How did humans live before the development of agriculture?

Europe had lions.

Paleolithic foragers had much better lifespans and quality of life than neolithic farmers

Ah yes, the paleolithic foragers adopted the farming lifestyle because it was worse.

no, they adopted it because it provided more food. not the best quality food, which led to an overall decrease in health and stature, but way more of it.

Where are the proofs?
The only time I've ever read a hypothesis like that was on some crappy paleo diet website without any references.

It's also more prone to feast-or-famine syndrome (literally); five years with plentiful food followed by one year of malnourishment doesn't do much for the health of a community.

It is generally accepted by archaeologists that by most metrics (stature, lifespan, skeletal and dental health, infant morality and death in childbirth rates, etc) average health dropped significantly after the agricultural revolution.

All of this is completely correct (and not widely-known)! Have you studied archaeology?

He doesn't have any proof because there doesn't exist any.

It's just pure ideology, and I'm going to predict that the guy you're talking to is a 20-something Californian liberal who is a vegan, and voted for Obama twice and Bernie in the last election.

>agriculturalists have taken the most fertile lands for thousands of years. To live in scraps, you have to fight over scraps.

I always thought virgin forests were all swampy and wet until I hiked in a military owned forest. Turns out state parks where I hiked as a kid are the tidbits that weren't decent for modern agriculture or housing. So, since nobody wanted the land, it became city owned, and turned into a park. The military on the otherhand has some prime landholdings. High, dry woods with solid ground. Spread out territory that would allow for uninterrupted movement. Foilage ain't even that bad. When all you have seen is ravines and creekbeds, it's quite a gamechanger.

I really don't have the motivation to go dig up sources on this (I'm not the guy you're replying to, anyway), but trust me, they exist, and you can easily find them if you go looking. Archaeologists can get a pretty good idea of the health of a population by looking at things like bone chemistry, general stature and rates of skeletal abnormalities (which can indicate both malnutrition/malnourishment and disease), levels of dental wear and tear and rates of cavities and other oral health issues, population density and infant mortality rates (which can be reconstructed fairly accurately).

Agriculturalists were shorter, had shittier teeth, got sick more often, and died more often in childbirth. But there were a lot more of them.

Oh, fuck it, here's one source. It provides a good general overview. But trust me; there's MANY others.
digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1186&context=nebanthro

Thank you for being helpful and constructive to this thread.

My undergrad degree is in archaeology. We went over this extensively. He's absolutely correct.

In general, prehistoric archaeologists are the absolute last people you'll ever find peddling a bullshit noble savage narrative (few archaeologists are liberal Californian vegans, although some cultural anthros are). In some ways life before the Neolithic sucked. As the guy above mentioned, you were overwhelmingly more likely to die violently. But there's abundant evidence for a decline in quality of life & overall health after the agricultural revolution, and that's not a political claim, there really just is a lot of evidence. Some hippie-dippie types (and a lot of Paleo bloggers) have taken that fact and used it to claim a lot of other things that are maybe a little silly but that doesn't make it not true.

>But there's abundant evidence for a decline in quality of life & overall health after the agricultural revolution

No there's not. There's only the retelling of Marxist historiography.

Historical materialism rests on the assumption that utopic social organization existed previous to the agricultural revolution(Which means we can retain it again in the future), which is a psychological myth that lays at the foundation of Marxism.

Which there is literally zero evidence for.

I've linked one paper presenting concrete evidence already, and if you have any familiarity with the field (which you don't, but whatever), you'll know there's hundreds of others. I am not going to track down dozens of references for you but they're out there. This has absolutely nothing to do with historical materialism or Marxist archaeology.

Look, I have to step out for a while. Later when I have more time and more motivation I'll link some more papers. Papers authored by archaeologists and co-authored by biologists and physical anthropologists that stick to hard physical facts, with titles like "Rates of skeletal warping in Neolithic [geographic region] populations", not "Re-examining social structures before the agricultural revolution: a Marxist perspective".

>that one asshole injecting right wing politics into a completely unrelated topic.
Did you get lost and end up on the wrong board?

Has nothing to do with "utopian" social organizations or marxism
Back to One quick search in google scholar:
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618206000334

It's pretty easy to understand:
Hunter/gatherer eat a wide variety of food they find while roaming around. Foliage, roots, fruit, nuts, insects, fish, shellfish, birds, bigger prey...
This variety gives good nutritional value.
Agricultural communities now focus an fewer species for nutrition. Especially the reliance on a single staple crop like grain opens up the possibility of malnutrition, especially since denser population reduce the amount of wild edible things around.

Thanks for keeping the cancer like this guy at bay. People like you make the board enjoyable.

>Agriculture only involves growing crops and not breeding and raising animals and not growing fruits

Agricultural societies had access to meat, they could also hunt and fish and gather wild fruit and nuts.

The truth is they both had similar diets, the issues with settled societies are a result of population not of diet. Denser populations lead to disease and less food, the infant mortality rate would have been similar. The reason why it appears that settled societies have such a high mortality rate compared to nomadic ones is because we can easily find the bodies of the settled people. Something that is difficult for more nomadic groups.

How about you read any ethnography/anthropology book written in the last hundred years? Here's a tip: Leviathan is a few hundred years out of date.

>Denser populations lead to disease and less food

That's what I was getting at. Of cause settled populations still hunt, fish and collect plants, but it gets less divers and more focused on the main staple crop, since there are more people to feed.

Depends entirely on what cultures we are talking about of cause.

It's not that, whatever you're thinking of.

Imagine toiling the Earth using copper tools. There are a class of men called priests who demand a tithe of the fruits of your toil. These priests then tell stories about an idyllic paradise before men "had to work" but your ancestors were shit and the gods punished them.

Your teeth rot away before middle age because all you eat is a monoculture of sugars aka grains that bacteria love. Then the bacteria turn sugar into acidic shit. Your bones wear away faster than modern man. The monoculture of food means you have malnutrition.

As metallurgy advanced, it became less shitty. But decreasing soil quality rears its' ugly head and it becomes harder to eek out a living.

IIRC, Colonial Americans were, on average, a head taller than their European cousins because the soil quality in the colonies was pristine in comparison to the centuries of soil degradation in the old world.

Civilization really sucked if you were a first adopter for the most part. Being a priest or royalty? That shit was cash. But such an unequal arrangement also facilitated accelerated evolution. "War is the killer app of intelligence" and all that.

yeah no dipshits, I voted Trump and almost full fash, I just know a thing or two about archaeology and human health. I know 1488 larpers have a fetish for wheat fields but here's a hint, guys: wheat is the real Jew.

Thanks for the assist with the links bros. I was gonna bring up archaeological findings if I found the time. In addition to the colonial Americans vs Continental Europeans, there are records of colonists remarking on how basically tall and ripped the Indians were when they first arrived (because they had a more traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle). I think that's actually even in 1492 which I thought was required reading for this board but I guess not.

Adders, brown bears, cave bears, cave hyenas, cave lions, European leopards, wolves, Irish elk, aurochs, straight-tusked elephants, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, elasmotherium, sabre-toothed cats, wild boar and neanderthals

>Have you studied archaeology?

Only in a dilettante fashion. Read about anarcho-primitivism and found the following as a brilliant summary of the positions held in that school of thought theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-thirty-theses

Well when Mr. Godesky had his site up.

Nowadays I'm more of a "Zetetic Pyrrhonist". Living has thrown far too many curveballs for me to deny or assert much. A lot of people have a boner for being part of an absolute truth, as if it were a magic club letting loose the most bestial of reactions in service of their form of highest good.

There's a certain pettiness in mass argumentation and a certain narcissism. Arguments stop being arguments and become linguistic spells. Which has a certain aesthetic beauty in service of a truth, as if she were a damsel. It becomes infinitely ugly in service of mass partisans.

BANTU'D

>prehistoric furries

>elasmotherium
looked it up. man the ice age created some wierd ass scenery.

>I voted Trump and almost full fash
So you are a retard?

like real men

OK
>OH SHIT TYPHOONS
>OH SHIT WE HUNTED *ALL* THE GAME
>OH SHIT THE FISH SCHOOLS DIDNT PASS OUR ISLAND
>OH SHIT WE DON'T HAVE FRESH WATER BECAUSE THE SEASONAL RAINS DIDNT COME
>OH SHIT I GUESS WE HAVE TO LEAVE THIS ISLAND AND NAVIGATE OUR WAY TO LORD KNOWS WHERE.

He is right, though.
One of the reasons why lots of Africa was "never as good as Europe" was that there wasn't so much a struggle for survival in many parts of it.
Many places had an abundance of food and whatnot to exploit without as much pressure from wildly different nearby tribes to come and fuck with them.

Africa did eventually develop and there were warring powers but they were never driven to innovate in the same way europeans were.

You are worse than the most green haired demisexual uni student.
Maybe bait?

>elasmotherium
Who the fuck named that dude bro