Agriculture and civilization

Great Debates
1

I’ve thought, heavily influenced as I am by Guns, Germs and Steel, one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, that agriculture is a prerequisite for advanced civilization. The latter requires professionals who don’t get food on their own, which in turn requires a food surplus, hence organized food production, hence agriculture. Also, hunter-gatherers tend to be nomadic, which is not a total barrier to civilization but at least a hurdle.

Now I’m reading the Neanderthal Parallax, a seemingly well-researched book series that’s partly about a parallel Earth where our ancestors became extinct while Neanderthals went on to create civilization. They never developed agriculture, and a long passage in the second book deals with how civilization is possible without agriculture.

The argument goes that a hunter-gatherer only needs fifteen hours a week to feed themselves and their dependents (given the limitations of family size that hunter-gatherers impose by necessity), giving plenty of time left over to produce a surplus. Also, efficient hunter-gathering requires permanent settlement so that the hunter or gatherer can learn the local area. Most children of farmers have to move away to start their own farms, while children of hunter-gatherers can stay put, taking over their parents’ territory.

The book also says that you don’t want to hunt or gather at full capacity since this will eradicate the local wild- and plantlife, but doesn’t investigate this notion further or explain how it rhymes with the above.

Any validity to this argument? Is agriculture in fact not necessary (and maybe not even beneficial) for the development of advanced civilization? Current scientific consensus is the view I outlined in the first paragraph, right?

2

I have no cites to support this, but having also read the Neanderthal Parallax I see no reason why it is incompatible with civilization. What will result is a different type of city, smaller and far less densely populated. I imagine that technology might advance more slowly, but innovation is born of time and necessity, and a hunter-gather society has time in spades. A more likely scenario is put forth in the Quintaglio ascension also by the same author. There, a race of carnivores uses a system of small city centers surrounded by open pastoral and wilderness areas. Food animals are regularly herded to open air pasture stockyards where they are cared for until butchering. The author never state it explicitly, but it is implied that the animals are never there for a lengthy period of time, making feed and care need minimal.

3

Sure, it’ll work - until A. the population controls fail and everyone starves or B. One group discovers agriculture, undergoes a population explosion, raises a professional army and conquers all the rest. Which is basically what happened. Agriculture caught on because it gave its adherents a Darwinian advantage.

I mean, I’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel, too.

4

Hunter-gatherer subsistence has very little room for people not participating in the daily food quest (ie. specialists), even if the time expense per person is lower than in an agrarian community - a single hunter or wild plant-gatherer can’t make up for others devoting their time to non-essentials in the way a single farmer can, since the food sources are scattered far and wide. Lack of amassable wealth, too, means the society will remain relatively egalitarian.

5

Farm kids always moved away? Why is it that until very recently many farm people never left the village they were born in?

A lot of discussion is going to centre around what you think is “civilization”, anyway. Is it always cities and wealth?

6

I haven’t read the Neanderthal Parallax, but my initial reaction in looking over the Wikipedia article on it is that the development of a modern technological civilization would be very unlikely. Many of the technological advances they would have to make would require real permanence in their dwellings that is a relative raritiy in Hunter Gatherer societies, because most environments aren’t rich enough in resources to allow it. In North America the only Hunter Gatherer group that had an environment that allowed them to live in permanent dwellings were the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, and even they still had to have winter and summer lodges. The much more common pattern was Hunter Gatherer groups like the Plains Indians following herds of bison, or rotating between a series of camps to follow game like the Inuit.

It also presents sort of a game theory problem: it only works so long as no other Hunter Gatherer group makes the switch to food production and agriculturalism. Agricultualism allows a much greater amount of food to be produced from a given area of land than does hunting and gathering, and correspondingly allows larger and larger groups of people to live closer together, giving Horticulturalists and Agriculturalists the advantage of much greater numbers over Hunter Gatherers. There would pretty much have to be no development of any Agriculuralist cultures to allow any one Hunter Gatherer to reach that level, which seems like it would almost require a conscious choice to deliberately avoid it.

7

A problem that hunter-gatherers face is that a group must be of a limited size in order to find enough food within a reasonable distance. I believe the upper limit is about 40. Above that, they have to split up. I suspect it could be an hindrance to develop a complex civilization. How do they organize to feed the specialists they need, for instance?

8

I’ve often heard that said of villagers but I’ve never seen a reliable citation. I have my doubts as to whether or not this was the norm in Europe from 500 CE until 1450 CE.
Odesio

9

No, no, no. How many errors and logical fallacies in one simple sentence.

  1. HGs spend about 4 hours/day obtaining food. That means the literal and dedicated act of going out and getting the food and returning it to camp. Unfortunately that has been compressed into a factoid by people who never bother to read the actual research. What they then overlook is that they spend another 10-16 hours/day making tools, travelling to new hunting grounds, grinding seeds, chewing food for infants and so forth. HGs work damn hard for their food, whiuch is why you will never see a fat HG. So the idea that HGs had a lot of leisure time is bollocks.

  2. Even if HGs did only spend 4 hours per day gathering food, that does not indicate any ability to produce a surplus. The simplest way to illustrate that this is nonsense is simply to ask the author why, if HGS could produce a surplus so easily, their weren’t far larger HG populations due to this surplus of food? Of course the answer is that HG food supplies are unpredictable. At the beginning of the dry season a HG will only spend 4 housr a day gatheirng food because that is all the time she needs to spend. And at the end of the dry season a HG will spend less than 2 hours a day gathering food and slowly starve because their is simply no food to gether. And once every 10 year sof so their would come a drought or harsh winter and people would starve to death

HG popultions were kept small through routine infanticide precisely because food supply was never abundant or predictable. They coudldn’t afford to raise a child for two good years only to have it starve during the thrid drought year.
So HGs didn’t only spend 15 hours a week working, They spent >60 hours per week working. They didn’t have a lot of leisure time. They certainly never had an abundance of anything. HG populations varied wildly with the environment they lived in. Where the environemnt suported large populations they had high populations. In less benign environments they had lower populatons. But everywhere the population was maintained at the carrying capacity of the land. There was never a sustained surplus anywhere.

This would be funny if it wasn’t so sad and ignorant.

The only HG group that had permanant setlements were some people in the Pacific Northwest. If permanant settlemenst made HGs more efficient then why does the author think that it was so incredibly rare?

The author clearly has no idea about ecology either. Environments don’t change within a few days or even a few weeks walk. It’s not like a person who is intimately familiar with an area around New York will suddenly become totally bamboozled by the strange plants and climate in Boston. That’s just ridiculous. While there are always microclimates and geological factors producing variant ecosystems within any region that is just as true within a day’s walk as within a month’s walk.

The idea that a San bushman wasn’t intimately familiar with every square mile her entire 10, 000 square mile home range becuase she had to walk all over it her entire life is just too dumb for words. Whoever proposes that has clearly never left the city.

WTF? Most susbistence farmers, even today, have never been more than 10km from their place of birth. In contrast every HG child will have been at least 50km form thier place of birth within 6 months of being born. Moroever HG women invariably move in with their husband’s band, and will therefore move hundreds if not thousands of kilometres by the time they are 16.

It is a dmeonstrable fact that farmers are sendentary and HGs are nomadic. Not the other way around.

It’s also menaingless nonsense. HG populations weren’t the same worldwide. In areas of low prductivity or erratic food supply HG populations were low. In productive, reliable areas they were high. IOW they HGs always existed at full capacity, just like every other animal on the planet.

And HGs did eradicate thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of species of plants and animals.

Not only is their no validity, their is no sense, no truth and no factual basis. It’s all been cobbled together from a mish mash of half understood anthropolgical factoids and noble savage mythology.

Of course its’ necessary. We can demonstrate this quite simply by pointing out that modern humans have existed for ~200, 000 years. Civilisation only developed after the invention of agriculture. Case closed.

Consensus? Hell I don’t think you could find a single scientist that would dispute it.

10

Not true. Sedentary, large-village-dwelling hunter-gatherers were found in numerous, diverse locales such as the lower Danube around 6000 BC and the eastern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia around 3000 BC.

11

You could make a case for fishing societies as well here. Icelanders for example raise sheep and fish. They don’t produce a ton in the way of plant crops. That’s a modified sort of HG considering that before the industrial revolution they basically only farmed a small patch. It could be done with herding societies with a large controlled area. They would have to be good herders to produce a warrior and artisan class, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility. I believe that a few African nations had significant city states primarily controlled by herding groups.

12

That is at best contentious, and at worst simply incorrect. There is evidence for villages at those locations, no evidence at all that they were either A) occupied year round and B) not agricultural. The odds of a village in those regions not being in any way agricultural a mere 5, 000 years ago is remote to say the least. There’s no doubt that settled people in a lot of areas obtained a sizable portion of their food from opportunistic gathering, much as the Yanamomo do today, but that is far cry from being HGs.

What you find when you look at the archaeological evidence from the Baltic is that in numerous locales people adopted agriculture, then at various times agricultural products became more or less important in their diet. But there is no evidence that it dispperaed completely. Precisely why people turned away form agriculture, in some places in repeated cycles punctuated by agricultural periods, remains a matter of debate.

If someone herds domestic animals liek sheep then they are a herdsman, not a HG.

Yes, but herdsmen such as the Masai or Lapps or for that mater Texan cowboys are not HGs by any stretch of the defintion, they are herdsmen.

13

I think the problem here is that many people don’t realize that herding is a form of agriculture.

14

No. The Bantu Dispersal, that spread ‘civilisation’ across Africa was agricultural.

15

Actually it’s kinda-sorta true to the degree, but it proves quite opposite point. Sure, third or fourth son of a farmer had to leave his home settlement and colonize new land, become specialist and/or move to the city. But it’s because farmer could provide enough food for their numerous children, whereas HG would simply not had third or fourth son. So ultimately farming society expands more than HG society, but due to their higher growth rate, and not due to their mobility.

16

I also question that “fifteen hours a week” figure. I wonder if maybe the authors fudged it. Maybe the average hunter-gatherer spends fifteen hours a week feeding himself and another sixty hours each week unsuccessfully looking for some food so he could feed himself.

And looking at it from a society-wide level, a farmer is better than a hunter. A hunter may spend only fifteen hours a week gathering food and a farmer may spend sixty hours a week producing food. But a hunter is only feeding five people and a farmer is feeding thirty.

17

The genesis of the 15 hour work week is that hunter gatherer societies are OFTEN below the carrying capacity of their region. That’s because there are periodic shortages, droughts and so forth that produce bottlenecks where there’s not enough food and people start to go hungry. But in normal good times they don’t have to work as hard, and population density can’t reach levels where everyone has to work hard during good times because of the periodic bad times.

One reason why farming produces specialists is that farmers are vulnerable to taxation in ways that hunter-gatherers aren’t. A farmer can’t move away when swordsmen demand a cut of his crop because he’ll starve without his farm. The swordsmen take the farmer’s surplus and thus don’t have to work and thus can devote themselves full-time to fighting. There are no professional warriors in hunter-gatherer societies, every adult male is expected to be a fighter and their hunting tools double as tools of war. Same with herders, the day to day life of a mounted herdsman is also training to for light cavalry.

And as others have pointed out, while hunter-gatherers are typically better fed and healthier and arguably happier than farmers, farming allows for a much greater population density. And so a farming village has ten times the population as an equivalent hunter-gatherer settlement on the same land. And so in a fight the farmers always win and drive the hunter gatherers out or assimilate them.

There are cases where people abandon agriculture and return to hunting and gathering, but this usually happens after a demographic crisis that dramatically lowers population density. The indians of the American plains used to be farmers, but after waves of epidemics decimated the population they abandoned their villages and became hunter-gatherers. But they couldn’t have sustained the old population density with hunting, they could only afford to abandon farming because most people were already dead.

18

That can hves unfortunate results. Many hunter-gatherer societies have violent death rates that are shocking.

19

Interesting. I wonder how much of that numbers can be explained by availability of emergency medical services. Most human-on-human attacks in developed regions ends without lethal consequences, even if one combatant is seriously wounded. Badly broken arm, knife to the guts or tire iron to the head is mostly survivable in western cities. Not so in African savanna or Amazonian jungle.

20

But I believe it is mostly explainable by the lack of institutions to prevent violence. If I were to take a tire iron to my neighbor I’d almost certainly be arrested by the cops, sentenced by a judge, and kept in prison by guards. These things don’t exist in hunter-gatherer societies. If a hunter-gatherer takes a tire iron to his neighbor, his other neighbors are the only ones who can respond to the situation. And their responses are limited…they can kill the offender, or banish him, or order him to pay some sort of restitution or undergo some sort of penance, or they can do nothing. And so a typical response to homicide is another homicide. You kill my buddy, so I kill you, or one of your buddies. And now I’ve killed someone and now the buddies of the guy I killed are going to come after me and my buddies. And so on.