Agriculture - Civilisation’s biggest mistake?
I wanted to start with quite a controversial argument I imagine which is to suggest that the discovery of agriculture is one of civilisation’s biggest mistakes. I will set out some of the main reasons why but the main one to start with is the fact that it created surplus and with that the idea or concept of wealth. Of course it was important that for Hunter / gatherer tribes pre agricultural discovery and revolution to ensure they could provide for the tribes basic needs in line with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - food, shelter, security. It can be argued too that the surplus initially provided more free time and this probably allowed the development of the arts. However it is true that early art evidenced by cave paintings were a feature of early man well before agriculture. My argument though will be that it is through the surplus created by agriculture that wealth was generated and as a consequence the early beginnings of the idea that those with power (strength in the main but ideas too) created the very early beginnings of the class struggle and the haves and have nots.
Maybe it was inevitable but aside from protecting territory and resources that territory contains for Hunter / gatherer tribes there would not have been the excess surplus that provides the ability to create a distinct division in wealth that we see so grossly over exaggerated today.
With that surplus became arguably the rise of the merchant class. I have no problems with the theory and practice of trade as this relies on taking advantage of specialisation which can be a human trait and of course that different natural resources can be available from different types of terrain. The game Civilisation uses these types of principals and even with Hunter / gatherer we can understand the concepts of natural resources and Human Resources. Trade of course leads to writing and recording and thus early accounting. Clearly language and the written word in parallel or alongside it were equally important.
But to end this intro to try and start the discussion it is what happened to the excess surplus and the wealth it created. To end this intro it also arguably started the idea of consumption or over consumption. The modern disease if you want to think of it like that as consumerism surely had it’s birth as a result of the excesses of surplus and the creation of wealth that could be owned by the few - how this should be distributed gets into the realms of forms of government but it is this surplus arising from agriculture that fuelled it and the inevitable geometric increase in surplus.
Nature herself does not hold back in creating surplus naturally with the right conditions as any farmer knows.
Maybe it was inevitable but aside from protecting territory and resources that territory contains for Hunter / gatherer tribes there would not have been the excess surplus that provides the ability to create a distinct division in wealth that we see so grossly over exaggerated today.
With that surplus became arguably the rise of the merchant class. I have no problems with the theory and practice of trade as this relies on taking advantage of specialisation which can be a human trait and of course that different natural resources can be available from different types of terrain. The game Civilisation uses these types of principals and even with Hunter / gatherer we can understand the concepts of natural resources and Human Resources. Trade of course leads to writing and recording and thus early accounting. Clearly language and the written word in parallel or alongside it were equally important.
But to end this intro to try and start the discussion it is what happened to the excess surplus and the wealth it created. To end this intro it also arguably started the idea of consumption or over consumption. The modern disease if you want to think of it like that as consumerism surely had it’s birth as a result of the excesses of surplus and the creation of wealth that could be owned by the few - how this should be distributed gets into the realms of forms of government but it is this surplus arising from agriculture that fuelled it and the inevitable geometric increase in surplus.
Nature herself does not hold back in creating surplus naturally with the right conditions as any farmer knows.
Comments (63)
I've also considered fire as a potential culprit. But I'm still cogitating on that.
Are you Yuval Noah Harari in disguise?
Sorry, just being a smart-ass... I do miss all the hunting and gathering with my chums, though.
I think that to isolate a mistake for the conundra (do not use that word in your thesis defense!) which distress humankind, you might have to regress much further in time, and discern a non-human agency. For my part, I blame it all on the faulty way in which organic molecules developed in the primordial sea. Those pesky polynucleotide chains which led to DNA, which led to evolution, which led to us having brains too large for our own good. In short, chance, rather than agriculture, is the culprit (or God, if you subscribe to the notion of a creator), and that which is to blame for all of our puzzling circumstances.
ooooh, what a cute little doggie! What is that ugly thing on the bottom?
I think it is easier to argue that agriculture is the reason for human civilisations.
Surplus would merely free up time for human cultivation - ie. free time and the pursuit of self-improvement (or simply scientific study, politics, mathematics and other interests).
Agriculture led to larger populations and better standards of living as far as we know (meaning medicine, education and cooperation). Basically I don’t see the negatives outweighing the positives. It is certainly intriguing to look at what we may have lost along the way though.
It brings to mind a sign in a bar just off the Shoshoni/Paiute Reservation. It said something to the effect: "We hunted and fished and crafted and sang and danced and had sex all day. We paid no taxes and the women did all the work. The white man showed up and figured he could improve on that."
I think Pleistocene diets work best when you have to work for your food.
You were completely wrong. Longevity is increasing - the same trend is seen where child mortality has remained constant. The data is pretty clear in this regard. We are undoubtedly living longer and longer on average and it isn't due to healthcare or healthier living as far as we can tell - because we are not exactly living healthier lives. It is a puzzling phenomenon and it is exponential in growth. You musty have heard scientists say that if you were born in the 2000's you're likely to live to 100.
It is probably something to do with a more species wide phenomenon that can be observed in other creatures from time to time. For some reason some creatures physically alter due to certain population limits. I wouldn't be at all surprised if humans acted in kind of the same manner (even though the mechanisms remain a mystery). Think of it like each human cell seemingly 'knowing' how to read the DNA coding and produce a fingernail cell rather than a neuron. Blow that up and think of each human being as a singular 'cell' with the species. Once a certain threshold is hit a new stage kicks in.
Given that CRISPR is on the horizon we will be pretty much able to live for ever - barring accidents and such. Diseases will be eradicated by CRISPR as will (almost certainly) what we currently regard as the human race ... we're going to recreate ourselves genetically and who knows what the results will be.
Note: It is okay to point out unexplained phenomenon. Examples of this are strewn through human history with the miasma theory of disease - which had some relation to mosquitoes living in humid climes. It took some time for people to figure out the it was the mosquitoes rather than the weather.
Quoting James Riley
Generally speaking the lives of hunter gatherers was pretty brutal from what we can tell - and 'modern day' hunter gatherers are not exactly living to a ripe old age in perfect health (even though 'modern day' is not equated to actual prehistoric human lifestyles so not much of an argument there either way). There was likely a Golden Age of sorts where humans had plenty of freetime between basic sustainance, yet disease, parasites and general interhuman brutality were not exactly non-existent.
It could be argued that in our modern societies life seems harder than it is because we have it pretty easy for the most part - as in acquiring salts, sugars and fats.
There is also the issue of how our physical well-being has deteriorated from more physical life styles. Our diets have almost certainly impacted our physiological status ... how? We have limited data and not exactly a comprehensive understand of epigenetics and how the interplay of species and environment can shift in relatively sort spans of time.
The Birth of Inequality is a pretty well argued topic in anthropology. The issue of unearthing such matters proves difficult due to too many extrapolated fields of research that act contrary to each other rather than together (anthropology, psychology, neurosciences, biology, econmics, etc.,.).
I stand corrected. I was probably thinking of something like this: https://socratic.org/questions/5a84f54411ef6b017ad524fa That, and anecdotal statements from indig clients and friends who said their old people (over a 100) was common before alcohol and reservation life.
Either way, when I look around at people now, I don't see much "life." I see lot's of suicide, depression, diversion, desperation, insecurity (ironic, eh?) and malaise. Having spent a good deal of time "living off the land" alone in "wilderness", hunting, gathering, fishing, and laying around thinking, drinking clean water and breathing clean air and eating clean food, I pine for something I never knew: Living every day. Rose colored glasses? Maybe. But hunting bison priscus and wooly mammoths is attractive to me.
One theorist (maybe in Against the Grain--not sure) proposed that agriculture was not intended to make life better for the farmer; it was intended to make life better for those who controlled the farmer. Capturing labor for economic exploitation would have had to wait until agriculture was developed well enough to produce a surplus for the new exploiters. Getting from the first bowl of oatmeal (so to speak) to the first grain collection bins may have taken several millennia.
The prosecution of the case against agriculture is a search for The Fall. Ah, it was settling down, living in one place, and working the land that corrupted us. Before agriculture, we were free and virtuous.
Some people suspect other serpents in the garden.
Quoting James Riley
Whether it was grain, fire, forbidden fruit, or something else -- many people think we were once innocent. For some, the entire population of the Western Hemisphere were innocent until the Europeans came along and fucked everyone and everything over.
A question: Do human beings have much choice about developing elaborate responses to the conditions in which they live? If we were to start all over again--15,000 or 20,000 years ago--we'd probably do the same thing over again. Does that make us bad actors?
HA! Hardly. Part of my fantasy is that I'm the first and only, never having to look over my shoulder, except for maybe a Dire Wolf or Saber Tooth Tiger. Well, I'd allow for 30 or so women. LOL! But Indians were torturing and killing each other long before the Europeans showed up. It's that damn free time! And competition for resources. And fire.
I love dogs, have two myself, and try to impose my will on them as little as possible.
Quoting David S
Since agriculture would seem to be a necessary condition for civilization, I can't see how it could be one of civilization's mistakes. So, in the interests of charitability I'll take the qeustion to be whether it was one of humankind's biggest mistakes. And then I'll say that question cannot be answered.because we really don't know what it would be like to live as hunter/gatherers. I suspect it would be a very fulfilling way to live, but who knows?
Just as a point of order, I know some Indians who would say there is a difference between "civilization" and "civilized."
Whoever that theorist is I imagine they know next to nothing about anthropological studies in this area. Agriculture is a group effort and I cannot imagine that farming began through dictatorship given the amount of effort that must be invested. It looks far more likely to have be a cooperative group effort.
I doubt it was an overnight revolution either. In sites of the earliest known 'buildings' there is good evidence for social gatherings between tribes/groups. Great amounts of labor were needed to construct such artifacts and so food would be needed ... it kind of makes sense that either they started building due to having the free time to do so OR that they made the free time to do so and set aside resources (food) for such events.
I doubt there is a singular main explaination either. Obvious factors would involve happenstance, climate change, religious ideas and sendentary living (which almost certainly went hand in hand with the onset of farming).
Quoting Janus
Not exactly. There are exceptions. Generally a complex social heirarchical strata is what defines a body of people as a 'civilisation'. If a hunter gatherer society could sustain a large enough populace then there is no reason why it couldn't be considered 'civilised' (so to speak).
It's not a theory I accept or find of much use.
The process of getting from wild plants that bore edible seeds (like the various grasses)--corn, wheat, rye, oats, rice, sorghum, millet, etc.; all the new-world foods--tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and tobacco (all nightshade family plants); kidney and lima beans; cacao; peanuts, and all the plants developed in Europe, Asia, and Africa, ALL required a lot of long, careful, insightful attention. Some foods grew on trees ready to eat (nuts), but most had to be bred up from what must have been rather unpromising plants. Hunter-gatherers, requiring skilled observation to survive, likely knew about these plants before they started to domesticate them.
Settling down required some level of agriculture, and some level of agriculture required stability. No body switched from a breakfast of venison with wild nuts and berries to oatmeal, yoghurt, and toast overnight. More like centuries or millennia were required to learn how to grow plentiful grain, mill it, and make bread and beer. How they accomplished all this is just not known. And what all they did while they were developing domesticated crops isn't known either.
The first iteration of Jericho was built around 11,000 years ago. Is that the beginning of settled life? Almost certainly not. Before we built with stone, we built with wood, material which rots away under ordinary circumstances. Stone tools were poor for making planks out of a big tree, but smaller trees and branches could be harvested for simpler construction.
My guess is that they hunted, gathered, built shelter, and cultivated--gradually shifting away from the former and toward the latter. All of this required community -- cooperation -- along with preserving memories, methods, and material culture. Eventually they arrived at a stage where they could grow the food they needed, and began other agricultural / material cultural tasks, depending on their location.
While we're on the topic, a few excerpts from the section on agriculture & humans from Yuval Noah Harari's book, Sapiens vide infra:
[quote=Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)][...]gathering was Sapiens' main activity and it provided most of their calories.
there is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. surviving in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. when agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up. you could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.
the hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants; shepherds, laborers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
while people in today's affluent societies work on average forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats - such as the Kalahari desert - work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily.[/quote]
That's just to offer a taste of Harari's disparaging account of the so-called agricultural "revolution".
He goes on to say how depending on just a handful of crops/fruits/vegetables is a recipe for famine, the weather being out of our control. Then there's crop failure due to pests, fungus, etc.
Add to the above list of extra burden humans have to bear the fact that the severe reduction in dietary variety, the one thing that gave us an edge in the evolutionary rat race, translates into poor health, environmental degradation brought about by deforestation for farming.
Moreover, health issues:
1. Our bodies are adapted for hunting & gathering, not farming. Exhumed remains bear the mark of many orthopedic ailments - from all the backbreaking work I surmise.
2. Too many people from all that surplus food meant infectious diseases were rampant.
All that said, there's a glimmer of, albeit dark, hope. It can be said that humans are mother nature's trump card against extinction level events. Check this out: NEO Surveyor. Only humans seem to possess the capability of deflecting a planet-killer asteroid. Disagree? We're at least working on it.
So, the agricultural revolution may lead to man-made catastrophes but it also enabled mother nature, through us, to deploy its only defense against extinction level events. Mother nature, it seems, is prepared to take a few losses in order to ensure the reset button is left alone.
We, humans, then are frenemies of mother nature.
[quote=Confucius]Frenemy bad. Asteroid worse.[/quote]
Like I said, there is nothing to say a 'civilised' society couldn't come into being based on a hunter gather lifestyle. The main issue would be sustaining a larger population.
Of course there is the view that some form of complex economic record keeping plays into the idea of what a 'civilisation' is - be this with common writing or other forms of symbolic representation like quipu in the Incan empire.
Generally though a 'civilisation' is just a body of people organised into complex social strata with more skilled-labour being a major hallmark.
Defining the term it's cut and dry. There are many gray areas. A big problem is some people get caught up in arguing what the term means rather than focusing on what they were originally interested in :D
Here the question posed is basically 'Is agriculture a mistake because it has led to a disparity in wealth?'
I think that is a rather myopic view because it fails to take into account anything but the idea that agriculture caused some kind of social tyranny. In the cosmological sense I see the habits of humans to be one of controlling our surroundings in order to reconcile our sense of 'World'. We draw a line in the sand and 'claim a space' in order to experiment within it and see what kind of control we can inhabit within the space. An extension of this happens as we come to appreciate what we gliby refer to as 'time' now and through that insight we can plan and act upon the natural world wilfully.
In a purely biological energy sense we paid for our lack of strength with a more energy thirsty brain. This brain has paid off as we can expend little energy by acting in concert and by manipulating the world around us (fire helps us digest food more quickly and happened to kill harmful parasites too). A lot of what we do exists because it has benefitted us in some way (known and unknown).
Referring to another thread it is in these kinds of areas that Critical Theory is of use in reexamining possibles. The danger is getting carried away by them.
I'm not quite sure I agree. Farming yields a steady predictable supply of food, which fits in well with an organized society. Hunter gathering is less predictable, much harder to feed an entire civilization. It's necessary to constantly migrate to new areas just to find prey.
Quoting I like sushi
Which is different than hunter-gathering.
Examples?
Haha.. wise man, he.
Yes, perhaps, but the important part for abstract thinking, upon which all art and science depends, namely the frontal region, has grown tremendously, while the evolutionarily less important parietal and occipital regions have shrunk.
Harari is not wrong about everything, or even about much in particular. It is just his sweeping conclusions which are questionable, which appear suspect on their face. The poor fellow takes a bit of a beating for his conclusion that the development of agriculture was bad for humans as a species, which I think does not follow from the evidence. Undoubtedly, it entailed suffering for some, or even many, individual people along the path of history. To say, though, that agriculture itself is at fault for that suffering is similar to saying "that gun killed Billy the Kid" as opposed to "Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid with that gun"; I think it involves an error of misattribution.
The old maxim, "homo homini lupus est", but becomes nonsensical when changed to "homo agriculturae lupus est". If agriculture had never developed amongst us, and so men had never been able to behave wolfishly towards their less fortunate contemporaries in the presence thereof throughout succeeding history, men would yet have behaved wolfishly towards other men while all were hunting and gathering. Point is, the cause of human inequity, and so of suffering amidst abundance (the very abundance partially resulting from agricultural industry) proceeds not from extraneous causes, but from within us, as a result of our nature.
I would hesitate, as well, to say that agriculture has been bad for humans in general. If anything, it along with advances in medicine and in technology generally, has resulted in our being too successful. We have overpopulated, and threaten the ecological status quo. The statement with which I could agree is that, "the development of agriculture by humans has had a negative influence upon the ecology of the Earth", because of the role agriculture has played in humans experiencing a special success which we have evidently been incapable of managing to best effect.
So, disinformation is not beneath Yuval Noah Harari. His book was just getting interesting. Oh well! I suppose he had his reasons to make that claim or maybe he didn't know or perhaps you're wrong or where you picked that tidbit from has poor credibility ratings. More possibilities than I can handle.
Quoting Michael Zwingli
Yep, we're hunter-gatherers; ill-equipped for farming, and whatever else that followed from ploughing fields, planting seeds & irrigating them.
Harari also points out that human intellect or whatever it is that put us on top of the food chain brought about change at such a pace that the environment and other animals had no time to adapt. The usual way things happen in evolutionatry terms is a slow rate, spanning over millions of years, at which individual species impact other species and the environmentn giving them time to, well, adjust. Human impact, however, has occurred over a mere 30 or so thousand years, agriculture being one of them.
This is the anthropological view. We CANNOT assume that it never happened or could never happen.
Quoting Michael Zwingli
Brain size doesn't dictate brain power. There is obviously a loose connection. The cranial size doesn't tell us about how compact and interwoven the actual neural networks are. A skull doesn't tell us anything like the whole picture when it comes to brain power.
To be clear I am NOT assuming they were civilised only using some conjecture about what we define as being 'civilisation'. Some people insist that 'writing' is what makes a 'civilisation' but there are unseen forms of writing that people miss (ie. quipu from the Inca Empire).
Note: I don't vie wit as a 'mistake' either. It is interesting to discuss and look at how the onset of agriculture has changed the face of humanity, and it is fair to muse about what we may have forgotten/left behind. I could argue the same for the written word as there is some interesting study into the area of mnemonic techniques and knoweldge passed down through mythos.
There is evidence (somewhat anecdotal) that 'prestige' was more important. Putting on a feast for other tribes rather than being viewed as a display of wealth was more accurately viewed as a competition of sorts where one tribal leader would try to outdo the other. The idea of 'material wealth' is much more of a modern concept and may very well be tied into the onset of sedentry living and farming (a very old topic in anthropological circles - The Birth of Inequality).
There is that, as well, which is partially a function of evolution, and partially of usage. So true!
I understand the gatherers may have actually contributed the bulk of the diet, but even that was a maintenance program pending the big kill. So I'm not so sure the leisure time argument for ag holds water. I think ag was a response to population increases, territorial limitations and over-hunted meat animals.
You don't know that.
They were fine until the neighbors moved in. Now they fare as well as their prey base. Not so good. What, with all the clear cutting, strip mining, over-grazing, damming, paving, subdividing, developing and commodification of natural and human resources. It's not looking good for them, but it's not looking good for the culprits either.
I'm thinking the land demands per capita for hunter gatherers exceeds that of industrial societies by several hundred fold at least.
Hunter gatherers lost the Darwinian game. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/hunter-gatherer-culture/
No doubt. That's why cities are so awesome.
It's too early to tell. It's only been about 12k years or so. That won't make for a verdict. Side note digression: I always loved looking at Nat Geo but something about it made me uncomfortable. They seemed driven to see, explore and map every square inch of the planet. That gives me the creeps. As Leopold opined, "Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"
I wonder if man, with all his intellect, has saved the indigenous hunter-gatherer wisdom/knowledge. You know, just in case. Leopold also said "The first sign of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts." I wonder what 12,021 will look like.
Duh.
:lol:
That reminds me, when I was a kid they said we'd all be buzzing around in our jet packs by now. WTF? I feel ripped off by history.
On the other hand, with just hunter gatherers, there basically wouldn't be culture as we know now. Would writing and more advanced mathematics even be needed?
Yes, we can yearn for the Noble Savage who hasn't been spoiled by civilization.
Well, that civilization is our culture, so...
This is a congruent approach to the situation I was considering when I said that,
Quoting Michael Zwingli
The salient issue pertaining to this, is that if humans had remained dependent upon hunting and gathering their provender, then human populations would have been naturally restricted. People would yet have had many children, but all throughout history many more than do now would have died of starvation and other causes secondary to malnutrition. Such circumstances would not appear to have increased human happiness in general.
Very good point.
Hunter / gatherer methods worked for what... 200,000 years?
Agricultural-based societies did OK for what... 10,000 years?
industrial-based societies are only what... 300 years old, and we are facing the very real possibility of global catastrophe--for us and for many other creatures.
From Wiki:
The site's original excavator, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, described it as the "world's first temple": a sanctuary used by groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers from a wide area, with few or no permanent inhabitants. Other archaeologists challenged this interpretation, arguing that the evidence for a lack of agriculture and a resident population was far from conclusive. Recent research has also led the current excavators of Göbekli Tepe to revise or abandon many of the conclusions underpinning Schmidt's interpretation.
The above does seem to suggest that the points of controversy are concerning whether there were no or few permanent inhabitants and no agriculture, and whether there were many permanent inhabitants and agriculture. Apparently the site is far from any known sources of water, which if true would seem to make both agriculture and any permanent population unlikely.
But perhaps, to reference the other thread you addressed me in, as @Olivier5 would have it there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether there was agriculture and a permanent population or not. :wink:
This is not as controversial as you might think. Against the Grain has already been mentioned, fantastic book. After the Ice is another which explicitly makes detailed accounts of how the concept of private property arose in conjunction with exclusive agricultural ways of life. There are other works out there as well that question the common narrative of the agricultural revolution.
There was no "Agricultural Revolution", in the sense that suddenly humans discovered they could plant seeds and harvest crops; this was known for many centuries before the first city-states arose in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. What changed was the shift from using agriculture as a supplement to using it (as well as husbandry) exclusively.
When I say stop doing "what we did to get what we like" I just mean the bad stuff which threatens our enjoyment of what we got. We could continue doing the good or innocuous stuff.
Could we not have clean air, clean water, highly complex and extensive biodiversity, "wilderness", open space, etc? Can't we have our cake and eat it too?
Are they correct who say we must continue on our aggressive, desperate, competitive, polluting, exploitive, extinctive, winners/losers, rich/poor course in order to survive or maintain or improve?
We remind me of the movie quote when someone asked a rich man how much money he wanted and he simply said "more." Is that attitude required to maintain what we have? Is it required to get more? Or can we get more, more responsibly?
An interesting question, something I have also wondered a lot about too :up:
Fundamentally, I believe it is an issue with technology, and not just this or that technology, but the overall technological drive to maximize efficiency - technique. A technologically-advanced society is a programmed society. It seems naive to me to think that humans can "control" technology; the most we can do is slow it down. At least as long as we continue to use it, which by this time seems pretty much guaranteed.
For all the things we seemed to have gained, there seems to be less attention paid to what we have lost, since we shrugged off the H&G mode of life. Indeed there seems to be quite a lot of fundamental things that we have lost, thanks to the luxury trap of civilization. Most of us have lost our ability to take care of ourselves without a complex social bureaucracy; most of us think freedom consists in being unique instead of being self-sufficient; most of us are completely at the whim of large corporations and militarized governments with powerful technologies which no person is capable of resisting alone; most of us are fed propaganda every single day and don't really own their thoughts; most of us live pointless lives working jobs that serve only to further cement the technological mode of life; most of us are completely disconnected from the natural world and only know about it through television or the occasional visit to a park; most of us are so addicted to our technological dope that it seems inconceivable to go back to a way of life that does not have it.
In the original 2000 Deus Ex video game, one of the final plot choices is to take out some kind of central global communications node, which doing so plunges the world into a technological Dark Age, but a Renaissance for human freedom. An interesting idea which has been raised by others as well.
:up: Sounds like the old saying "He who rides the tiger cannot dismount." I guess we aren't all that intelligent and wise or we'd be able to have the best of both worlds.
Quoting darthbarracuda
That reminds me of a paper I wrote in the 80s that said "Next to the last few minutes with Charles Kuralt and a trip to the wilderness now and then, when do we ever do anything that is not absorbed in "us"?"
Last time I counted, the end of "Sunday Morning" was down to under 30 seconds. :roll:
They do okay. They live lives with ample free time, but not as much as before. The amount of effort some peoples have to put into basic sustaiance is quite high in some places though, plus if they’re cut off from the modern world they are commonly infested with all manner of parasites.
Note: In prehistory there was undoubtedly more interaction between groups whereas today such groups are more insular due to the encroachment of the ‘modern world’ and the reduction of fellow like groups.
This is surprisingly good.
It’s a bit like the ‘all swans are white’ point. We cannot state something with such certainty when there is scant evidence/history. Added to this we carry around numerous modern assumptions about ‘how humans live’ based purely on how we live now. We cannot really do much about this other than try and guard against and highlight what possible assumptions we may be making and such assumptions influences our perception of said matter.
The problem is that would take a drastic reduction of human population. By one estimation earth cannot sustain a human population of more than 200,000,000 using organic farming techniques, not to mention returning to hunter gatherer life. Who knows what the real number is? But it seems obvious that it's much, much less than the present population.
So, the problem is how to effect such a reduction ourselves when the whole question seems to be taboo to most people. Nature may do it for us, or we may do it to ourselves in some unthinkable way, but neither of those are alternatives that many people would wish for.
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/aegean-prehistory/lessons/lesson-11-narrative/#l11d
For myself, anyone questioning Renfrew is putting themselves on the line as Renfrew is a very steady hand.
Also, even though this points more toward the 'elites' having more selfish goals it doesn't then make humanity worse only bring out into the open a natural tendency. I don't agree one way or the other but I do know that in the modern world many people assume wealth is a result of selfish ends rather than reciprical cooperation. Again I would not hold to such a simplistic view in a stand alone sense as such reciprocity would have to insular in some fashion rather than universal - intent aside!
I'm a bit of a nature guy myself. At the very least I know that I have a tendency to get into bad habits if I'm surrounded by too much comfort. I've noticed it for myself: the more primal my conditions get the more functional I become as a person. Living in a jungle somewhere in Asia over a year in fact was the most profound and life changing experience I've made in my life.
I think generally we do two essential things as humans: Trying to survive and seeking stimulation. The first one is rather obvious for any living being, the second is to some degree uniquely human (some animals will do certain things to entertain themselves, none at the level which humans do though). I reckon our obession with any form of stimulation is caused by how trivial survival has become these days. With hunter-gathering, survival itself served as the stimulation. The amount of awareness necessary to be a succesful hunter is akin to the awareness a Buddhist teacher demands from his students. Agriculture in contrast is much less engaging. Tending to fields is a mindless task. It demands very little awareness and offers very little stimulation.
Our cultural evolution has always been like that. With a decrease in effort comes a surplus in time - but with a surplus of time comes an increased demand for stimulation. The evolutionary steps are entirely based on each other. The surplus we got with each step was necessary for the next step, though I'd say certain steps have more gravity than others.
Fire was essential but I don't think it changed our life style enormously. Basically it drastically increased our efficiency as hunter-gatherers. The middle-step between hunter-gathering and agriculture was much more impactful: The herding of animals. People still lived a nomadic lifestyle but the necessity to hunt fell flat. Instead, they were taking their herd from pasture to pasture and gathered along the way. The step to agriculture then probably was a direct consequence: The herders found certain spots that were especially favourable in supporting life. Instead of marching all over the land they localized to places where both herding and gathering was at it's best (this wasn't possible as hunter-gatherers because it didn't allow for good hunting). And then it went from there. Humans had a fixed routine with plenty of time to spare and began on their neverending quest to find something to do beyond survival.
Do I think agriculture was a mistake? Yes and no. It's obvious that agriculture was necessary for everything we have today. Surviving is an endless task - but we made the task trivial. In return, we were left with another endless task. Since most of us don't have to do anything RIGHT NOW to stay alive, it leaves us constantly planning what's next. This is like a maze with no end because from one moment to the next, there are endless possibilities to what can happen in the world.
Put it that way: Evolutionary agriculture makes perfect sense because we massively improved our survivability. On an individual level though, we opened up Pandora's box. Biologically we're meant to live in nature and do survival. We've left our natural habitat and it confuses us. This shows in the rise of mental health problems people struggle with today.
I once did a back-of-the-napkin analysis and came up with 250-500k. I figured that at our current rate of consumption, as an apex predator, and based upon the richest, most consumptive person on the planet (I don't know who that is) we would need what we had as hunter-gatherers. I figure 10k square miles of temperate zone land per 35 people would be about right. (Fewer as we go closer to the poles and the equator.) That's a block 100 X 100 miles. The center of that is about 50 miles to any border of the next group's area. That is a reasonable distance to travel once a year to party, diversify the gene pool, trade lithic knowledge, etc. and yet still be able to slaughter mammoths, bison, fish, etc. without really harming biodiversity. Of course they could go different directions, seasonally, to link up with other groups, maybe four times per year.
As modern homo sapiens, we would not want all 500k living in and around the same city because that would present a danger from a localized catastrophe, not to mention disease. So we'd spread out but maintain travel and communications. Ideally those 500k would be made up of as much genetic diversity as we could cram into 500k. In this way, we could maintain the current highest standard of living of the richest, most consumptive person on Earth, without jeopardizing maximum complexity and biodiversity of the planet.
Not that anyone would want more people, but if we decided that we wanted more people, we could easily do that with lowered consumption. Anyway, if human beings are as smart as we think we are, we should be able to automate extraction of resources and the production of all the food and luxuries we want, speed around and off the planet, reserve all knowledge gained thus far, continue to gain it, and generally leave the planet whole.
How do we get there? Well, if we're so fucking smart, then it shouldn't be a problem. And we should be able to do it without killing billions of individuals before their normal time would be up. But we are not as smart as we think we are, and we are no different than any other species on this planet. We certainly are not humble. Rather, we are desperate, insecure, over-compensating, fearful little creatures scurrying around the pizza, grabbing slices because we don't think there will be enough. And we are right, because we are scurrying around the pizza grabbing slices because we don't think there will be enough. We are who we are, and no better. And we could never agree on who should stop the grabbing. So we'll just let the pizza run out. Earth can only make so much pizza.
I am not familiar with "the fields of anthropology", so no comment.
Quoting I like sushi
I do not know how scant our evidence is.
One common occurance throughout the history of interpreting artifacts is that we constantly make biased assumptions - usually because we assume certain things we do now as 'the norm'.