Traditionally (and for all I know) the trees weren't farmed. Somebody just walked around until they found a suitable tree and then cut it down. So...hunting and gathering. But IIR, people track the growth of individual trees to make sure they're harvested at the right age, but they aren't specifically planted or cultivated in a "farm" sense.
It's not a terribly different notion from what's being written about here I think. I would guess that humans have found starches of various kinds throughout their environment, extracted and processed them, and then made simple flatbreads or pancakes almost everywhere.
It doesn't even have to be obvious. The line from palm tree to sago is not clear at all. Why even consider eating the core of a tree? Why invent a long, multi-part, labor intensive process to make it more edible? Nobody really knows how it started.
But I think the important point I got from this was that agriculture is not a clean cut-off. You aren't digging out root vegetables one day and then planting wheat the next. There must be some kind of transition period that depends on the local plant life and many of the things that we think of as indicative of post cut-off agriculture societies probably aren't that at all.
People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced with death, you'll try anything.
it's the documentary talked about here, I highly recommend it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-m...
Modern hunter-gatherers do not necessarily equal ancient ones.
edit: and as bad_user pointed out, thats a huuuge reason itself to even be nomadic
Just because modern, industrialized humans are out of touch with natural limits doesn’t mean we were always like this.
I'm not trying to argue that ancestors were smarter.
For our own political purposes, it's probably best if the narrative becomes "all of our ancestor societies binged themselves to collapse, so we need to be very careful about our own habits" although it's not exactly true that all groups did that.
Ancient civilizations rarely had a clue of how a desert came to be. Certainly, we today understand the environmental impact we have.
Furthermore, we posses many tools to combat the problem: resource taxation; development of sustainable technology; reduction of waste and consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_American_animals...
But in fact few things in nature lives in harmony. If there is a balance it's usually kept through violent death or starvation.
Agriculturists, on the other hand, labored all day doing work that our bodies weren’t evolved for. They depended on a single crop. If anything went wrong with that crop, famine for many people was certain. And since they had less food diversity, they were comparatively malnourished.
In other words, yes, New Guinea is violent, but it doesn't represent a hunter-forager society.
[1]: Sapiens, p. 82
N.B. animals have evolved in harmony with their environment. In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants. If there are too many herbivores in an area and without natural enemies, that can quickly turn the environment to a deserted land. There are actually stories around like how introducing wolves in the Yellow Stone national park has saved its rivers.
Humans on the other hand are too adaptable for the environment. We can live in any environment and without natural enemies to keep our population in check, nature’s laws don’t apply to us.
So could we deplete our resources 15,000 years ago? Hell yeah. In fact that’s the number one reason for the migrations of early humans between continents.
This is just flat out wrong. Both predator and prey animals starve to death all the time, often due to the impact they have on their environment but also due to a myriad other natural events. It's known as the predator-prey cycle and is a series of population booms and busts caused by over consumption and over population. Here's a video that gives a very basic explanation.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-e...
But one does not need to be near death to start fighting starvation with all his might.
Even today.
There's a lot of taper along the spectrum: hunting, foraging, gardening, farming, manufacturing.
Trees, fish, mushrooms...
Ditto non food stuffs.
It's important to remember there is no evidence to suggest our 14,400 year-ago-ancestors had office / factory / workshop jobs to go to for 60 hours a week. Probably very little in the way of school or universities assignments to hand in by Friday. And they likely didn't have to pick up the dry cleaning or the kids on their way home.
I'm going to propose that, probably, everything the ancients did was labour intensive. Predominately due to not having invented the powered machine yet.
We even have the ruins of catch traps in central Asia and other places that would have industrialized animal slaughter before agriculture was ever a thing.
Agriculture was likely a required response to human degradation of formerly productive areas for hunter-gatherers due to over-taking of natural resources.
Oh?
If you have any information that goes against civilitty's comment there, I'd be interested to read it. I was always under the impression that in most hunter/gatherer cultures the men were primarily involved in the hunting.
From a study[0][1] of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes:
> In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare.
From another study[2][3] on the emergence of division of labour:
> We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history [...]
> gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work.
> "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned,"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-wo...
[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796
[2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-...
[3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197
Evolution isn't goal oriented but the survival bias can shape things in a shockingly strategic way like with lactose tolerance trait/technically a mutation as seen on maps. Traditionally herdsmen regions have it higher and the swiss practically have it ubiquitously. Although with wandering there may be intelligent selection bias where the ones who would be sickened by dairy decide to risk going elsewhere.
The general assumption is that men are more likely to be the hunters: I'm not contradicting this, just pointing out it's not definitive. The previous poster was stating it as fact, and the first commenter was being questioned for daring to question said unverified fact.
Often the assumption is based on the need for speed and strength, but a lot of hunting (even of big game) was trap-aided, and primarily called for practised skill rather than simple strength and speed.
Unless by speed you mean quick reactions. That might help for catching a lizard by stamping on its tail. (I did that as a child: the tail came off so it wouldn't have been many calories.)
I imagine persistence hunting as being a big thing in olden times. You'd need to have a long-distance runner's physique, and ability to follow tracks. Also bow and arrow: skill in moving quietly, and aiming well, obviously.
When it involves mostly running for hours, sex probably matter much less.
Well in a way. "Less" would be accurate than it might matter in contests of strength, but it's still hugely relevant. I think the older races may even be more informative since that would be more of contests of raw athleticism as opposed to the extreme diet/supplemental/developmental process that high level athletics is today.
There's obviously no data, but I would bet any of the top 10000 long distance women runners outruns Usain Bolt in their category. Regarding persitence hunting, it's prohbably easier for humans to hunt cheetas* than to hunt horses.
Except the biological differences in strength, speed, etc. Unless they're arguing that these came about after agriculture, but a look at our close relatives would suggest it's always been there.
> In the Philippines population
Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think the Philippines had much in the way of large game, this and the general geography (mountainous rain-forest) could be negating the advantages men had in other parts of the world.
> and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles
I'd suspect it's based on the belief that you'd want the stronger, taller, faster people doing the work the involve strength and speed. This won't always be men, but usually it will be.
We are a sexually dimorphic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans) species, it shouldn't be at all surprising that we divided labor based on these obvious physical differences.
14,000 years ago most people didn’t live pass 30-40, pregnancy takes you out of commission as far as hunting goes for at least a year for population growth it means that a woman had to successfully give birth to more than 2 children that would manage to survive till purberty on average, there are no indications that puberty was any different than it is today which would mean that essentially they only had 10-15 or so years to pop out 3-4 kids if not more considering the child mortality rates of the era.
The low average life expectancy was not because adults died young but because child mortality (especially for children under 5) was sky-high.
There was also an article on here just yesterday about how we list ancient skeletons as "50+" instead of "75" years old because we can't distinguish ages of skeletons above 50, which also contributes to that misconception.
Long story short: a prehistoric human who made it to puberty had a pretty good chance of living to be 60-80, well past menopause.
Pre-historic humans who made it to puberty didn't live anywhere near 60-80 years on average we have the plenty of skeletons to know that (in fact modern hunter gatherers who do benefit from some levels of outside intervention don't even get to that).
It's also important to note that unlike today or even later in history the age past puberty didn't sky rocket.
Women often died due to child birth, men died hunting dangerous game, and both often died to the elements as at the time we were still migratory and didn't live in settlements.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
If you have better data by all means share it.
Are you sure? Life expectency of ~30 doesn't mean people didn't live past that, since that's due mostly to child mortality.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy we have a lot of skeletons.
The fallacy many people tend to fall into is forgetting that while you are quite likely to die at childbirth or early years unless you were extremely privileged you would also be almost as likely to die even when older when every day of your life was a struggle.
Sure the elites that lived lives of relative luxury could live almost as long if they didn't require medical intervention but the plebs? pffttt any accident could be fatal without modern medicine and working hard laboring life without any support structure simply didn't allow people to live that long which caused essentially a pretty big discrepancy in early history and classical times between the life expectancy of the lower and upper classes much more than what we see today.
https://www.brown.edu/academics/economics/sites/brown.edu.ac..., page 32 (the numbers are expectency so for example at 15 if the life expectancyis 14 you get total life expectancy of 29).
In particular the dating of age for ancient skeletons usually comes down to some correlation to tooth and bone growth. You look at their teeth/bone development and approximate the age based on how long it takes modern samples, that we know the age of, to reach a comparable level of development. But at a certain age these all sort to converge to becoming identical meaning we can't really tell the difference between e.g. 50 years old and 80 years old.
And, as mentioned, there's also the issue of representation. Are the measurable samples we have recovered a representative sample or is their some bias or other issue that might be getting in the way? And there's even the problem of assuming identical growth patterns. Did different diets, lifestyles, and even evolutionary changes affect development? Maybe, but we're optimistically hoping the answer is no. All in all the science behind these numbers is just really not all that great, even if it's the best we can do for now.
And in general that's the problem. We have to make a whole lot of optimistic assumptions, but if even one is off then everything is completely thrown off. This is the reason I tend to take pre-historic anthropology with a grain of salt. For that matter even post-historic anthropology tends to often be full of questionable science. For instance one big piece of news was the discovery that a piece of Viking burial cloth, in Sweden, contained Arabic script and references to Allah. The problem is that it was later discovered that the script it was allegedly written in had not yet been invented at the time of the corpse's burial. That such a 'discovery' was not the first thing that was checked before racing to publish seems to be an unfortunately common occurrence in these sort of sciences. It goes without saying that you should try to disprove your hypothesis, not prove it. Only then when you've completely failed to refute your hypothesis should you begin to considering the possibility of its correctness, given available information.
Or, inversely, as soon as they covered their food needs (which could be quite meagre) they were pretty leisurely, like many primitive tribes the ethnologists have studied.
I've read that a leading theory as the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies was that agricultural societies incentivized larger populations, were able to sustain them, and that their desire for arable land led them to fight - so the transition was not as much towards qualitatively better lifestyle but towards a qualitatively stronger lifestyle. As much as I enjoy beer, I find this more compelling than the theory that people chose to pick up farming just to drink
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
I think there's a balance between technological and economic advancement and what really matters (creativity, love, friendship, leisure, no stress, etc) - and we're awful at striking that balance because we let society run on automaton.
That's not the meaning of the parable though.
The meaning is that you can enjoy such things without being a millionaire.
Tons of people have been sold a rat-race stressful life in "careers", when they can achieve their ultimate goals with much more modest means (and in less stressful occupations).
To me it would seem selfish to choose that life knowing that dependents (parents, children, spouse, whatever) might end up comparatively worse for it. Of course that's not a problem if you don't have any of those, or don't care
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/opinion/sunday/how-beer-g...
Higher ABV requires less fuel for heating the water, and results in a product that keeps better, so why wouldn't some early brewers produce it?
The article unfortunately didn't go into details, but this makes sense to me. It is actually pretty easy to make a strong mead (a more ancient alcoholic beverage than beer, and also present in Egypt) and a few references indicate that Egyptians fortified beer with honey or dates sometimes (which would serve mostly to increase ABV, in addition to adding a little flavor). (https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/zymurgy/pharaoh-ale-b...). So they certainly were capable of brewing stronger stuff; I have doubts that they went for the low-intoxicant "session beer" all the time.
Wild grain would probably grow in the same place year after year, and the tribe would go back to harvest it even though they did not plant it themselves intentionally or irrigated the soil.
The problem about grain before agriculture was to collect it. The right conditions to make that feasible existed only in certain regions.
I think it is clear with this "flatbread" that we are seeing evidence for proto-pizza delivery. They may yet turn up what amount to coupons, perhaps as notches on sticks, or perhaps a receipt or change.
The tools sound like a real obstacle given how fanatically low possession hunter gatherers are - doing things like flint knapping on demand tools instead of specialized tools. Perhaps gatherer divergence - they would need just a pot and maybe a vegetation cutter at most to be useful for gathering and cooking while hunters could need just things to kill and butcher their kills. Wood and stone both being grabbed in situ.
This was my intuition as well. And IIRC, wheat was naturally plentiful in at least some parts of the fertile crescent, such that people could bake bread without needing to farm it. In such places, heavy grinding stones and other artifacts were found which suggested that people had settled (they were far too heavy to be picked up and moved from place to place) because the region was so abundant.
Not that this particular example was an accident from leftover boiled grain.
Just like the experience of fermented milk / yoghurt / cheese -- thousands of years of experience with the possibilities.
Refrigeration is not comfortable to tent-dwelling nomads.
But why would agriculture have developed, if people were't cooking the stuff? It's true that making bread involves more work than just boiling grain. But bread also serves as ready-to-eat storage. As does beer. And I can imagine how both developed more-or-less accidentally from leftover boiled grain.