How easily can the case be made that in hunter-gatherer societies the individual was better off than in post Neolithic revolution agrarian societies?
>food quality went down
>this brought health down: worse teeth, bones
>agrarian dense populations also meant more diseases
And arguably:
>increased working time compared to hunter gatherer
>stratification of society: a controlling elite and a serving class, poverty
>wars
>taxes
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Most populations didn't go from hunter gathering to an agrarian life style in an instant, in Europe, for instance, people hunter gathered and fished while practicing rudimentary agriculture and started practicing herding soon after
Yes however that doesn't really answer the question.
It is my assumption that agrarian societies simply out-competed their hunter gatherer counterparts, but for individuals the shift was negative rather than positive.
Nope. The spread of agriculture was through mass migration and exponential population growth.
> for individuals the shift was negative rather than positive
Society is not about making an individual happy tho, it's about self-preservation and growth, and agriculture helps a lot with it.
And?
The migrants in europe practiced hunting, fishing and herding
Nobody argued otherwise. I realize that an agrarian society is more effective which is why it came to dominate in the first place.
But in this thread I am speaking from a strictly individual perspective.
>increased working time compared to hunter gatherer
patently false
>agrarian dense populations also meant more diseases
they also meant more, individual time, wealth, education and intellectual density to deal with them
in a tribe the shaman could have smoked some weed and chant pain pain go away and that was it, in a city built on farming, they eventually had actual doctors
But they had crops when migrating to Europe.
>for individuals the shift was negative rather than positive.
That's only if we assume that optimal conditions for hunter gathering endure. Which is never the case in the long run. Hunter gatherers are much more vulnerable than farmers to adverse conditions. Shift in migration patterns of animals is sufficient to made them starve, let alone weather. And you can't easily migrate cause the neighbouring territory is already occupied and defended by another band.
This is nonsense.
Hunters are far more resilient and could inhabit much more difficult climates.
Hunters do however have a 50-1000 lower maximum population density.
This density is regulated by regular pattern of starvation.
>Living on the brink of starvation and existing only to hunt and forage is better than technology, artisans, culture, language and civilisation
Once there's a reliable and constant source of food you can devote time to other activities such as creating a writing system or crafting pottery.
And?
That's a farmer problem. Drought and all.
Hunters had easy food supply and could always migrate. You can survive on low amounts of food for weeks to months.
Hunter's had different problems like getting killed by other hunters who wanted their women and their kids turning out retarded because of inbreeding.
It means that in Europe it was instant. The full package came and there were no intermediate stages.
It was shitty rudimentary agriculture and it was complemented with hunting and herding
you seem to have an incredibly romantic picture of hunter-gatherer lifestyle in your head
So shitty that it allowed the highest populations the world had ever seen.
But I didn't even mention the fact that they had more free time.
It's just reality though that getting food as a hunter gatherer is incredibly easy since you have less people to feed. That's not to say that there wasn't long periods of hunger but they were genetically adapted to get through them.
For agricultural societies it's different since there's just a lot more people to feed and if the conditions are bad(weather fucks crops, animals get stolen by neighbors etc) there will be actual famines.
>patently false
Is it? I left it under "arguable" because I know that it is not certainly known, but if you're going to make a certain claim then please have some evidence.
I can't remember the original source where I first heard it but wikipedia cites specific researches:
>en.wikipedia.org
>individual time, wealth, education and intellectual density
Let us not forget it was all mainly concentrated in the elite.
>they eventually had actual doctors
Which took what, thousands of years for them to become available to the public at large? And even then now it's mainly a luxury for most people.
>food quality went down
Unbased statement. Wild tribes eat accessible shit.
>this brought health down: worse teeth, bones
Shorter nails, rarer hairs.
>stratification of society: a controlling elite and a serving class, poverty
>taxes
It was only in city-states or aqua-states. Average primeval peasants didnt have stratification. Small natural taxes could be even among hunter gatherers.
>wars
Everybody do wars, hunters first.
If there's a famine you just hunt other humans for their supplies
So it should really be hunter gatherer vs agriculturalist hunter gatherer
Where?
in the Levant yes, in Western and Central Europe villages were small as fuck until 4000-3500 bc, the only really populated areas were the Balkans and Greece which had the fucking Danube river valley in one case and fucking Anatolia next to it in the other
>luxury for most
Sorry where is the majority of the population, what's the life expectancy now
That is a good point. Agrarian societies could store food and transport it over longer distances which gave it flexibility in the face of natural uncertainties. However farming is more reliant on weather and as seems to be the case, it is the agrarian civilization turned industrial that may reach the Malthusian catastrophe with potentially disastrous results for humanity whereas hunter gatherer societies had minimal impact on surroundings.
>And even then now it's mainly a luxury for most people.
Where the fuck do you live? Kenya?
Not when there's famine, they hunted ALWAYS
Cardial pottery cultures in W Europe had their economy based largely on hunting even though they also practiced agriculture
Proper medicine is uncertain even in many of the first world countries due to money and massive waiting periods, but I'm not even going to go into what it's like in the third world.
>what's the life expectancy now
Mostly about the same. The biggest impact on the "average" lifespan was the eradication of most of infant mortality, not the actual prolonging of life.
Yes, in the richest countries the life expectancy is 15-20 years longer than it used to be thousands of years ago, but when you average it over all of worlds population you will see no difference.
Heh, """"supplies""""""
>A 2009[1] study confirmed many findings from the 2006 study, but added new information. In just one pit deposit, this study found 1906 bones and bone fragments from at least 10 individuals ranging from newborns to adults. At least 359 individual skeletal elements were identified. This in-depth study revealed many more cut, impact, and bite marks made upon the skulls and post-cranial skeletal elements.[1] It was apparent that parts of the humans' bodies were singled out for their marrow content, suggesting cannibalization (see Hypotheses).
You can easily make the case for that but I suppose in hindsight and with a long-term perspective, agriculture was an important step.
The other way, full-blown semi-nomadic pastoralism has its pros and cons too, better health than agriculturalists and even hunter-gatherers, greater population size than hunter-gatherers but less free time and often extreme stratification and subjugation of women but it too doesn't seem to lead to very complex societies in the long-run.
>in a city built on farming, they eventually had actual doctors
Yeah, literally 10,000 years later.
>Is it? I left it under "arguable" because I know that it is not certainly known, but if you're going to make a certain claim then please have some evidence.
I'm just going to ask you how many hours have you spent working the fields this year, and after you - with almost 100% certainty - answer "fuckall", I will have three follow up questions
1) how many hours do you personally have to work to afford a kilogram of beef
2) what percentage of population of developed countries is employed in food production
3) how does it feel to flaunt your ignorance using a device which would have been absolutely impossible to develop and construct in a hunter-gatherer society?
You need free time to have a warrior culture
That's very wrong, mate. It isn't just infant mortality, it's eradicating factors that would have also easily killed you in any other stage of life.
Sanitation, antibiotics etc. And of course those have been available really only in the last century.
But of course the maximum human lifespan under ideal conditions hasn't changed. That's why you saw better-off men living up to 80+ in the past.
why isn't it better than "never"?
I work 12 hour shifts and I live in poverty. I was raised by a single mom who had to take care of two children without any state support while working a minimum wage job.
1) At least two hours.
2) Irrelevant. More to the point question would be "what percentage of population is employed?"
3) Bad attempt at ad hominem.
Warrior cultures seem to kinda naturally develop among pastoralists. Might have something to do with defending flocks and raiding for cattle/sheep. Agriculturalists need larger-scale mobilization to actually occupy foreign territory and they'd have to settle down to take advantage of it.
Because it took 10 000 years of poverty, wars, oppression, propaganda and diseases to net something positive for one fifth of humanity.
Yes, sheperd cultures usually are bloody
>It is my assumption that agrarian societies simply out-competed their hunter gatherer counterparts, but for individuals the shift was negative rather than positive
You can say the same thing about the Industrial Revolution. Industrial societies outpaced pre-industrial ones rapidly, but the quality of life for the average plebs went to shit for a while. But the important thing about both the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture and the industrial revolution is that things did eventually get better for average plebs, better than they had been under the old system. But like a lot of big changes in history, it took a lot of suffering to get there.
That is arguable if things really did get better or not but the main problem with this is that it shows that changes will happen regardless of whether they are good for the individual or not. Meaning there is a system that essentially develops a 'life of its own' and will subjugate humans to what is efficient for its sustaining.
I live on the east coast of Canada. If there was no agrarian society, and we lived off the land, then we'd be eating many fibrous plants that we normally don't eat, and lots of berries. Without toilets, we'd be fertilizing the land. Without the fishing industry (which I'm part of), there would be more fish, lobsters, crabs, etc, and they would be BIGGER. Fishing would be as easy as putting out a line or a single trap, and catching possibly a couple fish and lobsters on a good day. There'd be literally no effort. If you were a caretaker of a herd of cattle, you could collect milk while they grazed. Food would be instant. There'd be no refrigeration, but you wouldn't need it. 90% of the day could be oriented toward what YOU want to do. In that way, you can enjoy the work you do; you can do crafts, make ceramics, and write and read.
Agrarian culture is mostly defined by the scarcity and deficit which are STAPLES of that kind of society. Had people not starved, there'd be no need to farm. Once they started to farm, it freed them to live leisurely and pursue their hobbies. Those hobbies became valuable, thus that encouraged trade. Trade is basically giving deficit. If trade was truly generous, there'd be no reciprocal payment; instead, people would freely give and not expect anything in return.
Your second paragraph seems contradictory to first and makes little sense. Could you elaborate a little?
1) Optimistically, things will just keep getting better and they definitely have been
2) From a species-wide perspective, hunter-gathering populations were often close to extinction (or actually became extinct in some areas) due to natural events. That happens much less easily when you have a certain population size.
3) If you take a more micro/less human-centered perspective, even if you live worse off, if your genes are found in higher frequencies in the next generation anyway, you're more successful in the grand scheme of things
I think you're underestimating how much you could die from whatever. Even the poor in modern societies, especially developed ones, have much more stability in their lives.
Now you could argue that low-level stress is perhaps more constant in our lives than it'd be in that case and that's definitely a factor but I think not as important.
1) Arguable. You'd first have to prove that overall the progress has been a net positive for the individuals.
2) I'm not sure if hunter-gatherers were all that often close to extinction as you make it out to be, but your point is true that from a bigger perspective progress is necessary to ensure the survival of our species.
3) Honestly it's the same as 2)
But you're missing a point which is that given recent modern trends (climate change mainly), there seems to be a potential danger that our progress poses to our living conditions.
One important thing to realize is that progress and civilization does not have the long perspective in mind. They are after efficacy just as is evolution: the system that is the most efficient comes to dominate. Whether that will result in a Malthusian catastrophe or not is irrelevant to the working of things.
The first massive extinction event that occurred happened because a species appeared in massive numbers that produced oxygen. Oxygen back then was a poison to most of lifeforms and the result was that nearly most of life in Earth was wiped out, which came back and almost killed off the species themselves that produced it to begin with. This just proves that whether something comes to dominate or not does not necessarily mean that we should expect stability and safety out of it. Things dominate because they're efficient at dominating, not because they have a long perspective of endurance in mind.
In a hunter/gatherer society, We'd be mutually dependent on our environment. We'd fish, hunt, forage, and populate; there would be MORE food, more resource, less people.
Agrarian societies are parasitic, because they rely on a deficit. You couldn't live in an Agrarian society if there wasn't a class that collectively starved. It's essentially how trade works; one person trades what he values less for what he values more, knowingly giving someone "less than" what he received, even if both of them think it is "good". For example, I give you 1 apple for 1 orange; I value the apple less than your orange, therefore I benefit at your expense, even if you say that you benefited; we'd be giving each other less than what we value, and that's the problem. Agrarian societies are only charitable when an agrarian god (yahweh) steps in and tells them to be charitable.
>Agrarian societies are parasitic, because they rely on a deficit.
That's an interesting perspective. Where did you come upon it?
Hunter-gatherers probably had more free time, but what exactly is the utility in free time if you don't have anything fun to do?
I mean, assuming from current native tribes in Africa and other parts of the world, what they do in their free time is scar each other, have sex, and do ritual dancing. Which is probably fun, but how is it different from a Westerner spending their free time reading books and playing video games?
Not a lot.
>but how is it different from a Westerner
I doubt natives hated themselves as much and suffered from depression as severely.
Probably true, but I'm going to assume the reason is because life is way more social and communal in a tribe than in a urban mega-city that most Westerners live in.
I chop fire wood, and I work on a boat. I've been in construction, and witnessed, first hand, an accident that got national news. I know people who've fallen overboard. I know people who've been electrocuted. I know people (my grandparents) who died from cancer. I've slept on an ice cold floor in the dead of winter, with no heat, with one blanket, and I woke up to the glass of water next to me being a glass of ice.
I've been healthy my entire life. I've had maybe 2 needles in my life (for diseases which are transmitted by agrarian societies). As a kid, I used to cast fishing line off the wharf and catch squid and mackerel, things I could bring home and cook daily if I wanted to.
During the industrial revolution, without regulation, some kids worked 100 hours a week (which was the average work week at the time). Could you imagine working 16 hours a day? There's no need of it. There's no need to work at all, because agrarian societies have distanced leisure and work naturally.
>I work 12 hour shifts and I live in poverty. I was raised by a single mom who had to take care of two children without any state support while working a minimum wage job.
congratulations, you live better life than roughly 80 billion humans did before you
>1)At least two hours.
so comparatively nothing, to both hunters and early farmers
says something about how far did ditching that shitty lifestyle got us
>2) Irrelevant.
extremely relevant since it's a ridiculously miniscule fraction of the population, with the rest free to take up any career part they desire
compare to hunter gatherers, who all had to either provide food or take care of the young, like fucking animals
>3) Bad attempt at ad hominem.
do you really not see those societies had ZERO intellectual/technological growth, because their hands were completely tied with providing nutrition?
do you not? if not, then pack your socks and go live in the forest
and don't you fucking dare to take any technology with you, not even a metal knife, that's a fruit of inferior agri-society
1) I think it has been but it also depends on what you privilege sometimes. Suppose someone were more stress-free overall in their life but more prone to die at any moment from something minor. Not preferable to me.
2) At least some Eurasian groups definitely were always pretty close to becoming extinct at any point if you look at their tiny effective population sizes (and some seem to have judging by DNA but that's still in its infancy).
3) It's not exactly the same, one is a species-wide perspective while the other is a more individual genetic perspective (which I still wanted to differentiate with how you experience your own life of course).
>progress and civilization does not have the long perspective in mind
I already agreed with that yes, it's only positive in hindsight.
Though keep in mind that we have been conditioned from all sorts of pleasures that we wouldn't have access to otherwise. If we had never experienced such, more free time to do basic shit might be more fun.
And though some stress is positive, certain levels of chronic stress are definitely not good. As the other user wrote we probably suffer more from all sorts of mental disorders.
Hunter-gatherer societies were more egalitarian in how people experienced life vs today but from my perspective they were overall worse on average so eh. And I'm optimistic about things just getting better for the whole of humanity unless some extreme ancap overlords take over.
>so comparatively nothing, to both hunters and early farmers
Two hours for a beef is nothing? Are you insane? Do you think it took 1000 hours to hunt a deer? Did you even think this through you fucking mongoloid?
>any career part they desire
Ask people if they love their job. I fucking dare you. Even you are probably slaving in some mind numbing shitty slave dead end job and if not, grats, you're in the lucky minority.
>because their hands were completely tied with providing nutrition?
Their hands were "tied" with enjoying their free time which they had more than we do. Their work week consisted of 15-25 hours, hardly "completely tied with providing nutrition".
>ZERO intellectual/technological growth
Wowee now I can sit behind a glowing screen the spare hours I have before sleep. Really worth trading away the potential of providing for my family, of socializing with people close to me all day long, of living out in the open nature, of not having to slave for some huge corporation doing shit that I don't even get to see the results of, not to mention have any part in profiting from aside from the pay that barely gets me food on the table. Sub par second grade low quality food, that is.
Not everyone was born into a middle class American family and even they probably feel worse than the average hunter gatherer.
I'm not sure how your own personal experience negates a claim that e.g. sanitation and antibiotics are saving people on a large scale from things that would have easily killed them in the past.
And accidents were the case in our hunter-gatherer past too. Only then you'd have to live with a badly-healed broken wrist for the rest of your life instead of having modern medicine to properly help it heal.
And let's not get into living in more tropical environments outside most of Eurasia where you have to constantly face off parasites of all sorts. A pre-modern lifestyle would be even worse then.
If we lived 500 years ago, I'd take your claims seriously but when we have experienced modern society, just no.
>from things that would have easily killed them
*cough cough* that were created by dense populations of the agrarian society to begin with *ahem*
>where you have to constantly face off parasites of all sorts
They still do that and they seem fine.
>but when we have experienced modern society
Correction:
>now that I'm part of the top 15% of humanity, part of the first world, I'm gonna say this is cozy enough for me and I wouldn't change a thing :)
>because they rely on a deficit
How exactly is that bad?
>we'd be giving each other less than what we value, and that's the problem
But if both agreed to the trade and both gained something out of it, what's bad about it?
psychologytoday.com
Doesn't seem so bad.
>Unbased statement
Literally every source corroborates it, kys.
>Average primeval peasants didnt have stratification
As soon as farmland became possible to own there was stratification.
>Small natural taxes could be even among hunter gatherers.
What fucking taxes?
>Everybody do wars, hunters first.
Yes but their scale would be a lot smaller and rarer and never did you have to fight for some elite because he wanted more lands.
That article is really biased.
Current human society is also based around play. Capitalism is a game. In fact, it's probably the most sophisticated game humans have created.
How is it biased?
Too much of a "noble savage" narrative there if you ask me.
Idk, did you really get the sense that he's trying to push some narrative, or do you say that just because you can't comprehend something so necessary as being so enjoyable and literally fun?
It's based on observation of the existing hunter gatherers. And it's interesting to note that such people genuinely do not see work as "toil" and only had to create such a word for when referring to people from civilization they observe.
Why do so few people hunt in our day and age? You get a stock of fresh, top tier cuts that you can either keep or sell. It's fun, refreshing, and employers never hesitate to give you time off during hunting season.
If you sign up for ranger duties you even get paid + even more meat doing almost nothing.
In the short term, it may have seemed bad, but in the long term, it's undeniable that agriculture is the greatest thing that's ever happened to humanity. Without it, we would still be primitives struggling to eke out an existence with high infant-mortality rates, extremely high rates of violence, etc.
You may not agree that agriculture itself was such an improvement, but it is the cause of every improvement we've made since.
>Literally every source
Example? Peasant live more than semi-nomadic monkeys.
>As soon as farmland became possible to own there was stratification.
I can also say "As soon as hunt or gathering it was possible to own there was stratification". This is bs because members of all primeval tribes are allmost equal.
>What fucking taxes?
Exactly. Feudal duties are taxes?
Sometimes, hunting can be an expensive hobby, and, in places like Europe, even a legally precarious one (while most countries do allow firearm ownership for hunting, getting a license for it can be difficult). I don't know where you live, but, where I live, it's estimated that about 10% of the population hunts as a hobby. I don't do it anymore, though, just because I'm too much of a softie.
It's expensive at the start but it really pays off. Getting a license isn't all that difficult, just somewhat costly.
Have you just read Sapiens?
In the US, yeah. I have a friend in Russia who explained to me that, to own a rifle for hunting, you have to have had a shotgun license for 5 years preceding. There's a lot of bureaucratic red tape in the world.
I'm in Sweden. The only requirement is that you're an adult, not charged with violent crimes and pay for the course.
>it's undeniable that agriculture is the greatest thing that's ever happened to humanity
To society*
It's undoubtedly the greatest thing to happen for the civilization, but from the individual/humanity/humane perspective it's highly arguable.
You have to be at least 18 to post here. Go read a book nigger.
Na but he seems to be on a similar stance.
>from the individual perspective, it's highly debatable
Not unless you enjoy high infant mortality rates and murder rates that make drug cartels look like a joke. It wasn't Rousseau(?) state of nature tier bad, but it was really bad. You were much more likely to either die of infancy, lose a child in infancy, get murdered, etc. before civilization.
from an idividualist perspective hunter-gatherer was superior, but from a evolutional persepective agriculture allowed us to mulitply on a whole new scale (evolution doesnt give a fuck if you are miserable, as long as you reproduce)
You mean its great that we aren't closer to nature, and how humans "ought to" live? Personally, I don't think humans are supposed to live in these gigantic communities. Yes we are a social species, but it only works in small communities. Otherwise you just walk down the street and think of everyone else as inhuman and just in the way.
>The spread of agriculture was through mass migration
Not really. That's a very outdated theory that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
There is a third option: being a raider who preys on agrarian societies
High murder rates? What are you basing that on?
Why would a small tribe of relatives and friends have a higher murder rate than a city comprised of complete strangers?
You're agreeing with me:
Are you new to his?
Berserkers were the warrior class of an agrarian society and they would have been the ones genociding hunter gatherers.
Berserkers weren't a thing you autist.
War Before Civilization, by Dr. Lawrence Keeley
amazon.com
en.wikipedia.org
Pick it up, user, it's worth the read.
Dildos
>Not really. That's a very outdated theory that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Explain.
dreamflesh.com
He seems to point out some of the flaws that Keeley has in his logic.
I'm not saying that the book must be entirely wrong, but as the critique pointed out, using state vs non-state instead of agrarian vs pre-agrarian is a really bad decision.
Outdated data
so what's changed in the last 2 years
Yeah no shit in comparison to modern states they're much higher. What a pointless book
Outdated question
Sapiens was such a good book... til the second half. What the fuck happened?
Questions and answers are outdated in an age where raw information is detached from the human created social reality.
you what?