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Well, if you're starving, you'll try anything. If you survive, hey, that worked, let's do it again! People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced w

Well, if you're starving, you'll try anything. If you survive, hey, that worked, let's do it again! People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced with death, you'll try anything.

jopsen 8y ago
And we keep forgetting just how common starving to death must have been in prehistoric tribes..
- tamizhar 8y ago
  Is that true or an assumption we make? How do we know for sure that this was the case for prehistoric tribes? I mean, most habitats aside from the desert are teeming with edible items.
  - fifnir 8y ago
    There was this documentary about a first contact with an amazon tribe. I remember an interview with the (very young) leader of the tribe who was talking about how life was in the jungle and iirc he described it as very miserable, they wouldn't eat for days at a time, bugs everywhere ++ it's the documentary talked about here, I highly recommend it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-makes-first-contact-with-outside-world https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-m...
    - kaycebasques 8y ago
      Yes, but you have to put this in historical context. These modern tribes have been pushed into corners by the industrialized nations all around them. Modern hunter-gatherers do not necessarily equal ancient ones.
      - fifnir 8y ago
        Good point!
  - pharrington 8y ago
    Most habitats indeed are full of living organisms compatible with human dietary needs. The problem is, sometimes you're so good at killing that you just kill all the food before the food has time to reproduce itself. Or maybe it just doesn't rain for two months. Or myriad other contingencies that make nomadic life precarious. edit: and as bad_user pointed out, thats a huuuge reason itself to even be nomadic
    - weberc2 8y ago
      For example, you become injured or sick and all of a sudden you can't catch those edible items.
      - kaycebasques 8y ago
        If it was a temporary injury, you could rely on your family.
    - kaycebasques 8y ago
      Our ancestors were way more in tune with their surroundings, and knew how to moderate their consumption so as not to decimate their food supply populations. We have evidence from many Native American tribes. Just because modern, industrialized humans are out of touch with natural limits doesn’t mean we were always like this.
      - robbomacrae 8y ago
        You might be interested in Jared Diamonds "Collapse". He's aggregated a lot of evidence of many societies that over populated, over consumed and died out. Not all did though and your technically right in that the survivors (our ancestors) avoided this fate. I just think we should be weary about any claims that peoples of the past were any smarter about their self preservation than we are..
        kaycebasques 8y ago
        Fair enough, I'll check out the book. I'm not trying to argue that ancestors were smarter. For our own political purposes, it's probably best if the narrative becomes "all of our ancestor societies binged themselves to collapse, so we need to be very careful about our own habits" although it's not exactly true that all groups did that.
- atlantic 8y ago
  Why? Animals don't usually starve to death. Nor do humans. Any generation has an established means of extracting what it needs from its environment. Starvation is an exceptional occurrence.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    If the tribe gets too big, it can quickly deplete the resources in the area, especially when helped by natural phenomena like drought. N.B. animals have evolved in harmony with their environment. In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants. If there are too many herbivores in an area and without natural enemies, that can quickly turn the environment to a deserted land. There are actually stories around like how introducing wolves in the Yellow Stone national park has saved its rivers. Humans on the other hand are too adaptable for the environment. We can live in any environment and without natural enemies to keep our population in check, nature’s laws don’t apply to us. So could we deplete our resources 15,000 years ago? Hell yeah. In fact that’s the number one reason for the migrations of early humans between continents.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Preditors prey relationships are far from perfect. What's missed is locally things can get out of whack, but both preditors and prey move around. Further the vast majority of species have died out, and that trend shows no sign of stopping.
    - pharke 8y ago
      >In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants. This is just flat out wrong. Both predator and prey animals starve to death all the time, often due to the impact they have on their environment but also due to a myriad other natural events. It's known as the predator-prey cycle and is a series of population booms and busts caused by over consumption and over population. Here's a video that gives a very basic explanation. https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-ecology/hs-ecological-relationships/v/predator-prey-cycle https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-e...
- jeffal 8y ago
  We forget how common starving to death was before very modern times.
- kaycebasques 8y ago
  I question this idea. It seems like “common wisdom” that hunter-gatherers had “nasty, brutish, and short” lives but the author of Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind argues that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were the “original affluent society.” They probably spent much less overall time on food than our agricultural ancestors. The H-Fs would spend 4-6 hours foraging, trapping, or hunting, and then have the rest of the day to do other stuff. They had a diverse food supply, meaning they probably got more nutrients. Agriculturists, on the other hand, labored all day doing work that our bodies weren’t evolved for. They depended on a single crop. If anything went wrong with that crop, famine for many people was certain. And since they had less food diversity, they were comparatively malnourished.
  - tyu100 8y ago
    Stephen Pinker often talks about life in present day Papau New Guinea where tribal societies exist that are likely very similar to those that existed in all hunter-gatherer societies. Life mostly sucks and if you meet someone in a different tribe you spend most of your time deciding whether or not to kill that person.
    - kaycebasques 8y ago
      Yuval Harari [1] argues that the violence in New Guinea is an example of a "simple agricultural society with no political framework beyond village and tribe." In other words, yes, New Guinea is violent, but it doesn't represent a hunter-forager society. [1]: Sapiens, p. 82

Well, if you're starving, you'll try anything. If you survive, hey, that worked, let's do it again! People seem to lose sight of that fact: when you're faced with death, you'll try anything.

jopsen 8y ago

And we keep forgetting just how common starving to death must have been in prehistoric tribes..

tamizhar 8y ago
Is that true or an assumption we make? How do we know for sure that this was the case for prehistoric tribes? I mean, most habitats aside from the desert are teeming with edible items.
- fifnir 8y ago
  There was this documentary about a first contact with an amazon tribe. I remember an interview with the (very young) leader of the tribe who was talking about how life was in the jungle and iirc he described it as very miserable, they wouldn't eat for days at a time, bugs everywhere ++ it's the documentary talked about here, I highly recommend it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-makes-first-contact-with-outside-world https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/01/amazon-tribe-m...
  - kaycebasques 8y ago
    Yes, but you have to put this in historical context. These modern tribes have been pushed into corners by the industrialized nations all around them. Modern hunter-gatherers do not necessarily equal ancient ones.
    - fifnir 8y ago
      Good point!
- pharrington 8y ago
  Most habitats indeed are full of living organisms compatible with human dietary needs. The problem is, sometimes you're so good at killing that you just kill all the food before the food has time to reproduce itself. Or maybe it just doesn't rain for two months. Or myriad other contingencies that make nomadic life precarious. edit: and as bad_user pointed out, thats a huuuge reason itself to even be nomadic
  - weberc2 8y ago
    For example, you become injured or sick and all of a sudden you can't catch those edible items.
    - kaycebasques 8y ago
      If it was a temporary injury, you could rely on your family.
  - kaycebasques 8y ago
    Our ancestors were way more in tune with their surroundings, and knew how to moderate their consumption so as not to decimate their food supply populations. We have evidence from many Native American tribes. Just because modern, industrialized humans are out of touch with natural limits doesn’t mean we were always like this.
    - robbomacrae 8y ago
      You might be interested in Jared Diamonds "Collapse". He's aggregated a lot of evidence of many societies that over populated, over consumed and died out. Not all did though and your technically right in that the survivors (our ancestors) avoided this fate. I just think we should be weary about any claims that peoples of the past were any smarter about their self preservation than we are..
      - kaycebasques 8y ago
        Fair enough, I'll check out the book. I'm not trying to argue that ancestors were smarter. For our own political purposes, it's probably best if the narrative becomes "all of our ancestor societies binged themselves to collapse, so we need to be very careful about our own habits" although it's not exactly true that all groups did that.
atlantic 8y ago
Why? Animals don't usually starve to death. Nor do humans. Any generation has an established means of extracting what it needs from its environment. Starvation is an exceptional occurrence.
- bad_user 8y ago
  If the tribe gets too big, it can quickly deplete the resources in the area, especially when helped by natural phenomena like drought. N.B. animals have evolved in harmony with their environment. In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants. If there are too many herbivores in an area and without natural enemies, that can quickly turn the environment to a deserted land. There are actually stories around like how introducing wolves in the Yellow Stone national park has saved its rivers. Humans on the other hand are too adaptable for the environment. We can live in any environment and without natural enemies to keep our population in check, nature’s laws don’t apply to us. So could we deplete our resources 15,000 years ago? Hell yeah. In fact that’s the number one reason for the migrations of early humans between continents.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Preditors prey relationships are far from perfect. What's missed is locally things can get out of whack, but both preditors and prey move around. Further the vast majority of species have died out, and that trend shows no sign of stopping.
  - pharke 8y ago
    >In general you get the perfect ratio of predators to herbivores to plants. This is just flat out wrong. Both predator and prey animals starve to death all the time, often due to the impact they have on their environment but also due to a myriad other natural events. It's known as the predator-prey cycle and is a series of population booms and busts caused by over consumption and over population. Here's a video that gives a very basic explanation. https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-ecology/hs-ecological-relationships/v/predator-prey-cycle https://www.khanacademy.org/science/high-school-biology/hs-e...
jeffal 8y ago
We forget how common starving to death was before very modern times.
kaycebasques 8y ago
I question this idea. It seems like “common wisdom” that hunter-gatherers had “nasty, brutish, and short” lives but the author of Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind argues that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were the “original affluent society.” They probably spent much less overall time on food than our agricultural ancestors. The H-Fs would spend 4-6 hours foraging, trapping, or hunting, and then have the rest of the day to do other stuff. They had a diverse food supply, meaning they probably got more nutrients. Agriculturists, on the other hand, labored all day doing work that our bodies weren’t evolved for. They depended on a single crop. If anything went wrong with that crop, famine for many people was certain. And since they had less food diversity, they were comparatively malnourished.
- tyu100 8y ago
  Stephen Pinker often talks about life in present day Papau New Guinea where tribal societies exist that are likely very similar to those that existed in all hunter-gatherer societies. Life mostly sucks and if you meet someone in a different tribe you spend most of your time deciding whether or not to kill that person.
  - kaycebasques 8y ago
    Yuval Harari [1] argues that the violence in New Guinea is an example of a "simple agricultural society with no political framework beyond village and tribe." In other words, yes, New Guinea is violent, but it doesn't represent a hunter-forager society. [1]: Sapiens, p. 82