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Sounds like a parallel to Tasmania: the tech level kept ratcheting down, as they lost tech like crops and had no way to regain them, so every loss was permanent

• hyperthesis 3y ago
  Yes, there's an argument that our "increasing returns" are related to population size, not technology itself. So the coming population plateau may be interesting. Perhaps AI's will compensate for this.
• resolutebat 3y ago
  Jared Diamond's Collapse tells the story of how this happened in the far reaches of the Pacific, as Polynesian settlers landed on increasingly distant islands with poor resources, and then their societies collapsed in slow motion when trading stopped and essential imported goods like metal became unavailable.
  • facialwipe 3y ago
    Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.
    • tareqak 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island for anyone interested.
      • anon-sre-srm 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • Vecr 3y ago
          Well, I mean, technically, but it would absolutely be better if the NSI people could warn them off using similar mathematical and diagram-based signaling techniques as would be used for space aliens.
          • ceejayoz 3y ago
            They've made it very clear. The guy in 2018 just wouldn't take a clear no for an answer.
            • usrusr 3y ago
              Suicide by cop, instigated by life-after-death fiction. Should the publishers be made responsible? How about mandatory warnings like on cigarette packs?
    • huytersd 3y ago
      It’s because they aren’t cutting down all the trees there. They’ve found a way to just actually live off the land without destroying. Way more than a millennium, they’ve been doing it for 50,000 years. It’s no joke.
      • DiscourseFan 3y ago
        Yeah no wonder they kill anyone who tries to come
        • huytersd 3y ago
          Good for them. Honestly.
        • Hucklederry 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
      • jojobas 3y ago
        That's not a life you would want to live though.
        • huytersd 3y ago
          No, but it’s probably a pretty good life if that’s the only thing you know. They have a lot of sex on the beach (actually) and don’t look malnourished.
          • mixmastamyk 3y ago
            Reminds me of the parable chiding the fisherman relaxing at the beach to work hard, so he can later retire relaxing at the beach.
    • cubefox 3y ago
      This doesn't mean it is a "success" in the context above. The population living there might have lost most of its previous technological abilities and stabilized in a permanent "collapsed" state. There is no reason that humans have to go extinct when they lose their cultural achievements, after all, other animals survive without having those in the first place. Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.
      • timeagain 3y ago
        This is a central theme in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness books. Space travel is slow (100s-1000s of years), so travellers are forced to calculate the likelihood that their destination will have experienced societal collapse by the time they arrive. The idea of a perpetually-sustained civilization is a failed dream. Technology helps societies bet larger and last longer, but also more dependent on the technology to sustain their growth.
        • heavenlyblue 3y ago
          In real life you could take a ship between two different distant lands and when you arrive it is ravaged by war started a couple of days ago
        • cubefox 3y ago
          But the population size theory says this is increasingly unlikely the larger the population gets. Even Gran Canaria was large enough to avoid the loss of crops for a thousand years, unlike the populations on the smaller islands.
    • tivert 3y ago
      > Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium. IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.
    • AlbertoGP 3y ago
      Well, they did get a big supply of metal in 1981, and there might have been trading with other islands up to 150 years ago: > Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory. > It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981. > [...] > Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time. > It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-mysterious-shipwreck-off-north-sentinel-island/7UWWHDCA35XKJ2Q3PGRXMBXYNQ/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-m... > Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880. > We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage. https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-about-north-sentinel-island https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-abou...
• jojobas 3y ago
  There were never crops in the first place in the modern or even ancient sense. Some tribes figured out that some tuberous plants can be replanted and will regrow after the tuber has been harvested and that's it. Some may have understood how seeds work (that's debated) but at no point did Aborigines clear a plot of land to plant a particular species with seeds harvested last season. This was a reason of total misunderstanding with the arriving Europeans, there was no way to lure them to help farm and get their share of the crops, it just wasn't on their map. In contrast, Maoris just across the ditch understood both growing plants and raising livestock, and a mere decade after wheat and pork were brought from Europe they were widely growing both.
  • anon-sre-srm 3y ago
    See also: Guns, Germs, and Steel section on Papua New Guinea.
  • ttt11199907 3y ago
    You honestly don't think they "knew how seeds work"? It's not like you can't turn over leaves and see a literal plant growing out of a seed. Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.
    • simonh 3y ago
      There’s more to knowing how to manage seeds effectively than knowing plants grow from them. >why…when you get enough.. That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk. >ultimately end up destroying… You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.
      • fmbb 3y ago
        > You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow. Crops destroying native life is immediate, not years in the future. It’s not like there was nothing before on that acre you cleared for planting.
• defrost 3y ago
  > Sounds like a parallel to Tasmania: the tech level kept ratcheting down, as they lost tech like crops and had no way to regain them, When did the Tasmanian pre colonial people have crops? https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/A/Aboriginal%20life%20pre-invasion.htm https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_histo... https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tasmanian-Aboriginal-people https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tasmanian-Aboriginal-people https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-War https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-War They arrived by walking across the Bassian Plain (now the Bass Strait) to a land with highlands locked by ice. There are many sources that discuss their gathering of plants, sea foods, hunting, etc. Which sources talk about their agrarian crop planting? More to the point which sources discuss the loss of crop planting? The big issue in pre colonial studies these recent years appears to be a lack of past recognition of any non "hunter gather" practices - the early settlers destroyed semi permanent infrastructures such as rock pool fish traps (some quite extensive that were blown up to allow river boats through), they didn't recognise non European land and plant tending practices, etc. There's a lack of solid study on what practices were actually taking place in different parts of Australia, and a lot of "imagined" commentary.
  • wisty 3y ago
    Small scale agriculture and aquaculture has been long understood. The tipping point where the use of labour and soil to create surlus labour, which is then used to conquer more soil is why agriculture led to a "culture" or "civilisation"(according to 19th century hisorians IIRC). 19th century hisorians argued (I think) that superior societies had superior technology, which made them even more superior. If anything, I think modern academics are too concerned about refuting the premise that Western civilisation ended up with superior technology, rather than simply accepting that they did (in most ways) but that this didn't always make them morally superior.
    • defrost 3y ago
      I freely admit to knowing very little about "19th century hisorians" and their ideas about "surlus labour" .. I also am unaware how this relates to the above theory about how pre colonial Tasmanians had and then lost "tech like crops". I do have a notion that metrics such as "superior" tend to be value judgements based on particular axioms .. some people feel that storing their nuts for winter, creating an industrial revolution, eliminating other life forms on the planet through expansion, and altering the atmosphere to be a superior approach. Others seemingly enjoyed a particular quality of life for several tens of thousands of years by spending some time gathering food and most of the time telling stories. Clearly different value systems are at play.
• sidewndr46 3y ago
  Isn't it the opposite? Technological progress has resulted in the ability to sustain a higher population
  • astine 3y ago
    It's not necessarily an either-or situation. Increased population can enable increased technological sophistication and increased technological sophistication can in turn enable an even larger population. This can be a self-reinforcing process. Anyway, I think your referencing the rgeen revolution which happened in the last hundred years while the GP is referencing the rise of agriculture.
    • eru 3y ago
      There's also the (English) agricultural revolution. And the rise of logistics and world trade in general. Bigger markets mean more productivity from specialisation, even if the underlying technology doesn't change. See eg the ancient Roman economy. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... is a good introduction.
  • eru 3y ago
    It's a feedback loop.
    • anon-sre-srm 3y ago
      More precisely, many things are roughly modelable as differential equations where aggregate rate of change depends on an amount present.
      • eru 3y ago
        In that language, I would say that we are dealing with a multi-dimensional differential equation.
  • anon-sre-srm 3y ago
• cubefox 3y ago
  > The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently. Yes, but is strange that this theory wasn't mentioned at all in the article, despite containing clear evidence for its truth: For example, there is the fact that they gradually lost the ability to build boats to trade between islands, and that smaller islands lost some or all crops over time.
• walrus01 3y ago
  > and occasionally abruptly, in environmental or social shocks Reminds me of the history of what happened to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) after all the trees had been cut down and the ecosystem significantly modified by human presence. The whole island was originally forested.
  • hyperhello 3y ago
    This was shown to be kind of likely to have been rats that arrived with the settlers destroyed the defenseless palm trees in a matter of years. Since palm is a softwood and not suitable for building boats for deep sea fishing, the islanders switched to agriculture, growing taro and other plants in volcanic soil. They recognized the island had a maximum population capacity and socialized themselves to build statues from the quarry, instead of making babies. Very interesting.
    • concordDance 3y ago
      > They recognized the island had a maximum population capacity and socialized themselves to build statues from the quarry, instead of making babies. That would be bizarre and completely at odds with what I know of human nature. Do you have a source?
  • atombender 3y ago
    As far as I'm aware, this has been thoroughly debunked, especially by Hunt and Lipo [1], who have argued against the "ecocide" theory, pointing out that the deforestation appeared to have had a positive effective on the islander's agriculture, and that contrary to Diamond's claims, the population was increasing, not falling, at the time of European contact. The deforestation was almost certainly caused by the Polynesian rat, as archeological research has shown that the same type of deforestation happened on other islands where rats where accidentally introduced, but not on settled islands where there were no signs of rats having been introduced. I believe Diamond (or maybe it was Heyerdahl) claims the settlers chopped down the forest in order to make rolling logs for transporting statues, but we now know that statues were transported by "walking" them using ropes [2]. As a pop-sci counterpart to "Collapse", I recommend the podcast The Fall of Civilization's episode on Easter Island [3], which includes this newer research. The podcast is wonderful in general, and that episode is one of the best in the series. As far I'm concerned, Diamond has a lot to answer for in perpetuating these modern myths that get repeated long after they've been debunked. His narratives catch people's interest because they are simple explanations that "make sense", and come with a kind of moral component, one of dramatic irony (the settlers were so stupid to chop down their trees, just to make these useless statues!). Diamond also wrote about Greenland and argued for the same kind of story there, despite evidence to the contrary. There is an entire academic book [4] devoted to debunking Diamond's claims, which should tell you how annoyed real archeologists, anthropologists, and historians are with his books. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2042672 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2042672 [2] https://youtu.be/YpNuh-J5IgE?si=arekVaU6AnwEvQwY https://youtu.be/YpNuh-J5IgE?si=arekVaU6AnwEvQwY [3] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pGCsvdjo344EQ2dALE6dD?si=6J6i-7O4SY-7OEySXiyWGQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pGCsvdjo344EQ2dALE6dD?si=6... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questioning_Collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Questioning_Collapse
• thehappypm 3y ago
  More people = more technological advancement is a really cool observation. And, more technological advancement creates the environment for more people to survive and thrive. Exponential growth, baby!
  • 8organicbits 3y ago
    The technology loss side of this is a little scary. Imagine a large war or disease that takes out a large portion of population and productivity. With so much interdependence between industries, like agriculture's dependence on computerized equipment, chemical fertilizers, and so on, a collapse of one industry could lead to further collapse. When building cloud infrastructure a practice I've seen used is to avoid creating dependency cycles between systems. Otherwise an outage of one can result in an unrecoverable situation for many systems. We don't avoid cyclic dependencies in our economy; I think we reward it.
    • bbor 3y ago
      For anyone who thought this comment was interesting or scary, I highly recommend A Canticle For Lebowitz. It’s about nuclear war and its impact on technology, and I recommend you go into it knowing little more than that
      • NegativeLatency 3y ago
        Sounds a bit like a more compact version of Foundation
        • bbor 3y ago
          Yes, that is a great observation! I’ll have to think about that one… I see the core distinction between CFL and Foundation as pragmatic focused narrative vs idealistic grand narrative, but there’s also a very very interesting element of magical realism and religiosity in the former that I find far more interesting than the more empirical themes of Foundation dealing with institutional structures and their reciprocal relationship to historical developments. But I’ve only read the first book of Foundation, so might be wildly off. Tried to read the second, but accidentally bought the third and never got the time to fix the mistake! Who names their third book “second foundation”??
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  > The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently. Dr. Robert Zubrin said this in Merchants of Despair, which is the most important book published this century. Just read the first chapter. There are 2 graphs that changed my thinking. It is illogical to ask for green tech to clean up the environment while also asking for population reduction because a smaller population means fewer inventions.