It’s not “all” humanity, and it’s not “at the same time” - just *very *roughly so. Which is to be expected given the different circumstances, that responses to the same climatic event would take varying times in different environments.
I think you are confusing cause and effect. For big game hunting, cooperative behaviour is necessary; similarly, a single big kill feeds a large number of people, but needs to be disposed of (or preserved, like dried meat, pemmican, etc.) People lived in small groups, and pooled everything, because the survival of the group demanded it.
(For a fun discussion of nomadic tribe economics and sharing, see the opening sequence of “The Gods Must Be Crazy”)
Once a group becomes farmers, the family is more important. they have their area to work and the proceeds of this land and labour, and certainly do not have enough to share with the whole village - and of course, the question will arise - “why do we have enough food and the next hut does not?”. If it is a real misfortune the group will contribute, but one family cannot feed the whole village with their usual harvest - it’s to each their own.
As for possessions - being sedentary is what leads to an accumulation of possessions. A nomadic tribe is limited to what they can carry. In settled village, with care a family can accumulate many vermin-proof clay jars and more than one or two sets of clothes. They can accumulate artwork and memorial works, they can decorate their hut or expand it.
As for “what changed?”. By the time of the emergence of agriculture, humans were scattered all over the world. Their genetic lineage had become isolated on 4 land masses with minimal cross-communication or interbreeding. (5 if sub-Sahara is separate). It’s not conceivable that there emerged a change in all (except Australia) at the same time. The idea that there was a time-release change buried in the human brain is also less plausible.
IMHO something changed about 70,000 years ago or so. “Modern humans” from what I’ve read emerged from a small bottle-neck group about that time and spread across Africa and then the world very quickly, replacing existing variants of early humans. What was it? Better speech? Conceptual thinking leading to better planning of hunting etc.? Or was it something a simple as volcanic eruptions and/or climate change drove them close to extinction and nothing special emerged? We may never know.
But, those humans did not have the steady climate able to take a good proto-crop plant and selectively grow it for the centuries at a time required to make such a plant a suitable substitute for hunting, in terms of volume of nourishment it would be feasible to cultivate… The point of the linked articles is not that there was an ice age, but that the climate came and went - what would be warm enough to grow certain crops one century might not be the next century - variability.
Anyone who’s seen wild plums or crabapples or wild strawberries no bigger than a pea must consider - what would agriculture be like if that were the best of those sort of plants that could be found? If early wheat did not ripen all the same time and had to be grabbed before it fell off the stalk? They would be an addition to a hunter’s diet, collected haphazardly and throwing into a mix with the meat. The point of the article was that when climate stability arrived, very soon after so did better plants through human selectivity.
As for Australia - Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses this - that the main crops of agricultural societies are a lucky coincidence of the appropriate precursor plants that can be adapted to produce sustainable volumes of food for a society. Some places - notably, Australia - did not have these plants, and/or the climate was not appropriate to import the nearest agricultural neighbour’s crops. Also, Australia after the ice age was more difficult to reach, so less cultural exchange.
Where do you come by the notion that nomadic cultures didn’t have individual property? Cite for this?
A man might own his weapons and a woman a few baskets/sacks, people own small things, but no one amassed large amounts of stuff. So yes, technically, there was private property but not hoards like modern people typically have.
That’s the nature of being nomadic HGs. “Not a lot of stuff” doesn’t mean “didn’t own the stuff they had”
The issue here is whether all or most stuff was shared. There’s no actual evidence for the claim that pre-agricultural people owned everything in common, and plenty of evidence from burials that they didn’t.
Yes, climate change. The more unstable the climate, the less agriculture pays off versus competing strategies. Especially early in the process when you don’t have the selective breeding and techniques down.
Genetic studies of human remains in the middle east and Zagroz shows that agriculture at first spread as a concept, to unrelated peoples. After a bit, someone in Anatolia figured out how to do it right, and a massive population wave spread out. The descendants of this population is still a major component of the European genetic profile. Otzi the Iceman was a representative of this group.
Interactions with the previous hunter-gatherer population varied. There are still genes from the hunter-gatherers present. Agriculture came late to the British Isles, but when it did the agriculturalists totally erased the previous population. Conversely in the east Baltic the native population held out and adopted agriculture with little replacement (at that point). Speculation is the area was so fertile and varied in resources that it supported a greater population density, that held out until picking up agriculture.
A similar pattern of an agricultural population explosion erasing local populations can be found in Southeast Asia.
As for the Mammoth/Mastodons, there is always some new paper trying to exonerate humans by pointing the finger at some other culprit. Comet strike, mega-flu what have you. Climate change seem like a poor choice.
The species and related probscidea go back to the Miocene, and seems to have had a remarkable ability to weather climate changes, powering through both the hotter Miocene and repeated, fast-shifting (in evolutionary terms) glacial and inter-glacial periods. I am not aware of any evidence of stress during previous climate changes.
They even managed to survive into historic times in a location not reached by humans. If you can make it on Wrangel Island, you need a really good excuse not to flourish elsewhere.
My guess (IANA anthropologist, archaelogist or historian) is that it was a combination of a few things that none of which on their own would have resulted in agriculture.
- Climate change such that cultivation was actually viable.
- Someone noticing that plants grow from seeds, and deliberately reserving a proportion of their food crop seeds to replant the following year. I bet this was more of an observational thing- “Hey- those wheat plants grew where I threw out the leftover stuff in the pouch in the spring! Maybe I can repeat that and have more seeds come Fall…”
I mean, once you’re at the point where you’re trying to hedge your bets by scattering seeds in hope of getting more food, you’ve basically got agriculture. From there, you’re domesticating the food species.
My guess (subject to change with more evidence) is that people owned their personal tools and clothes/ornaments, but not much else because there wasn’t much else. The territory was “owned” in common. They cooperated to build shelter(s). Food was definitely shared, often with elaborate rules for distribution. Likewise, rights to harvest various resources were elaborately codified, but there was a notion that all of this was supposed to contribute to everyone’s survival. I think sometimes people think it was some sort of free-for-all finders-keepers but in fact all the HG societies so far discovered have a lot of rules to follow.
In 1978, James Burke did a 10-part series called, “Connections”, which traced the development of existing items back as far as he could.
In episode one, he theorized that the primary motivating factor away from hunting-and-gathering was the invention of the plow. Humans could now grow food in place rather than spending time looking for food.
Certainly wrong, since plowing was a relatively late development. Early agriculture relied on hoes and digging sticks (and still does in the subtropics and tropics). The earliest evidence of plowing seems to be about 3800 BC, which is 4000 years too late. Also, AFAIK plowing never developed in the agricultural societies of the Americas. While early plows were drawn by humans, to be really effective they needed domesticated draft animals, which were lacking in the Americas.
Keep in mind that the process of domestication predates agriculture by quite some time. We wouldn’t complete the process until the advent of agriculture, but we were on our way to coevolving a mutually beneficial relationship with a number of different species ages ago.
The earliest bands of hunter gatherers would have been picking berries and grains as they walked their trails, dropping some seeds along the path and others when they relieved themselves. They would pick the largest, most appealing to a human grains and fruits, and this is the very beginning of “artificial selection”, though at this point it was no more “artificial” than a fruit evolving bright colors to draw in birds. But it ensured that large, colorful, tasty and sugary fruits (all relatively speaking, of course) wouldgrow where humans are.
In places like South America, we even stepped in for plants whose evolutionary partners had died out. Avocados, for example, evolved their huge pits because they were eaten whole by giant ground sloths and mammoths; the pit would pass the digestive system and sprout. When the sloths died out, the avocado couldn’t reproduce anymore. But we stepped in and replaced the megafauna.
This applies to livestock as well. Thousands of years before we bred and herded goats, we were able to selectively hunt old animals past reproductive age out of the wild herds, ensuring continued growth; we were able to kill off the most aggressive males in each generation, ensuring a more docile species; and we were able to protect the herd by killing off wolves or other predators that strayed into our territory.
By the time we decided to stay in one place for good, our grains were larger, our fruits juicier, our prey species more docile. All preselected and primed for domestication – species we didn’t have such a beneficial relationship with would be outcompeted, or vice versa – we would congregate in areas full of our beneficial species.
It’s almost like our early ancestors and the ancestors of our domesticated species worked together to create the ideal environment for civilization to arise in. But of course, that is how it would seem to us, the end product of this union. From the perspective of a puddle, the hole in the ground it finds itself in is exactly the right size and shape for the water.
ETA: So what changed 10,000 years ago? Conditions were finally right for us to settle permanently enough to leave the traces of what we today call “civilization”, and the rate of change escalated from there exponentially – a process that continues today. But the birth of civilization wasn’t REALLY a distinct event – just a continuation of previous processes that finally passed a tipping point.
But not because folks suddenly had an intense desire to get inebriated like a Notre Dame freshman. The drink of choice in colonial America was hard cider. The alcohol meant it could be kept for quite some time without spoilage/disease issues. When you’re wading along the edge of an ice age, fresh, pure, uncontaminated water’s not all that hard to come by. Climate warms up, running water sources gets…iffy- and the need for the ability to carry and store liquids that remain drinkable becomes a very important component of survival. Moist grains WILL ferment- and desperation leads to discovery. Light bulb moment, gradual shift to steady production & supply, less disease, more calories, greater population. Anyone who thinks one would farm by choice if given an alternative has never farmed. Farming was harder than working as a lumberjack!
This definitely isn’t the case with the *current *HGs I’m familiar with (the San). Individuals (often women) own such territorial features as water holes and foraging areas. So cites for why this is supposed to be different in the distant past would be useful.
Sure, everyone helps erect temporary structures.The Amish have communal barn raising, do they not own property then?
That’s not egalitarian “sharing”, that’s a stratified gift economy. Not the same thing at all. There’s a clear sense of who has the rights to portion food out. The hunter, if it’s meat (and this is usually to everyone, gift economy style), the forager’s family only, if it’s foraged food. That distribution right’s a form of ownership.
Cite, please. Cites for recent anthropology or archaeology papers that show this “notion” rather than your romantic supposition.
That’s the opposite of everyone sharing everything. You know what we call it when there are elaborate rules for who can use what? Property rights.
Not just agriculture but a whole host of things from biological evolution to the development of industrial technology seem to follow the same general pattern: no apparent change for long periods of time, a tipping point, then exponential growth to the limits. Has anyone proposed a general theory of why this pattern occurs, and how that would apply to agriculture?
Did you miss the part where I said this is my GUESS???
No, I didn’t. I just assumed your guess was *based *on something concrete, given the forum. Maybe some anthropology training, maybe some fieldwork with HGs, maybe a National Geographic Kids article you skimmed one time. Not just a wild stab in the dark.
For evolution it’s Punctuated Equilibrium., but I don’t know anyone’s applied it to agriculture.
The theory isn’t without its critics even there.
This is fascinating and will change things a lot when verified:
*The remains of a mastodon discovered during a routine freeway excavation in San Diego shows there was human activity in North America 130,000 years ago — or about 115,000 years earlier than previously thought.
…
Paleontologists with the San Diego Natural History Museum discovered the remains of the ancient mammal more than 20 years ago. But it wasn’t until now that scientists were able to accurately date the findings, and possibly rewrite the history of the New World as we know it.
“This is a whole new ball game,” Steve Holen, co-director of the Center for American Paleolithic Research and the paper’s lead author, told CNN. The discovery changes the understanding of when humans reached North America.
The study, to be published this week in the science journal Nature, said the numerous limb bones fragments of a young male mastodon found at the site show spiral fractures, indicating they were broken while fresh.
Hammerstones and stone anvils were also found at the site, showing that humans had the manual skill and knowledge to use stone tools to extract the animal’s marrow and possibly to use its bones to make tools.*
As is often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this site doesn’t provide that. Spiral fractures and alleged hammerstones do not a butchery site make. The interpretation has been criticized by many archaeologists, including Tom Dillehay, whose analysis of the Monterverde site in Chile helped break the “Clovis first” paradigm. If this was a butchery site, why weren’t formed stone tools and cut marks on the bones found as well?
Like I said, when verified. Before peer review and publication, it’s pretty much just “interesting” but doesnt prove anything. I have doubts, but still it’s interesting anyway.