5 ms·

> 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

by Aunche 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
  Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
  - defrost 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
  Living in the forest is illegal.
  - derektank 10mo ago
    You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks
    - pclmulqdq 10mo ago
      Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.
    - marssaxman 10mo ago
      You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.
      - derektank 10mo ago
        A state small game hunting license is very cheap
badpun 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.

by Aunche 10mo ago

etothepii 10mo 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 10mo ago
Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
- defrost 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
Living in the forest is illegal.
- derektank 10mo ago
  You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks
  - pclmulqdq 10mo ago
    Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.
  - marssaxman 10mo ago
    You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.
    - derektank 10mo ago
      A state small game hunting license is very cheap

badpun 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.