Simple reality is that best estimates had the global human population at under 5 million until agriculture and civilization started to take off with the best guess for average life span at about 10 years old. Lots dying very young; some not insignificant amount of infanticide; women dying in childbirth not uncommonly; men not infrequently in skirmishes. Get past your 20s and your odds of making to group elder were pretty good but fairly few did that.
That 5 million was likely the carrying capacity for humans without agriculture and civilization. So not millions who would die off but well over 7 billion, which is how far we are above what would be the carrying capacity in an HG mode.
For all of civilization’s ills (and indeed they are myriad) I have a hard time waxing nostalgic for that.
But hey … there was no philosophy!
FWIW an interesting article offering a take on the op.
My point is they did not have to spread like wildfire to cover six continents on an evolutionary timescale. 13 miles would be what they might cover each week chasing a herd. Perhaps population pressures might persuade them to cross less hospitable terrain in a generation or two - continental divides, etc. Or travelling along the shorelines of the continents or relatively short distances from island to island (in the case of Indonesia then Australia). So the truth is somewhere between “they didn’t move” and “they moved quickly”.
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Read a book like Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter”. It’s essentially the catalog of how lush and rich the ecosystem was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the rest of North America before Europeans brought industrial-scale slaughter to the continent. Even with generally agricultural nomads (slash and burn agriculture) fairly densely populating the area, the wild food resources were astounding. Buffalo herds that took days to wander past observers, passenger pigeons and arctic curlews in flocks so thick their migration darkened the skies, cod 6 to 10 feet long in schools that were so plentiful you could almost walk on their surface.
One can imagine that was the richness the original humans came across in the fertile areas, before humans practising agriculture cleared the wild areas, and slowly exterminated the easy game.
Agriculture was a series of progressive decisions, each the result of exploiting the easiest food sources. Once each option was exploited to its fullest, there was no going back. Population pressure pushed humans into denser food production, rather than nomadic hunting; the winners in that race could then displace the losers by both numbers and technology. When the farmers were also thinning the wild herds hunters depended on, and wrecked the best natural habitats, and had better defended homes - choices were limited. Adapt or move away.
There’s the claimed population bottleneck about 70,000 years ago. We are descended from a very small group. So what was it? A climate event? Geological event like a major eruption? My money’s on a substantial evolutionary event - better speech, conceptual/abstract thinking and planning, or something that suddenly gave a yuuuuge advantage to a small group. After all, humans had spread out in several waves well before then, it’s hard to believe any physical event would reduce the population to barely survival level in a concentrated locale.
It’s also hard to believe that the ecological conditions that permitted agriculture - a rich river valley with a convenient high-yield crop - did not exist before about 10,000 years ago.
What happened? I’m still looking for some interesting hypotheses for the sudden emergence of agriculture.
I think you misunderstand how this works - We stay here, at this nice place. Next year, my kid Num is a man, and moves 13 miles down valley because he needs the space for his new family. A year later, your daughter Lum meets some nice guy at Solstice, and has to move out - but she can’t go 13 miles down valley, that’s NumLand. So she moves 26 miles down. And so on, and so forth. We stick in one place, humanity moves on. Bearing in mind population is expanding continuously…all those fat glyptodonts make for soft living.
Lots of theories. Agriculture seems to have been invented several times in separate places around the world, so more than one could be correct. And it occurred during the same general time period, when the climate stabilized.
The oldest farming by a narrow margin seems to be in the middle east. Farming seems to have originated in a fairly fertile region at a time when climate change reduced the available animal population. Presumably leaving the population with the choice of finding new ways of getting calories or starving.
New genetic research indicates that farming initially spread out from Anatolia by itself, i.e. without an accompanying population replacement. However, old genetic research indicates that all these farming communities grain descended from the same original stock. After the first few millennia, farming communities in Anatolia just took off, and farming spread through Europe from about 6 000 BC with the Anatolian farmers DNA becoming the major component of the European gene pool until the Indo-Europeans came.
My personal supposition is that farming had a “lag phase” where it was sufficiently successful to be adopted by neighbours, but not successful enough for the farmers to overwhelm their neighbours. After the farmers got things fully sorted out, the overwhelming started.
An interesting older piece of research generally forgotten in the flurry of exciting new discoveries is *[Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication Identified by DNA Fingerprinting/I] from 1997. It tracks back domesticated wheat genetically, pinpointing the origin to a point in Turkey. That point is within walking distance of a hill where an archaeologist called Klaus Schmidt was working at the time. In 1997 I don’t think anyone had heard the name of the hill -Gobekli Tepe.
In Spanish we call it the same word as for the religious period of belt-tightening which, curiously enough (damn it’s dusty here) happens at about the time that crops are not yet in: Cuaresma. Which ends up on that Sunday where you roast some newborn lamb…
“Chasing a herd” is not “on an evolutionary timescale”. Yes, 13 miles a year is “wildfire”, on an evolutionary timescale. That is the point you are missing.
I think you are misunderstanding the post I was responding to. Note that he claimed humans stuck in one place because “No animals to carry things for them”. Nonsense.
That is nonsense, but wasn’t the part you replied to, that I then replied to. My point is that you can get 13 miles a year by simple population growth. Hardly “wildfire”.
Mr. Dibble: Also, please see the last part of my post #37. Anyone who claims to know just exactly how our ancestors lived for 100,000 years or so before agriculture doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s quite possible that some “pretty much stayed in one place”, some were actually true nomads (following herds), and some moved around like crazy, for whatever reason, responding to the environment around them. Frankly, we really don’t know other than the fact that once out of Africa, things happened pretty quick, and we start showing up in large parts of southern Asia, then Northern Asia and Europe. And finally making it to the Americas.
I’m not so much making an affirmative claim that all humans were constantly on the move, but refuting the idea that we all just “stayed in one place”.
The only thing I’ll take exception to is your claim that the defining characteristic of our species is “social tool use”. I’m not a big fan of making claims about single, “defining characteristics”, but if there is one for us it would be the transmission of knowledge and information through the use of fully articulate language. Perhaps that is more or less what you meant by “social” tool use, but it wasn’t clear.
Of course, the major development in agriculture that raised productivity, IIRC, was that the variety of wheat used falls off the head of the stalk quite easily, making harvest a much easier task. It’s not inconceivable that that is the reason one genetic variety of wheat appears to be the source of agricultural evolution - perhaps wheat of sorts was being grown in a variety of places, with different levels of dedicated agricultural activity, until some area found itself with a far simpler and more productive crop variety. I would imagine their neighbours also took to using that variety, and so on.
13 miles a year is not wildfire, especially in rich, fertile river valleys. Obviously it went in fits and starts, not a steady 13 mpy. What is fascinating is how migrations crossed the less hospitable ranges like mountains and deserts. But it seems humans were capable of decent sea voyages by 60,000 to 40,000 years ago, so most likely they followed shorelines when anything else was not as hospitable. Perhaps they were decent fishermen too, then - which means a less hospitable land just meant good protection for their villages. Never underestimate the motivational power of needing to get away from marauding neighbors.
What is your source that hunter-gatherers can expand at that rate for extended periods of time “by simple population growth”? What does “simple population growth” even mean? What makes it “simple”?
Anthropologists are often remarking on how quickly humans got from Africa to Australia. If you want to use “quickly” instead of “wildfire”, be my guest. Our species stayed in Africa for ~100,000 years. We then left Africa and showed up in Australia a few thousand years later. Use whatever term you feel works for how quickly that happened, but “simple population growth” doesn’t cut it.
Mr. Dibble: Sorry, that was unnecessarily snarky. Even if we were to assume that “simple population growth” (however we define it) accounted for the spread of humans, it was still remarkably fast compared to our history in Africa. In evolutionary terms, it was very rapid, and I don’t think “like wildfire” is an unreasonable descriptor, whatever mechanism was in play (and I suspect there was more than one). I’m not particularly wed to that term, but our species, as a whole did not “stay in one place”. That is, on the face of it, simply wrong.
I put it down to the exponential nature of population growth from the bottleneck, myself. That, plus the African part of the story is woefully under-studied, with only Olduvai and Sterkfontein localities getting really intensive study.
But my personal experience, in the South African context, at least, is of fairly sedentary HG occupations in prehistory (fuck-off huge shell middens, for one, and pottery, for another), so that’s the model I find more likely. If the cultures you’re more familiar with were more migratory, you’d likely see it differently.
Oh, *carême *!
Huh. You know I’d never made the link between the religious ritual and the season/time of the year. I strongly suspect they’re linked - you know, “Good folks, god says to not eat so much right now (because unlike you I can count, and at this rate you’ll start digging into the sowing reserves soon)”. Or, possibly “yes, brothers, I know you’re starving, but it’s a good thing ! Jesus did too, everything’s FINE !”
Which would also explain why these days the “fast” of Lent is not exactly drastic and more symbolic than anything.
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FWIW; not a single word, but in the UK that period is referred to as the “hungry gap”.
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Yup it had been answered upthread, but thanks all the same, friend.
Getting back to this, of course the ‘Why’ cannot be answered in any detail. We know something of the pre-agricultural conditions and somewhat more after agriculture began to flourish. The clear but unhelpful answer to the ‘Why’ is that it worked better than hunting and gathering. Populations grew, hunter gatherers dwindled. But simply saying that farming produced food more reliably isn’t all of it. Farming changes the way people live, they can build structures that they don’t have to carry with them or leave behind. They will build more of anything they can because they don’t have to carry things to keep them. They’ll build more baskets, they’ll build more pointy sticks, they’ll build food storage structures, they’ll build out of stone and heavy wood, they’ll build walls, they’ll make more rope, they’ll make more pottery, they’ll change their environment to suit them instead of seeking new places to live. And they’ll have more free time. Not a lot more, a lot of that free time maybe starving while they wait for the crops to bear fruit, but they’ll have the time needed to plan and prepare for the future and expand their farms. They’ll also become more territorial and develop more complex social structures. But the ‘Why’ is still to the extent of our knowledge that they tried it and it succeeded.
