I don’t think that is quite right. While this is true in some existing h/g societies, most seem to have alternatives to revenge killing: You killed my brother, so I will kill yours unless you give me two pigs and one of your wives. And this generally holds for killings outside the clan/village/what-have-you. If the killing is inside the group, then I believe revenge killing is quite rare (as an organized activity).
Pacific Northwest of NA managed to have a comparatively high level of material culture based on a hunting & gathering lifestyle - but their achievement is pretty well unique, and based mostly on living in an area comparatively rich in resources.
Although I’m sure reduction in population had something to do with it, the introduction of the horse into North America created efficiencies in hunting & travel that allowed the Plains Indians to return to h/g living. Hunting a buffalo on the open plain was very, very difficult before the horse.
That aside, Neanderthal Parallax is not very well researched, includes innumerable completely stupid conclusions, and worst of all, contains a sex scene that made me embarrassed to be alive (and I used to read cheap romance novels on a professional basis).
Somebody back up there (Blake) made a few mistakes of his own. You can be a good hunter gatherer in some environments with very little time or effort. However, the food source is intrisically limited. You can roam the savannah of Africa with a spear and find all the food you need with very little effort. But there are only so many dead animals to scavenge from, only so much you can hunt. And then you win dup having to conserve energy. And you don’t spend much time making tools, either.
Everything else you say is perfectly accurate though.
Plus if you are following the herds, or moving from place to place within your range, you are limited in what you can carry. Even food surplus takes some effort, and large tools - forget it.
I thought Plains Indian culture and populations developed quite a bit after the Spaniards brought them horses. Before that, they were limited to what they could carry (or drag on a travois), and their only pack animal was the dog.
Regards,
Shodan
Organized hunter-gathering sounds a lot like game farms, yeah it’s more sporting than cattle ranching, but I’m not sure it’s really any different.
Quick question:
How were they able to make the switch from hunter gathering to agriculture? Was there a time when they did both?
There were certainly other areas of hunter-gatherer cultures forming civilizations besides the American Pacific NW. Before agriculture was developed, some rich “farming” land would have produced a large amount of wild grain suitable for gathering. As some hunters switched from hunting wildlife to keeping herds, some gatherers switched from collecting wild grain to planting. Becoming a farmer is as simple as helping the plants you’re eating to grow more widely and densely.
Many hunter-gatherers did (or in some cases, still do) farm a little bit. They just don’t make it their main event, so to speak. They’ll find a clearing and put down seed, but they aren’t dependant on it and don’t work the land. They’re just leaving something for when they come back.
I’d be interested in seeing the evidence for this.
Nope, exactly the opposite is true. Rich farming is land is by definition productive, and hence grows a lot of vegetation. In most places that vegeation is trees, but in other places it’s dense herbage.
Wild grain in contrast is an ephemeral plant that grows in areas where conditions are only very occasionally and briefly suitable for growth. IOW the areas that are by definition not rich farmland.
The first farmers made their great gains by taking those wild grains form their natural environemnt, where they were either very thin on the ground or else only very irregularly available, and sowing them in area such as floodplains or cleared forests where they wouldn’t naturally have grown in any density.
Under natural conditions there wild grains are either never abundant enough to support anything like a civilisation, or they are abundant only every other year, and thus not able to suport anythinglike a civilistaion. A civilisation requires a secure food resource which wild grains are not by nature of the very adpatations that make them so productive in agriculture.
It’s nothing like that simple, which is why it took ~180, 000 years for agruculture to develop. It requires not an increase in density or distrubution but an increase in
certainty. It is not enough to have the plants growing widely and densely. The one thing thatis crucial is having them growing predictably. If you can’t gaurantee next season’s yeild then you simply can not be afarmer, no matter how widely or densely your crop grows.
That is why our principle crops are all ephemerals or annuals of some form. They have evolved to take advantage of breifly available favourable conditons. People selected those ephemeral plants, rather than the dense species that would have naturally dominated the most productoive farmland or the widespread species that would have dominated the truly marginal area. That’s because by doing so they could have a food supply that, whielit was less dense and less widely distributed was more reliable.
I’m not aware of any HGs that actual did or do behave in that way. The one’s I do know of use excatly the opposite tactics.
Some work the land intensively but briefly. The classic example of that tactic being the New Guinean swamp dwellers with their sago patches. These people work hard to keep their very long term sago patches free from competing trees. It’s very intensive working of the land to the point of creating a monoculture out of a swamp forest.
Others, such as some of the Congolese, find a clearing such as a newly formed mudflat and put down seed, but they are then obliged to settle in that locale for a few months to protect the crop.
I’m not aware of any groups that exploit natural productive patches of land and then abandon their crop until it is ready for harvest. It’s kind of hard to imagine how that would be workable in a landscape with an abundance of wild animals that eat precisely the same foods that you do. If your food supply is naturaly protected such as sago then it’s unlikely to be suitable for sowing into natural clearings and thus will demand intensive working of the land. And if it is suitable for sowing into natural clearings then it has almost certainly evolved as an ephemeral pioneer and isn’t going to survive in high densities without protection.
I’m a bit confused by what you might mean by this. Farmers today, with all the benefits of modern technology, cannot guarantee next season’s yield. That’s why they buy crop insurance. Obviously crop reliability is extremely important, but there are no guarantees in farming. A stone age farming society is going to be susceptible to mass famine in the event of widespread drought. Thems the breaks.
We won’t even talk about societies that used cats as pack animals…so sad… 
I read once that people learned to grow food by mimicking the ‘shamans’ attempt to grow drug plants. Given humans propensity for drugs and alcohol this seems plausible. Any truth (or evidence) to this?
It seems unlikely. Where would the shamans have learned to plant seeds and grow plants?
My guess is that some tribes noticed that if you were eating a watermelon and spitting out the seeds and then came back a year of two later there’d be watermelon vines growing there.
I don’t much care for what you’d like.
However, early pioneers in North America found that Amerindians did precisely this, as well as having many permanent lodgings. They substituted quantity (or areas sowed) for quality (well, a high yield-per-acre from intensive farming). They weren’t nomadic, and they didn’t plow or significantly improve the soil. They did use simple techniques to improve soil conditions, such as Sqanto’s famous instruction to bury the kernels in a dead fish. But they did not really work the land, and hunting and gathering remained at least as important as this early agriculture.
Cultures farther west (definitely in the Ohio Valley and the Cherokee lands) had somewhat more organized agriculture and worked the land more intently.
Well since you are unable to provide a reference when asked we can discount what you are saying as baseless nonsense.
Dude you apprently don’t realise that the vast majority of Amerindians were agriculturalists, not HGs.
Dude that ]is working the land. Just how easy do you think it is to catch several thousand fish, bury them and then plant the seed over it? That would be much harder than just planting the grain using European style broad acre tillage.
Well since you can provide absolutley no evdience for your claims I’m not inclined to believe this is true.
Can you actually provide any evdience at all for this mythical east cost HG group? A name? A location better than being vaguely “further east” than the Ohio valley?
Bear in mind also that early HGs had far more certainty than most farmers today. They tended to start in areas with “guaranteed” favourable conditions such as river valleys or areas with sufficent snowmelt to guarantee moisture. It was after farming was well established that people moved into more marginal areas dependent on rain, and they were able to do that in large part because of the buffer provided by themore productive areas and the ability to move food from unaffected zones to famine zones.That is why midwestern Indians only farmed the river valleys which were unaffected by drought. It’s also why the fertile crescent civilisations started in the river valeys.
If you think about it logically if the human population had insufficent food for survival more than once every 30 years then the population will decline, not grow. So obviously the first farmers experienced such shortages less than every 30 years or so. Farmers in later times in some regions, experiences production problems much more frequently because they were living in marginal land and dependant on food stores and the ability to bring in food from other areas to prevent them starving. But even they had a guaranteed food supply insofar as they never starved to death.
While famines were common enough in olden times fatal famines were once in a lifetime events. That is what I meant when I said the first farmers had a guaranteed food supply. It could not have been otherwise since if they were forced to revert to huting and gatheirngmore than once every three decades they could not have achieved faster population groth than HGs, which they demonstrably did.
So it is unlikely that early stone age farmers would have been subject to mass famine. That would have been problem only much later when the population expansion had pushed people into the marginal areas.
Since you haven’t bothered to give any yourself, I don’t really care what you think.
Why are you and Blake fighting over Pleonast’s statement? 
Actually, yes it is. Look up the roots of the word. It literally means “things relating to people living in cities”, and in a broader sense, the benefits of having them in the first place. Like laws and their enforcement, proximity to specialists of all kinds, access to culture, exchange of techniques and ideas, that sort of thing.
Of course, one could argue that it’s kind of a bias - we deem that cities are “better” because we live in them and our civilization stems and spreads from them. So did the Romans who coined the word. If you define the aim of human society as “living most happily together”, I’ll agree with you that it’s debatable whether modern society is inherently superior to tribes of the Serengeti. But where comfort is concerned, I’ll take western cities any day ;).
I’d also strenuously object to the idea that nomadic life is just a hurdle in the path of civilization. You can’t carry tons of books with you wherever you move, and written records are what allows advances in science as well as laws, property, philosophy, military tech & tactics, the arts… If you can’t rely on written word, all you have is oral tradition, and that isn’t conducive to advanced anything.