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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

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.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I'm not sure what your familiarity with the literature is, but I'd strongly caution you against assuming too much about relationships between sedentism, writing, and property. First of all, there's many thousands of years between the first widely recognized sedentary cultures and "true writing". Proto writing of various kinds existed long before and after that transition. The relationship between writing and property has even more issues and they're usually circularly linked. Property rights are difficult to understand from the archaeological record alone, so the vast majority of work done has been at least partially based on literary sources. This in turn makes it look like "literate societies" (what a terrible term, ugh) are the ones who have property rights. At the same time, archaeologists have long used definitions that more or less guide what they consider a "civilization" to look like that has traditionally included criteria like writing. Certain philosophical schools (like Marxism) relate social/political/economic development to these stages, and thus implicate certain productive relations simply based on the presence of other features like writing, even if it remains untranslated. This is what's happened with Harappan archaeology for example. They might have universal relations, but the currently available evidence is very unclear about that and I'd recommend against strong statements about either the nature or timeline of that relationship.
  - AndrewKemendo 4y ago
    I never claim any correlation between them Sedentism and property started in my estimation 6000 years before writing So I think you're arguing with yourself
- jessaustin 4y ago
  When one appeals to authority, it's better if those authorities exist and actually say anything related to one's argument. You haven't addressed my point, you cite yourself and you should be citing ecology rather than anthropology anyway. I have read some anthropology (Graeber and Wingrow, which you cite in note 2, is within arm's reach right now, which is why I know your citation doesn't appear on the page you list or any nearby page I can find, nor does it appear in the other document you link for that sentence in note 3 [0]), and IME in anthropology papers on a fairly regular basis one sees howlers like this one: The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME) was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC, and accelerating into the Neolithic around 11,000 BC. We don't need to wade through the literally contradictory citations noted for this proposition; it's ridiculous enough to reject on sight. 39,000 years is "extremely rapid" on a cosmic scale but not on a human one. It's not as though big game hunters were flying airplanes around the globe to collect trophies. People in e.g. northern Europe didn't share anything cultural with people in e.g. southeast Asia. Humans responded to ecological reality, but it most likely did not take the form that you claim. It's easy to convince yourself of this. In our time, modern agriculture and modern chemical manufacturing provide food for most of us, but not all. In remote locations throughout the world, right now but more significantly within the last millennium, indigenous neolithic populations support and have supported themselves in "the old ways". That is, even though no giant ground sloths exist (although large mammals such as buffalo, elk, moose, elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, etc. do) and even though modern humans have been consuming most global resources, these isolated tribes have successfully fed themselves. They have been visited by anthropologists who have recorded their lifestyles of e.g. monkey hunting, clam digging, or swidden agriculture. They don't starve and they don't hoard. In most locations, meat makes up less than half of the diet. Foraging plants and consuming small game isn't strange and isn't inefficient. That is what hominids have done throughout our existence. As we know from ecology, the particular species that make up a trophic level do not change the fact that energy flows up the food chain. Perhaps koalas might die out if eucalyptus disappears, but humans are highly creative and adaptable to various food baskets. Your speculative, ecologically unlikely argument needs more support than an "imagine you're a nomad" just-so story. For one thing, we "evolved" to eat fruit not mastodons. Some of us have eaten mastodon when it has been available, but it has only ever been available on a small portion of earth's landmass. When mastodons disappeared that probably caused some people to starve but starvation is a common cause of death for any predator. That's why humans in the state of nature typically eat plants that they forage: to avoid starvation. I mostly agree with the "against the grain" hypothesis, but it has been covered better elsewhere. I haven't spent enough time thinking about your later propositions to judge them. This paper may be recoverable with some editing. [0] http://pacificecologist.org/archive/18/pe18-hunter-gatherers.pdf http://pacificecologist.org/archive/18/pe18-hunter-gatherers...

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.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
I'm not sure what your familiarity with the literature is, but I'd strongly caution you against assuming too much about relationships between sedentism, writing, and property. First of all, there's many thousands of years between the first widely recognized sedentary cultures and "true writing". Proto writing of various kinds existed long before and after that transition. The relationship between writing and property has even more issues and they're usually circularly linked. Property rights are difficult to understand from the archaeological record alone, so the vast majority of work done has been at least partially based on literary sources. This in turn makes it look like "literate societies" (what a terrible term, ugh) are the ones who have property rights. At the same time, archaeologists have long used definitions that more or less guide what they consider a "civilization" to look like that has traditionally included criteria like writing. Certain philosophical schools (like Marxism) relate social/political/economic development to these stages, and thus implicate certain productive relations simply based on the presence of other features like writing, even if it remains untranslated. This is what's happened with Harappan archaeology for example. They might have universal relations, but the currently available evidence is very unclear about that and I'd recommend against strong statements about either the nature or timeline of that relationship.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  I never claim any correlation between them Sedentism and property started in my estimation 6000 years before writing So I think you're arguing with yourself
jessaustin 4y ago
When one appeals to authority, it's better if those authorities exist and actually say anything related to one's argument. You haven't addressed my point, you cite yourself and you should be citing ecology rather than anthropology anyway. I have read some anthropology (Graeber and Wingrow, which you cite in note 2, is within arm's reach right now, which is why I know your citation doesn't appear on the page you list or any nearby page I can find, nor does it appear in the other document you link for that sentence in note 3 [0]), and IME in anthropology papers on a fairly regular basis one sees howlers like this one: The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME) was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC, and accelerating into the Neolithic around 11,000 BC. We don't need to wade through the literally contradictory citations noted for this proposition; it's ridiculous enough to reject on sight. 39,000 years is "extremely rapid" on a cosmic scale but not on a human one. It's not as though big game hunters were flying airplanes around the globe to collect trophies. People in e.g. northern Europe didn't share anything cultural with people in e.g. southeast Asia. Humans responded to ecological reality, but it most likely did not take the form that you claim. It's easy to convince yourself of this. In our time, modern agriculture and modern chemical manufacturing provide food for most of us, but not all. In remote locations throughout the world, right now but more significantly within the last millennium, indigenous neolithic populations support and have supported themselves in "the old ways". That is, even though no giant ground sloths exist (although large mammals such as buffalo, elk, moose, elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, etc. do) and even though modern humans have been consuming most global resources, these isolated tribes have successfully fed themselves. They have been visited by anthropologists who have recorded their lifestyles of e.g. monkey hunting, clam digging, or swidden agriculture. They don't starve and they don't hoard. In most locations, meat makes up less than half of the diet. Foraging plants and consuming small game isn't strange and isn't inefficient. That is what hominids have done throughout our existence. As we know from ecology, the particular species that make up a trophic level do not change the fact that energy flows up the food chain. Perhaps koalas might die out if eucalyptus disappears, but humans are highly creative and adaptable to various food baskets. Your speculative, ecologically unlikely argument needs more support than an "imagine you're a nomad" just-so story. For one thing, we "evolved" to eat fruit not mastodons. Some of us have eaten mastodon when it has been available, but it has only ever been available on a small portion of earth's landmass. When mastodons disappeared that probably caused some people to starve but starvation is a common cause of death for any predator. That's why humans in the state of nature typically eat plants that they forage: to avoid starvation. I mostly agree with the "against the grain" hypothesis, but it has been covered better elsewhere. I haven't spent enough time thinking about your later propositions to judge them. This paper may be recoverable with some editing. [0] http://pacificecologist.org/archive/18/pe18-hunter-gatherers.pdf http://pacificecologist.org/archive/18/pe18-hunter-gatherers...