Re:Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
by stcredzero on Tuesday April 29, 2008 @12:03AM
(#176284)
There is a well known study of Native American cultures in the Mississippi valley where we have access to skeletal remains over many hundreds of years. We can see the health of individuals decline as they made their switch to corn agriculture from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In fact, there are considerable increases in disease and a shortening of lifespan. The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations with ruling theocratic elites who could then organize manpower for military and other purposes. Hunter-gatherers, despite being healthier individually, couldn't compete.
The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations
Think what that implies. If the hunter-gatherer mode of life couldn't support a large population, how was that limit enforced? It had to be by people dying.
But that wasn't what I was asking anyway. I wasn't asking why agriculture won, but why it started. The first agriculturists must have switched from being hunter gatherers. Why, if life wasn't better?
(I realize the switch was a matter of degree, so consider the preceding question as an abbreviation for asking why about each degree of switch.)
I would think that it would have been more gradual than that. Some people in the community probably started growing the plants that they usually went out and gathered, since it was easier. Maybe during a time when they weren't moving as much. Or maybe they migrated between different areas depending on the season, so they planted, say, berries at all the different sites. I think it would have started more like that. Then because there was more food available from this, more people started doing it, and eventually it won out over migrating all the time or even staying in one place and hunting and gathering.
Re:Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
by stcredzero on Tuesday April 29, 2008 @03:25PM
(#176893)
The wild rice gathering practice of current-day Native Americans in Minnesota is a great example of incremental drift into agriculture. They go back to the same patches in the water brush rice into their canoes with paddles, inadvertently spreading the seeds of new rice plants in the process. It's easy to imagine how this could've turned into rice agriculture over time.
Could be because life was better in the (relatively) short term, but ended up worse overall. Maybe it also seemed better than it actually was. Evolution had prepared us to see and fear the hazards of hunter-gatherer lifestyle (such as hunger), but not of agricultural lifestyle (such as eventual disease).
People don't do what's always in their best long-term interest. They don't always even act in their best interest in any form.
Re predictability: You could say that about agriculture too. Think about the great potato famine in Ireland. Agriculture's not immune to famines from droughts or pests.
well, you have to ask why some of them took it up. but once that initial tribe did, they could've spread their way of life by conquest, since agriculture generally supports bigger populations than hunting. that newfound power might answer the why-keep-it-going question. as to why they'd even start (assuming they didn't decide to switch based on theories about population growth), i recall hearing a plausible-sounding hypothesis that hunter-gatherers experimented with agriculture to keep rare drug-producing plants in supply.
Re:Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
by stcredzero on Tuesday April 29, 2008 @02:35PM
(#176814)
I've also heard the theory that alcohol production was one inducement to settlement.
I think one problem with pre-agricultural life was that it was so unpredictable. You had plenty of food, until you didn't.
Another downside was what hunter-gatherers had to do to their parents when they got too old to travel, and to children born too close together.