6 ms·

Because making bread is quite labor-intensive It's important to remember there is no evidence to suggest our 14,400 year-ago-ancestors had office / factory / w

Because making bread is quite labor-intensive It's important to remember there is no evidence to suggest our 14,400 year-ago-ancestors had office / factory / workshop jobs to go to for 60 hours a week. Probably very little in the way of school or universities assignments to hand in by Friday. And they likely didn't have to pick up the dry cleaning or the kids on their way home. I'm going to propose that, probably, everything the ancients did was labour intensive. Predominately due to not having invented the powered machine yet.

wavefunction 8y ago
You can gut and dress an animal quickly if you're practiced. Snares and stake traps paired with flushing animals doesn't take a lot of 'intensive labor.' We even have the ruins of catch traps in central Asia and other places that would have industrialized animal slaughter before agriculture was ever a thing. Agriculture was likely a required response to human degradation of formerly productive areas for hunter-gatherers due to over-taking of natural resources.
- civilitty 8y ago
  Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. If tribal structures got more efficient at child rearing "at scale" over time, more and more labor could be invested by the rest of the tribe into making food stuffs, tools, etc. beyond the usual options necessary for survival. This would allow them, for example, to develop food that lasts longer and makes it less risky for the hunters to go out longer - a helpful trait to survive natural variability in animal supply but one that requires free resources for experimentation and production.
  - justinator 8y ago
    > Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. Oh?
    - King-Aaron 8y ago
      > Oh? If you have any information that goes against civilitty's comment there, I'd be interested to read it. I was always under the impression that in most hunter/gatherer cultures the men were primarily involved in the hunting.
      - lucideer 8y ago
        The answer is we don't know (and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles) but there is some research pointing to both sexes being initially involved in early hunting and the division of roles emerging later (possibly with agriculture, possibly before). From a study[0][1] of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes: > In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare. From another study[2][3] on the emergence of division of labour: > We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history [...] > gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. > "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned," [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-wo... [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 [2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-humans.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-... [3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197
        King-Aaron 8y ago
        Thanks for that!
        flukus 8y ago
- yesiamyourdad 8y ago
  I promise you that if you actually hunted and trapped/caught/killed your meal for the day, you'd be way too tired to log onto Hacker News and comment.
coldtea 8y ago
>I'm going to propose that, probably, everything the ancients did was labour intensive. Predominately due to not having invented the powered machine yet. Or, inversely, as soon as they covered their food needs (which could be quite meagre) they were pretty leisurely, like many primitive tribes the ethnologists have studied.
- opportune 8y ago
  honestly you've got to wonder whether we're the primitive ones considering a lot of those tribes work less than 20 hours per week I've read that a leading theory as the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies was that agricultural societies incentivized larger populations, were able to sustain them, and that their desire for arable land led them to fight - so the transition was not as much towards qualitatively better lifestyle but towards a qualitatively stronger lifestyle. As much as I enjoy beer, I find this more compelling than the theory that people chose to pick up farming just to drink
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Well, there's always this: https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma... I think there's a balance between technological and economic advancement and what really matters (creativity, love, friendship, leisure, no stress, etc) - and we're awful at striking that balance because we let society run on automaton.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      It's a good joke, but kind of a mediocre parable. The thing is, I don't think anyone would disagree that, all else being equal, living in a small fishing village, sleeping late, etc., would be better if you were a millionaire. The question then is which parts aren't equal between the two scenarios, and which of those are more important to you. I guess it's helpful as a prompt to consider that question.
      - 8y ago

wavefunction 8y ago

You can gut and dress an animal quickly if you're practiced. Snares and stake traps paired with flushing animals doesn't take a lot of 'intensive labor.' We even have the ruins of catch traps in central Asia and other places that would have industrialized animal slaughter before agriculture was ever a thing. Agriculture was likely a required response to human degradation of formerly productive areas for hunter-gatherers due to over-taking of natural resources.

civilitty 8y ago
Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. If tribal structures got more efficient at child rearing "at scale" over time, more and more labor could be invested by the rest of the tribe into making food stuffs, tools, etc. beyond the usual options necessary for survival. This would allow them, for example, to develop food that lasts longer and makes it less risky for the hunters to go out longer - a helpful trait to survive natural variability in animal supply but one that requires free resources for experimentation and production.
- justinator 8y ago
  > Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. Oh?
  - King-Aaron 8y ago
    > Oh? If you have any information that goes against civilitty's comment there, I'd be interested to read it. I was always under the impression that in most hunter/gatherer cultures the men were primarily involved in the hunting.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      The answer is we don't know (and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles) but there is some research pointing to both sexes being initially involved in early hunting and the division of roles emerging later (possibly with agriculture, possibly before). From a study[0][1] of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes: > In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare. From another study[2][3] on the emergence of division of labour: > We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history [...] > gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. > "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned," [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-wo... [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 [2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-humans.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-... [3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197
      - King-Aaron 8y ago
        Thanks for that!
      - flukus 8y ago
yesiamyourdad 8y ago
I promise you that if you actually hunted and trapped/caught/killed your meal for the day, you'd be way too tired to log onto Hacker News and comment.

coldtea 8y ago

>I'm going to propose that, probably, everything the ancients did was labour intensive. Predominately due to not having invented the powered machine yet. Or, inversely, as soon as they covered their food needs (which could be quite meagre) they were pretty leisurely, like many primitive tribes the ethnologists have studied.

opportune 8y ago
honestly you've got to wonder whether we're the primitive ones considering a lot of those tribes work less than 20 hours per week I've read that a leading theory as the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies was that agricultural societies incentivized larger populations, were able to sustain them, and that their desire for arable land led them to fight - so the transition was not as much towards qualitatively better lifestyle but towards a qualitatively stronger lifestyle. As much as I enjoy beer, I find this more compelling than the theory that people chose to pick up farming just to drink
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, there's always this: https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma... I think there's a balance between technological and economic advancement and what really matters (creativity, love, friendship, leisure, no stress, etc) - and we're awful at striking that balance because we let society run on automaton.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    It's a good joke, but kind of a mediocre parable. The thing is, I don't think anyone would disagree that, all else being equal, living in a small fishing village, sleeping late, etc., would be better if you were a millionaire. The question then is which parts aren't equal between the two scenarios, and which of those are more important to you. I guess it's helpful as a prompt to consider that question.
    - 8y ago