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Comment by tjmaxal | Hacker News Reader

If hunter gather society was so perfect why did we ever change?

Hunter-gatherer lifestyles aren't something we need to theorise about... as recently as a couple of hundred years ago people were living "unspoiled" pre-agricultural lifestyles in Australia and to a lesser extent South America. It's so easy to think that such a thing sounds idyllic when you're clothed, bathed, have a secure food/water supply, all your teeth, are not currently dying of any diseases, and are not subject to the whims of some village strongman who will kill you if you step out of line.

Personally I believe that a portion of the Australian outback (and any other country with room for it) should be set aside for people who want to live hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The primary purpose would be to stop the Australian Aborigines from complaining about the whole European-settlement thing (as in "fine, you want to go back to the way things were before? Here ya go!") but it would be open to anyone of any race who felt like living there. Only two conditions:

a) Nothing goes in except the people who want to live there, who can take nothing except a loincloth and one day's food supply.

b) Nobody comes out except by giving two months' notice (this stops people from being able to leave to get medical treatment).

We could start with a few thousand acres and let it grow if it actually becomes popular.

Your point relies on the fact that their was no technology advances that would have been made between colonization and now. On the North American continent there was serious trade up and down which would have helped. I don't know anyone here (on a reservation) that really wants to go back, they just want the paper the government signed to be honored.

On point (a), really?!? Is that what the natives there wore? That sounds rather unkind of you.

In Australia at least, technology was pretty stagnant for 40,000 years, so it's unlikely that an extra 200 years of isolation would have produced much innovation. The American context is quite different, as several quite advanced civilizations flourished there at various times.

Of course anyone going onto my hypothetical reservation would take with them a lot of knowledge unavailable to the true stone age folks, but not much can be done about that.

As for clothing, a loincloth would be on the modest side:

http://www.gondwananet.com/aboriginal-clothing.html

Agriculture (and the associated civilization) has one big advantage over hunting and gathering: It can support more people per acre, even if the lifestyle is worse. As a result, agricultural civilizations can overwhelm hunter-gatherers with sheer force of numbers.

Source: Jared Diamond covers this in "Guns, Germs and Steel". Excellent book.

Some people (Rousseau, Kaczynski, and in a narrower way Marx) say that the change was brought on not by the masses, but by the stong men who enslaved them.

Others (like Robert Wright (and me!)) think that civilization meant net net gain, even if we lost some really important things.

I don't mean to say that civilization is evil. I only mean to say that it looks like we want some of our own lifestyle back, and it looks like we're steering the ship that way.

Read up on the transition of the Mongols and American Indians. Population density vs. food output per acre will generally favor agriculture.

You're totally right. As a matter of fact, in undergrad I had a professor (Dr. Robert? Hard) who found even more correlates, some of them environmental, and plugged them into a GIS that would highlight good candidate sites for archaeological digs. Amazingly, he would go to these places, and often find important sites. Foremost among these was Cerro Juanaqueña, where Dr. Hard (at least a decade ago) earned the distinction of finding the oldest use of corn north of Mexico.

So yes, there comes a tipping point where agriculture becomes the most attractive option, and when that happens, humans begin the sequence that causes them to lose a few important things and gain a lot of great things.

And strangely, it looks like we're getting some of the things we lost back.

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