Hacker News Reader

It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible

I would be cautious about drawing such a conclusion. I think if you were a typical neolithic farmer you would not be looking yearningly at the hunter-gatherers living in the mountains, wishing you could live like them. You'd probably feel that their life was pretty hard.

If anyone wants to learn more about the realities of life for nomadic hunters, I'd recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People (http://www.amazon.com/Harmless-People-Elizabeth-Marshall-Tho...).

There's a pretty lengthy section in the middle of "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly that argues against romanticized portraits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Here's the short version:

Lifespans were short, so there were basically no old people. Old people are key carriers of institutional memory. Without them, you don't have much culture, and you can't learn from the past. Every generation is forced to reinvent the wheel. That's why they didn't develop technology or art.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_ToftPd4R8UC&lpg=PT30&#...

"Lifespans were short, so there were basically no old people."

I don't have a citation for this, but I've heard that the reason that the average lifespan in ancient times was so short was mostly due to the high rate of infant mortality.

Those people who did manage to survive infancy actually lived much longer than you'd expect. And the maximum human lifetime back then was not much different than the maximum human lifetime today.

I don't think KK is talking about averages that have been brought down by infant mortality. He's saying explicitly that among hunter-gatherers, lifespans were short. Which I believe from what I've read about them.

It's also false that people who made it to maturity in preindustrial times lived as long as people do today. It was unusual to see 70.

I would be cautious about drawing such a conclusion. I think if you were a typical neolithic farmer you would not be looking yearningly at the hunter-gatherers living in the mountains, wishing you could live like them. You'd probably feel that their life was pretty hard.

I suspect there would never be such a comparative perception. I doubt a neolithic farmer is tending a field and thinking "gosh, should I just give this up and head back into the mountains?" As little as they probably even considered hunter-gatherers, they probably considered them something "other".

Actually, evolution does tend to be progressive from the point of view of selfish genes. It's just not necessarily progressive from the point of view of things like creature comforts.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. Following pleasure and hedonic drives seems to lead nowhere. After all, isn't the most efficient route to happiness heroin?

Most animals spend 100% of the time conserving energy or hunting (primates and children play excluded). They don't do leisure.

Evolution favors the plentiful. Some might say the most fit to survive the earth are the roaches. We can't kill them, all our techniques fail, nukes won't kill them, they live off the scraps of crap that humans don't even think creatures can live on.

Agriculture ensured that we have an ability to feed an increasing number of people. It also means that we can settle any area, and as long as crops grow there, or crops can be IMPORTED there humans can spread to that area. With that came technology for defending it from humans and predators. From an evolutionary perspective, agriculture is perfect.

Most animals spend 100% of the time conserving energy or hunting (primates and children play excluded). They don't do leisure.

Sorry, you missed several of the essential activities. All of the important ones are summed up in the 4 Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting and fornication.

I agree with you, but the characterization in your second paragraph of hunter-gatherers and farmers might be construed as two static ideologies battling for supremacy (which isn't true). Indeed, as you say, the transition from nomadic to agricultural was messy, happened over centuries, and was a result of many factors.

Also, once you have a permanent address you can trade. Civilization does well in places with trade routes (like coasts, big slow rivers, or well defended roads)

Great post! However, do you have any sources to back your claim on religion? Not sure if you are saying, that religion is required 'as a motivating force' for building a stable society or for writing thoughts down. Both developments can be explained well without religion, no?

No one knows for sure, and it's a running joke in anthropology that anything poorly understood among ancient peoples is declared "religious", but it's probable that religion emerged at the same time as law (the real motivator behind inventing writing) and that they were deeply intertwined.

Belief in the supernatural exists for genetically hard-wired reasons, but the first truly organized religions were probably not the live-and-let-live shamanic practices that began among hunter-gatherers, but ancestral cults with some coercive intent. The most important question of law has generally been: who should own what? This is where the ancestors (cum deities) come in. A king will just have you killed if you steal his possessions. What happens when he dies and his less charismatic son wants the same power and privilege? His son says, "If you don't show the same loyalty to me as you showed my father, he will possess a lion and that lion will eat you." This raises the possibility of an afterlife. A generation later, the grandson says, "If you disobey me, my grandfather will torment you forever in the afterlife." Eventually, these ancestors became gods and their accomplishments are magnified to supernatural levels of achievement. Three thousand years of oral tradition later, with a human ancestor morphed into a fictional character and no one able to determine who the "real" descendants were, priests (people of high social class) become the intermediaries. Divination, religion, and law were intertwined at this time. Law began from the question, "How do we organize our society to keep the gods happy?" And it needed written tradition to keep track of what worked and what didn't. Most of what was being divined at first was who "rightfully" owns land, possessions, and people-- and gambling, for the record, probably has the same roots: Let's ask the gods who should have these resources.

This is not to say that pragmatic, civil law could have emerged in the absence of religion, and I'm sure that half the architects of ancient law were thinking, "I don't really believe in this supernatural shit, but these ideas work", but it seems not to have happened that way. Modern philosophy didn't even exist until 700 BC at the earliest, by which point the ancestors and divine-kings and gods were well-established.

By the way, I don't mean to disparage religious belief outright with this summary. I'm a skeptic who generally finds organized religion silly, but I'm actually a deistic Buddhist, not an atheist or agnostic. That, however, is a discussion for another time.

The main thing here is that in good times an agricultural society was able to produce surplus. And the existence of this surplus made hierarchies possible: suddenly the society could afford to have a non-working ruling class.

Organized religion probably arose from the possibility of surplus combined with an agricultural society's need for having someone observe the seasons and predict weather.

Agreed. The facts about malnutrition and fitness are interesting, but more important is the author's point that historically 'Might makes right'.

The biggest 'mistake' of the human race is that we created surplus without any mechanism to distribute surplus for the greatest good.

It seems to me that it's quite rare that humanity addresses concerns on any scale before they actually become problems. If that's the mistake, we sure do make that mistake a lot.

For a long time people had that idea, but new findings may challenge that view. The Gobekli Tepe site, near Urfa, Turkey (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-te...) is dated to ~ 11K years ago and is thought to be the world's first temple. This pushed back the dawn of religion quite far back.

"To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies."

This view has not been accepted by all, but it had generated quite a bit of excitement and discovery.

Noting that the submitted article dates from 1987, I decided to Google around to look for commentary on or references to the article.

http://community.livejournal.com/radanthropology/2294.html

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/eichengreen/e210a_s09...

By the way, the Google searches I did reveal that this 1987 essay is often assigned reading in college classes.

After edit: seeing pg's post (same reply level as this one) reminds me of a very interesting book about pre-agricultural life, based on an extensive discussion of most of the available scholarly evidence.

The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

Guthrie is a paleozoologist, a bow-hunter, and an a visual artist, who uses his knowledge of Pleistocene times to draw a vivid picture of the life of our ancestors.

Just to clarify, 'evolution' is the process of change that takes many, many millions of years - time frames of 15,000 years are not evolution.

As Ricky Gervais once desribed, in evolutionary terms, modern man is still equviliant to a shaved chimp!

Biological evolution takes place over millions of years: actually, it's a bit faster than that and can be observed quite quickly in simpler organisms, but I agree with what you are saying. At present, cultural and technological evolution are so fast that biological evolution seems to be glacial in comparison.

I would argue that the occlusion of hunter-gatherer lifestyles by agriculture is an "evolutionary" process, even though one in the cultural rather than biological sphere (since it's unlikely that there were substantial genetic differences between the two types of people). As with biological evolution, what survives is what is most fit and not what is "best".

That sounds roughly like the "dual inheritance theory", that human societies are a product of both biological evolution and sociocultural evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory

(I don't have any strong knowledge of or opinion on the subject; seems plausible enough.)

A comprehensive scan of the human genome finds that hundreds of our genes have undergone positive natural selection during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.

http://www.livescience.com/609-hundreds-human-genes-evolving...

Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html

There are many more examples that can be found through Google.

good point - of course I absolutely believe humans (as well as every other living thing on Earth) as still evolving. And of course evolution happens all the time, with every generation evolution must be happening. And I've written genetic algorithms to find solutions to problems so I know that evolution is not intrinsically a slow process.

My point really was that evolutionary changes in these time-scales are very unlikey to significantly affect society (changing to agriculture etc).

Thanks for the response and the great links!

I wonder how long until human evolution produces humans genetically incapable of interbreeding. Wikipedia says that even some intergeneric (genus) hybrids may be fertile!

Here is some unsettling information about "humanzees" and "chumans", hypothetical intergeneric hybrids between humans and chimpanzees:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Humanzee

Also:

Hybrids between different subspecies within a species (such as between Bengal and Siberian tigers) are known as intra-specific hybrids. Hybrids between different species within the same genus (such as between lions and tigers) are sometimes known as interspecific hybrids or crosses. Hybrids between different genera (such as between sheep and goats) are known as intergeneric hybrids. Extremely rare interfamilial hybrids have been known to occur (such as the guineafowl hybrids). No interordinal (between different orders) animal hybrids are known.

Well, for any major fitness difference, evolution could happen considerably more quickly than millions of years. A 10% difference would be noticeable in only hundreds of years, and a 1% difference in thousands.

Evolution doesn't always happen slowly. To take a well-known example: The lactase persistence gene went from insignificant levels to covering the majority of Europe and northern Asia over just a few thousand years.

Evolution usually happens slowly because usually species are already well-adapted to their environment. When an environment changes to provide a significant benefit to a particular mutation, the spread of that mutation can speed up dramatically.

> time frames of 15,000 years are not evolution.

Tell that to MRSA...

Their mistake is counting years not generations...

That's not really a clarification, as it's misleading.

Every single child inherits traits from its parents with variation, and the frequency of their being passed on to another generation is subject to selection pressure. That's all evolution is. Biological evolution happens with every generation - hours in bacteria, decades with humans. And since we're reproducing asynchronously, it's happening second by second across the population.

This is important to understand. Evolution does NOT operate on scales of thousands or millions of years. It can not, because there are no reproduction-variation-selection operations working on that timescale in biology (that I know about). There may be large time spans between what look like interesting things - speciations, the advent of birds, etc. But this is just in the mind of the observer.

Consider that the bacteria that cause infectious disease are becoming resistant to the antibiotics we've had for only a few decades. We can see evolution happening in petri dishes.

Don't try to draw any technical insight from Ricky Gervais' comment. Chimps today, like all animals today, are are equally evolved.