Agriculture may have been humanity’s greatest blunder (1987)
discovermagazine.com
discovermagazine.com
For more details, and options for the future, I recommend "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture"
http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hum...
http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with...
The amount of controlled agriculturally productive land correlates to more food to raise a larger army which in turn can be used to forcefully acquire more land.
I specifically remember a sentence from the book, to paraphrase: "The hungry lion does not kill the entire herd of antelope, but rather takes what it needs and the herd replenishes."
To quote Ayn Rand (channeled through her character Dominique): "Religion is class exploitation."
From the article: "Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses."
So maybeagriculture wasn’t the blunder. The blunder was hunting and gathering so hard that you had no choice but to farm. Agriculture itself was probably the best thing our ancestors could have done given the scarcity they created for themselves.
But I don’t know anything about this, I’m just a computer programmer.
That's not really how it worked. No one culture made a decision to stop hunting. Even ignoring the costs in leisure time, agriculture allows for much (MUCH) higher population densities and a life in a fixed location that allows for development technologies using equipment that can't easily be carried with you (like walls, long term food storage, arsenals full of spears, etc...).
Eventually someone learned how to do it, and discovered after a generation or two that they outnumbered their competitors, who were either pushed aside or borrowed the same techniques to survive.
"during a month when food was plentiful"
Don't know if the article discusses the other 11 months, since the next page button doesn't seem to work on Firefox Android.
Oh, and what was that early childhood mortality rate?
Their way of life is stable, "A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BCE was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012."†
Agriculture was born out of need.
> Is it stable though?
For at least 42,000 years, based on the stability of their tools. IANAAnthropologist.
> What do they do when the hunting grounds disappear? Migrate to nowhere? Curse the gods and die out?
They live in very small and widely dispersed groups, they may go years between meeting other family groups (if I recall correctly. Seriously, the movie is a treat, don't take my word for it, see for yourself.)
The result is that they live within the carrying capacity of their "range", so there may be lean years but actually starving to death is rare. Again, I am not an anthropologist, and most of what I know is from that one movie.
But, obviously, they don't die out, as they are still here 42,000 years later (from the day someone left those tools at that site.)
> Agriculture was born out of need.
We don't know why humans started agriculture. We do know that it is about the dumbest thing you can do with land. Nowadays we have science, specifically ecology, that shows the way to a much better mode of civilization using applied ecology ("Permaculture" is one prominent school of thought, founded by an ecologist.) (It's also fun and easy and solves a lot of other problems, search for Geoff Lawton "Greening the Desert".)
Groves have existed much longer than that. As did fishing.
And yes, ancient tribes starved, including to death.
Everything breaks when there's too many people in any given area. Hunting and gathering only worked due to very low populations in any given area.
"This research explores the idea that if excess mortality is associated with first pregnancy, females will outnumber males among young adult skeletons. The sample is of 246 skeletons (119 males, 127 females) representing Later Stone Age (LSA) foragers of the South African Cape. Young adults are distinguished through incomplete maturation of the medial clavicle, iliac crest and vertebral bodies. With 26 women and 14 men in the young category, a higher mortality risk for women is suggested, particularly in the Southern Cape region. Body size does not distinguish mortality groups; there is evidence of a dietary protein difference between young and older women from the Southern Cape. Possible increased mortality associated with first parturition may have been linked to morphological or energetic challenges, or a combination of both."
± https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187998171...
"During times of deprivation, infanticide was permitted to preserve resources."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people?wprov=sfla...
As for infanticide "during times of deprivation" that is not unique to the Juǀʼhoansi people. Nor death in childbirth.
FWIW famine has been a feature of agricultural societies to within living memory.
In any event, if the movie is anything to go by, they are happy. Like, really happy.
Good thing author doesn't need to worry about their next meal, and has time to write such bullshit.
I've always been amused by the concept of egalitarianism in tribal societies. Prison (or high school) should teach you otherwise
Besides that, the gathering side of the equation, which the women were in charge with, is generally a lot more reliable on a daily basis than hunting.
Publishing this article in a magazine, with later distribution online, is a very special kind of irony given that hunter-gatherer societies rarely if ever developed writing systems.