Neolithic, also called New Stone Age, final stage of cultural evolution or technological development among prehistoric humans. It was characterized by stone tools shaped by polishing or grinding, dependence on domesticated plants or animals, settlement in permanent villages, and the appearance of such crafts as pottery and weaving. The Neolithic followed the Paleolithic Period, or age of chipped-stone tools, and preceded the Bronze Age, or early period of metal tools.
The Neolithic stage of development was attained during the Holocene Epoch (the last 11,700 years of Earth history). The starting point of the Neolithic is much debated, with different parts of the world having achieved the Neolithic stage at different times, but it is generally thought to have occurred sometime about 10,000 BCE. During that time, humans learned to raise crops and keep domestic livestock and were thus no longer dependent on hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. Neolithic cultures made more-useful stone tools by grinding and polishing relatively hard rocks rather than merely chipping softer ones down to the desired shape. The cultivation of cereal grains enabled Neolithic peoples to build permanent dwellings and congregate in villages, and the release from nomadism and a hunting-gathering economy gave them the time to pursue specialized crafts.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the transition from food-collecting cultures to food-producing ones gradually occurred across Asia and Europe from a starting point in the Fertile Crescent. The first evidence of cultivation and animal domestication in southwestern Asia has been dated to roughly 9500 BCE, which suggests that those activities may have begun before that date. A way of life based on farming and settled villages had been firmly achieved by 7000 BCE in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys (now in Iraq and Iran) and in what are now Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. Those earliest farmers raised barley and wheat and kept sheep and goats, later supplemented by cattle and pigs. Their innovations spread from the Middle East northward into Europe by two routes: across Turkey and Greece into central Europe, and across Egypt and North Africa and thence to Spain. Farming communities appeared in Greece as early as 7000 BCE, and farming spread northward throughout the continent over the next four millennia. This long and gradual transition was not completed in Britain and Scandinavia until after 3000 BCE and is known as the Mesolithic.
Neolithic technologies also spread eastward to the Indus River valley of India by 5000 BCE. Farming communities based on millet and rice appeared in the Huang He (Yellow River) valley of China and in Southeast Asia by about 3500 BCE. Neolithic modes of life were achieved independently in the New World. Corn (maize), beans, and squash were gradually domesticated in Mexico and Central America from 6500 BCE on, though sedentary village life did not commence there until much later, at about 2000 BCE.
In the Old World the Neolithic was succeeded by the Bronze Age when human societies learned to combine copper and tin to make bronze, which replaced stone for use as tools and weapons.
The Birth of Civilisation - Cult of the Skull (8800 BC to 6500 BC)
The Rise & Fall of Europe's First Longhouse Builders - European Prehistory
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Theory:
Zombies are a chud fantasy. It is all the material possessions you could want and the sure knowledge that you are the strongest and smartest person around.
No thoughts about the future. No worrying about UTIs, no actually challenges.
This is an overly reductive analysis of the zombie genre. The "Zombie apocalypse as a Chud fantasy" was only really the case from ~2002 to, I honestly don't remember, 2015? Were zombies still cool when Trump was president?
For decades before that, as well as during that time, there were zombie movies that dealt with all kinds of topics. I am Legend is a complete inversion of the "CHUD becomes action hero last man survivor guy", as far as I know long before the CHUD action hero survivor guy thing even became a thing. The original Night of the Living Dead is, what, a character study, I guess? The sequel is a critique of consumerism as much as anything, and the Return of the Living Dead movies are mostly horror comedies where the zombies are the result of the US military disposing of chemical weapons.
Honestly, looking back, is this take even about zombie movies or zombie media, or the way chuds interacted with it? I can't remember many movies that actually depict the "CHUD hero becomes apocalypse warlord" meme. That's more likely to be parodied or deconstructed than depicted straight. It's not present in any of Romero's movies that I'm aware of, nor the Return movies. A lot of indy and low budget zombie movies are shlock gore movies where everyone gets eaten by the end. A fair number of them are about fear of disease and contagion. I can't seen Deadgirl in 15 years but I recall it being about sexual violence. The Resident Evil movies are barely about anything, just an excuse to watch Mila Jovovich jump around and shoot things. Dead Snow is about killing Nazi zombies. REC is set in a quarantined apartment building and certainly isn't any kind of power fantasy. Cabin in the Woods is a satire and subversion of the whole horror genre.
Resident Evil/Biohazard, the game, is about cops getting eaten by monsters made by an evil biopharm company. It's a power fantasy in as much as any single player game is, but you're usually on the back foot fighting the monsters in the game due to very limited ammo and health equipment. Left 4 Dead is a horde shooter. I think it's a pretty big stretch to call it a power fantasy. Being able to gun down hundreds and hundreds of zombies is a game mechanic to keep pressure on the players, and it's not like the heros become lords of the apocalypse.
In Project: Zomboid you're one person stuck in Kenntucky and a big theme of the game is trying to avoid going insane from boredom and despair. You die all the time, usually from silly stuff and often from minor injuries getting infected.
The Nazi Zombie Army games are power fantasies about killing shitloads of Nazi zombies during the end of WWII but that doesn't strike me as a bad thing, doubly so since the games usually have soviet protagonists as well as Americans and assorted Euros.
DayZ is... idk, a power fantasy? When I played it it was mostly a hunting and gathering game where the fun was finding stuff and sometimes fighting and/or allying with strangers, with the zombies mostly acting to keep pressure on the players so they have to keep moving
The Dead Rising games are goofy comedy adventures where the zombies are explicitly people in a mall or in vegas, and much of the appeal of the game is it's weird plot and doing goofy stuff like fighting zombies by putting giant lego character heads on them so they can't see, then watching them bump around.
Dying Light is a power fantasy. You get to parkour all over the place, you make cool weapons out of random junk, you fight a... chud warlord who has declared himself king of the ruins when you turn against your NGO handlers and decide to try to help the normal people who have banded together in the face of a horrible disaster. Like there is a chud warlord who wants to rule the ashes. He's the bad guy. You cut his arm off at one point. You spend most of the game trying to help people and screw up several times with horrible consequences.
Dead Space is... uh... It's hard to call it a fantasy because everything that happens is horrific. Issac Clark is a hyper-competent engineering fighting dude, but he doesn't end up lording over anything, he just scrapes by barely surviving one nightmare after another.
Yeah, there's the Zack Snyder movies, and a bunch of video games about building little communities or whatever. The Last of Us has the whole grizzled dad man protects girl thing.
But like, this "Zombies are a chud fantasy" thing is more a reflection of CHUDs not having media literacy to realize that they're the badguys, more than it is the actual text of most of the most popular zombie entertainment products. A lot more of them are straightforward horror and the ones where the heroes run around killing hordes of zombies are usually comedies. CHUDs trying to set themselves up as warlords are frequent antagonists and rarely protagonists or heroes. Zombie media is all over the place - There are zombie pirates in Pirate of the Carribean. There's a zombie boyfriend in Hocus Pocus. there's a zombie revolution against the tyranny of the living in Land of the Dead. Most iterations of I am Legend have the zombies/vampires forming a new society and it's the living protagonist who ultimately turns out to be the horrible monster. Dead Space is mostly a fuck you to Scientology. The three good Fallous all have zombies that are just weird, often very old and crochety people. Sean of the Dead is a goofy comedy about being British.
I've seen this "Zombies are just a CHUD fantasy" take thrown around a lot lately and I think it's got a lot to do with CHUDs being really excited about zombie movies because they don't have the media literacy to understand that they're usually the badguys, and then leftists taking CHUDs reaction to the genre as the intended message of the genre, than it has to do with a lot of actual zombie media. And, as mentioned, zombie media is really diverse and all over the place, ranging from dumb action movies to comedies to romance movies to dumb action romance comedies.
True, there are more left leaning movies about how 'we were the monsters all along'. Maybe my dataset is skewed. I was thinking more of the view from the bottom. If I see a zombie fanatic in the wild they are likely to be thinking about how to protect their compound full of guns. There are countless webcomics, and like epublished books, where it zombies are just what our hero needed to shoot his neighbors and build a harem. I dunno what the most representative data set would be. I know what I see having the most juice as a fandom and I feel like that means something.
Ahh, see, I don't read chud fic. Most horror fans I know like the transgression of social norms, they like the way horror tends to invert dominant narratives (ie the bad guys are cops, the bad guys are wealthy people, the good guys are poor people or minorities or other outsiders, the monster was created by the horrific actions of people in positions of power and authority). There's also a lot of appreciation for the technical art and craft of horror movies; A lot of horror fans really appreciate and build a deep understanding of how gore special effects and other horror movie staples are portrayed and part of the fun is starting way back at the end of the Hayes Code and watching how the technology and techniques have developed, how they are used innovatively, or very poorly, and so forth. The same way there are people who can tell you all about Kubrick's camera work and directorial style there are people who can tell you all about Tom Savini's work in special effects over the decades.
I would take as representative of the the genre the many high-profile, high grossing movies, games, and novels out there. I don't really pay attention to random self-published novels and I'd be kind of shocked if there are a lot that have significant readerships. I'd also say that a lot of those people probably don't care about zombies as a genre, zombies are just their paper thin excuse for chud warlordism fantasies. I'm sure they also write fantasies about the US frontier in the 19th century, or Australia, or whatever other places they think they could do what supremacist warlord stuff. Just knock-offs of the Turner Diaries.
I don't read chudfic either. Which means I am acutely aware of what proportion of the subject I have to spend energy avoiding it. While I agree with you that they are wrong in their analysis of the themes they are chuds. Them being wrong is a given, but that doesn't correlate to their enthusiasm for subjects.
I am not sure we can just defacto say that the big media pieces contain the soul of the genera either though. That seems somewhat fascile in a way I can't fully think through at the moment.
If it's not in Night of the Living Dead, Sean of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead (both versions), Resident Evil, the various versions of I am Legend, 28 Days Later, Zombieland, Train to Busan, both versions of REC, Evil Dead, The Crazies (both versions), Braindead, The Walking Dead, and so forth, where is it? These are the stories that define the genre.
Where are you encountering these works? Is it a Tumblr thing or something?
Oh I forgot Pontypool, definitely one of the more creative entries in the genre in the post 28 days later era of zombie films.
I've also found out that I need to see Juan of the Dead, a cuban/spanish production, and Little Monsters, which apparently got overshadowed by Us in 2019 but is highly regarded.
we are the zombies. they fear the horde.
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It's not all so. But tha tis the core of it. That's why they went to the mall, that was the critique.
Shawn of thr dead is perfectly liberalized about comfortable home ownership in the UK.
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True, it is just how there really aren't any leftist horror fantasies because Any terrible thing we can imagine is simply real under capitlaism.
Pan's Labyrinth, about the horrors of fascism
Jaws, about the banal greed of small town Americans
Candyman, very explicitly about the neglect and impoverishment of urban public housing
Nightbreed is about a community of not very monstrous monsters ostracized by society for their superficial differences
They Live. The text is that rich people are evil aliens who exploit us. That's the whole text.
The Host is about family, mostly, but the event that sets the plot in motion is the US Military dumping chemicals in to a Korean city's sewer system
Alien is about a bunch of space truckers getting killed when their employer decides it wants the titular alien for for some reason
The whole Bas Leg cycle isn't horror per se, but it's undeniably full of horrific things, and it's written by noted Anarchist China Mieville. Most of the stories deal with class society, unions, revolutions, failed revolutions.
Stepford Wives isn't explicitly leftist, and the white PMC feminism of the 1970s is pretty dated, but it's still a feminist horror film
American Psycho is, if not leftist, at least a brutal critique of capitalist society
I haven't seen Attack the Block, but from what I understand it's about a bunch of black British kids from an impoverished council block fighting off aliens.
Vampire the Masquerade usually has a whole group of vampires who are pissed off anarchists and revolutionaries, at times acting as either catspaws or executioners of the prevailing power structures.
I don't think your statement is supported by the canon and reflects a lack of familiarity with the material.
See, I feel like it does. Pan's labyrinth is about fascism. That is an existing thing. We don't need to make up horrors. They already exist and we comprehend them.
I am saying chuds make up stuff to get mad about and that fantasy aspect is something we don't have very much in our horror.
The zombies are crypto-blacks. They're coming for you and it's totally OK to take out all the guns you've been carefully stockpiling and shoot them. Otherwise you'll become one with them!
They almost never are. Like this gets thrown around a lot here, but in most post Night of the Living Dead movies the zombies are white middle class consumers, random Londoners, mostly white pirates, space aliens, rich people, Nazis, cruise ship passengers; Basically any group other than racialized minorities. I'm open to the idea that there are a bunch of zombie movies I haven't seen where the zombies are coded as racialized minorities, but i haven't seen or heard of them. The closest I can think of off hand would be Resident Evil 4, where the Zombies are the Japanese designer's idea of a remote Spanish rural village.
I honestly can't even think of a zombie movie where they're a metaphor for immigration. One of the really consistent things about the zombie genre is that the zombies come from within - They're your neighbors, they're part of your socioeconomic and racial class. Part of the horror is that insiders become outsiders, people who are like you become the dangerous, ravenous other that seeks to destroy you. that juxtaposition is essential to the horror and I would say is largely what distinguishes zombie movies from other kinds of horror movies; People who should be on your side are unwillingly converted in to a hostile enemy. There are also a fair few zombie stories that aren't even really about zombies, zombies are just the excuse to throw the characters in to a very stressful situation.
I don't mean the zombies are literally black people. They're what whites imagine blacks are - this swarm that's going to consume them and turn them into one of them.