IANA expert, but as a native English speaker with a pretty hefty vocabulary I’ve never heard of a single word for that concept. So you shouldn’t feel frustrated to not find it.
We certainly have aphorisms like “It’s always darkest before the dawn” which connote a similar idea: there’s a point of low ebb in any cycle and even the early phases of the upswing still resemble more of what was than what will be.
But I know of no word for that idea or for the time period before first harvest when supplies would be critically low.
I don’t think you understand the difference between a reason and a *good *reason. Something does not have to be a *good *reason to be a reason.
Farming does provide higher-quality, tastier food than scavenging or hunting. The fact that you lecture/dismiss that as “luxury” doesn’t change the fact that it is an actual, real, motive and reason to farm rather than scavenge.
And I’d bet dollars to nickels that you yourself routinely eat food that can be considered “luxurious” by your own criteria - farmed food, imported food, etc.
Hungry gap (Hungry gap - Wikipedia) Look at the lower left corner, the Français link takes you to “soudure” (which I’ve only ever associated with welding, sti)
It’s the gap in which you’re hungry so English calls it the hungry gap. There!
Darkest before dawn: We also find this in terms of temperature, both within a day and within a year. The coldest days of the year are not usually the days with the shortest days (in December) but rather in January and February. In the same way, we intuitively expect noon to be the hottest part of the day but the warmest part of the day is usually in the mid-afternoon. We expect midnight to be the coldest but the coldest to be around sunrise.
Our minds tend to confuse rates of change with stored amounts. I.e.: We expect that since noon is the time the sun transmits the most energy, it should be the hottest but we don’t intuitively take into account that heat builds up through the afternoon and 3PM may be hotter than noon even if the sun transmits less energy at 3PM than at noon. The same thing happens with January and February being coldest even if their days are longer than in December. Or land fertility and stored food.
It all comes down to rates of energy transfer and stores of energy.
How is this relevant? Who gives a wet damn what we, ourselves, do, when we’re talking about primitive societies in the late stone age? I’ll bet you brush your teeth, too, but did they?
(Actually, half-way serious question: what was the origin and distribution of the habit of teeth-cleaning?)
Just to clarify, that 2500 BCE is if anything early for maize in North America (was about 9000 years ago, 7000 B.C.E, in Mexico) but other crops, such as squash and sunflower, were domesticated in North America earlier.
And while Crane may be off about the decline of large animal prey as a potential factor accelerating towards more farming (that prey already being long gone) the basic concept is possibly true - fresh water mussel populations declined significantly around the time that maize production took off. Directionality is the question. Did agricultural practices cause the decline or did declines due to climate change increase the reliance on agricultural practices?
(and yeah, *soudure *in that sense is a relatively obscure, technical term - it is indeed derived from welding. Where y’all see a gap, we see a junction )
Many cultures we’d call hunter-gatherers spend a lot of their time actively husbanding [?spousing] plant and animal resources in ways that are no different to farming. The perception that unless you are putting seed down in long rows you ain’t a farmer is bound up with all sorts of Darwinian notions of cultural evolution that tell us more about 19th century values than about what really took place.
From 10,000+ years ago emerging environmental stability, established sustained management of plants or animals become preconditions to further intensification. Cereals have seeds that can be readily transferred, while some resources [eels, yams] can only be enhanced but not readily replanted. They seem to be the ones that make the transition to what we’d call farming.
Intensification involves more growing and hopefully bigger surpluses, but it is social changes that allow surpluses to be distributed in a way that usually create a more hierarchical society that allows surpluses that provide greater power to some and so on.
You are conflating a cause with a consequence. Those things were not what caused humans to start farming-- they are consequences that occurred long after farming had begun.
Not necessarily. Farming usually provides higher quantities of food, but farming societies can end up with poorer nutrition due to over-emphasis on stable crops like wheat or rice. “Taste” is subjective, so let’s just throw that one out on that basis alone. Farming took off because it turned out to be a more reliable means of providing food for larger populations. We don’t have any evidence that it did so because mush tasted better than venison and berries.
Jared Diamond has quite a good rep amongst lay readers of his books.
Most of the pros in his field think he’s full of it. Or so we’ve been told in other threads by people who really are anthropologists, not popular authors of pop-anthropology.
Pop anthropology? But his book won a pulitzer prize though.
I was just hoping for a non noble savage answer to the question. Some previous authors thought agriculture as well as technology was a corrupting influence that would consume humanity.
A Pulitzer prize for pop anthropology dumbed down and converted into a convincing, albeit most false, narrative for the masses.
Many an inventor has been harmed or even killed by his invention. Might humanity as a whole suffer the same fate? Sure.
OTOH, if we were still living like slightly smarter chimps a hefty percentage of human man-years that have already happened would never have done so. Assuming we can keep it together for another 500 years then the vast majority of humans will have lived and died in the technological era.
A “decision” back in the smart-chimps days to never take the next move to technology or agriculture would have been a decision to condemn half of humanity to never living at all, and of the half that did live, leaving most of them living lives that were nasty, brutish, and short as Hobbes so memorably put it.
Net, net humanity is better off for what we have done to date. And with decent luck, our far descendants will look back on our era and wonder how anyone could have lived so badly, so ignorantly compared to themselves.
The only way to get to the answer of “tech/ag is bad/corrupting” is to use the noble savage argument. Which is, as you seem to know, bunk from end to end.
*The *defining characteristic of our species is social tool use. No other Earth species does tools, or social, anywhere near as well as we do. The synergistic effect of those two behaviors together is vastly more powerful than either one in isolation. It’s not X + Y. It’s more like X[sup]Y[/sup].
Anyone saying it’s somehow corrupting to do what we do best is essentially arguing that flying is corrupting to birds, or stinging is corrupting to scorpions. It doesn’t even pass the laugh test. It’s not just mistaken; it’s contemptibly ignorant.
If one believes that creating civilization and increasing the number of humans on the planet were adverse events that will destroy the planet and our species before long, then agriculture was a bad thing.
And one can make that argument. Civilization brought with it massive social and resource inequalities. More who have lived and loved, more who live long, and more who have suffered. And maybe we will destroy the whole place.
Personally though I don’t buy it.
Now not what Diamond thinks, what do you think? Which was/is better?
Humans are not going going to “destroy the planet”. We might destroy ourselves, but the planet is going to get on just fine. If you remove the idea of what humans value from the equation, there is no condition of the planet that is “better” than any other condition.
Which really makes it the definition of a popular science text. How many true science texts have ever won a Pulitzer? (Interesting question, but the number of possible candidates can be counted on the fingers of one hand so the final count has to be tiny.)
In Diamond’s case, the research he did is recognizable to others as having sound but basic popular science roots, although across a very large area. I did serious research on one of the topics in his book for a book of my own. I saw the books he footnoted and had read all of them. I think I used them well, but as popular science. Diamond’s compilation of the varied research was fascinating but the strains where he didn’t quite know enough about all those many subjects to make a convincing case showed. And many true subject matter experts weren’t as kind to the book as the popular audience was. I’d still recommend reading the book as a good example of popular science. I’d also caution not to take every argument in it as settled truth and use it to start my reading rather than end it.
Fair enough, but Homo Sapiens has existed for around 200,000 years, and agriculture only got started around ten thousand years ago, more or less at the same time in multiple locations. Why didn’t it happen much earlier at least somewhere? I remember reading somewhere that it had something to do with the end of the last ice age, and that could make sense for much of the northern hemisphere, but what about Africa, or most of southern Asia? I have always wondered about this.
I don’t know, I mean I read all the downsides that resulted from the switch but that is more like hindsight speaking. The same would go if we went back, who knows what would happen. Certainly many would die off, millions.
Going back to hunter gatherer sounds good, but that’s likely because people are still living in some kind of dream world to suggest that. I agree that technology needs to be met with skepticism but there has to be a middle ground between futurism and primitivism.
I personally like the life I have, I think life would not be worth living if we had to go back to focus on survival. It would just be living day to day, for what? Just to live? Nothing else? Doesn’t sound like a world I would like to be in.
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