These societies had seen the value of owning stuff – they were already recognizing "private property rights," [said says Samuel Bowles, the director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico]. That's a big transition from nomadic cultures, which by and large don't recognize individual property. All resources, even in modern day hunter-gatherers, are shared with everyone in the community....
[And t]he early farmers had one advantage over their nomadic cousins: Raising kids is much less work when one isn't constantly on the move. And so, they could and did have more children.
May 13, 2013
"[T]he earliest farmers expended way more calories in growing food than they did in hunting and gathering it."
So, why do it?
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Sure, no one had a sense of 'ownership' in the dead bison or the berries.
It was a happy band of communal gatherers.
Oh wait, it's NPR.
Never mind.
Why did they do it - farmers could make beer; hunter/gatherers not so much
Currency. Agri-goods could be bought or sold. Simple. Robert Cook wouldn't approve. Those damned capitalists.
Sounds very speculative to me. I'd like to see the data on hunter gatherers and the definition of private ownership together with the role of lending and reciprocity. I would guess, for instance, that Eskimo's "owned" their gloves, clothing, and weapons, but would share when needed in the expectation of reciprocity. In fact, I would expect reciprocity was enforced by shame and social pressure.
All roads lead to 1968, or 1972, or some collectivist upper middle brow liberal tribal band of university-town dwelling liberal cooperative types, with some Pete Seeger, neuroscience and jazz thrown in.
Hunter/gatherer is a lot more precarious than farming. When the herds move, when there's a blight on the trees, you're in big trouble.
That's a big transition from nomadic cultures, which by and large don't recognize individual property...
Absurdly wrong.
Actually, I should add with some EJ Dionne, a house conservative, some Jane Eyre, the latest hipster band and some world reporting.
I think farming started the decline from collectivist utopia, really. We were able to share and share alike, and live in harmony with nature.
We didn't even need bike paths and Obamacare.
Beer is why they did it. Tough to have grain to ferment when you are a hunter gatherer. The first agricultural societies were founded on fermentation. Beer helped create math, poetry, pyramids, modern medicine, labor laws, and America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PdwYjFnFoJU
NPR should stay the fuck out of the anthropology business.
Leisure time sistah! You may not expend more calories, but you certainly expended more time to hunt and gather. ROI-Man understood the return on his investment in grain, legume and vegetable growing could cover him in non growing times and he could always have hunting and gathering to fall back on if crops did not provide huge bumper crops.
But if you didn't plant, and the herd was thin or a frost killed off blossoms on fruit or nuts, what could you do but expend more time and effort (and calories to pinprick the theory) to hunt and gather farther afield cross into other tribal areas (clash, clash).
Nakoula did a video on it just before his Mohammed video.
They may have expended more calories in growing, but they produced FAR more calories growing than by hunting per man/hr of effort, according to an article I read in the Smithsonion circa 1994. The author claimed the men hunted while the women farmed as an ego trip and to get themselves "out of the house" so to speak. This anthropologist claims the married men of the S. American tribes she studied even often gave thie catch to young girls just to impress, rather than return home with it. Also the sporadic nature of successful hunts further argued that their efforts would have been better put to use helping with farming if maximazation of calories produced was the goal, but that logic was seemingly NOT what inspired the males of the tribe, but other psychological drivers such as prestige, ego, etc., were involved that made no logical sense if maximazation of productuion of food calories was the primary tribal survival goal.
No competition for the limited game/wild plant resources? Please.
The start of agriculture = more calories and more consistent consumption of high quality proteins which changed our brains.
I believe this is when we truly became human and God entered into relationship with us. After all, God's first command was to till the garden and keep it. Agriculture.
Hunter gatherers had to kill a lot of their children. Agriculture would be a way out of necessary infanticide.
I read an article some time back that argued that agriculture only started when it became impractical to hunt and gather enough food for the growing population. It was a stopgap Plan B forced on society to prevent starvation, not some great advance in food technology. They had some kind of data to show that average health of the population was higher before agriculture not after.
All resources, even in modern day hunter-gatherers, are shared with everyone in the community....
Unles...as we all well know, you drop a glass coke bottle on them. Then you just sit back and enjoy the zea mays everta.
Why? Because wheat doesn't have horns and teeth, and fight back.
At one point one guy said: "Naa, my family and I are gonna stay here till you guys get back next year. We'll keep an eye on things while you carry your entire life around with you just to end up back here with it anyway." Then next year nobody left. It was the skunk works of it's time.
Maybe it was this one:
USA Today
Farming makes no sense. Textbooks tell us cultivation and herding came about because they allowed humans access to more abundant food. But an analysis shows that they're actually about 50% less efficient than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they replaced in terms of producing food. Early farmers ate less well, were smaller and less healthy than their roaming counterparts.
Agricultural societies could support armies who conquered hunter / gatherers.
Simple, stupids: the expended more calories, but they had a more stable source of food.
With hunter/gatherers, they might expend less in bountiful times, but, if climate changed or game suddenly died off for other reasons (disease, ovrunting, etc.), the hunter/gatherer could barely survive, if at all.
Farming employs more long-term planning and thinking than hunter/gathering, and delivers less satisfying meals. The reward is a much better chance at surviving a long winter.
This is why Sub-saharan Africans ---i.e. those Sons of Obama types we're blessed with in the crime blotters of the nation---have lower IQs: in Sub-Sharan African, hunter/gathering has been viable long-term. Farms need only be small to give a few extra crops--which is why women there do it, and its little more than gardening. No long term planning needed to survive, only short term; ergo, their IQs never evolved.
Harsher climbs required better planners. Better long-term thinking. Higher IQ.
Evolution. (Remember when the left was pro-science? lols.)
But why think about facts when you can scream racism at people and blame them for holding darkies down!
Enjoy the the decline, racists!
I think this is an interesting topic. Perhaps they were shorter because taller people could travel easier. Who knows? Way to many variables.
Or maybe they loved their wives more, and didn't want them to travel while with child.
Meanwhile, I do not think the great apes are nomadic, as there are specific spots they go to. I don't know about chimps either.
Personal property? That starts with the body. Most people will try to keep its ownership to the death.
Oh, and one other thought. In CA, get this. The women produced all the food for a year, outside of the meat. They would gather acorns over a two week period, then process them.
Talk about free time.
They probably did expend more calories growing food, but the number of calories they got in return was both greater in quantity and more reliable.
I don't believe his conclusions for a second.
Wealth accrual is severely limited in nomadic cultures simply because of the problem of moving much stuff around. Over time a stable base gives the farmer a distinct advantage.
The good thing about early agricultural settlements was that they made the objects of theft, rape and pillage easier to find. Thus came early organized crime, which evolved into the sophisticated government apparatus we know today.
Actually one of the first sentences isn't (probably) correct: it's entirely up in the air whether agriculturalists -- actually, it's more a function of sedentism -- were less healthy or had more disease than HGs. Our knowledge of ancient HG disease is very poor, largely because we have few skeletal remains from true ancient HGs since they tended to bury their dead wherever they happened to die, unlike the often extensive cemeteries of sedentary people. True, ag's had a suite of diseases not generally seen in HGs due to larger numbers of people in small areas, eating, drinking, and defecating in the same area. OTOH, HGs also had contact with a lot of zoonitic (animal-related) diseases, very often underwent periods of famine, etc. Yeah, we have some modern HG groups, but there's no indication they're really representative of ancient groups and none of those studied in any detail have been completely untouched by settled groups.
True, though, sedentary agriculturalists do have higher fertility rates than HGs since they don't have to drag kids around over the landscape. That's also a reason ag's have lower life expectancies: it's a function of higher fertility rates; more kids = higher infant mortality = lower life expectancies.
I'm going to read the paper itself and see what the rest of it's like. We're finding out more and more that large groups of people can live fairly sedentarily without agriculture and even produce a lot of the large public works associated with settled agriculturalists (e.g., Poverty Point, Gobekli Tepe), but intensive agriculture doesn't seem to have originated there; rather it sprung up in a few locations and spread out from those. So at least they've decoupled sedentism from agriculture and that's fairly novel.
They had some kind of data to show that average health of the population was higher before agriculture not after.
The problem with these models that purport to show Neolithic hunter-gathers to be brawnier and healthier than their farming cousins is that they do not adequately weight the infant mortality numbers. Also these models do not account for the fact that hunter-gather clans are to some degree self-selected groups -- the weak are abandoned, the inconvenient neonate gets the chop -- the remains that get analyzed by graduate students 20,000 years later are the winners of the lottery, i.e. they happen to die when their clan was well-fed and living large in a cave, rather than wandering in a forest in fruitless pursuit of game, with members dropping now and then from exhaustion to be eaten by wolves or ones relatives.
In contrast to hunting societies farming communities always have a nearby necropolis where the Jethro Bodines get interred with the runts, thus upping the measurable child mortality and depressing the aggregate robustness among the sons of the soil.
I'll echo the statements above.
Fermentable grain was the reason that agriculture started.
And fixed locations made easy targets for theft/pillage. Either the farmers kept/supported their own soldiers under a dynamic leader, or worked up a system of paying off the raiders. Both methods developed into a system of royalty-plus-army and common-farmers.
[Bowles'] next major work, A Cooperative Species: Human reciprocity and its evolution, co-authored with Herbert Gintis, will be published in 2011.
All these old neo-Marxists professors reinvented their disciplines to "cooperative" studies and "behavioral sciences" once socialism was widely discredited.
Ridiculous. Man was created 5,500 years ago with farming knowledge instilled.
I think that most people were farm animals with a thin skein of civilized men at the top. I think the civilized men lived somewhat better than the hunter gatherers unless they were conquered by the hunter gatherers as sometimes happened. I'm fairly certain that exploitation of the weak is what humans do, irrespective of the civilization or economic system under which they live. Grasping is a function of opposable thumbs and not of farming or hunting.
> Beer is why they did it. Tough to have grain to ferment when you are a hunter gatherer. The first agricultural societies were founded on fermentation.
Nomadic mongols make yogurt and cheese so I'm not convinced that nomads can't do fermentation.
Not to mention that you can leave fermenting stuff alone for a week or so. If there's no competition for game, there's no one to steal your beer.
Anthropology is so interesting. Unfortunately, it's taught by anthropologists.
People settled once they started planning for the future and needed a stable food supply. People thus avoided the boom and bust population cycles of other animals that did well when food was available, but abandoned or ate their own babies when food was not to be found. The "Beer Theory of Civilization" has some merit, same with milling grain..finer particles meant more surface area where nutrients could be absorbed into the body, while beer added, by fermentation - nutrients missing in straight cooked or raw grain.
Add: It is an awful lot easier to store extra food in one place than carry it with you in nomadic travels.
Add: The NPR behavioralist assumes that people could just waltz about gathering wild bounty of food with no predation by animals or competing human tribes. Not so, and that was a huge problem. Growing food and having domestic animals makes food accumulation easier..even though it acts as lures for other farming folks and nomadics of different tribes to come and take the "free stuff" ...because settlements can be defended easier than being out vulnerable on open plains. You can build Kralls, high stone walls, and accumulate lots of weapons in one place. You can also breed lots of people, even if they are a bit weaker and stupider than the nomads - even before welfare and the "humanitarian" impulse to keep the weak and parasitic took root in societies...6 weak spear chuckers beat one many man spear chucker any day.
The non-settled human tribe had none of that.
The NPR commentor also misses that gathering wild food means long distances travelled and food gathered limited to what one person could carry. So multiple trips needed to any food source and heightened vulnerability all the time. Have bad luck and some lions come along, bad news. Same with a tribe of rivals that will wait for the baskets to be filled with "wild gathered" then taken from the rival gatherers, then all killed but the attractive females and young girls..that were removed from the preyed on tribes breeding pool and added to the predators one...so warfare made sense for reproductive success.
Finally the dichotomy between gatherers and tribes actually promoted trade and growth of civilizations. Nomads learned the value of things they had access to in more widespread travels could be traded for food and crafts. It beat having your head smashed in from a rock hurled by a weaker "townie" high up a stone wall you couldn't breach to get at the food, pussy, and other good stuff. Flints from 600 feet up a mountain 42 miles away got you a basket of grain in trade. Another tribe meandering through might give hides or slaves - to obtain some grain, but also some of the towns spare nice flints and the cooking pottery made there....
And word of that tribe hitting another settlement and people there seeing pottery better than they made and having fruits and herbs the settlement with the pottery lacked, sent the tribe back with that to the original town.
Lines of communication were established...and nomads were essential to it in spreading the goods and "best ideas" of civilization from town to town.
Many nomadic tribes then didn't settle down - but became travelling merchants needing draft animals, boat technology, carts to drag, then far better carts with the new wheel things..
The produce of the best and most fertile fields that became coveted until armed men declared a boundary of protection. Then crafty armed men anointed themselves as King and court installed in cooperation with the local religion/fertility cult's High Priests.
Egypt did it first or was it the river running through Syria and Iraq, I forget who was first after Eden was closed. Their rivers were fertilizer and water sources.
At least in the tropics, hunting and gathering only takes about two hours per day. What humans did the rest of the time was sit around and shoot the shit. Same as today basically. Except now we do it on cellphones rather than sitting around on a banana leaf in a clearing in the jungle.
The farmer is a good and thrifty citizen.
No matter what the hunter/gatherer thinks.
You seldom see him drinking in a bar-room.
Unless somebody else is buyin' drinks!
My wag is that people settled down in areas that had plenty of water, fish, game, and naturally growing wild edible plants. Fishing was probably an important source of protein. They stayed cuz this was the best location, location, location. The very first farming they did was to stop pulling wild edible plants out by the roots when they collected them. The second farming they did was to pull weeds from around their favorite wild plants. The third farming thing was to clear open space for their favorite plants. The fourth was to observe the plants closely to see how they spread naturally and then facilitate/imitate that. The fifth was to irrigate.
The key thing was settling down in a great location. Once that happened, agriculture was likely to follow. Fishing probably played a huge role in settling down in one area.
jimspice was created 5,500 minutes ago with absolutely no knowledge or redeeming value.
NPR looks at its subjects through the NPR lens.(which is rose-colored socialist).Reading Bowles comments he is echoing something that Ihave read Piggott,Durant,and Diamond say. Basically that settled ag societies had more stuff and societies transitioned from transhumance patterns to settled ag patterns with many changes including the development of families,private property ,the priest and military classes,and many others.Including the method of preserving decaying grain products called fermentation.Ag may not have produced individually robust persons but it produce over time more people.Species survival isn't about the individual giant it is about the norm.
NPR never heard of the aesop's fable about the grasshopper and the ant. By farming you could store food for when you were too sick to go hunt or the weather gets bad. There was never a time when hunting was so easy.
Also, for those who talk about beer, I just want to point out that wine from grapes and figs long predates beer. Those fruit have yeast naturally occurring on their skin, so making wine was much easier to discover and create than learning to harvest yeast and applying it to grain.
"Tough to have grain to ferment when you are a hunter gatherer"
"Nomadic mongols make yogurt and cheese so I'm not convinced that nomads can't do fermentation."
Yes, but 'nomadic' =/= 'hunter gatherer'. Those nomadic mongols had gotten around to domesticating large animals, which is something that the stereotypical hunter-gatherer doesn't do. (I don't think.)
On a farm, children are an asset because they provide free labor that helps the family.
edutcher said...
Hunter/gatherer is a lot more precarious than farming. When the herds move, when there's a blight on the trees, you're in big trouble.
Exactly. Consistency. Farmers also could and did supplement their crops and herds with hunting and gathering.
I agree with those who have said that agriculture provided consistency and predictability--the growing season came exactly once a year--whereas hunter-gatherers could never be sure when the next herd of bison or antelope would show up.
This researcher is committing the classic statistical fallacy of only comparing averages. Like the old joke of the statistician who drowned while crossing a river whose average depth was only four feet.
Even if the average amount of time to be a hunter-gatherer was less than to be a farmer, that didn't help if occasionally you starved because the prey you wanted to hunt didn't show up.
Whenever I see an article from NPR, I'm immediately skeptical.
Re: Hunter/gatherers
When nature produces a crop, you harvest it. Wild rice, maple syrup, blueberries, and other food stuffs were there almost every year.
Chippewa Indians, before winter set in, broke up into family groups and traveled to ancient places where they spent the winter. Hunting and fishing daily, and eating their gathered food.
Everyone hunted when possible and harvested food when it was ready.
I thought agriculture started when someone realized fermenting certain plants got you loopy and laid.
> Those nomadic mongols had gotten around to domesticating large animals, which is something that the stereotypical hunter-gatherer doesn't do.
Horses aren't required for fermentation.
Nomads have the relevant property that supposedly makes fermentation impossible for hunter-gatherers, namely, being on the move.
> whereas hunter-gatherers could never be sure when the next herd of bison or antelope would show up.
Herds of bison don't move that fast - you can follow them on foot.
Game and wild crops don't suddenly disappear, except if there's fire, which is a bigger problem for folks with more permanent accommodations.
There can be rather fast changes, but they're due to climate (drought and the like) and they also have an effect on farmers.
Hunter-gather doesn't necessarily mean "eat everything in an area and then move". If you keep your usage down, you can stay in an area for a long time.
Of course, you might have a couple of such places for different times of the year. Say a fishing village when the salmon run, a bison valley for the summer, and a warm spot for winter.
The best fertilizer is increases in a trace gas called CO2.
So why do the Faux Science Enviro-Nazis want to stop farming successes?
"Ridiculous. Man was created 5,500 years ago with farming knowledge instilled."
Jim Spice hangs with smart people in real life but doesn't understand that he isn't one of them.
'kentuckyliz' wrote, "The start of agriculture = more calories and more consistent consumption of high quality proteins which changed our brains."
Except, pastoralists and nomads tend to have higher quality diets than peasants. Because they eat more meat, milk and eggs whereas peasants eat more carbohydrates (grains).
Agriculture brings permanent settlements but also the need to defend them (whereas hunter/gatherers can just move on). Although in most climates it does make higher population densities possible. And specialization of labor, as farmers could be productive enough to support those who don't farm (e.g. priests and scholars).
And before you know it you've got an aristocracy and the death of this share-and-share alike People's Democracy so beloved by NPR. And all you need to maintain this beautiful equality is a willingness to live in grass huts, and move on whenever someone stronger moves into the neighborhood.
"Horses aren't required for fermentation."
But they are kinda necessary for horse milk.
Because they'd die otherwise? Because they couldn't tell how many "calories" they were expending but knew they were staying alive? Just a thought.
Scott M said...
I thought agriculture started when someone realized fermenting certain plants got you loopy and laid.
Beer is just watery bread.
Beer = clean water.
I think the American Indians always lived by a creek for fish, always planted little fields and also wanted about five miles of hunting territory behind the creek location. The settlers would move in behind the Indians who would be outraged "My family will starve" but the settlers didn't see that. They had a more advanced farming technique and didn't need five miles of land plus a creek plus a farm to survive. Hence many tears.
Tell you what - I'll give you two lifestyle choices.
Choice #1 - You work hard every day, live in one room, and eat oatmeal three meals a day. Pretty crappy life, right?
That's early farming.
Here's Choice #2. You get to kick back, eat steak and salad, and enjoy life. Better, right? Oh, but here's the kicker. For six weeks or maybe (if I feel nasty) two months I get to lock you into a refrigerator and feed you nothing but cold water.
You might live - you might not. Most humans won't quite starve to death, if they are lucky and healthy.
That's living in the wild.
You can pick what you want - but... all of our ancestors chose door #1.
I think that you have to keep a couple things in mind. First, agriculture supports a much higher population density. When a HG people met an AG people, the HG got pushed out. Happened pretty much whenever the land would support agriculture. Interestingly, one of the more recent examples of this happened in our birthplace, sub-saharan Africa, where entire races (and tribes) were all but wiped out over the last maybe 500 years, making darkest Africa far more homogeneous than it had been for probably hundreds of thousands of years. While the natives of that continent have far more genetic diversity than the rest of the world, most of it anymore is in small pockets.
And, there are some who believe that the Neanderthal disappeared for a very similar reason. Sure, they were bigger and stronger, but lived much less densely, and so could be pushed out until they died out.
Also, in terms of hunting, outside of sub-Saharan Africa and the bison in central U.S., man has seeminlly been able to eliminate large mammals fairly quickly, as arguably evidenced by how most of the rest of the largest mammals were killed off in short order after the Indians showed up on this continent. The species that did not migrate large distances were mostly smaller and wouldn't support much in terms of population densities. So, you either had to follow the herds over long distances, or limit population to not over-hunt the smaller prey. Raising cattle, sheep, etc. allowed man to have the best of both worlds - larger, denser protein sources, w/o having to travel to hunt them.
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