Bad seasons don’t happen in one small place. Walking from where there has been a bad season to where there has been a good one could be thousands of miles. Doing that while starving might not be a great prospect. Particularly since unless you are pioneering a new land, the place you move to will already be supporting a population without necessarily any room for you.
Agriculturalists and herders have surplus resources. They can stockpile. Sure, they can get wiped out, but it is less likely.
You’re bucking every expert comment I have ever read on this subject. You are also bucking the trend of history. If H & G is so resilient and agriculture and herding so vulnerable, how come the latter has been almost totally replaced by the former?
Read the article linked in post #28 of this thread. It does overly romanticize h/g and insofar as I like digital pianos and Harry Potter and the feel of a 389 Pontiac accelerating as it rounds a well-paved, well-banked turn, and insofar as I don’t have to work all that hard (albeit still many more hours than my h/g ancestors), I’m not inclined to agree with the author that taking up agriculture was truly a wrong turn. But ignoring that for a moment, there’s a well-written exposition on why h/g was driven to the fringes, which answers your question.
I know all that. I read the article, heck, I’ve read the Jared Diamond’s book on the subject. It supports what I’m saying. Agriculturalists and herders outsurvive H/G’ers not the other way around, albeit that the former may have worse and shorter lives than the latter.
I think this is about right. I’m not an anthropologist but I think such primitive societies do a much better job of integrating young people into the adult life than we do. Most of them have some sort of rite of passage, for boys at least, making them aware that they are now “part of the team.” And I think that the women did, and still do the agriculture while the men do most of the hunting.
However, my WAG is that the excellent integration of young people into the society also results in few malcontents since most are satsified with the status quo and therefore they tend to be static societies that change little over time.
For a famous and interesting perspective on the relative tradeoffs of changing from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, see Jared Diamond’s The Worst Mistake.
Your assuming a bad season for a HG is the same as one for a agriculturalist. A drought or wildfire, for an agriculturalist might mean no food, but for the HG it just means a longer walk.
Why would they be starving? If they stayed in one area during a bad season they would use up the available resources, but being mobile expands the resources you can exploit. There might not be as much during a bad season, but it doesn’t turn everywhere into a barren wasteland.
Your also assuming a population density that has not been constant for the history of HG, how many humans were there during the neolithic period?
For the HG everything you don’t eat IS surplus.
The experts have gotten it wrong before!
But you could also ask, if agriculture and herding is so resilient and HG so vulnerable, why did it take so long to develop?
Your assuming a bad season for a HG is the same as one for a agriculturalist. A drought or wildfire, for an agriculturalist might mean no food, but for the HG it just means a longer walk.
Why would they be starving? If they stayed in one area during a bad season they would use up the available resources, but being mobile expands the resources you can exploit. There might not be as much during a bad season, but it doesn’t turn everywhere into a barren wasteland.
Your also assuming a population density that has not been constant for the history of HG, how many humans were there during the neolithic period?
For the HG everything you don’t eat IS surplus.
The experts have gotten it wrong before!
But you could also ask, if agriculture and herding is so resilient and HG so vulnerable, why did it take so long to develop?
Potentially too long a walk to be viable. You are ignoring my point in that respect.
And anyway, if there is only a local disaster, and if there are resources to be lived off elsewhere, farmers can walk too, ya know. So that is not a distinguishing point. It is the really bad widespread disasters that will make the difference, and that is where surplus resources come into play. A farmer may well have stored resources to eat or trade while an HG will not.
Fewer. But HG will support fewer (much fewer) than agriculture. In neolithic times there may have been many fewer people, but the land was probably still supporting as many people as that land could support. So moving out of your usual territory due to a disaster may well just take you to into another territory that is already fully exploited for an HG lifestyle.
Tosh. Everything HG don’t eat goes rotten or is eaten by animals. It doesn’t just lie around fresh as a daisy ready for a bad season. To create a good surplus, in one place, sufficient to justify the resources to build storage good enough to preserve that surplus from rot and animals at that place takes agriculture.
Because the conditions required for its development are rare, is the probable answer from what I’ve read. Once it does develop it pushes HG aside.
You could as easily ask: “if the internet’s so great, how come it wasn’t invented in 50,000 BC?”
How resilient and pervasive something is once developed is not necessarily related to how easy it is to develop in the first place.
Perhaps because the aggies are settled and pushing out the herders and hunter gatherers … and the aggies had surplus population that could dedicate itself to warfare without regards to removing themselves from the important food and resource production.
When one has a farmstead, with outbuildings and crops in place, one tends to be a bit possessive … why do you think we had range wars in the US when the farmers started fencing in land and water which prevented the herders from open ranging across planted fields.
Ever wonder why the little greekling came up with a moral story about how good it was to be a good little cricket and horde food and prepare for winter? Buck up, and keep your head down and grind out that food? Or why the nomadic cultures were so demonized coughAtillacough. Ever notice that in the ‘Golden Age’ of any culture the food was plentiful, people didnt have to work so hard, never had droughts or plagues, and life was perfect in its simplicity?
Well I suppose when nomads come in and kill the men, rape the women, and loot the houses that might have something to do with it.
Pastoralists tend to be able to mobilize for war much more easily than farmers. Every herder on horseback is a potential light cavalry raider. Herders have strategic mobility…the entire nation can pick up and move to greener pastures, and if those pastures are currently the cropland of farmers, so much the worse for the farmers. The farmers can defend themselves, but they can’t strike back at the herder’s homeland. If the raid fails, the herders return home and the farmers pick up the pieces, but if they try to invade the herders the herders can just pick up and leave.
However, herding can’t support the density of farming. So herders invade and loot and retreat, or take over, but become assimilated as the new ruling class until the next band of herders comes calling. And farmers can support many more specialists. Eventually the specialist farmers invented gunpowder and the days of the supremacy of cavalry are over.
You’ll note I never used the word murder. Murder is socially unacceptable killing. It’s illegal. The words I used were slaughter and infanticide, Those are or can be legal and socially sanctioned. Very different concepts. Murder was extremely rare in most HG societies because the punishment was usually direct retribution in-kind from the victim’s relatives.
Of course those things weren’t magically available as soon as people adopted farming either. Those techniques took a lot of time to learn. So it’s not like these are real differences between early farming and HG societies. Issues of infanticide and population control were real differences right from the outset.
No doubt there are many problems associated with subsistence farming. But looking at our specific objections:
HGs have at leats as strong a concept of ‘our land’ as any agriculturalists. Probably far more so. Once again this seems to be a someowhat romamticised idea of how HGs lived. These were not animals that wandered freely across the entire globe like migratory birds. They were nomadic animals with tightly defined and defended home ranges, akin to the other large mammalian predators. As a result HGs need to defend their land from intruders wishing to steal limiting resources just as any farmers do. However higher population densities will make it far easier to defend ‘our land’. So on this score at least farming is solely positive.
Because farmers can afford to invest resources in substantial dwellings and have an ability to store food they are less at the mercy of the weather than HGs.
You are certainly not mobile. As I pointed out above, that is the main strength of the HG system. Because you are not mobile, or not highly mobile, you can start investing in heavy tools, substantial housing and so forth.
Not saying that subsistence farming isn’t a dicey way to make a living, but it has numerous advantages of HG techniques in most places.
And you have impressive Google skills. Unfortunately the references are totally invalid. I haven’t read thema ll in depth, but the everything I have seen has had no relevance to this discussion.
Unfortunately you have made the assumption that nomadic and HG are interchangeable terms. That’s not the case. The Huns were nomadic herders, ie they were agricultral people, not HGs. A great many American Indians people were also nomadic agriculturalists.
AFAI can tell all your references refer to naomdic agriculturalists, not nomadic HGs. If there are any exceptions then by all means highlight them specifically. But my comments referred specifically to nomadic HGs. Not just to nomads in general. Important distinction.
1)If you want wool and dairy from your animals you don’t eat them all the time. Which is why the Huns, the LApps and the Masai didn’t eat their animals all the time. Milk/blood was the primary protein source of these nomadic herders AFIAK. That way you can have your wool and still us t the animals as food. That doesn’t make the people any less nomadic agriculturalists.
2)By this standard of HG the modern USA is a HG society. stags, boar, river fish and birds are all commonly hunted in the USA, along with various wild foods. Certainly Europe until late Reformation at least was HG by this standard. Poor farmers have always subsidised their herds/crops with wild food. That doesn’t make them any less farmers.
If you want to argue that any society that hunts or gathers is a HG society no matter what the primary occupation and food soucres are then of course you are free to do so. But that is not the normal defintion, nor is it the one anyone prior to you used in this thread.
Where did I read that 30% of all HG males would be killed in tribal warfare - and after each decade about 10% of all tribes would have been completely wiped out by neighboring tribes.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it doesn’t explain why agriculturalists always managed to maintain higher populations than HGs. It is also slightly problematic that it defies the laws of physics.
If HGs could always fond more food by simply moving, no matter what their population density, then why weren’t they always having more children? Contagious disease is rare amongst HGs, so what exactly kept their population low. You are saying it can’t be disease because there is always more food available by moving, evening the worst drought. And you are contending that they never practiced culling. OS why didn’t HG populations grow exponentially, everywhere, al the time?
The normal explanation of why farmers sustained higher populations than HGs is because they had access to more food. It’s elegant and it’s supported by the evidence. Yet you have just claimed that HGs have access to unlimited amounts of food. No matter how much they use there will always be more avialable if they move, even in the worst droughts. SO now you have to explain why HG populations were so low.
Then you have to explain how this gets around those damn laws of thermodynamics. Any system receives a finite amount of energy. So how can there always be more energy available simply by moving within that system, no matter how many people are using that energy? Where is all this free energy coming from? How can there be no limit to the amount of energy available to HGs?
Yes, but it doesn’t make those resources infinite. You can’t make a dollar out of 65 cents no matter how much you move it around.
The system is receiving a finite amount of energy. Changing location within that system doesn’t create more energy. The amount is fixed. So how does changing location allow HGs to obtain infinite amounts of energy from the system? This is a massive hole in your claim. It simply defies the fundamental laws of physics. Moving around doesn’t magically create more energy within a system. If the energy isn’t available it isn’t available. Yet you are claiming that HGs can always get a bit more energy by simply moving. How do they do that?
Anyway I’ve provided my references for HGs limiting population through killing. Now I want a refernce from you to support your claim that HGs could always obtain more food by moving.
And yet mine is the first link which, by including the subject matter, a dial-up user like myself can immediately TELL whether or not it’s Jared Diamond’s well-known essay. The other links are not clearly marked, and at dial-up speeds, I don’t always open every link even when I “1/ Read thread,” as you so eloquently put it.
How about adding “3/ label your links clearly for the benefit of other users” to your list?
