But did the Steppes peoples actually develop that technology, or did they borrow it off an agrarian culture?
BTW: I don’t think that anyone has yet provided the requested cite for the HG 15 hours of work per week. I’d like to see this cite for personal reasons (I have a social anthropoligist friend and this recently came up in one of our debates).
Yeah, I’m still waiting. Have excavations nearby the Lasceaux caves in France found in Cuenniform, “And le hunteurs and gathereurs shall work up to 17 hours in oune week, and if zee number shall exceed zis amount, zee worker shall be given oune extra antelope her hour worked, an antelope and zee turkey bird for each of zee hours past twenty.”
If food really was that readily available and these people really were just happy little hunters like has been suggested, then I suspect that they would also do what known human population with excess resources and no access to birth control would do: screw, and screw like little bunny rabbits until the population has expanded to consume that entire set of resources.
Read the thread. It’s already been well explained why this doesn’t happen: all HG cultures practice population control, primarily by infanticide. The 15-30 hour/week figure for HGs isn’t in any way controversial. I’ve never actually heard anyone disagree with it before. HGs can manage that because the population is always maintained at just below worst season carrying capacity. The number of hours required to obtain food will increase slightly in worst seasons, but not markedly. When there’s no food there’s no food. It doesn’t matter how hard you work.
“the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.”
http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html
From what I remember from the Discovery Channel (or maybe it was the National Geographic Channel), true HG (the real HG or the OG HG 
- sorry), life was hard. Food was not abundant. The HG had to go out and kill it, stalking prey like animals stalk their prey. They would travel miles to kill things (well, maybe not that long). If you couldn’t keep up, they left you behind, and I guess you probably starved, thus, no lazy people. After a kill, they could pursue leisure activities, but I wonder how long food kept? After that, it was back to the hunt. Also, the HG hunting weapons were primitive, not much more than rocks and sharpened wood, and the occasional club. The HG was mobile, but not by choice, they had to follow the migration path of their prey in order to survive.
Please don’t use the Disocvery Channel as a basis for a ‘factual’ answer. It’s notorious for inaccuracies. It’s is certainly not an approriate ‘reference’ when you are using it to chalenge several acedemic papers and univeristy websites.
Wrong. Arodn 50% of HG food is vegatble. ANother 30% or so is small game like rats, grubs and lizards. HGs don’t have to go out and stalk and kill the vast majority of their food.
Pray tell, in precisely what way are HGS like animals in this respect?
Almost invariably far longer. I don’t have a refernce to hand, but the normal distance travelled for a hunt was something in the order of 5 miles. Depending on the evnironment, hunting methods and mode of hunting it could easily have been as much as 20 miles.
Yes, like jackals really. Once a pack member can’t keep up they starve. Can we please have a refernce for this claim?
All the evidence chows exactly the opposite has been true, and that dates back to well before our species evolved. The injured and sick were cared for, especially if they couldn’t keep up. Doubtless there were occasions when people who couldn’t keep up had to be abandoned because there was no way to carry them. But in no way was such behaviour common. Both anthropological and archaeological evidence shows that people who couldn’t keep up or even forage for themselves were cared for, often for years at a time.
These are human beings we are talking about. Why would they not behave as human beings?
You seem to be labouring under a misapprehension that ‘kills’ were the only or even primary way that HGs obtained food. Not true. Nor was it even true that most men hunted on most days. Quite commonly only one person would actually hunt, and that might only occur every few days. If people were actually free to engage in leisure activities after a ‘kill’ you are saying they were free to so fully 110 hours a week on average.
Not long. Most HG societies had no food storage technology of any sort.
Really? And here was me thinking we were talking about Homo sapiens. Precisely what HGs were restricted to rocks, sharpened wood and clubs? Jumpin’ Jesus, not even H. erectus was restricted to rocks, sharpened wood and clubs.
Really? then how do you explain the survival of HG groups that didn’t follow migrating prey, or even have access to migrating prey.
Except that most hunter-gatherers aren’t big game hunters following migrating ungulates.
The idea that HGs were total nomads following herds of migrating ungulates is completely misguided. Most of their food actually came/comes from gathered plants. When hunting they’re more likely to bag a squirrel or rabbit than a bison or giraffe. Hunter gatherers have a home range…they might have a summer camp for hunting migrating caribou, a fall camp for gathering berries, and a winter camp for fishing. Pregnant women and infants and elders have to be taken care of.
Hunter-gatherers CAN store food, just not easily. Meat and fish can be dried/smoked. Fish can be buried in covered pits and fermented. Fruit can be dried. And so on. Any way that farmers of pastoralists can preserve food can be done by HGs, with two exceptions which pretty much define the difference between HGs and farmers and pastoralists. Pastoralists and farmers can keep food animals around for later milking or blood drawing or slaughter, “preserving” meat in a live state. And farmers can store large amounts of grain for months. Hunter-gatherers can even store grain/seeds too, but they’re going to have far less of it to start with since it all has to be gathered wild. But every type of grain cultivated by farmers started off as a wild plant that was gathered by hunter-gatherers.
Think for a minute about the lifestyle of the Eskimos of 100 years ago. Totally hunter-gatherer, absolutely no agriculture, the only domestic animal was the dog. Yet they have permanent semi-subterranean houses (although not used year-round), territory, large multiperson skin boats for hunting whales and walrus, they preserved food…smoked salmon, dried meat, meat preserved by freezing, fish preserved by fermentation in pits, berries and fish eggs preserved in seal oil. And they had leisure time for art, handcrafted clothing, beads, masks, etc. They weren’t moving every day following caribou herds, although they hunted caribou, the women mostly stayed at the camp while the men went out after the caribou, and they didn’t follow the caribou year-round, they hunted caribou when the caribou migrated into their home territory and stopped when the caribou left.
And people mostly didn’t starve as long as it was a good year. If it’s a good year there’s enough food for everybody. It’s when you have a bad year…the salmon run fails, the seals don’t come, or whatever…then people start to starve, then babies die when the mother’s milk dries up, then the sick and the old don’t get much food, then people go over to the other band’s territory and kill them to try to take their food. Life as a hunter-gatherer CAN’T be lived on the edge of starvation every day, because if the food fails for a week or two you’re dead, or at least too weak to hunt and gather more food. As a hunter-gatherer, most of the time there’s got to be plenty of food, otherwise you can’t live. Your carrying capacity is set not by an average year, but by the worst year in 10.
Farmers though are often on the edge of starvation…they’ve got X amount of grain that has to last them to the next grain harvest. But they can portion it out even if it isn’t much and hang on.
Things have to be really, really bad for hunter-gatherers to starve. Even in marginal areas like deserts and the arctic there’s plenty of food to choose from. It may not all be tasty, but it’s food. Years back, we had a discussion about this in an Anthropology class. The San (bushmen) listed 100+ animals they considered to be edible, but regularly ate only about 15-20 of these regularly. Why? Some of them taste better or provide more meat for less effort.
For them to go hungry, a bunch of these species would suddenly have to get very scarce. That’s just animals. Most of the food in most places came from gathering plants. There were hundreds of different edible plants. The odds of most of them suddenly going away was also pretty low. The advantage hunter-gatherers had was that it’s very unlikely for most of their major food sources to all go away at the same time. There might be other benefits for adopting a different lifestyle, but protection from starvation is not one of them.
Contrast that to agricultural societies where survival depended on a handful of staple crops with fairly specific requirements for a successful harvest. There were also people, the specialists, who were almost totally dependent upon someone else for their food. Stockpiles were almost never enough for a really bad harvest. Famine is close to inevitable in a primarily agrarian society. Adopting agriculture to offset hunger is like drinking sea water to offset dehydration; you just kill yourself faster.
To pretend like I’m actually addressing the OP, I’ll add that you have to be a severely lazy bugger to not work enough to support yourself in a hunter-gatherer society. Not to mention the fact that hunger is a great motivator. Yes, all people take care of the young, the sick and injured, and the old, but no society and no individual will consistently allow someone to mooch all the time. If you’re capable of taking care of yourself and you don’t, sooner or later someone’s going to tell you to get your own damn food. I doubt anyone would just sit there and starve, waiting for others in the band to take pity and give him or her a handout when it only takes a few hours to get food.
Realistically, getting food that way is fun, even. How many city kids run off all over the place and bring back animals, bugs, plants, and other junk when you take them out into the woods? (Assuming you confiscate all portable gaming devices). Chasing each other (mock hunting) and finding stuff (collecting, shopping) is still part of what we do for fun. Why wouldn’t going on a hunt or going gathering be considered the same as playing football and drinking beer, or getting together with friends and gossiping while doing stuff together? Women often still like doing artsy-craftsy social activities like scrap-booking, party planning, and shopping. Men still like hanging out, swapping tips and hints on how to do things better, and trying to prove they’re bigger, faster, tougher, and stronger than each other. It’s the same behavior, it’s just that now that behavior is mostly disconnected from obtaining food.
I think it was probably more like “if you will not work, you shall not eat.” Sounds fair to me.
I think that the trait of being a “lazy screwup” today was probably much more adaptive in earlier times. In hunter-gatherer days, it was probably wise not to spend time on a task unless the benefits were fairly clear and immediate. Note that today, most lazy screwups can still find the energy to bring their welfare check to the check-cashing center.
Also, the peer pressure in a group of 20-50 people depending upon eachother for survival would have been much more intense than on a lazy screwup today.
But if somebody was totally lazy, I would guess the same thing would happen to them that would happen today – they would be ostracized.
I’ve heard city slickers grumble about “the small-town mentality”, where gossip is brutal and everyone lives in fear of “What will the neighbors think?” In an HG tribe, everyone you want to impress lives right next door. If you start slacking off, everyone you care about will know about it, and whether you have a good reason, or a lame excuse.
When the mighty hunter gets sick, the tribe will take good care of him.
When the lazy screw-up gets sick, he will have to beg for scraps.
The pretty girls will flock to the mighty hunter’s tent.
The lazy screw-up will sleep alone.
Absolutely. Reputation was currency.
People don’t starve because of a lack of choice. People starve because of a lack of volume.
To put that into perspective agrcultural people list some 10, 000+ animals and plants they consider to be edible and about 10 times that number of plants. If mere variety somehow made starvationm les likely then agriculturalists hsould starve less frequently than HGs, and we know that is not the case.
Yep, and that’s preciely what happens in dorught years and harsh winters.
Not so much ‘pretty low’ as ‘certain to happen every 5-15 years’. Hgs have no advantage when it comes to their major food sources vanishing simultaneously. When it doesn’t rain for 8 months or the snow doesn’t melt for 6 months then everything suffers.
But that isn’t the case. Prior to the industrial revolution agricutural people utilised exactly the same number of plant and animal species as HGs living in the same environment. Do you think that American Indians didn’t hunt deer, or that Zulu never fished, or that Englishmen never gathered acorns.
This is one of the most interesting threads in a while. I am biting my tongue. Do you realize how much you guys sound like Christians?
In a discussion of the practical aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Umm… how does this relate to “sounding like Christians”?
Sleel, if what you say is true, then why did an agrarian lifestyle ever develop? If as a HG it’s almost impossible to starve whilst living as a farmer means I’m on the edge of starvation almost constantly, why on Earth would one favour the latter over the former?
Am I missing something or do you mean “more frequently”?
By putting ‘man’ in some sort of special place. Agricutural living is neither good or bad for mankind. Evolution’s only ‘goal’, as it were, is proagation of the species. By HG or agriculture we are doing just that. Stunningly I might add.
The individual’s comfort level during the process is irrelevant in so far as it relates to turning to agriculture being a “mistake”. It is relevant only in an abstract way.
I think you’re msising something, but I’m not sure what it could be. It all seems fairly straightforward.
Sleel claimed that the more species of food plants people have access to, the less likely they are to starve.
I pointed out that agricultural people have acces to at least as many food plants as HGs, and usually more because they can also cultivate and trade exotic plants.
I then pointed out that, based on Sleel’s starting assumption that more food species = less starvation, we should expect agriculturalists to starve less than HGs since agriculturalists have more food species.
I then reiterated a point made numerous times in this thread, namely that HGs very rarely suffer the effects of starvation, whereas starvation was the normal condition for agriculturalists prior to the industrial revolution.
Quite clearly both 3) and 4) can not be simultaneously true. We cannot accept that agriculturalists starve less because they have access to more food plants while simultaneously accepting that agriculturalists starve more. Quite clearly the logic is flawed somewwhere.
The flaw is twofold. Firstly Sleel’s initial assumtpioin that more species = less starvation. There is nothing to support that asumption whatsoever. Then his assumption that agricultural people don’t bother harvesting wild food. That pointis directly contradicted by the evidence.
I hope that clears it all up.
I missed your point, sorry.
Huh? Your statement is a goulash of non-sequiturs. This thread is (mainly) about HG lifestyle and the probable folkways of HG social groups. Reducing every conversation about the relative efficiency of various social and lifestyle constructs to some linear discussion about the evolutionary goals of the human genome is kind of beside the point in the context of the subject at hand.