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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

If it's anything like Africa has been over the past 100 years, agricultural tribes and hunter-gatherer tribes simply don't mix.

Agricultural tribes find the hunter-gatherer tribes to be dirty, lazy, uncivilized -- not a lot of sexual attraction going on. And the hunter-gatherer tribes think the agricultural people work way too hard for nothing, with their priorities all wrong, and don't want anything to do with the lifestyle.

At least that's how it was all explained to me during time I spent in Kenya and Tanzania, where I spent a couple weeks with a hunter-gatherer tribe.

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I'm also reminded of the dynamic between the Native Americans and the European colonist-settlers, in particular Scott's review [1] of the book Empire of the Summer Moon [2].

    And throughout the book's description of these events, 
    there was one constant:

    All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it
    and refused to go back to  white civilization. All the 
    Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did 
    everything they could to go back to their previous tribal 
    lives.

[1] http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/...

"And the hunter-gatherer tribes think the agricultural people"

The teeth, the teeth! Look at meat eater teeth compared to stone ground grain eaters teeth. Also this is a very old story which makes it unusual that they carefully avoided relative health issues such that grain eaters shrink in height and strength compared to the H-G eaters. So you've got Ms Hunter looking at a short little troll of a grain eater with rotting teeth vs studly McMeat eater... And in the other direction the ladies have little patience with the HGs because their diet gets a little sparse in the winter and they don't want to watch (more of) their kids starve.

HGs: Less of them per sq mile, taller, stronger, healthier, other than in winter when the die off, great teeth.

Farmers: More of them per sq mile, shorter, weaker, less healthy, starve less often, awful rotting teeth.

It must have been an interesting dating/social dynamic.

Farmers were chronically underfed to modern times. They never had enough to eat for thousands of years.

Yes; it's indeed important to note that the shift to agriculture was a quantity/quality tradeoff. Farming could sustain more people than hunting and gathering, so by pure math, it won over in the end, but the average quality of life decreased for thousands of years, until the industrial revolution.

There's a lot of interesting history around this topic. Anyone have recommendations?

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a good soft introduction to the topic, told in parable form. You probably want a proper history book covering the Neolithic Revolution.

So was everyone though.

The big difference demographically between hunter-gatherers and farmers is that farmers could store enough of their food to eke out a harsh winter or even a lean harvest in a following year. It would be tough but it would let more of them and especially their children survive. Hunter-gatherers had a higher quality of living on average but during the winter their kids died more often.

This makes a lot of sense. None of us can comprehend radically different lifestyles. Regardless of race, a very different lifestyle is almost like a different culture.

Nowadays Muslims and Christians don't 'interbreed' - and they have much more in common than stone age hunters and farmers.

My Catholic wife and I are planning on being a counterexample to that argument :)

Nonsense. My wife and I are an example...

If it's anything like Africa has been over the past 100 years, agricultural tribes and hunter-gatherer tribes simply don't mix.

You are missing the point IMO. Back then, it wasn't like today, where you check their LinkedIn profile, FB pictures, date them a few dozen times and then decide.

Food, shelter and protection were even more important than now. And 2000 years is a long time not to mix, imagine what the world goes through in 2 millennia.

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