5 ms·

"and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds" Earlier. Picking berries, seeds or ears of grain is

by lukan 11mo ago

"and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds" Earlier. Picking berries, seeds or ears of grain is something very small hands can do. "We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad." But no. You are talking about a primitive (poor) agrarian society. That only started a couple of thousands years ago, while our species used fire since over a million years in a semi nomadic live style. And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around. (Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well, but that also started rather recent)

Aunche 11mo ago
> And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures independently decided to not only spend several hours a day picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to.
- etothepii 11mo ago
  Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting. This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do. They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.
  - watwut 11mo ago
    Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
    - defrost 11mo ago
      Some hunters have elders rather than dedicated full time priests, and they can veer more rabbinical; they've got the stories and pass down the classics as food for thought and discussion. On a superstition v superstition basis it's hard to get a photo finish between them and a Bishop. https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro
  - Ar-Curunir 11mo ago
    Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed, much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG “sky father” [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral lifestyle. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
  - DoctorOetker 11mo ago
    I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society. Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle? It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves. With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape. In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ... Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture. It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery! For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!
    - etothepii 11mo ago
      This is an idea I have not encountered before but makes an enormous amount of sense. I wonder how one would create a hypothesis that could then be shown or not I the archeological record. Slavery was certainly an integral part of both the Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman societies. It has historically been associated with the concept of a person being property which rather requires that one has a concept of property. A very interesting insight, thank you.
- lukan 11mo ago
  "Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to." You mean nobody would choose the half nomadic hunters life? Hm, some indigenous cultures I spoke to disagree, but the choice is not there anymore, as the bison herds they sustained on got slaughtered. The conflict of the nomads vs sedentary is an old one and the establishment of the latter, made the old ways of life simply impossible.
  - Aunche 11mo ago
    You're completely missing my point. Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads. Yes, this includes the ancestors of the bison hunting plains tribes. It was only with the population collapse due to smallpox and introduction of horses where the nomadic way of life became dominant again. Until the invention of firearms, nomads had equal footing with settled people, if not an advantage (e.g. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan). The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size.
    - lukan 11mo ago
      "The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size." Metallurgy? Not just firearms. Stone axe vs bronze sword? Bronze sword vs iron sword? Iron sword vs steel? Nomadic people got their advanced weapons usually through trade from settled ones. The nomadic horse archers dominance was rather an exception, also their kingdom included cities where the weapons they used were made. "Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads" And there always was external pressure. Also .. our knowledge of that time is just fragmentary. We don't even know the real names of those cultures. So yes, clearly there were benefits to settling and planting corn, otherwise humans would not have done it. But to my knowledge, it is not correct to call it a voluntarily process in general. Once there are fences, the nomadic lifestyle does not work anymore. Adopt or die out was (and is) the choice.
      - estearum 11mo ago
        All technological advancement is downstream of population size and in particular density. You can't divide work if you aren't near enough other people.
- taneq 11mo ago
  Exactly. It reminds me of all of the maundering about being "forced to work" (ie. having to earn some income in order to purchase some of the bounty with which we're surrounded) which usually comes along with the "hunter-gathering was a life of luxury" mindset. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from walking off into the forest and living off berries and grubs, except that (a) they don't have the required knowledge to live off the land, and (b) they're not willing to do so, because (c) it's a miserable existence compared with living in a house with hot and cold running potable water, strong walls and a lockable door, electric amenities, and a comfy bed and sofas. Nobody's forced to work, we choose to because all of the above are nice things that are worth some effort to maintain.
  - eudamoniac 11mo ago
    Living in the forest is illegal.
    - derektank 11mo ago
      You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks
      - pclmulqdq 11mo ago
        Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.
      - marssaxman 11mo ago
        You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.
        derektank 11mo ago
        A state small game hunting license is very cheap
- badpun 11mo ago
  The agricultural people were able to produce, collect and store a surplus, which allowed them to raise armies. After that, it was all downhill for the hunter gatherers. They no so much chose the settled life, but were co-opted to it.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  The big difference between agrarian and nomadic populations is that the latter is decentralized. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is generally very leisurely, but it's strictly limited in population viability. A tribe of some tens of people? Sure, no problem. A city of 5,000 people? It just doesn't work, because you'd end up wiping out the resources in your region faster than nature could replenish them. So you're never going to see a massive hunter-gatherer population, essentially by definition. It doesn't say anything at all about their standards of life, which by most accounts were (and are) exceptionally high. [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
  - kspacewalk2 11mo ago
    I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the predators, and the predator population soars. Then they overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator population crashes. It's not stable.
    - somenameforme 11mo ago
      There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.
taneq 11mo ago
We hear this refrain, that hunter-gatherers lived lives of relative ease while early agrarians lived lives of backbreaking labour, but honestly it's never made any sense to me. Outside of a few garden-of-Eden scenarios, life as a nomad seems far more precarious than life in an established village. Maybe the good days were better but the bad days were inevitable, and far more terrifying.
- WalterBright 11mo ago
  I'd sure hate to be a nomad in winter.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    Well, that is why most modern nomads I know go to the south in winter. (but sure, native tribes also did this a bit, but were much more limited in range. So winter time in general did meant being cold and hungry often and the weak ones died. Might be the reason, why humanity started in africa and not scandinavia)
embedding-shape 11mo ago
> Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well I'm sorry but this strikes me as incredibly wrong and misleading. Herding cattle is anything but "a very chilled job" unless your frame of reference is "hunting Mammoths" and "facing Sable-tooth tigers". Sure, at moments it can be pretty straightforward, but as most jobs, the hassle comes from the situations that aren't straightforward, and they can get back-braking, hairy, dirty and outright taxing on you.
- lukan 11mo ago
  Yes, frame of reference. But I actually meant dangerous at times, yes, but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things. So when herding there were times of danger and stress (young bulls, wolves, other tribes coming to steal the animals), but most of the time it was sitting and watching.
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things I don't know if you mean "office work" as "modern stressful average job" or "food delivery as a freelancer and barely getting paid", but almost any physical job would be more taxing both mentally and physically than sitting in an office all day. Maybe my experience of only becoming a office worker after ~50% of my working life and before that doing other things, but I think most people (especially here on HN) don't realize how taxing physical labor is, even for the brain and the head.
    - lukan 11mo ago
      Well, I worked all kinds of things, but office jobs I actually found more stressful than physical labour to be honest. What I meant is the expectation, that in modern jobs you have to be activly doing things all the time. (Or pretending to). While hearding your main activity was watching (and be ready for the need of action).
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
hermitcrab 11mo ago
I would have thought herding or keeping large animals was quite dangerous, especially without modern technology. One of my wife's not-so-distant relatives was killed by a domestic pig.
- lukan 11mo ago
  Dangerous at times yes(like most of premodern life was) And cows, or rather bulls are for sure more dangerous than herding sheep. But most of the times it just meant sitting and watching.
- literalAardvark 11mo ago
  Pigs are extremely dangerous for kids, but herding cows and goats is 100% something kids did. Source: I did it. The village kids would get up, take the cows out to the road where the other cows also came, then together, a big group of kids and cows would head to a pasture and spend most of their day watching cows, playing games and messing about. It was great. Realistically the cows and goats took more care of the kids than the other way around.
  - hermitcrab 11mo ago
    A quick Google shows that ~20 people per year are killed by cows per year in the US. So not very dangerous, but not super safe either (cows kill more people than sharks - although that mostly shows how few people sharks kill).
    - literalAardvark 11mo ago
      Cows are very safe for their herders, assuming there are no bulls (and there never are, those require containment). They can get defensive or spooked and then they're very numerous very large animals with hooves and horns, but their herders won't be the target of their aggression even if the herders are very mean. At least not intentionally. Pigs are extremely dangerous to children in all cases (they will eat body parts with no hesitation and no effort, like carrots). Goats are incredibly awesome and accept you as part of their pack and defend you from predators. They can also be assholes but playfully. As with cows, female only herds, as males are dangerous. I've never herded sharks so I'll go with your opinion on those.
dweez 11mo ago
The Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
alexsmirnov 11mo ago
I've read book written by captain Kocebu, that was on duty to protect Russian holdings in Alaska. They visited San Francisco in 1805 and 1815, and several chapters described life of native people in the mission. He described harsh conditions, hard work, no freedom at all, and very high death rates. Shocking even for a early XIX century naval officer. Once a year, those people allowed to visit their tribes and relatives. And they always came back! So, the real hunter gathers, who had first hand comparison for both nomadic and agrarian life, prefer near slavery in mission to life in the wild.

by lukan 11mo ago

Aunche 11mo ago

> And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures independently decided to not only spend several hours a day picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to.

etothepii 11mo ago
Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting. This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do. They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.
- watwut 11mo ago
  Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
  - defrost 11mo ago
    Some hunters have elders rather than dedicated full time priests, and they can veer more rabbinical; they've got the stories and pass down the classics as food for thought and discussion. On a superstition v superstition basis it's hard to get a photo finish between them and a Bishop. https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro https://www.magabala.com/products/yorro-yorro
- Ar-Curunir 11mo ago
  Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed, much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG “sky father” [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral lifestyle. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
- DoctorOetker 11mo ago
  I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society. Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle? It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves. With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape. In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ... Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture. It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery! For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!
  - etothepii 11mo ago
    This is an idea I have not encountered before but makes an enormous amount of sense. I wonder how one would create a hypothesis that could then be shown or not I the archeological record. Slavery was certainly an integral part of both the Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman societies. It has historically been associated with the concept of a person being property which rather requires that one has a concept of property. A very interesting insight, thank you.
lukan 11mo ago
"Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to." You mean nobody would choose the half nomadic hunters life? Hm, some indigenous cultures I spoke to disagree, but the choice is not there anymore, as the bison herds they sustained on got slaughtered. The conflict of the nomads vs sedentary is an old one and the establishment of the latter, made the old ways of life simply impossible.
- Aunche 11mo ago
  You're completely missing my point. Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads. Yes, this includes the ancestors of the bison hunting plains tribes. It was only with the population collapse due to smallpox and introduction of horses where the nomadic way of life became dominant again. Until the invention of firearms, nomads had equal footing with settled people, if not an advantage (e.g. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan). The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    "The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size." Metallurgy? Not just firearms. Stone axe vs bronze sword? Bronze sword vs iron sword? Iron sword vs steel? Nomadic people got their advanced weapons usually through trade from settled ones. The nomadic horse archers dominance was rather an exception, also their kingdom included cities where the weapons they used were made. "Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads" And there always was external pressure. Also .. our knowledge of that time is just fragmentary. We don't even know the real names of those cultures. So yes, clearly there were benefits to settling and planting corn, otherwise humans would not have done it. But to my knowledge, it is not correct to call it a voluntarily process in general. Once there are fences, the nomadic lifestyle does not work anymore. Adopt or die out was (and is) the choice.
    - estearum 11mo ago
      All technological advancement is downstream of population size and in particular density. You can't divide work if you aren't near enough other people.
taneq 11mo ago
Exactly. It reminds me of all of the maundering about being "forced to work" (ie. having to earn some income in order to purchase some of the bounty with which we're surrounded) which usually comes along with the "hunter-gathering was a life of luxury" mindset. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from walking off into the forest and living off berries and grubs, except that (a) they don't have the required knowledge to live off the land, and (b) they're not willing to do so, because (c) it's a miserable existence compared with living in a house with hot and cold running potable water, strong walls and a lockable door, electric amenities, and a comfy bed and sofas. Nobody's forced to work, we choose to because all of the above are nice things that are worth some effort to maintain.
- eudamoniac 11mo ago
  Living in the forest is illegal.
  - derektank 11mo ago
    You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks
    - pclmulqdq 11mo ago
      Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.
    - marssaxman 11mo ago
      You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.
      - derektank 11mo ago
        A state small game hunting license is very cheap
badpun 11mo ago
The agricultural people were able to produce, collect and store a surplus, which allowed them to raise armies. After that, it was all downhill for the hunter gatherers. They no so much chose the settled life, but were co-opted to it.
somenameforme 11mo ago
The big difference between agrarian and nomadic populations is that the latter is decentralized. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is generally very leisurely, but it's strictly limited in population viability. A tribe of some tens of people? Sure, no problem. A city of 5,000 people? It just doesn't work, because you'd end up wiping out the resources in your region faster than nature could replenish them. So you're never going to see a massive hunter-gatherer population, essentially by definition. It doesn't say anything at all about their standards of life, which by most accounts were (and are) exceptionally high. [1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
- kspacewalk2 11mo ago
  I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the predators, and the predator population soars. Then they overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator population crashes. It's not stable.
  - somenameforme 11mo ago
    There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.

taneq 11mo ago

We hear this refrain, that hunter-gatherers lived lives of relative ease while early agrarians lived lives of backbreaking labour, but honestly it's never made any sense to me. Outside of a few garden-of-Eden scenarios, life as a nomad seems far more precarious than life in an established village. Maybe the good days were better but the bad days were inevitable, and far more terrifying.

WalterBright 11mo ago
I'd sure hate to be a nomad in winter.
- lukan 11mo ago
  Well, that is why most modern nomads I know go to the south in winter. (but sure, native tribes also did this a bit, but were much more limited in range. So winter time in general did meant being cold and hungry often and the weak ones died. Might be the reason, why humanity started in africa and not scandinavia)

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well I'm sorry but this strikes me as incredibly wrong and misleading. Herding cattle is anything but "a very chilled job" unless your frame of reference is "hunting Mammoths" and "facing Sable-tooth tigers". Sure, at moments it can be pretty straightforward, but as most jobs, the hassle comes from the situations that aren't straightforward, and they can get back-braking, hairy, dirty and outright taxing on you.

lukan 11mo ago
Yes, frame of reference. But I actually meant dangerous at times, yes, but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things. So when herding there were times of danger and stress (young bulls, wolves, other tribes coming to steal the animals), but most of the time it was sitting and watching.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things I don't know if you mean "office work" as "modern stressful average job" or "food delivery as a freelancer and barely getting paid", but almost any physical job would be more taxing both mentally and physically than sitting in an office all day. Maybe my experience of only becoming a office worker after ~50% of my working life and before that doing other things, but I think most people (especially here on HN) don't realize how taxing physical labor is, even for the brain and the head.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    Well, I worked all kinds of things, but office jobs I actually found more stressful than physical labour to be honest. What I meant is the expectation, that in modern jobs you have to be activly doing things all the time. (Or pretending to). While hearding your main activity was watching (and be ready for the need of action).
  - WalterBright 11mo ago

hermitcrab 11mo ago

I would have thought herding or keeping large animals was quite dangerous, especially without modern technology. One of my wife's not-so-distant relatives was killed by a domestic pig.

lukan 11mo ago
Dangerous at times yes(like most of premodern life was) And cows, or rather bulls are for sure more dangerous than herding sheep. But most of the times it just meant sitting and watching.
literalAardvark 11mo ago
Pigs are extremely dangerous for kids, but herding cows and goats is 100% something kids did. Source: I did it. The village kids would get up, take the cows out to the road where the other cows also came, then together, a big group of kids and cows would head to a pasture and spend most of their day watching cows, playing games and messing about. It was great. Realistically the cows and goats took more care of the kids than the other way around.
- hermitcrab 11mo ago
  A quick Google shows that ~20 people per year are killed by cows per year in the US. So not very dangerous, but not super safe either (cows kill more people than sharks - although that mostly shows how few people sharks kill).
  - literalAardvark 11mo ago
    Cows are very safe for their herders, assuming there are no bulls (and there never are, those require containment). They can get defensive or spooked and then they're very numerous very large animals with hooves and horns, but their herders won't be the target of their aggression even if the herders are very mean. At least not intentionally. Pigs are extremely dangerous to children in all cases (they will eat body parts with no hesitation and no effort, like carrots). Goats are incredibly awesome and accept you as part of their pack and defend you from predators. They can also be assholes but playfully. As with cows, female only herds, as males are dangerous. I've never herded sharks so I'll go with your opinion on those.

dweez 11mo ago

The Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

alexsmirnov 11mo ago

I've read book written by captain Kocebu, that was on duty to protect Russian holdings in Alaska. They visited San Francisco in 1805 and 1815, and several chapters described life of native people in the mission. He described harsh conditions, hard work, no freedom at all, and very high death rates. Shocking even for a early XIX century naval officer. Once a year, those people allowed to visit their tribes and relatives. And they always came back! So, the real hunter gathers, who had first hand comparison for both nomadic and agrarian life, prefer near slavery in mission to life in the wild.