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Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy

Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy decreased following invention of agriculture and that people had more stressful lives, but the other benefits of social organisation so totally make up for that, as shown by the huge increase in life expectancies since then. Do you realise just how much more peaceful we are in organised society than in hunter-gather societies? Watch the talk on "the surprising decline in violence" by Stephen Pinker: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  > in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    How it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people don't necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food. Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
    - snogglethorpe 14y ago
      Certainly increased mortality would be the obvious explanation for low population grow absent birth-control... [Which makes H-G society sound rather less peachy than the original article seems to have been claiming...]

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.

snogglethorpe 14y ago
> in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  How it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people don't necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food. Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Certainly increased mortality would be the obvious explanation for low population grow absent birth-control... [Which makes H-G society sound rather less peachy than the original article seems to have been claiming...]