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Is it stable though? What do they do when the hunting grounds disappear? Migrate to nowhere? Curse the gods and die out? Agriculture was born out of need.
by AstralStorm 7y ago
Is it stable though? What do they do when the hunting grounds disappear? Migrate to nowhere? Curse the gods and die out?
Agriculture was born out of need.
- carapace 7y agoHave you seen the movie? It's really good. > Is it stable though? For at least 42,000 years, based on the stability of their tools. IANAAnthropologist. > What do they do when the hunting grounds disappear? Migrate to nowhere? Curse the gods and die out? They live in very small and widely dispersed groups, they may go years between meeting other family groups (if I recall correctly. Seriously, the movie is a treat, don't take my word for it, see for yourself.) The result is that they live within the carrying capacity of their "range", so there may be lean years but actually starving to death is rare. Again, I am not an anthropologist, and most of what I know is from that one movie. But, obviously, they don't die out, as they are still here 42,000 years later (from the day someone left those tools at that site.) > Agriculture was born out of need. We don't know why humans started agriculture. We do know that it is about the dumbest thing you can do with land. Nowadays we have science, specifically ecology, that shows the way to a much better mode of civilization using applied ecology ("Permaculture" is one prominent school of thought, founded by an ecologist.) (It's also fun and easy and solves a lot of other problems, search for Geoff Lawton "Greening the Desert".)
- AstralStorm 7y agoYou mean mass agriculture. Groves have existed much longer than that. As did fishing. And yes, ancient tribes starved, including to death. Everything breaks when there's too many people in any given area. Hunting and gathering only worked due to very low populations in any given area.