Do people actually take seriously the notion that agriculture had no advantages? The biggest factor has been well studied: infant mortality. Hunter gatherers have more precarious populations and very slow population growth because they have higher infant mortality. Having food reserves from agriculture makes it easier to keep children fed through the occasional harsh winter, and that translates to higher population growth rates for agriculturalists.
The claim has never been that it had no advantages.
The claim has always been that, although agriculture is a dominant strategy at the cultural level (obviously, from history!), it allegedly involves a less pleasant life experience for the individuals (more work, higher rates of malnutrition, whatever else).
If I understand correctly (big "if"), agriculture scales better with population, and so while the HGs are inherently limited in population size, the farming society ends up larger and swamps them. 1000 HGs vs 10k farmers is going to have a pretty straightforward outcome, even if it's the case (as these theses claim) that the HG is happier, healthier-on-average, stronger, smarter, etc. (After all, the per-individual advantages are not alleged to be enormous).
The tl;dr; seems to be that there was one paper 50 years ago that everyone cites around how great it is to be a !Kung. But that the study didn't take into account some of the downsides, and it also happened to be a particularly fruitful year for the tribe.
(BTW, an extra shout out to http://marginalrevolution.com which is where I found the link to the article. I mention it here, because it seems like a site that a large cross section of HN would enjoy on a regular basis, as it's a very thoughtful Econ blog.)
Total mistake, obviously so. Let's go back to at least half of all women dying in childbirth, life expectancy reduced by decades and the sheer joy if you get to be an adult of spending all that extra leisure watching the majority of your children die. Living with lice and fleas is natural too.
But the nobility of that life, the nobility.
How the hell does anyone take this kind of utter crap seriously in any way, shape or form?
The whole idea that Hunter-Gatherer was a superior lifestyle seems at odds with the fact that agriculture won. Everywhere people had the choice between what they were doing before and agriculture they either chose agriculture or they died out.
At the very least it seems less dangerous to concentrate your food reserves in a small area that you can defend instead of having to forage into the territory of dangerous predators regularly. Plus it reduces conflicts with neighbors when you can survive on a much smaller land area. You also have a lot more control over how many calories you will be able to extract from the land and plan accordingly, unlike HG societies that go through feast and famine cycles depending on a large number of environmental factors.
>The whole idea that Hunter-Gatherer was a superior lifestyle seems at odds with the fact that agriculture won.
As the famed Prisoner's Dilemma[1] shows, the dominant strategy (the one that "wins") is not necessarily the same as the optimum strategy (the one that's most favorable for all the participants).
Essentially the latter question simplifies to, "is it better if everyone in the world adopts X, vs. adopting Y?" The former question simplifies to, "who wins when people who adopt X come into conflict with neighboring people who adopt Y?" These are not the same question, and they need not have the same answer.
Far from "reducing conflict", one explanation is that agriculture gave certain tribes surplus food, allowing them to wage war and kill/enslave/absorb their neighbors, or even simply out-breed and slowly displace them. Many agricultural tribes will no doubt be peaceful and direct this surplus to other ends, but the presence of a single war-like (or otherwise expansionist) agricultural tribe destabilizes the equilibrium.
I'd like to point out to those that downvoted shiffern's comment that large armies only arose after agriculture made it possible. Downvotes do not counter historical fact, no matter how much cognative dissonance the facts cause for you.
Seems like they had already won once they had a reliable agricultural surplus. Doesn't matter if they were warlike or not their numbers are going to explode and they're going to start pushing out the HG societies.
That's not necessarily the case. When populations have adequate resources, they do not explode. Their birth rate falls. This has been seen repeatedly all over the world across myriad human cultures. Failure to account for it screwed Japan who banked on an infinitely growing population, is currently screwing South Korea for making the same mistake, and will screw the US (and probably most others) eventually.
The real danger is that with agriculture, unlike with nomadic tribes, if someone decides to dominate others in a region, the tribe can't just leave that person behind. A nomadic tribe goes over the next hill and leaves the jerk to be dominant over the weeds and sticks. An agricultural society just gets dominated.
Sorry for the confusion. I agree 100%, and edited to try to make that clearer.
The presence of a single expansionist tribe destabilizes the equilibrium (be it any combination of military, economic, cultural, or political expansionism). Like the suspects being interrogated in separate rooms, each tribe cannot trust all the other tribes to agree to be non-expansionist.
I fear you missed my main point though, which was that this is a completely separate question from whether the system is "superior" (from the perspective of the aggregate well-being of the individuals in the society). Feel free to substitute a different term than "superior" if you prefer, but that's all semantics.
I agree that it does come down to how you classify "superior".
From a gene propagation standpoint (your children survive and have children of their own), it isn't a contest. Agriculture is the clear winner.
In a "how fulfilling is your life" context there is more room for debate, but I tend to think that modern authors overly discount the negative effects of food insecurity in a primitive society. The tradeoff between "your daily life is full of toil but you and your children probably won't starve to death or be eaten by a wild animal" is one that people came down hard in favor of historically.
In the long view, only one lifestyle choice leads to a population that can survive the next dinosaur killing asteroid impact.
But seriously, modern people underestimate how much it sucks foraging for food every day, even in the rain, even in the snow, even when the local animals have died off due to some disease, even when you are sick and/or injured, you either hunt or you go hungry. Your culture has to be largely word of mouth because anything else you have to carry with you. Technology progresses at a glacial pace because you don't have a system of writing and you don't have reliable sources for most raw materials. Even if you do find a source for something useful like obsidian your nomadic lifestyle means your access is still limited.
My stance remains that people who wax poetically about how superior the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle is are not thinking things all the way through.
Thanks, great discussion and great points. I agree on all of them, but the part about space sticks in my brain. While I think it's correct, imo it's only looking at one side of the long-term-human-survival coin.
>In the long view, only one lifestyle choice leads to a population that can survive the next dinosaur killing asteroid impact.
A nice future to imagine, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion. The future might lead there, or it might lead elsewhere.
In the real world it's looking like business-as-usual kills the civilization (but not the human species) before we get a chance to re-enact Deep Impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg
Expanding into space doesn't help us if we proceed to destroy our habitats on a finite time-scale (which is all "unsustainable" means: that it cannot continue for some reason). And we haven't figured out how to avoid that in an industrial society, which is necessary for living in space. New planets don't help if every civilization you establish on them inevitably collapses. Expanding through space can't be used to maintain a non-zero exponential growth rate either, if for no other reason than that the available volume of space only grows as t^3.
Ultimately we must BOTH establish a completely sustainable, steady-state (capable of 0% growth indefinitely) global civilization AND expand into space, or perish as a species. Neither is sufficient on its own.
Agriculture does seem to help the latter, but it hurts the former. Seeing as how we haven't actually retired the asteroid risk yet, and yet we have introduced at least two new existential risks (nuclear war and environmental degradation/climate change), I'd say we're not looking that great in the long view.
Our current score seems to be two steps backwards, one [hypothetical] step forwards.
>From a gene propagation standpoint.. Agriculture is the clear winner
Removing the primary means of genetic selection doesn't improve gene propogation qualitatively and it only improves quantity in theory until population levels reach capacity and another limitation restricts further growth. If birth rates decline over all, such that 1/1 survive now rather than 2/10 then we have regressed both quantitatively and qualitatively on an individual level. The only thing agriculture has added is the stability and certainty of food supply for those who control the means of production; which allows for a larger population, economics, and tech development, but doesn't necessarily improve genetic propogation in the long term for individuals.
>At the very least it seems less dangerous to concentrate your food reserves in a small area
You might think that... but for the first several centuries of the adoption of agriculture, massive famines every 5 years or so due to soil depletion of nutrients were commonplace. No such issue was had with foraging. Agriculture also invented the concept of the nuclear family, and of men owning spouses and children as property. Women began to bargain sexual liberty for material security. Men were incentivized to make certain they weren't 'wasting' scant resources on raising someone else's kids. Tribes raised kids in common and all we know of believed in a concept of shared fatherhood.
Agriculture also gave a big boost to communicable disease. In nomadic groups, communicable disease often burns through a population quickly and is over with. In agricultural communities, pathogens can establish themselves and circulate for years. Agriculture also gave raise to strong notions of private property, and gave us lords and vassals and the like.
There are certainly downsides to agriculture, but lots of them are not immediately visible and many are compensated for by the benefits agriculture provides once people manage to figure out that the church isn't the best guide to tell you when to grow your crops and crop rotation works. When talking about widespread lifestyles like this, there will always be profound costs and significant benefits to every single option. A desire for a clear and sensible 'obvious right answer' is fundamentally flawed.
> Everywhere people had the choice between what they were doing before and agriculture they either chose agriculture or they died out.
Once the agricultural revolution began, the extra food allowed the population to grow rapidly, forcing people to keep up with agriculture lifestyle to stay fed and survive - they couldn't just back out.
If anyone finds it interesting, I strongly recommend reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari - a very insightful book that also talks pretty extensively about the flaws of the agricultural revolution.
TLDR: People thought foragers had it better because they spent less time collecting food than working (2.4 days), but the study this figure is based on forgot to include processing time, which yields about 6-7 eight hour days.
