3 ms·

Can we really put that down to value systems? You’re implying that the latter group made a choice, but for that to be true they would have to have developed the

• jazzyjackson 3y ago
  you don't invent guns and grain silos because you're having a great time, you do it because resources are scarce and contested. Necessity is the mother of invention they say. Personally I don't subscribe much to notions of choice, but in that framework, I would say the pre-agrarians made the choice not to develop agriculture and all the rest.
  • Natsu 3y ago
    Is there some place that resources were not scarce or contested? Competition for resources happens across the animal kingdom as far as I can tell.
    • jazzyjackson 3y ago
      The degree to which resources are scarce and contested varies geographically yes. Around me there is not a constraint on the deer population, resources are plentiful for them and outside of hunting season there is little contesting the deer. Eventually the deer population grows enough that the lifeforms they share space with decide to, mm, contest their expansion, but there are places and periods in which populations can grow unconstrained for a while. I suppose I was making the point that humans maintaining a certain way of life for tens of thousands of years may have lived in a way where resources and rival tribes were not an issue, and hence, had little motivation to develop defensive weaponry / collect starvation rations for rainy days.
    • defrost 3y ago
      There are many places across the globe (equatorial regions) that don't have the severe winter "nothing grows at all" problem that some would argue drove European cultures to advance food storage and intensive agriculture techniques. There's always some kind of scarcity everywhere, sure, but the key notion here is regular predictable extreme scarcity that can be planned for and hedged against with a considered amount of energy and advance preparation.
      • zilti 3y ago
        Advanced food storage and agriculture tech originated not in Europe, though, but in the great flood plains - Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Amazonia. On that note, it is by the way theorized that the necessity to coordinate farming with the floods and other farmers is what kicked off civilisatory development.
        • defrost 3y ago
          Fair point - I thought of that after I made the above comment (which obviously started with winter scarcity) but river delta flooding is another good example of literal flood | famine food availabilty. And, as you note, an original challenge that predates human advance into the northern environments as glaciers retreated. The great OG mathematical challenge for humans was the "fair" recurrent remarking of land plots following a flood - how to survey land area, and how to plan for and account for food surplus to last over food scarcity.
          • b112 3y ago
            I don't see pests listed in the above discussion, although I could have missed it. However this is as big as drought, if not larger. Not just insects, rodents, bird cyclictic overpopulation wiping out crops, but also fungus, bacteria, etc. The world has starved more than once from such things, and the Egyptians had reverence for cats for a reason.
        • flir 3y ago
          Jōmon Japan, too. And the PNW.
  • flir 3y ago
    Grain silos (storage pits, more generally) were primarily used to store seasonally abundant foods, as I understand it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_storage_pits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_storage_pits
• defrost 3y ago
  Judging one lifestyle to be a superior society seems to be a value judgement. It's hardly a nuetral unbiased assessment when it's literally Europeans saying "who has two thumbs and superior culture" as they photograph themselves amongst a pile of dead indigenous people and ship a bunch of heads home to pickle for the phrenologists.