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Comment by pkdpic | Hacker News Reader

I don't think theres one simple conclusion to this ongoing general question of pre-history vs modernity but I remember coming across the infanticide and geriatricide rates in pre-agricultural societies (not that they were / are all the same) at some point and having it complicate my thinking pretty drastically.

I believe it was in here, its a quick interesting read in any case.

http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scan...

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> The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

I'm sure the people invented agriculture didn't think of it as a mistake. It's not like they decided that they liked eating cultivated grass seeds more than wild nuts and mammoth steaks. They did so because that's what they had available.

The general argument is that if you are a proto-government/warlord/gangster, you want to encourage/coerce your subjects into agriculture as the output is easily taxed and stored. This turns out to be wildly successful for creating large hierarchical societies, which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive.

So, lobsters have undersea farms?

The people who resorted to eating cultivated grass seeds had more imminent problems to worry about before ambitions about being warlords. That occurred a few thousand years later.

> which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive

Until gunpowder, tribal societies were at least a strong as their hierarchical contemporaries. The Huns destroyed the Roman Empire and Mongols conquered China.

The Huns were not hunter gatherers. They were pastoralists that had access to metal work and other manufacturers goods from their sedentary neighbors.

Pastoralism is a logical evolution of hunting after animals became domesticated. My point is that you didn't necessarily need a large hierarchical society to fend off against one.

The Huns and Mongols absolutely did have large hierarchical societies, though. The Mongol army had a decimal system organizing forces into groups of 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 men. This is about as explicitly hierarchical as it gets.

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