Makes you wonder if Hunter gatherer times were better. Due to the much lower population densities than feudal times there would have been less famine I imagine.
This is exactly how chimpanzees live today, and matches well with most of the archaeological remains we have of primordial hunter-gatherers. Our forebears lived very violent lives.
I've been reading some books on the subject that claim the contrary, also based on archaeological proofs (and on identifying faults with the existing studies). So I wouldn't state that with such confidence.
See RoboTeddy's comment for some details on this POV.
And also, if we look at bonobos, another primate closely related to us, we might get a completely different perspective on life in the distant past. It's just that we discovered chimpanzees first.
It appears that some people prefer to focus on a very specific behavioral trait pinned on bonobos (having sex with group members to diffuse conflicts) just because it fits their preconceived notion of an ideal outcome involving absence of conflicts in general and war in particular. Some people even pin the name "hippie ape" in what looks like a desperate attempt to validate their personal ideals. Yet, bonobos are indeed known for organizing attacks on neighboring primate groups for the express purpose of killing and even eating them.
But could you please shed some light on this sentence:
> Yet, bonobos are indeed known for organizing attacks on neighboring primate groups
Are those primates other bonobos? That could be called going to war. If not, it's called hunting: those other primates are just food. It's not like we go to war against whatever other animals we are eating.
To the parent's comment though, bonobos don't actually form patrols and they tend to avoid contact with other groups, so intra-group conflict is lower for bonobos than chimpanzees.
Could you please cite the names of one or two of those books? I'll start by citing "War Before Civilization" and "Social Conquest of Earth" as in the camp of "our forbears lived very violent lives".
I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's a hell of a simplification. Do you have sources for your two sentence summary of 250,000 years of human pre-history?
In particular:
* Level of food security (very high -- people only bothered to keep 3 days of food on hand, since it was so easy to get more)
* Their social living arrangements (persistent "living groups" of 10-ish people, multiple of which might be camping around the same water hole at a given time. so there's a collection of people you're often around that rarely changes, and then other groups you see and live with for a time periodically)
* Reasons why their population didn't explode despite lack of contraceptives (no crops --> no e.g. maize that can be turned into mash for kids --> kids breastfeed for years longer, which apparently acts as a contraceptive.
As others are saying, life undoubtedly was quite different for hunter-gatherers in other regions.
Actually, it's far more probable that population were kept low because everyone got killed at a very high rate compared with the rate of reproduction. With no medical care to treat diseases of wounds and with both man and nature invested in killing off people, population growth tends to be kept low.
People started growing crops out of necessity. In terms of food security, hunting-gathering was far easier. The average hunter also worked far fewer hours than the average farmer in antiquity.
I'd assume in hunter-gatherer societies, children would not be that useful for hunting until they are fully grown, or in gathering until they've spent many years learning where to go to gather what. Also not useful in making tools, since those would take a lifetime to learn.
Whereas children are readily useful in traditional farming even at a younger age, because there are all sorts of places one can employ unskilled manual labor on a farm.
Hunter-gatherer societies had very low rates of demographic growth. And industrial societies are also seeing much lower population growth, because children are an enormous economic burden.
This gives an impetus to at least wait 3-4 years between pregnancies.
There is no such pressure on agrarian societies.
I imagine there was no(t much) fieldwork, crops were raised on the side, if hunting and gathering was indeed easier. What else would explain foregoing that?
Still today I sometimes dismissively assume that sowing seeds and just waiting is the simplest thing ever. Maybe neolithic people didn't need to process the crops either, instead feeding animals and eating them then, which is less efficient, energetically speaking.
May I warmly recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens": https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/d...
It discusses this and other issues related to the cultural evolution of our species at length. Some of his views into modern life are especially eye opening.
My original question was a bit cheeky as I already knew the answer.
The Icelandic ancestors didn't have that luxury in their country's bitter cold
It's clear that agricultural societies were more fit than hunter-gatherer societies.
Agricultural societies could breed more people and use them to kill the hunter-gatherers and take their land.
Even if the meat/vegetable eaters were bigger and stronger than the grain eaters, there were simply a lot more grain eaters.
Classic Greek myths are full of references to "golden age" men who were displaced by more degenerate modern, civilized men. I can't help read those myths as a story of the rise of agriculture.
> [Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.
> In the 5th century BCE, the philosopher Empedocles, like Hesiod before him, emphasized the idea of primordial innocence and harmony in all of nature, including human society, from which he maintained there had been a steady deterioration until the present.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/55101875...
https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...
I concede that people adjust their expectations to norms that surround them. But I also feel there are certain floors in the human condition -- the death of a child being one of those rock bottoms.
If you want to explore the other side to that old essay, try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Worst+Mistake+in+the+His...
"After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands." - Wikipedia
Do you dispute his position on women in science? Or, should we take his position as correct for the same reasons that you list.
I did not say his only credit was popularity. I said he's a pop-writer, as opposed to, say, a peer reviewed expert in the domain.
In any case, my primary request is that people consider the long list of refutations to the claims in his mass-market publications.
And history has also shown some experts can be wrong when the paradigm change of new ideas is too big.
However, and I say this is particularly important: all refutations I have read about his work focus on some particular detail, they are of the type: 'this number is wrong'. Of course it can be, he's speculating. And that's the easy part to fix! Just change the number in his argument with the correct one. Be constructive.
But I have never read a refutation that says: 'this line of reasoning is wrong'.
In fact, his work has been cited as an inspiration for 'Sapiens', which is a current best seller and it follows the same modus operandi.
Or, try googling. For example, here is a relevant discussion on NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-do...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118
(Tichy’s karma is just 110 short)
For example, perhaps certain facts have been more/less passionately supported after 10 years. Also aspects like tone.
To further your analogy, would you prefer to be a diabetic paraplegic in the modern era, or the medieval? Because you're not going to be able to medicate yourself with the insulin you need, and there's not much work for paraplegics to do if they're not born into money.
> Our 60 years of wage slavery in windowless offices might seem unconscionable to a medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends, even if he ends up dying at 50.
We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism is the whole reason why this site exists. For a medieval peasant, they can't move into the nobility, their inventions are not protected, they frequently aren't allowed to move around, travel is dangerous, communication with anyone outside the area they grew up in is more difficult due to language differences, hobbies are limited largely to what you can build yourself, since trade for items is difficult and expensive... the list of restrictions goes on and on.
In any case, the peasants of yesteryear are analogous to the working class of today, and they don't work in offices, windowless or otherwise.
> We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism
Entrepreneuralism often is just another form of slavery. You exchange serving your boss 8 hours a day for serving your customers (and/or investors) 16 hours a day. Most businesses are not innovative problem solving endeavours, they're mundane servitude in highly competitive markets. If you're lucky, it may lead you to significantly more wealth than your dayjob; if you're not, you just wasted years of working 16h/day for less reward than you'd get working 8h/day in a regular job.
The slavery only ends when you don't have to do work for other people in exchange for resources necessary to live a decent life. As a society, we're nowhere near that yet.
(Thinking that starting your own business is freedom from the man is confusing irrelevant freedoms, like the ability to choose your customers, choose your logo, choose your working machine, with actually important freedoms, like choosing whether to have customers at all.)
A person today is less of a slave to his environment than in the past, although this is more the case in Canada and Scandinavian countries, than in the US.
Now you could say that people worked less in past times, but you could also work half a year and enjoy the rest of your time labour-free, so long as you sacrifice a lot of luxuries (running water, police service, paved roads, fire department, any means of connectivity, etc.)
You wouldn't be sent to prison in the first place.
"The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls."
Mead was expensive since it require lots of honey and was mostly used for special occasions. Most they did drink weak beer because they had learned that in some places peoples drinking water did die more often than the peoples drinking beer. The beer was weak because they did not know how east works and it was probably flat. So don't confuse it with what we know as beer now.
I do also have a hard time believing they in general had more freedom, maybe the top 10% had more freedom than what many have now? Which is far from what the top 10% have now
People became food raisers because it was a better life. It allowed plentiful food so that others could do things unrelated to food. Art... and science.
For one good documentary (or book), check out Guns, Germs and Steel. (it's usually found online and fun to watch!) A book which documents the reasons some civilizations went from tribes, to eventual empires, while others like one in Papa New Guinea remained hunter-gatherers. That tribe, for example, has no "beasts of burden" on the island, which were the initial "machinery" that multiplied the amount of work output a tribe could produce compared to one of only men.
But at no point does anyone suggest that hunter-gathering was "better." It was the thing everyone wanted to get away from but certain societies had an easier time doing it.
It's like that guy who eschewed modern society and went hiking out in Canada/Alaska with no research or even a map. He died. He died poisoned by simple plants that anyone would have told him not to eat. And he died less than a couple miles from a ranger station full of food, shelter, and an emergency phone/radio. "Oops."
Romanticize all you want. But never forget it's a fantasy.