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Large-scale agriculture and cooking made us even smarter. A good pot of rice and beans will net you even more energy with less work than meat. It's also less li
by sprout 16y ago
Large-scale agriculture and cooking made us even smarter. A good pot of rice and beans will net you even more energy with less work than meat. It's also less likely to spoil and give you any number of diseases.
- tokenadult 16y agoCooking preceded agriculture in the development of the ancestral line to Homo sapiens by hundreds of thousands of years.
- sprout 16y agoLarge-scale cooking though is a more modern innovation. Especially canning.
- chunkbot 16y agoActually, diseases are largely a result of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers were much healthier (and about 6 inches taller) than their farmer successors.
- dejb 16y ago> Hunter-gatherers were much healthier But probably not smarter in the way we think of intelligence. They didn't develop civilisation, agriculturalists did.
- rubashov 16y ago> They didn't develop civilisation They didn't make very many durable stone structures. That's about all we know. The complexity and quality of their societies may have generally exceeded ours. We do know they had transcontinental trading routes and fairly advanced astronomy, in Europe at least.
- dmm 16y agoSo your hypothesis is that what differentiates agriculturists and hunter-gatherers is intelligence? That's an extremely strong statement. Do you have any proof of significant differences in human intelligence amongst populations? Basically I'm saying you're full of shit. You should read the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel". It was written by someone who took the time to research the issue and develop some convincing arguments.
- TheSOB88 16y agoHow about share some of the more convincing of those arguments?
- dmm 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error "In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors." Look for it and you see it everywhere.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 16y agoCan you explain how the Mongols fit with this statement?
- chunkbot 16y agoThat's a convincing argument that higher population density improves collective intelligence, but says less about the individual.
- m_eiman 16y agoI'd guess that the higher population density in a farming civilization is more to blame for diseases than the food they're eating.
- chunkbot 16y agoI believe the close proximity of animals and people (for the first time in history) is what was responsible for the new diseases. Of course, the higher human population density means increased likelihood of contagion.
- kragen 16y agoFor most domestic animals, that is a possibility, but not for dogs. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Origin_of_the... "Archaeology has placed the earliest known domestication at potentially 30,000 BC, and with certainty at 7,000 BC....Perhaps the earliest clear evidence for this domestication is the first dog found buried together with human [sic] from 12,000 years ago in Israel." And dogs came with many groups of hunter-gatherers in their intercontinental migrations.
- scott_s 16y agoThere's also the transfer of diseases from some of the animals we depend on.
- gahahaha 16y agoHave a look at "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" by Jared Diamond http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf http://www.environnement.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/m... Agriculture was (is?) a disaster for our health. Edit: I noticed that you spoke about increased energy intake and brain size, not just health.
- rubashov 16y ago> increased energy intake and brain size Human brains have shrunk since the establishment of agriculture. Brains are smaller now than during even the middle ages.
- sprout 16y agoI was speaking primarily about modern day and the future, not antiquity. Though that paper makes some difficult-to-verify claims. It might be less a result of the diet's intrinsic problems and more a result of evolutionary pressures favoring dumber people, because work is much easier, so investing in intellect wastes energy that could be spent on other things.
- cgs 16y agoFor more on the impact of agriculture, check out "Sex at Dawn." Fascinating stuff.
- slowpoison 16y agoThanks for sharing that. What strikes me is that even given all that Jared argues, it's somewhat preposterous to call agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Agriculture paved the road the specialization, and hence the progress, diversity, safety and richness we see in our lives today. We can argue over whether these are virtues or not, but we can't turn our heads from the Darwinian view of life. Living as a nomad, with everybody toiling just to feed the mouths doesn't scale. And, Natural Selection says any group that is able to specialize even a little bit gains strategic advantages over non-specialized groups. No wonder hunters and gatherers were driven to extinction. Is Jared kidding us when he says that social echelons are bad? I guess, he thinks our hunter-gatherer ancestors treated everybody equally and with respect. I guess 30 seconds in front of Discovery Channel would tell him how apes live - alpha males "ruling" over females, and killing other males over food and right to reproduce. I'm quite amazed at his ability to scorn at social echelons and other malices brought upon us by agriculture while giving a silent nod to killing for food in the same breath!