Moved to GD.
Inertia Societies that are lacking in external pressures and have achieved a certain level of comfort have no desire or reason to change. Thus a certain pattern (culture) is obtained and inertia (tradition) dictates that it stay the same way until some external pressure demands change.
Comfort Integral with above. People adapt to their environment until they achieve a certain level of comfort with their lifestyle, then they tend to stop making advances, or achieve them only very slowly.
Isolation Civilizations can reach a certain level in isolation, but as we can see from the lessons of history, if they exist in isolation, they will eventually be overwhelmed by the poorer cultures they come into contact with (that external pressure - “Hey, we don’t have this stuff! We’ll take it from them!”) and thrown down. Given that cultures that achieved any significant level of comfort and advancement tens of thousands of years ago were likely to be small and relatively isolated, it isn’t surprising that they would disappear without a trace into the stream of history.
Spread of knowledge Somethings get developed over and over again. Other ideas require being spread by contact. It takes a huge amount of accumulated knowledge to put together a civilization like the Sumerians or Aztecs.
Which then requires;
Stability To develop language, culture and construction projects, a civilization must have a modicum of stability, even in the face of external pressures, for a relatively long period of time. In ancient days and with small civilizations, the external forces (other cultures) can be overwhelming. Then there’s a huge one, which is stability of climate and ecosystem. MANY ancient cultures were brought down by severe changes in their environment.
My WAG would be that climate change was key to humans developing formal agriculture. We didn’t develop it earlier simply because the conditions weren’t right, coupled with a stable population and other factors (perhaps ‘luck’ being one of them). For all we know other isolated populations of humans DID develop rudimentary agriculture but then were wiped out before they could further develop. We know that there have been several bottlenecks in human population, and a few times we were on the cusp of extinction.
At any rate, my vote is for climate change and luck which brought us from early agriculture through to the Simpson’s. We have had an unusually stable and mild climate now since the last ice age, at least compared to other periods of history on Earth, and that’s got to be a huge factor in why we’ve come so far so fast in the last 10-12k years.
…or, maybe it was the ancient astronauts giving us the technology and teaching us how to build pyramids and video tape recorders and such…
-XT
I see what you did there 
That simply isn’t true.
No harder than nomadic hunting.
It makes you less vulnerable to weather and predators. That’s why agriculturalists are more numerous and have higher growth rates than HGs.
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HG societies are far more violent and far more prone to war than agricultural societies. So the idea that agriculture puts you in more conflict with the neighbours is clearly bollocks.
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HGs have clearly defined clan territories. Any outsider found gathering plants within those territories without permision is invariably killed. So there is no misunderstanding that the plants are not to be gathered.
WTF? Early agriculturalists were, by definition, subsistence farmers. They had no need of a large supply of workers.
Why does somebody trot out this piece of ignorant bullshit in every HG thread? It is not even remotely true. What you have half understood is that HGs spend around 4 hours a day obtaining food. By the time you add in travel, tool making time, preparation of toxic foods and so forth HGs spend 10-16 hours a day in tasks essential to staying alive. That is far higher than almost any agricultural society in history.
AHunter3 your entire post is a load of ignorant child-of-nature nonsense. You start out saying that agriculturalism makes a group more prone to death from predators, warfare and disease then conclude by saying that agricultural populations grew faster and large ron the same area of land, and so supplanted HGs. EVen you should be able to see that such a position is oxymoronic.
What sort of external pressures do you mean? It;s hard t think of any that were present 10, 00 years ago that weren’t also present 60, 00 years ago
What do you mean by "a certain level of comfort "? Wouldn’t the high incidence of violence, warfare, infanticide etc in HG soceities mean that they weren’t particularly comfortable at any stage?
Why would “cultures that achieved any significant level of comfort and advancement tens of thousands of years ago” be any large ror smaller than the same culture tens of thousands of years ago? This is a total non sequitur.
Huh?
The Aztecs and Sumerians were only able put together those civilizations because they already had advanced agricultural techniques. IOW they didn’t develop agriculture because they had the knowledge to put together an advanced culture, they had an advanced culture because they developed agriculture.
Once again you seem to be putting the cart before the horse. You only get civilisation, of any size, after you already have agriculture.
This climate stability thing has been mentioned a few times, but is there any objective evidence that the climate has been less variable in the last 10, 000 years than during all other 10-millenia spans for the last 200, 000 years?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but if past civilizations before the last ice age grew to a high agricultural level, but without plastics, exotic ceramics or similar materials, what would be left of evidence of them?
How many human artifacts more than 10,000 years old do we actually have?
I think this point is key. I’m sure, long before farming, something like this was going on. However, based on my knowledge of the native american societies when the europeans got to north america, I’d guess that even when farming techniques are known there are strong cultural/lifestyle reasons to maintain certain aspects of the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
We’ve got lots of evidence over 10, 000 years, especially stone tools. If people were farming they would have needed to make large numbers of farming implements, and we would have found at least one of them. Basically a farming community will have as many sickles and hoes as it has spear or arrowheads. We have no shortage of spearheads of any age, and we have no shortage of sickles and hoes after the advent of agriculture, so there needs to be some explanation for the absence of farm implements 20, 000 years ago. And the simplest explanation is that there was no farming going on.
Added to that the changes in the environment wrought by farming and sedentary villages are pretty substantial all by themselves and provide clear evidence of agriculture.
ok, again correct my ignorance but most agricultural implements will be iron or wood not stone and so much less lasting than stone spear heads? Also, specifically which changes from sedentary villages in the environment would survive a 10,000 year glacial period?
it seems to me as an amateur observer that HG stone artifacts are likely to last much longer than agricultural iron/wood/bronze artifacts. Am I missing something?
Somewhat.
Early sickles had stone blades, often flint, with distinctive wear patterns from cutting plant material. Those blades survive. That’s just one example. Stones used for grinding grain (and other food) come in various shapes and sizes, but again have distinctive wear patterns and are found in all agricultural societies - including ours, in the case of “stone ground” wheat and the like.
So yes, if there had been agriculture further back than 20,000 years (or whatever) we would expect to find the remains of certain distinctive types of stone implements.
Although the rest of that post was quite on point, I find this one assertion hard to accept. Have you got a cite? My first thought is that you’re confusing primitive agriculturist societies (like those in New Guinea) with H/G societies.
In my anthropology classes at UC Davis, we were told that it was climate stability that resulted in the growth of agriculture. You can find loads of papers supporting this, such as this one and as of two years ago, it was the most-taught leading theory. As far as I know, nothing else has come along beyond that.
Taking a prehistoric tech class where we attempted to make several tools (and I do mean attempted) has proven to me that they require A LOT of knowledge. It’s not as if humans were stupid before agriculture. Just try living the HG lifestyle for a bit. It’s far more challenging than you think.
There are peaceful HG societies and there are warring agriculturalists. It all comes down to resource distribution. There is one famous researcher and anthropologist who argues that agriculture was humanity’s biggest mistake, but he also has a lot of detractors.
Oh, and farming isn’t always a ‘step forward’. There have been groups of farmers who changed into HG due to changes in resource availability. Groups of farmers can be out-competed by HG if the conditions are correct.
As others have said above, it’s hard to imagine a hunter choosing to farm unless he was starving. Hunting is FUN; farming is anything but.
The advantage of farming is that it produces more food per acre than HG and thus allows a higher population density. Each baby step towards the development of agriculture would have resulted in an increase in the population and thus a decrease in wild food available per individual. There was no going back. It would become harder and harder and then impossible for people to survive on wild food. Of course, even farmers will hunt or gather wild food when they can. If some plague came along and reduced the population a lot of individuals probably would revert to HG.
One example of “reversion” is that of the HG tribes in the interior of Borneo. They are the decendants of Austronesian farmers. Now, many of them are re-reverting to farming.
Hunting is fun when you’re doing it for a hobby. It’s not so fun when you know what you kill might make the difference between starving and surviving.
Endless amounts.
Start here, then here, then here, here,, hereand here.
Nope, I’m comparing HGs with agricultural societies. Not only was every HG society for which we have data much more violent than any extant agricultural society (the lowest figure for violent deaths amongst HGs that I’ve seen quoted is about 2%, roughly 100 times higher than the most violent agricultural societies), but archaeological evidence shows that when people became agriculturalists the incidence of violence declined dramatically.
Of course that shouldn’t be surprising. HGs are in a state of perpetual warfare over resources and status. With the advent of agriculture available resources become much less limiting, and the advantages to be gained from co-operation become much greater than that of status seeking. Of course violence declines.
I only looked at your first two cites. The first one is just a summary, and you have to subscribe to get premium content. The second one is a 58 page PDF document. Can you quote the relevant sections for us that support your claim?
As I noted above, we have no shortage of agricultural implements such as hoes and sickles from the neolithic. IOW once we know that agriculture was in use we suddenly find a plethora of agricultural implements. We also find a plethora of middens with all the indications of agriculture, such as monotonous diets with a repeating annual cycle.
So if agricultural implements were less durable than stone spearheads why is it that we find them in abundance in the era when we know agriculture was practiced? It’s not like there’s any absence of evidence here. All we have is an absence of evidence prior to 10, 00 years ago. It is that absence which needs to be explained, and the simplest explanation is that there was no agriculture being practiced prior to that date.
If you mean literally surviving for 10, 000 years under a mountain of ice, none at all. However most of the world wasn’t buried under a mountain of ice. Over most of the world the presence of cultivation and sedentary villages would be quite well preserved, if they existed.
Yes, the fact that the earliest agricultural implements were stone artifacts , and that fact that we have found them in abundance, just never from before 10, 00 years ago. IOW we have conclusive proof that they will survive and be found after millenia.
Only because it’s you.;). Unfortunately I’m not at home ATM, so I don’t have the full text of all of those. However what I do have I’ll give you:
Webb analysed ‘trauma using 6,241 adult post-cranial bone samples and 1,409 cranial samples from prehistoric remains derived from all major regions of Australia except Tasmania’.19…Leaving aside single and double cranial lesions,‘triple cranial lesions’ caused by weapons of assault were present on 3.8 per cent of females, compared with ‘only’ 0.7 per cent of males.21 Almost one in five East coast females had ‘parrying fractures’ of the upper limb, ‘which indicated defence against an attack from a right-hand person’.
Violence is the major cause of death among the precontactAche (w55% of all deaths) and very important among the Hiwi (w30% of all deaths), but notably less important in thetwo African societies and the Agta (3-7% of all deaths).
At >2% the homicide rates of HG societies are much larger than in agricultural. Again, none of this is really controversial. I’ve never heard an anthropologist argue that HG societies were more peaceful than agricultural societies. The evidence is just too overwhelming. The only real debate is how much more violent HG groups were. ie was the homicide rate closer to 3% or 30%. I have never heard anyone suggest it was anywhere near as low as the <1% levels of the most violent historical agricultural societies.
But if you have any evidence of these peaceful HG societies then I’d be very interested in seeing it.