3 ms·

Group size was defined by food sources. You can't feed a large group by hunting-gathering - the food will be too far. Groups can convene when there's plenty of

Group size was defined by food sources. You can't feed a large group by hunting-gathering - the food will be too far. Groups can convene when there's plenty of food but have to disperse again.

netcan 6y ago
Perhaps. I mean, it is certainly true that everyone needs to eat. OTOH, thinking of these as a chain of events is what I am calling the orthodox view. IE, new food sources (maybe because new food production/gathering methods) lead to larger groups and other complexity. Gobekli Tepeh, for example, gives us a somewhat reversed picture. Preceding grain cultivation and other neolithic elements, we find a major cultural site. Acres of statuary, stone structures. But if we are going to narrate a chain of events... it can't be agriculture first, then large group sizes, then more. Complex religious, politics or whatever the Gobeklin Tepens were up to preceded agriculture. Their agriculture grew from a culture that already had large group sizes, and the religious/political/cultural machinery that comes with it. Maybe pre existing group sizes demonstrated by the scale of the site created the demand for agriculture. Maybe large group sizes are necessary for discoveries like grain cultivation methods to spread.
- akiselev 6y ago
  I think you're reading way too much into Gobekli Tepeh and making the same mistakes we made a hundred years ago thinking that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The Gobekli Tepeh excavation was started in the mid-90s and it's still on-going. How its discoveries fit into the rest of anthropology is an open question and something as simple as a repeat analysis of the agricultural artifact dating could reverse the timeline.
  - netcan 6y ago
    I think it runs the other way. There is an orthodox view of the chain of events. We can call it a theory, but it is more suggestive than predictive. Still, its only the strongest theory as long as it is most parsimonious with existing evidence, artifacts mostly. Artifacts are sparse, but it isn't totally absent. Maybe I'm over extrapolating, but not using lack of evidence as evidence. Lack of evidence as evidence comes into play more in the the orthodox view before. It extrapolates a timeline of the fertile crescent. First comes semi-nomadic agriculture,^ then permanent villages, then towns, then "civilised" religion/politics/etc. The timeline assumes an absence of institutions like religion or politics from the absence of public buildings or monuments. Gobekli Tepeh is one hell of a public building, monument or whatever it is. Gobekli Tepeh is firmly dated before any known agricultural, villages, towns, etc. The agriculture date is especially strong, because archeology agrees with genetics. It is some sort of big political/religious/cultural thing. Using the same logic as the theory I'm challenging, we need to reorder things... or maybe conclude we have no idea. That said, it seems like (most scholars agree) that the site was made by non agricultural people. IMO, even concepts like settled/nomadic may need rethinking. How nomadic? What kind of nomadic. The range of possibilities is much bigger than village life. It's possible that earlier evidence for agriculture will be discovered, which would mean ice age agriculture... possibly of species that are no longer cultivated. Gobekli Tepeh itself will definitely turn up more dates, very possibly older too.
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      In my opinion, Gobekli Tepe isn't interesting because it's suggestive of pre-agricultural sedentary societies. We know those existed a long, long time before recognizable domestication occurred and probably even before the LGM. Gobekli Tepe is interesting because it's clearly monumental a heck of a lot earlier than the traditional narrative thought was possible. Classically, archaeologists argued that monuments were a thing of "big, complex hierarchial societies with full agriculture". The modern counterexamples were dismissed as unrepresentative, anomalous, or "cultural transmission" (i.e. copy-cats). Newer generation folks, myself included, think it's a dumb dismissal and having sites to corroborate that is nice. Unrelated, but there are species that were formerly cultivated by early foragers/farmers that got dropped over time. Rambling vetch is one example. There are some large preservation biases in what we're able to see of early sites. Grasses preserve best, so we've focused a bit too much on them relative to what was likely consumed.
      - netcan 6y ago
        I think we agree. I'm not even sure hobekki tepeh is evidence of sedentary society. It is evidence of what it is, primarily: the existence of a large monument/statuary site. I even think "sedentary" becomes an less interesting characteristic, largely because of GT. If something like GT existed before agricultural economies, then sedentary is not a "necessary condition" for the development of monumental culture. Sedentary agriculturalism is interesting because it later became prominent, but not as a milestone. Overall, my anateur interpretation of the site is "culture comes first." This is at odds with both the Marxist & Victorian views that put "material conditions" first. My other speculative take is that invention is constant. People probably "invented agricultural" many times. They may have even practiced it in significant ways. The spread an development of ideas is the limiting factor, not invention. GT, as place of gathering or some other custom that involved large groups, makes a lot more sense as a contributor to what happened next in Anatolian history GT isn't just early, it's adjacent to and immediately precedes one of the earliest known hotspots for neolithic human activity. I don't think that's a coincidence.
phaemon 6y ago
That didn't seem to stop Genghis Khan uniting the nomadic Mongol tribes?
- jojobas 6y ago
  They were pastoralists long before that.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    Oh right. I'd always thought that the idea of agriculture leading to civilisation, it referred exclusively to farms and fields of crops. If you include pastoralists, was there really any time when most humans were hunter-gatherer?
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      Yes, about the same 98% of human history that we also weren't farmers. Domestication of animals and crops in the near east occurred very close in time.
    - netcan 6y ago
      It does generally exclude pastoralists. In fact, it pretty much ignores and overlooks them. There was definitely a time when most humans were hunter-gatherers, including or excluding pastoralists. The earliest evidence fore very much of either is only about 8000 years old. Hunting and gathering was probably the primary mode of food production while the pyramids were being built... even in areas near egypt. There is a very big BUT though. "Hunting and gathering" is an extremely big universe of possible lifestyles. Agriculture is a lot more monolithic.
jcranmer 6y ago
The Precolumbian Pacific Northwest would take issue with that statement. There is also an argument that Peruvian urban development (in the Norte Chico area) predates the domestication of a primary grain as a food crop.

Group size was defined by food sources. You can't feed a large group by hunting-gathering - the food will be too far. Groups can convene when there's plenty of food but have to disperse again.

netcan 6y ago

Perhaps. I mean, it is certainly true that everyone needs to eat. OTOH, thinking of these as a chain of events is what I am calling the orthodox view. IE, new food sources (maybe because new food production/gathering methods) lead to larger groups and other complexity. Gobekli Tepeh, for example, gives us a somewhat reversed picture. Preceding grain cultivation and other neolithic elements, we find a major cultural site. Acres of statuary, stone structures. But if we are going to narrate a chain of events... it can't be agriculture first, then large group sizes, then more. Complex religious, politics or whatever the Gobeklin Tepens were up to preceded agriculture. Their agriculture grew from a culture that already had large group sizes, and the religious/political/cultural machinery that comes with it. Maybe pre existing group sizes demonstrated by the scale of the site created the demand for agriculture. Maybe large group sizes are necessary for discoveries like grain cultivation methods to spread.

akiselev 6y ago
I think you're reading way too much into Gobekli Tepeh and making the same mistakes we made a hundred years ago thinking that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. The Gobekli Tepeh excavation was started in the mid-90s and it's still on-going. How its discoveries fit into the rest of anthropology is an open question and something as simple as a repeat analysis of the agricultural artifact dating could reverse the timeline.
- netcan 6y ago
  I think it runs the other way. There is an orthodox view of the chain of events. We can call it a theory, but it is more suggestive than predictive. Still, its only the strongest theory as long as it is most parsimonious with existing evidence, artifacts mostly. Artifacts are sparse, but it isn't totally absent. Maybe I'm over extrapolating, but not using lack of evidence as evidence. Lack of evidence as evidence comes into play more in the the orthodox view before. It extrapolates a timeline of the fertile crescent. First comes semi-nomadic agriculture,^ then permanent villages, then towns, then "civilised" religion/politics/etc. The timeline assumes an absence of institutions like religion or politics from the absence of public buildings or monuments. Gobekli Tepeh is one hell of a public building, monument or whatever it is. Gobekli Tepeh is firmly dated before any known agricultural, villages, towns, etc. The agriculture date is especially strong, because archeology agrees with genetics. It is some sort of big political/religious/cultural thing. Using the same logic as the theory I'm challenging, we need to reorder things... or maybe conclude we have no idea. That said, it seems like (most scholars agree) that the site was made by non agricultural people. IMO, even concepts like settled/nomadic may need rethinking. How nomadic? What kind of nomadic. The range of possibilities is much bigger than village life. It's possible that earlier evidence for agriculture will be discovered, which would mean ice age agriculture... possibly of species that are no longer cultivated. Gobekli Tepeh itself will definitely turn up more dates, very possibly older too.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    In my opinion, Gobekli Tepe isn't interesting because it's suggestive of pre-agricultural sedentary societies. We know those existed a long, long time before recognizable domestication occurred and probably even before the LGM. Gobekli Tepe is interesting because it's clearly monumental a heck of a lot earlier than the traditional narrative thought was possible. Classically, archaeologists argued that monuments were a thing of "big, complex hierarchial societies with full agriculture". The modern counterexamples were dismissed as unrepresentative, anomalous, or "cultural transmission" (i.e. copy-cats). Newer generation folks, myself included, think it's a dumb dismissal and having sites to corroborate that is nice. Unrelated, but there are species that were formerly cultivated by early foragers/farmers that got dropped over time. Rambling vetch is one example. There are some large preservation biases in what we're able to see of early sites. Grasses preserve best, so we've focused a bit too much on them relative to what was likely consumed.
    - netcan 6y ago
      I think we agree. I'm not even sure hobekki tepeh is evidence of sedentary society. It is evidence of what it is, primarily: the existence of a large monument/statuary site. I even think "sedentary" becomes an less interesting characteristic, largely because of GT. If something like GT existed before agricultural economies, then sedentary is not a "necessary condition" for the development of monumental culture. Sedentary agriculturalism is interesting because it later became prominent, but not as a milestone. Overall, my anateur interpretation of the site is "culture comes first." This is at odds with both the Marxist & Victorian views that put "material conditions" first. My other speculative take is that invention is constant. People probably "invented agricultural" many times. They may have even practiced it in significant ways. The spread an development of ideas is the limiting factor, not invention. GT, as place of gathering or some other custom that involved large groups, makes a lot more sense as a contributor to what happened next in Anatolian history GT isn't just early, it's adjacent to and immediately precedes one of the earliest known hotspots for neolithic human activity. I don't think that's a coincidence.

phaemon 6y ago

That didn't seem to stop Genghis Khan uniting the nomadic Mongol tribes?

jojobas 6y ago
They were pastoralists long before that.
- phaemon 6y ago
  Oh right. I'd always thought that the idea of agriculture leading to civilisation, it referred exclusively to farms and fields of crops. If you include pastoralists, was there really any time when most humans were hunter-gatherer?
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Yes, about the same 98% of human history that we also weren't farmers. Domestication of animals and crops in the near east occurred very close in time.
  - netcan 6y ago
    It does generally exclude pastoralists. In fact, it pretty much ignores and overlooks them. There was definitely a time when most humans were hunter-gatherers, including or excluding pastoralists. The earliest evidence fore very much of either is only about 8000 years old. Hunting and gathering was probably the primary mode of food production while the pyramids were being built... even in areas near egypt. There is a very big BUT though. "Hunting and gathering" is an extremely big universe of possible lifestyles. Agriculture is a lot more monolithic.

jcranmer 6y ago

The Precolumbian Pacific Northwest would take issue with that statement. There is also an argument that Peruvian urban development (in the Norte Chico area) predates the domestication of a primary grain as a food crop.