Why did humans get into the agriculture business

Factual Questions
21

Not that I’m saying HG was a perfect idyll, but a few questions for you Blake:

First, can you give a cite that this really was a widespread belief (and not an origin story like the Garden of Eden)? I mean, plains Indians saw people, dogs and horses being born pretty regularly, and undoubtedly killed a pregnant bison on occasion. And there’s no evidence they were any stupider than we are.
Sure, no doubt someone believed this, but then again, someone in our society believes that the Earth is flat. And three hundred years ago, enough
people believed in witches to allow society to burn other people alive. Which makes me ask why you’re implying that an HG society is any worse at information transmission than a pre-literate farming society?

Well, I’m not disputing that all the stuff of an industrialized lifestyle – especially from the outside – can look pretty good to a typical HG; certainly there’s lots of examples of HG’s more or less begging for stuff when they encounter industrialized civilizations. But the little I know of the great plains cultures (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that they tended to look down on whatever primitive farming cultures they were aware of. I mean, primitive farmers would be begging from an industrialized civilization, too. So, any examples that we have evidence of regarding HGs attitudes towards primitive farming?

Barely. HGs today basically exist in the areas that nobody wants to farm/herd (note the history of the great plains), and these areas (if you leave aside fishing) are not going to be very suitable for HG, either.
Or did you have somewhere specific in mind?

22

The indians of North (and South) AMerica were by no means non-agricultural. There were the ones who followed the buffalo, and of course between passing herds the size of a small state and cyclical drought, the praries were not that condusive to farming anyway. Most of thw wild north, where the cree and Ojibway lived, was too cold or rocky for agriculture.

However, central USA all the way to the coast, there was a large agricultural population. The same applied in the more drought-prone southwest. Well into Ontario, the Huron and Mohawk practised a variation which, IIRC, some Amazon tribes also practised, of “slash and burn” agriculture. Contrary to the suggestion that it was one of those “too uniform” environments where hunting should preclude agriculture, they would wander the area, burn off a field site, build their town, and both hunt and agricult until they ruined the field fertility. As a result, they had very large settlements, with long houses and fortifications, despite having only wood axes. The local natives are known for teaching the pilgrims to bury a fish at the bottom of a dirt mound, plant corn on top, and beans around the base - well on their way to solving the soil exhaustion problem.

The Northwest coast Indians did not practice agriculture because they lived off a massive bounty - the volume of salmon they could catch and smoke provided year-round reliable food.

The mound-builders of upper eastern Mississippi seem to have managed to grow to towns of thousands, and massive constructions, based on a heirarchical agricultural existance.

So people there seem to have adopted agriculture because it was a good and eventually growing replaced a significant amount of hunting food sources. It also turned the need for wintering quarters and a place to store enough food for winter into relatively permanent housing. After all, the problem with being nomadic in a temperate climate is - how do you make, carry, and store enough food to get through the winter? The plains tribes made pemmican, dried meat (buffalo burger jerky essentially), and the massive herd thoughtfully allowed the fall slaughter near the winter camp. Groups hunting deer in the thick forest were less lucky.

I find it hard to believe any humans truly did not know seeds grew plants. Anyone carrying a bunch of seeds, and hoping that the last rain did not ruin them would realize seed-plus-water gives you sprouts with tiny leaves. Even a bunch of city boys will eventually figure out what that means.

Same with buffalo. There was a whole thread on “when did humans figure out sex means babies?” My thought was since generally, there was only one thing typically going into a vagina, and babies come out, it would not be dificult to make the connection even if the exact details took a bit longer to figure out. Once that connection was made, it does not take long to observe the same anatomical configuration and results animals. If a group is doing animal husbandry (a step to agriculture not mentioned in this thread) or follow a migration herd much of its path, then they will quickly figure or infer the same applies to the rest of the world. I suspect “they spring from the earth” is one of those just-so stories like “Turtles all the way down” which is a convenient mythical explanation but not a really believed one.

23

One explanation I’ve heard is “beer”. A hunter/gatherer society can’t make beer.

24

I always felt he was undervalued as an anthropologist and philosopher:

25

I can believe that people really could be stupid enough to think that bison spring forth from the Earth. After all, in Europe, people had similar beliefs even well into the age of agriculture and written records. I mean, you’d think that people would realize that baby frogs came from mommy frogs and daddy frogs, given the abundant precedent, but you still had educated scholars insisting that they arose spontaneously from swamp mud. Sure, the hunter-gatherer populations were just as smart as us, but they were likewise just as stupid as us, too.

26

A few years ago, my stepfather was arguing that flies come from dirt and refuse. Not that the eggs are put there because it’s a good nesting and feeding ground; he was saying they come from dirt and refuse. Admittedly, he’s not an educated scholar.

One of the benefits of education is that people can go on to make better, more sophiscated, smarter stupid mistakes.

27

We need some grain. You know, it’s a pain in the ass to collect this stuff from here and there. Why don’t we plant that stuff that got wet and sprouted and see what happens? Maybe we won’t have to spend all day walking around collecting it.

28

Not such a very old problem.

Ohhhh! The farmer and the cowman can be frieeeeends. . .

Mind you, most ranchers had permanent houses. But the cowboy life was very much a nomadic one, with mass emigrations at least once per year. They followed the food and the water; later the market. When the markets came into play, they began to steer the herds instead of just following them.

29

Some of the reasons for the transition to agriculture are covered in Jarred Diamond’s article “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”:

30

I believe that some Southern Californian Native Americans did both hunter-gathering and agriculture at the same time, without moving too much. They stayed on the coast to fish in the summer and went inland a short distance to farm in the winter.

31

But they can (and did) make mead.

32

And eat bletted /fermented fruits.

33

Yes, the first step toward permanent farming habitation - with a “task force” ssent out to do the fishing/smoking to add to the supply.

The Mohawk and Huron, similarly, supplemented corn and beans with deer hunted from the surrounding forest. When you throw canoes into the mix, you could greatly expand your hunting range.

Animal herding is an intermediate step (but not a mandatory one) between H&G and agriculture. I suppose the people that do both, figured out that once they wer sedentary, they need only figure out how to herd or fence to keep their meat near their home but away from their crops. Presumably they could even steal the idea and starter herds from others who were only herdsmen.

(A recent article suggests all chickens are descended from a type of bird domesticated somewhere in SE Asia.)

Food preservation and storage usually required pottery to seal the food from weather and vermin long term; but large amounts of pottery was not portable. making alcohol required keeping stuff in a container (Clay?) for an extended period, easier to do do if you are not travelling… Making large clay jars probably reuired equipment like pottery wheels, brick ovens big enough to fire jars, etc. Even plant-and-forget technique probably produced better yields if the nomads returned a little before the food ripened, to shoo pests and grazers away while the crop ripened. Occupying the same building every year, you could build walls of rocks and just cover the roof with the tent when you arrived and you have a heckuva lot more headroom. There’s a series of converging technologies whose obvious result is the longer a tribe stays in one place, the better off they will be.

34

The people who used to live where I do now (mid coastal California) did not know agriculture, nor was famine an issue except in very rare circumstances. Their base food source was acorns of several oaks, plus collected grass seeds. They did carefully seasonally burn over the coastal grasslands to keep them in grass. They had the salmon runs, the shellfish, unbelievably abundant flocks of wild geese and ducks, and vast herds of elk and deer. They did not practice adolescent torture. They did not practice infanticide. Rather, they had a very elaborate system of taboo times to have sex, which resulted in widely-spaced children and sustainably-sized populations.

Each tribelet had ancestral meadows and acorn forests to which they repaired in due season, so there was a kind of nomadism of harvest. Like other hunter gatherers (and farmers for that matter) they worked very hard at harvest time, but they had a great deal off/leisure time as well. Far more than any subsequent inhabitants who weren’t living off the labor of others. They apparently spent a lot of time gambling, and making some of the world’s most remarkable woven basketry.

Pre-Columbian central California was one of the most densely populated areas of North America. Without agriculture, or war.

Take that, generalizers.

35

We take cites too. All of us generalizers take cites.

36

The California Indians, A Sourcebook, compiled and edited by R.F.Heizer and M.A.Whipple, UC Press 1951 revised 1971

The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area, by Malcom Margolin, 1978

Early Uses of California Plants by Edward K. Balls, UC Press 1972

Those are just the books still on my shelf after many library purges. I know they’re old but that’s when I was interested in the stuff.

the first title is a scholarly anthology, the second is a popularization of the historical record, the third is just a remarkable little compendium of usable facts.

37

I would like to point that some tribes were practicing agriculture in the river valleys of the plains for a long time. The Pawnee proven by archeological digs since about 1250 CE and the Arikara, Mandan & Hidasata from what I can find are thought to be about the same time frame. Typically planting a crop, going on a buffalo hunt, and coming back to harvest their crops and winter in the village.

The stereotypical plains Indian lifestyle only came about with the arrival of the horse.

Cites (Wike cites but I don’t think it’s anything controversial)

38

I have to correct my previous post, the Ohlone at least did practice infanticide in that they exposed twins, and obviously defective infants, believing them to be cursed.

39

Otzi had barley kernels in his clothing and bread in his stomach, but he had a bow and arrows, and there were physical signs that he had done a lot of hiking in the mountains. His equipment would have enabled him to spend a long time away from home which suggests he was a hunter, or at least a herdsman who spent his summers at higher altitudes. My guess is that he was living in a community that was growing crops but hadn’t made the full switch to agriculture yet.

It’s also possible that he was strictly a hunter who raided an agricultural community, but the likelihood that he worked with metal discounts that. Whatever the case, I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t a farmer himself.

40

On the contrary, "California’s transcendent hunter-gatherers achieved the status of “proto-agriculturalists”: they sowed wild seeds; planted and/or tended native root crops, greens, and tobacco; pruned mesquite to stimulate growth; planted “vineyards” of wild grapes; irrigated desired plants; and used “quasi-agricultural” techniques to harvest acorns, grass seeds, yucca, mesquite, and pine nuts". “The extensive distribution of buckeye in San Mateo and Santa Cruz County stream corridors has been attributed to deliberate establishment by local Costanoan Indians, who depended heavily on buckeye as a food source.”

It’s going waaaaay to far to say that they did not know agriculture.

As with every hunter gatherer group.

Can you please quite the source that makes this claim?

Because a Google search shows that little is known about the exact initiation rituals, beyond the fact that “[Initiation ceremonies which result in something analogous to a secret society are found in the whole state except in the Northwestern region and among the agricultural tribes at the extreme southeast in the Colorado valley… The great majority of the males of the tribes are made to ndergo the initiation, and in many cases there is a distinct desire to force it upon every man, whether he be willing or unwilling”, that they involved facial tattooing using stone knives which all sources say pain was an important part of, “roasting” which some argue was real and some argue was ceremonial, and probably the use of a drug that causes horrific hallucinations and psychosis and frequently results in death.

Now I’ve got a pretty liberal definition of torture, but tattooing with stone, roasting and the forced administration of a drug that causes psychotic breaks sounds a lot like torture to me.

As with all HG groups, the details of initiation rituals were appear to have been highly secret and taboo, openly see by the participants. But the results could be seen.

So I would be interested in seeing a quote that says that the Costanoans did not practice torture as part of their initiation rituals.

That isn’t even remotely true. If the sources that you gleaned your information from made such a claim they can be discounted entirely because the authors clearly had no idea what they were writing about.

All else aside, if they really were without war they would be literally the only human culture in the history of the planet for which this was true.

But what we find with a brief Google search paints a very different picture.

There is a chapter in [URL=“Ohlone - Barbara A. Gray-Kanatiiosh - Google Books”]this book](http://encyclobooks.com/The-Religion-of-the-Indians-of-California/PUBLIC-CEREMONIES-CEREMONY-INITIATION.htm) on Ohlone warfare and weapons.
[/quote]

This book notes that “The people within that nation worked together and served as allies in times of war.”
This paper concludes that “trophy-taking and dismemberment were an important part of the warfare practices of central Californian tribes.”

This book notes that “they valued peace even if they did not always attain it. The quarrelsomeness and suspicion between naeighbouring groups often led to skirmishes… Claifornians saw warfare as… an unpleasant act into which we… have been forced by th ebehaviour of other”

This book notes that “war was not uncommon amongst the Costanoan tribes”

And the same search returns literally hundreds of similar hits speaking of Ohlone warfare, weapons, tactics, alliances and so forth.

Quite frankly this claim that the Ohlone were without war destroys the credibility of everything your sources have claimed. War is such an ingrained part of human natures that anyone making such a claim is clearly pandering to the “noble savage” mythology. The fact that such a large body of information about Alohne warfare exists, yet the authors ignored it, tells me that they either didn’t do the research, or were ignoring facts that didn’t mesh with the “noble savage” picture they were trying to paint.

But no, the Ahlone were not strictly HGs. They certainly got a lot of food from hunting and gathering, but they also sowed and tended crops, harvested the products and stored them. That’s agriculture, or so close to it that I have to wonder what the distinction is.

They were not peaceful. They were frequently at war with one another and their neighbours. They had initiation rituals which certainly sound like torture and involved pain and horrifying,psychotic hallucinations.

In my experience, any time someone paints a picture of humanity that sounds too good to be true, it is. People are people everywhere. That includes the bad as well as the good.