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=5601"},"modified":"2019-02-20T00:30:52","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T05:30:52","slug":"lets-play-far-cry-primal-ep-4-an-archaeological-exploration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=5601","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s Play: Far Cry Primal Ep.4: An \u201cArchaeological\u201d Exploration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a guest post by Philip Riris<\/a>, an archaeologist with the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. His research interests run the gamut from digital data in archaeology to cave art to the archaeology of South America. Philip’s first post in this series is here<\/a>, his second is here<\/a>, and his third is here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fourth, and likely final, episode of this Let\u2019s Play series focuses on the Izila and their role in the game narrative as antagonists to the Wenja. *SPOILER ALERT* The Izila or some version of them are the real winners of Far Cry Primal. Before circa 7000 BC in Europe there were no people with lifestyles based around farming or herding; everyone subsisted more or less entirely on what they could hunt, gather, and oftentimes, fish (especially in northern Europe).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly, as the march of history has shown, a farming lifestyle and its attendant material culture and behavioural patterns won out in many parts of the globe \u2013 in a nutshell think wheat and barley cultivation in western Eurasia, rice in eastern Eurasia, and maize and manioc in the Americas, supplemented with various kinds of domesticated animals \u2013 eventually leading to the kind of complex, state-like societies that eventually turned into our modern globalized civilization. That\u2019s a series of gross simplifications of a long and drawn out process involving interactions, innovations, setbacks, round-about solutions, developments, and changes to both humans and their environments on a planetary scale over time periods of several millennia. But \u2013 crucially \u2013 in Central Europe where Far Cry Primal takes place, it is probably fair to assume that there are no direct successor cultures to the Mesolithic foragers extant around the year 10,000 BC. Most Europeans, except for some notable exceptions such as the Sami, ultimately became farmers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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