And in the Pacific Northwest, the annual salmon runs were so abundant that most tribes lived in settled villages. They had no need to move to find game; the game came to them, on a very predictable schedule. So even though they weren’t agriculturalists, they were living a lifestyle very similar to that of the farmers in the east.
So that’s why Russia colonized Alaska!
When Columbus first arrived in the New World, the population of the Americas was greater than that of Europe. Partly because The Plague had reduced European populations, but there were just a shit-load of people living here-- about 100M. If they were h/gs, the population would have been maybe 1/100 of that.
It’s estimated that as much as 90% of the native population was destroyed by disease soon after the first European arrived. Disease advanced faster than the explorers, especially in N. American, where settlers didn’t arrive in most areas until about 100 years later.
The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan had a population of at least 200,000 when the Spanish first arrived. London, at that time had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.
So this is sort of what I was talking about when I said “romanticizing”. I mean, maybe that is what it’s like, I dunno - never having been there.
But that brings me back to my question: if it wasn’t starvation that kept a lid on their population, what did?
It also makes me think of another question: whenever I go walking in the woods, I don’t see a lot of low-hanging fruit. In fact, I rarely see any fruit at all (the closest I’ve seen is these little red berries, which may or may not be poisonous). I do see a lot squirrels and deer, but they’re not hunted, and we do feed them, so I figure that’s why we see them so much.
I haven’t been fishing in years, but my memory is that it’s perfectly possible to spend hours doing it, without catching a thing. In fact, that seemed like the most likely outcome. So I guess my question is, are the woods really as bountiful as all that? Because they don’t seem to be.
Starvation certainly played a role at times, but also accidents, childhood illnesses, death in childbirth, and interpersonal and intergroup violence kept the rise in population level slow. (It DID rise, eventually to the point where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle couldn’t sustain it; that’s why agriculture was invented, after all.)
Incredibly high homicide rates, including deliberate population control via infanticide.
The thing about “typical” HGs is that they can’t store food. That means that the population is constrained by the carrying capacity in the absolute worst season, just as it is for all other animal species. However most other animal species can reproduce at just a few years old, so the population can rebound rapidly following catastophes. Humans can’t do that. The worst season that our population has to endure isn’t the worst season in five, it’s the worst season in forty.
Humans need not oily to be able to reach reproductive age, we also need to raise our children to adulthood and teach them what they need to know. If we figure a 20 year generation time, then a productive adult requires a total of forty years to produce: 20 years for the parent to reach maturity and 20 years for the child. Compare that to something like bison or wolves, where a productive adult represents just 4 years.
Because of that long generation span, humans can’t afford to go through boom and bust cycles. If humans bred indiscriminately during the typical years, they would produce a population that is ten times the carrying capacity during the bad years. Which means that when the bad years hit, 90% of people are guaranteed to die.
But it’s actually worse than that. Because humans are so adaptable, the resources would be distributed so evenly that there woudln’t be enough resources for anybody to survive. You’d be looking at 99% mortality. Worse yet, the people who would die most would be the very young and the very old. The very young aren’t that important, but in a society with no writing, the loss of the very old represents a loss of the vast majority of human knowledge. You then get complete social breakdown, the culture dies and the population struggles to survive at all.
So to overcome that. HG practiced routine infanticide. That kept the population below the level that could be sustained int he worst seasons. Cultures that practiced infanticide has a massive advantage over those that did not, and ultimately replaced them.
Additionally, female infanticide was preferred over male. By restricting the number of females, the potential for population growth was reduced, further restricting the need for infanticide. It also produced disposable young men, which allowed for more successful warfare. This further limited HG population numbers by ensuring constant high adult mortality through homicide.
Fruit in temperate regionsis is a seasonal food source. While it was important to HGs, its seasonal nature means that it is unable to sustain a population. So the presence of fruit isn’t a good indicator of the carrying capacity of land. More important are things like nuts, seeds and tubers, which are available all year round. Unless you know what you are looking for, you are unlikely to be able to estimate how much food of this type is available.
Additionally. HGs deliberately altered the landscape to promote their favourite foods, mostly through the use of fire. They are also fragmented, and sitting adjacent to cities and agricultural land, so you are getting a lot more fruit eaters than you would get in a natural environment. The woods that you see are a degraded, unmanaged, disturbed fragment. they don’t give you any idea at all of what would have been available when HGs first arrived, much less what was there when it was being actively managed for food production.
What you see isn’t really important, because humans are good trackers and can think. Where you see one deer, an experienced hunter could probably found a hundred.
It depends on where you are fishing of course, but generally waters that are not heavily fished are absolutely teeming with fish. What you are seeing is probably the result of too many fishermen.
Woods aren’t particularly bountiful, which is why HGs worldwide went to great lengths to destroy them or open them out. Patches of woodland are good because they produce patches of food in season. But the best food collection areas for humans are grasslands.
As for how much food there was, that varies a lot by region, which is why HG densities varied by region. As a generalisation, your typical HG could find enough food in about 10-16 hours/day in typical seasons, but most of that time was spent travelling between campsites, making tools and so forth. Starting with a full toolkit, enough food could usually be obtained in about half a day.
But that is in a typical season. Generally, one year in every seven is a bad season, where HGs would have lost a lot of weight working as hard as they could. And one year in every forty will have a severe season, where death from starvation would have been widespread.
The inability to store food was the biggest restriction on HG population size. Those HG populations that did manage to collect and store surplus often managed to reach the same densities as agriculturalists.
The problem with drought in a subsistence farming situation is that if your crops fail, you aren’t just going to have a tough month until the rains fall. You don’t just lose Grandpa to a tough food fortnight.
If your crop fails, you do not have food for the year. With most staple grains, you get one or two shots at filling your granary, and that’s what you eat until the next harvest. In West Africa, September is known as the “hungry month” because often the harvest doesn’t quite last through the year, and near the end you end up having to stretch the last few rat-nibbled wisps of millet for weeks until you can harvest the new crop. And what if there is a complete failure? Then you lose grandpa, grandma, six of the kids, your neighbors, your livestock, your wife, and your land and fields as you migrate out of town trying to find someone to take you in as an indentured servant.
Without mechanization, subsistence farmers are not generally able to build multi-year food stores. Generally it’s a harvest-to-harvest lifestyle. One bad season can wipe an entire village off the map, as sure as if nobody every lived there in the first place. We still see this today, and people die by the millions because of slightly sub-optimal weather patterns.
That is contentious, at best, and illogical at worst.
If HG populations were restricted, directly or indirectly, by food availability, then HG populations were always at a point where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle couldn’t sustain it. By definition.
And if populations rose under HG production, then that population didn’t need agriculture to support it. Also by definition.
So a claim that agriculture was invented to sustain a population that couldn’t be sustained by a HG lifestyle makes no sense.
The causes the invention of agriculture are unclear, but it can;t have been invented to sustain a population that was already *growing *under a HG system. An increasing population may have *enabled *agriculture, or it may have provided a greater *benefit *to agriculture. But it can’t have necessitated it.
Khoe-khoen (Khoi is singular) were agriculturalists. You mean San (or Bushmen, for preference).
Not really. I’ve been there, climbed the mound and toured the museum. Not really comparable at all.
No archaeologist disputes that it was equal in size to any European city.
Why do you think otherwise?
Hunter Gatherers don’t build earthworks like Monk’s Mound. Neither do horticulturalists. You need highly organized societies to construct the hundreds of earthworks all over the midwest.
We really know almost nothing about the history of the societies that built these structures, because by the time Europeans who were interested in such things came along, they were all mostly dead, and the survivors had reverted to simpler social structures. But they were still mostly farmers. See Five Civilized Tribes - Wikipedia, and Iroquois - Wikipedia. These people were farmers who sometimes hunted and fished and gathered, right up until the time they were expelled from their homelands.
Indeed. As you said, very low intensity ‘farming’ had long since existed. Where nomadic people would cultivate spots along their trekking route. Returning to a spot in the right season.
Grain had long been used that way long before strains started to appear that had ears with ‘unnatural amounts’ of seeds. This enabled bigger crop surplusses and therefore more and bigger fields and more people to feed.
Bigger fields also means more maintanance but there probably was a long transition period from nomads to semi-nomads to semi-sedentary to fully agricultural.
That’s in the area where it originated, the Black Sea region, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.
Europe was probably taken over by the farming cultures that had to leave the Black-Sea region after it flooded.
Blake do you have a source for your infanticide claim, btw?
I’m not romanticizing. Just breaking down the ‘brink of survival’ meme. I have no doubt people were as violent then as they have ever been. Although the choice to avoid confrontation with other tribes is easier when you don’t have a home to defend.
That said I could imagine that violence inside the groups, for leadership f.i., might be higher. ‘Might be’ 'cause we simply have no idea what social constructs they had in place.
And you know the size of the city by this … how?
I didn’t think that the size of Cahokia was really in dispute.
While I readily agree that the builders of Monks Mound were not HGs, recient discoveries have turned on its head the assumption that HGs don’t build massive monumental-ceremonial centers.
There are even some who theorize that the “reason” HGs developed more intensive agriculture has nothing to do with population pressures - and is, rather, so that they could better concentrate in one place to build and maintain monumental-ceremonial centres!
There is a general rule for all living things - if they cannot make a living there, they wont be there, and if they can, they will. Humanity has created a way around this rule by inventing supply lines and transportation, that allows people to live in otherwise unproductive lands (for agriculture) like Las Vegas, and Phoenix. So, while you can walk in the woods and see scant amounts of food available, back in the day that place would have been avoided by people, or their presence would have been transient.
And WRT fishing, again, back in the day prior to industrial fishing techniques and water projects, rivers in the Pacific Northwest and California would have phenomenal salmon runs where, as stated upthread, the food would come to the people. And they did not use a fishing pole with a metal hook to catch one at a time, either. If there was not enough food in the environment, people would not be there.
Clearly, our solution to the problem does not work everywhere, as there continues to be people living in marginal or unproductive lands and enduring hardships in the absence of supply lines.
At the time Cortés visited Tenochtitlan, it had a population of between 200k and 350k.
To give an idea, London in 1530 had a population of about 50k. In 1560, Madrid had about 30k. By that measure, Tenochtitlan was almost an order of magnitude more successful than the greatest capitals of Europe at the time.
… it’s not entirely relevant to the current conversation, I just like to get people interest in meso-American history every opportunity I get. The scope and scale of the smallpox epidemic was mind-boggling.
See post #63. 
Yup. Most people (well, most interested-in-history people) are though familiar with the notion that Mesoamerica had urbanism.
It often comes as a surprise that North America had pre-Columbian urbanism as well (though to be fair, Cahokia was abandoned before any Europeans ever saw it). The stereotype of the hunting-gathering native is well entrenched. Though of course some natives were hunter-gatherers, it wasn’t the way the majority made a living.