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It's coming into sharper focus that pre-historic humans had almost the exact same genetic variability as humans do today. The difference was in the environment

It's coming into sharper focus that pre-historic humans had almost the exact same genetic variability as humans do today. The difference was in the environment: 1. Humans were a *tiny* but growing population (estimated <2M by 50,000BC) 2. The population of fauna and foragable food was in ridiculous abundance 3. Climate was in a Goldilocks period for human growth coming out of an ice age So when humans got to certain population sizes and consumed most of the easy to access food, the whole system collapsed and got flipped upside down into what we have today: society based on excludable property instead of a society based on communal sharing https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

NorthOf33rd 4y ago
Most of the population of North and Central America remained communal until colonial contact. there were plenty of examples of agricultural societies within that group, and they were farming because it was easier than than other food supplies.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Fully concur. The distinction between agriculturalists and nomadic hunters in my estimation is that it was a rapid shift in the majority behavior but there was always some "mix" of nomadic and agricultural starting around 150,000BC It's just that the shift went from 90% nomadic to 99% agricultural over the span of only 100k years or so
- swalling 4y ago
  Suggesting the Americas were some communal relic of Ice Age cultures before European arrival is laughably wrong. As far north as modern St Louis, the Mississippian city of Cahokia was larger than contemporaneous London 1,000 years before contact. You then have the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec Empires that were highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare, state religion, slavery, and pyramid building. This misperception exists largely because most of the population was wiped out by introduced disease long before European colonization happened in earnest in most areas. (Read 1491 by Charles Mann.)
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    It's not either or - it's both
  - NorthOf33rd 4y ago
    Communal societal or economic structures don't preclude "highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare, state religion, slavery, and pyramid building." Centralized control is a common theme. Read the Egalitarian Continent chapter in Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Content. Cahokia is specifically covered including how the communal nature of the civilization shifted over time to something more autocratic and materialistic, and how the shift contributed to the collapse of that society.
    - swalling 4y ago
      Describing a set of societies that featured large scale human sacrifice as in any way communal or egalitarian is bordering on deranged. Even examining them purely economically, they were often heavily based on extracting and centralizing resources from weaker communities subjugated through violence. Hämäläinen's book is widely thought of as trying to stretch a pretty weak and biased historical narrative, and presents a far from universally accepted view of history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen-review/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-continent...
      - NorthOf33rd 4y ago
        In the course of these comments you've referred to me as deranged and laughable. I'm going to bow out and let you hold onto your opinions, it's clear you're not interested in a conversation.
        swalling 4y ago
        Declaring that strident criticism of an opinion or perspective is the same as a personal attack on the person who holds it is your assumption, not mine. Good, kind, intelligent people have objectively wrong opinions all the time. This kind of fragility is why The Coddling of the American Mind ended up getting written.
jessaustin 4y ago
That link contains an unwarranted assumption. It's true that particular "mega" species declined and went extinct over the very long period you cite. There's no reason to believe, however, that such a decline would reduce food available for humans. Rather than eating a ground sloth, a tribe could eat ten deer or a hundred turkeys, or more likely some mix including deer, turkeys, etc. The absence of a giant herbivore like the sloth might mean fewer large apex predators like saber-toothed cats, but these are unlikely to be regular food for humans anyway. (Often we'd expect the relation to be reversed.) The foliage that the sloth would have eaten was consumed by other herbivores instead. We might speculate that it's easier to relax for a few weeks after killing a sloth than it is to kill a turkey every day, but refrigeration didn't exist and killing a wild animal that weighs a ton is not easy. After all, turkeys and smaller animals may be caught with snares that a single human can easily fashion from available materials. Giant ground sloths... that wasn't an option.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Respectfully, It sounds like you're speculating without having read the requisite anthropological work that it's based on. Many of the things you describe are not really accurate with how we understand pre-writing human culture. It completely changed HOW humans organized around resources From the link: >Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors This is based on thorough research linked in the paper and indicates that the PRESSURE from the change in hunting types, caused the innovation of private property in order to maintain the relative ease of calorie access compared with smaller fauna hunting (which was done also). Think about it like this, if your lifestyle is nomadic and you more or less follow herds around eating them (and any foraging) as necessary and then those herds die off, it completely changes how you live. Certain groups became great small game hunters, some became fishermen, some decided to be more agrarian etc...but the reality was that the lifestyle completely changed basically overnight (in evolutionary terms) and humans had to adapt as a result. There's a ton of variability in response starting in 10k BC, but the longer term iterated "optimal" resource production very clearly became intensive agriculture and animal husbandry - at the cost of our actual humanity in my opinion.

NorthOf33rd 4y ago

Most of the population of North and Central America remained communal until colonial contact. there were plenty of examples of agricultural societies within that group, and they were farming because it was easier than than other food supplies.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Fully concur. The distinction between agriculturalists and nomadic hunters in my estimation is that it was a rapid shift in the majority behavior but there was always some "mix" of nomadic and agricultural starting around 150,000BC It's just that the shift went from 90% nomadic to 99% agricultural over the span of only 100k years or so
swalling 4y ago
Suggesting the Americas were some communal relic of Ice Age cultures before European arrival is laughably wrong. As far north as modern St Louis, the Mississippian city of Cahokia was larger than contemporaneous London 1,000 years before contact. You then have the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec Empires that were highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare, state religion, slavery, and pyramid building. This misperception exists largely because most of the population was wiped out by introduced disease long before European colonization happened in earnest in most areas. (Read 1491 by Charles Mann.)
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  It's not either or - it's both
- NorthOf33rd 4y ago
  Communal societal or economic structures don't preclude "highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare, state religion, slavery, and pyramid building." Centralized control is a common theme. Read the Egalitarian Continent chapter in Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Content. Cahokia is specifically covered including how the communal nature of the civilization shifted over time to something more autocratic and materialistic, and how the shift contributed to the collapse of that society.
  - swalling 4y ago
    Describing a set of societies that featured large scale human sacrifice as in any way communal or egalitarian is bordering on deranged. Even examining them purely economically, they were often heavily based on extracting and centralizing resources from weaker communities subjugated through violence. Hämäläinen's book is widely thought of as trying to stretch a pretty weak and biased historical narrative, and presents a far from universally accepted view of history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen-review/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-c... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-continent...
    - NorthOf33rd 4y ago
      In the course of these comments you've referred to me as deranged and laughable. I'm going to bow out and let you hold onto your opinions, it's clear you're not interested in a conversation.
      - swalling 4y ago
        Declaring that strident criticism of an opinion or perspective is the same as a personal attack on the person who holds it is your assumption, not mine. Good, kind, intelligent people have objectively wrong opinions all the time. This kind of fragility is why The Coddling of the American Mind ended up getting written.

jessaustin 4y ago

That link contains an unwarranted assumption. It's true that particular "mega" species declined and went extinct over the very long period you cite. There's no reason to believe, however, that such a decline would reduce food available for humans. Rather than eating a ground sloth, a tribe could eat ten deer or a hundred turkeys, or more likely some mix including deer, turkeys, etc. The absence of a giant herbivore like the sloth might mean fewer large apex predators like saber-toothed cats, but these are unlikely to be regular food for humans anyway. (Often we'd expect the relation to be reversed.) The foliage that the sloth would have eaten was consumed by other herbivores instead. We might speculate that it's easier to relax for a few weeks after killing a sloth than it is to kill a turkey every day, but refrigeration didn't exist and killing a wild animal that weighs a ton is not easy. After all, turkeys and smaller animals may be caught with snares that a single human can easily fashion from available materials. Giant ground sloths... that wasn't an option.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Respectfully, It sounds like you're speculating without having read the requisite anthropological work that it's based on. Many of the things you describe are not really accurate with how we understand pre-writing human culture. It completely changed HOW humans organized around resources From the link: >Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors This is based on thorough research linked in the paper and indicates that the PRESSURE from the change in hunting types, caused the innovation of private property in order to maintain the relative ease of calorie access compared with smaller fauna hunting (which was done also). Think about it like this, if your lifestyle is nomadic and you more or less follow herds around eating them (and any foraging) as necessary and then those herds die off, it completely changes how you live. Certain groups became great small game hunters, some became fishermen, some decided to be more agrarian etc...but the reality was that the lifestyle completely changed basically overnight (in evolutionary terms) and humans had to adapt as a result. There's a ton of variability in response starting in 10k BC, but the longer term iterated "optimal" resource production very clearly became intensive agriculture and animal husbandry - at the cost of our actual humanity in my opinion.