4 ms·

Interesting thoughts. Agriculture (even horticulture or herding) vs. immediate-return hunter/gathering of course isn't a single invention but a complex co-opera

by dualogy 10y ago

Interesting thoughts. Agriculture (even horticulture or herding) vs. immediate-return hunter/gathering of course isn't a single invention but a complex co-operative enterprise necessitating quite an array of disruptive changes in lifestyle and establishment of social structures such as hierarchy, property, trades (constructing, protecting grain storage caches etc), marriage etc. Anything so complex, you tend to figure out various optimizations (from tooling to timing and beyond) from painful long-term on-the-ground experience. I'd argue "the knowledge of farming" is really that, rather than the simple notion that planting seeds may (or may not) grow new plants. That ancients "kinda sorta knew" that "planting" (or discarding) a plant's seeds someplace may yield a new growth there, I don't doubt. Of course actual farming needs to yield a maximum of kcals per acre/crop, given the massive amount of labour investment and social disruption required. To maximize this yield over the generations under the given local conditions (weather, soil, crops), isn't that the actual "knowledge of farming", only obtainable by doing the actual toil over the decades and indeed centuries? And when they encountered a new crop, a new soil or a new clime, knowledge for maximizing ROI had to be gained from scratch.

Retric 10y ago
Farming is only 'hard' in a competitive landscape. If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms and you need to subsist completely off of farming that it's risky. Consider, vermin are going to take more of the harvest the longer it's around. But, if your only trying to cover winter months then even fairly small harvests can make a huge benefit which dramatically reduces effort.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)
  - Retric 10y ago
    It's about risk not just calorie production as you need a huge surplus to cover poor crop years. After that you need to support non farmers (leaders, warriors, priests). If we want to think about early farming something like a medieval peasant that only supported themselves, and had a surplus of high quality land to work with they might have only needed to work 1/5th or less as much. Don't forget farmers have something to steal in both land and food. A hunter gather only has some tools not much food and are nomadic anyway. But, a village with 1+ years worth of food for 30+ people is a huge and stationary target. PS: I suspect the tipping point was selective breading producing high yield plant strains which kept lowering the effort of farming. Until a population boom prevented anything else from being viable.
chiph 10y ago
Farming also had a hand in the invention of math & geometry. You want to know things like "How much land do I have?" and "How much seed do I need to set aside for next season based on that size?" And also "Do I have more or less land than Ahmed next door?" Once taxes got invented, it became "Based on the size of your field and crop, you owe 8 talents."
mtrimpe 10y ago
If you ever interested in this sort of stuff then the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" [1] explores all these trade-offs in great depth (and places them in the larger context of the development of human societies in general.) [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...
- dualogy 10y ago
  Yeah the entire 'trilogy' of his (this was the first part so to speak) on this matter is brilliant.
  - mtrimpe 10y ago
    Now I'm curious what the 'other two' are...
- Phlarp 10y ago
  I thought academic anthropology was moving away from ideas like Diamond's "Geographic determinism" and towards a more "Historical particularism" view of civilizations progress?
  - woodandsteel 10y ago
    G,G,S is focused on why civilizations arise in the first place, and also why it is that Eurasian civilizations became so more powerful over the long term than any others, and for that he has a good explanation. He agrees there are many other factors involved in particular cases.

by dualogy 10y ago

Retric 10y ago

Farming is only 'hard' in a competitive landscape. If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms and you need to subsist completely off of farming that it's risky. Consider, vermin are going to take more of the harvest the longer it's around. But, if your only trying to cover winter months then even fairly small harvests can make a huge benefit which dramatically reduces effort.

dualogy 10y ago
> If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)
- Retric 10y ago
  It's about risk not just calorie production as you need a huge surplus to cover poor crop years. After that you need to support non farmers (leaders, warriors, priests). If we want to think about early farming something like a medieval peasant that only supported themselves, and had a surplus of high quality land to work with they might have only needed to work 1/5th or less as much. Don't forget farmers have something to steal in both land and food. A hunter gather only has some tools not much food and are nomadic anyway. But, a village with 1+ years worth of food for 30+ people is a huge and stationary target. PS: I suspect the tipping point was selective breading producing high yield plant strains which kept lowering the effort of farming. Until a population boom prevented anything else from being viable.

chiph 10y ago

Farming also had a hand in the invention of math & geometry. You want to know things like "How much land do I have?" and "How much seed do I need to set aside for next season based on that size?" And also "Do I have more or less land than Ahmed next door?" Once taxes got invented, it became "Based on the size of your field and crop, you owe 8 talents."

mtrimpe 10y ago

If you ever interested in this sort of stuff then the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" [1] explores all these trade-offs in great depth (and places them in the larger context of the development of human societies in general.) [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...

dualogy 10y ago
Yeah the entire 'trilogy' of his (this was the first part so to speak) on this matter is brilliant.
- mtrimpe 10y ago
  Now I'm curious what the 'other two' are...
Phlarp 10y ago
I thought academic anthropology was moving away from ideas like Diamond's "Geographic determinism" and towards a more "Historical particularism" view of civilizations progress?
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  G,G,S is focused on why civilizations arise in the first place, and also why it is that Eurasian civilizations became so more powerful over the long term than any others, and for that he has a good explanation. He agrees there are many other factors involved in particular cases.