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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

It's discussions like these that make romanticizing our non-agrarian ancestors so easy.

Before the agricultural and industrial revolutions and our correct system of highly specialized labor, it feels as though everyone just hung out together, having a good time, and doing what was needed to feed the tribe. Minus the disease and war, of course.

There wasn't this need for an existential discussion about this job or that job, or whether you're lifestyle was morally justified.

There weren't power structures that existed on a scale larger than a single community, invisibly guiding everyone's lives in ways they couldn't control.

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People also ran out of food a lot.

One theory about the Jacob and Esau story is that it's about a hunter gatherer (Esau) surrendering political power to a farmer (Jacob) because the farmer has much more reliable access to protein than the hunter, meaning that sooner or later, he can gain the upper hand in a negotiation with someone who's otherwise starving.

You might not ascribe value to this type of biblical 'economic history'. But the theory has explanatory power - if it wasn't for food shortages, why would our ancestors have given up 'hanging out together and having a good time' to embrace the toil of hoeing and herding?

> People also ran out of food a lot.

This statement is subject to inverse survivor bias, gatherers and pastoral societies tended to not run out, they tended to move instead. Agriculture based early societies tended to run out or get decimated by plagues, thus leaving concentrated evidence of their passing.

However due to the one way early ones are tracked by looking at stable settlements, the evidence is stacked against the nomadic ones. While what they often had is meeting places rather than residences. What we find is megaliths, but not the settled cities to support their building.

If you move and properly do not leave much behind, there will be no evidence left.m, especially after centuries, sometimes even years.

> There weren't power structures that existed on a scale larger than a single community, invisibly guiding everyone's lives in ways they couldn't control.

Eurocentric and thus wrong.

There were multiple societies that has structures of federation and collective government. It's just Europe that did not at the time.

Go farther back.

Eventually you're going to find nothing but lots of loose collections of a hundred to a few thousand people.

    Eurocentric and thus wrong.

I'm not sure why you're saying this. It's a similar story in most prehistoric societies, from Polynesia, to North America, to Europe.

In the romantic, non-agrarian era, People very regularly bonked each other with clubs over the head - esp those of a different community.

> Minus the disease and war, of course.

I doubt they even considered it war - merely the price of living.

People do this today - all over the world, only with missiles and automatic rifles.

When you look at the percentage of people involved in it and people who die to it, we're actually better off than pretty much ever before, even accounting for our vastly improved and devastating weaponry, and even when you look at massive conflicts like WW1 and WW2.

Thing is, a pre-agrarian society means hunters/gatherers, and for that to work out, you need quite a lot of land to provide for a single person (hence why those societies have such low population density). Thus, warfare in that era is all about directly reducing the number of people competing with you for those precious resources, either by killing them or by driving them off the land. And so pretty much all males are involved in it and regular mortality rates from constantly ongoing warfare can reach as high as 20%. Furthermore, warfare itself is explicitly genocidal in nature, e.g. raids of enemy villages, ideally while defenders are away so that you can slaughter as many as possible.

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