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>"Many thousand years of hunting and gathering gets tedious, so as soon as humans figured out beasts of burden and basic agriculture, they put down roots, in bo
by glaberficken 8y ago
>"Many thousand years of hunting and gathering gets tedious, so as soon as humans figured out beasts of burden and basic agriculture, they put down roots, in both senses. It saved a lot of walking. It was also the start of the concept of “after work,” which history teaches us is a thing most humans strive to increase in any way possible. That is, leisure, time off, vacations and every other use of time that isn’t working, hunting, fighting, and of course sleeping."
I recently read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, where he thoroughly debunks this notion that a transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural life-style brought more leisure time. I found it compelling, but don't have the arguments at hand at the moment.
- WaxProlix 8y agoThe common wisdom that I've heard was the opposite of that: hunter-gatherer societies had a wealth of free time. It's with agriculture, permanence, and the optimization that they allow that we start to lose it. Similarly though, no real citations here.
- btilly 8y agoIf you read Guns, Germs and Steel you will find the same information, with citations of anthropological research supporting it.
- fleitz 8y agoYeah, exactly. Lets get some horses ride around and kill shit, and then we'll setup camp near where we killed the shit, and have a BBQ sounds way more fun than farming. Building dumbass fences to keep the tasty animals out of your bitter lettuce that doesn't actually produce much at this point.
- RoboTeddy 8y agoThis is supported for example by Richard B Lee's work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Borshay_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Borshay_Lee)
- CuriouslyC 8y agoThere's a hint of truth in there. Farming increased the productivity of the land such that it could support more people. Some of the new people supported by the land weren't working it, such as bureaucrats and nobles. I'm don't know if the total calories per man hour went up or down, but the distribution of those man hours definitely became less uniform. Some people worked less, while most people probably worked more.
- ulkram 8y agoYou should check out the article "The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-again... And the book it cites "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States". Few quotes to whet your appetite: > The first is that, for thousands of years, the agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers. > there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states... Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” > War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing... writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.”
- hyperpallium 8y agoThe domestication of man.