Of course, the “stone tools” objection is simply an artifact of taphonomy. Take a look at the physical culture of a modern-day hunter-gatherer and stone tools are only a small fraction of the tools they produce. Almost everything they make is out of perishable materials–wood, grass, leaves, sticks, and so on. It’s just that the tiny fraction made out of stone can survive for thousands of years, while the other stuff rots away.
And of course, agriculture predates metalworking by thousands of years.
The answer is beer. There is no need to cultivate cereal grains until you discover beer. Some hunter gather’s supply of wheat or barley got wet and overlooked for a few weeks. He comes back to his bag, and being really desperate for food and water that he drinks the water off.
That’s nice, he thinks. I’m going to do that on purpose next time I find some of these grains. Before long, he’s figuring out how to cultivate the stuff, and the other tribe members are willing to do the hunting for him if he’ll make them some of his happy water.
That and other exorphins on the cultivated foods (like milk) that make folks want them and willing to work harder for them.
OK, I think I see the confusion. I was focused more on the “far more prone to war” part of your original statement. But then we’d have to get into the sticky argument of what constitutes “war”. We can save that for some other time.
For what it’s worth, I am familiar with the studies showing relatively high level of violence in H/G societies and how many people just automatically assume that it’s lower.
Or not. We’ve had that debate before, and Ive posted the references showing that almost every HG group has been in a state of constant warfare, with related death rates on par with those of WWII . And as you note, the opposition inevitably says that two groups of humans organising raids with the express and sole intent to kill one another isn’t a war. Whatever you call it, it was an organised, deliberate, sustained and lethal breech of the piece, and it was worse under HG systems than agricultural.
That’s pretty much what I took issue with in Ahunter’s post. He claims that agriculture leads to increased violence and increased inter group conflict, yet the evidence all says exactly the opposite: that agriculture causes a decrease in violence, usually an order of magnitude decrease.
So his claim that people eschewed agriculture because it inspired violence makes no sort of sense.
From my own dim memories of anthropology class, the confusion in violence between HG and agricultural societies has to do with scale. HG societies are more violent but don’t normally have the ability to scale their violence much past the level of a raid (there are exceptions of course). Agricultural societies however, by their very nature, have extra resources, which allows them to scale things up substantially, putting a lot more fighters into the field, giving them more and better weapons, etc etc.
Just my two cents worth since I’m sitting in my hotel and wishing I could sleep.
The assertion above, that agricultural societies are more prone to intergroup violence is founded on the assumption that those who have agriculture, and therefore surplus (new stuff, whatever) are viewed jealously by those also lacks something:
Those who are doing the envying are the H/G societies themselves. The one’s who attempt to take the fruits of agriculture’s bounty (ain’t I poetical?) are the ones who have NOT made the leap. Groups that have begun farming don’t see a need to steal from another’s fields (barring famine or blight) because they have their own to worry about. So it would be the H/G, already prone to continual small-scale violence, who would extend that behavior to their more settled and productive cousins.
It doesn’t matter how you try to twist or or what manner you care to use to justify it, the statement just doesn’t make sense.
An individual in any HG society has an order of magnitude greater chance of being a victim of violence than the same individual in any agricultural society. SO claiming that people eschewed agriculture because they were afraid of violence is simply nonsense. It contradicts reality. HGs lifestyles are not more peaceful than agrarian lifestyles. Never were, never will be.
If you care to peruse the cites provided, you will see that is not what has been done. Levels of HG violence are based on archaeological evidence from a time when everybody, or at leats everybody on that part of the world.
To the extent that we will ever be vable to say anythig aboout those times, we can say that HGs lived extremely violent lives.
per memory of reading guns germs & steel:
end of ice age
+
domestication of animals (creation of a new species, making the animal congenitally docile)
+
presence of domesticable grains (australia has like 2 compared to the middle east having 13 or so)
+
path of least resistance. agriculture has to be less strenuous than HG (think HG in a jungle or desert vs farming)
+
development of tools (sickle, millstone, ovens, thresher, etc.)
+
language/writing to propogate techniques.
+
time needed for diffusion of population. 200k years ago people cropped up in africa but it wasn’t until 40k that they reached polynesia/the americas. and when they did, they were still HG and not Farmers.
My understanding was that when populations switched from HG to Ag, there was a profound loss of nutrition with skeletal remains showing a significant loss of height which wasn’t recovered until the inventions of the Industrial age supplied us with transport and refrigeration. I was also under the impression that domestication of animals is what stuck us with a large number of the diseases now associated with the human condition, thanks to zoonosis.
If this is accurate, wouldn’t a population of HG see how scrawny and sick the Ags were and say “hmmm, none for me. Thanks anyways!”?
No, because you are posing a false dilemma. Both ways. It isn’t a choice between "scrawny and sick Ags"and “healthy and happy HGs”.
First off, early agriculturalists wouldn’t have been sick or scrawny. Early agriculturalists would have been living the same lifstyle and eating the same diet as adjacent HGs, only they would have had more food available to them. You can see this in the modern world amongst the sago farmers of New Guinea. These people clear the marshes in their territory of woody plants and keep the fires controlled, so the marshes become a sago monoculture. Aside from working to maintain their sago marshes they are identical in diet and behaviour to adjacent HG groups. They are niether smaller nor more sickly. The earliest farmers everywhere would have been in a similar position.
Only after farming had caused populations to build up well past the carrying capacity of the territory would people have suffered the effectsof disease and malnutrition, but that wouldn’t have happened for many generations after people adopted farming. IOW any HG group on the geographical frontier of agriculture would only have seen benefits form the practice.
Imagine if people in North Carolina invented agriculture. For several generations the people in South Carolina, Tennesee and Virginia are only going to see the benefits of agriculture. They will see the farmers increasing in numbers, they will see them having a surplus of food. They will see them being able to gather more food in much less time and have more time for leisure. So they will naturally want to adopt it themselves. Then the people in Arizona, Kentucky and so forth are going to see these healthy, happy farmers with excess leisure time, so they will adopt it. By then the people in North Carolina will start to show the adverse effects of farming, but the people in Kentucky won’t know about that, they will only know about the wonderful benefits of farming from the people in Virginia, where things are still going well. So Kentucky adopts farming, at which time Virginia starts to suffer the ill effects, but the people in Illinois don’t know about that, they only see the good side of farming from Kentucky.
Secondly, as has already been pointed out, HGs weren’t happy. They lived violent lives that required a huge amount of physical work just to survive, their possesions were limited to what they could carry, there population was strictly controlled by high levels of socially mandated infanticide, the capaicty to treat illness and injury was essentially non-existent and so forth. Contrary to the common child-of-nature nonsense the life of a HG could only be described as hellish. This is why everywhere in the world as soon as agriculturalists appear HGs immediately abandon their traditional lifestyle and become co-dependent on the agriculturalists
So if HGs saw sickly agriculturalists who nonethless weren’t killing 2/3 of their children, who had the ability to set bones, who could make boats, who didn’t have a oneon tree chance of being murdered and so on and so fort, it’s a safe bet that the HGs would consider the chronic disease a fair trade.
Of course there are lots of other factors as well, including the fact that agriculturalists were simply more numerous and thus able to take HG territory whenever they wished, the fact that agriculturalists had goods with which they could buy or seduce wives and so forth.
But in a nutshell early Ags had a lifestyle that combined all the best elements of the HG lifestyle and agriculture.
Nope, not even remotely true.
In order to back up his weak theory Diamond restricted his search of “domesticable” grains in Australia to the tiny and geographically isolated SW corner, ignoring the fact that the restof Australia is home to freakin’ rice, as though rice isn’t a domesticable grain… He also arbitrarily decided to define grain as only grass, so ignoring all the pulses, chenopods and so forth that are staple grains worldwide. He also arbitrarily set the seed size for “domesticable” at a level below that of many ancient domesticated grains, including finger millet, common millet and teff. Instead he set his size limit at that of modern wheat.
IOW Diamond had a theory and then set about redefining the facts until they supported it. Australia actually has at least one hundred domesticable cereals if we adopt the common sense standard of domesticable as one which falls within the limits of those cereals that we know have been domesticated. If we include pulses, chenopods etc we can easily double that number.
I think Diamond’s hypothesis are too often used as if they were scientifically proven theories, especially on this MB. He makes for a good read, and he raises good questions and makes some good points, but his word is not gospel.
