

Stone Age hunter-gatherers lived beside farmers, didn't interbreed - rfugger
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/stone-age-hunter-gatherers-lived-beside-farmers-didn-t-interbreed-1.1991430

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crazygringo
If it's anything like Africa has been over the past 100 years, agricultural
tribes and hunter-gatherer tribes simply don't mix.

Agricultural tribes find the hunter-gatherer tribes to be dirty, lazy,
uncivilized -- not a lot of sexual attraction going on. And the hunter-
gatherer tribes think the agricultural people work way too hard for nothing,
with their priorities all wrong, and don't want anything to do with the
lifestyle.

At least that's how it was all explained to me during time I spent in Kenya
and Tanzania, where I spent a couple weeks with a hunter-gatherer tribe.

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VLM
"And the hunter-gatherer tribes think the agricultural people"

The teeth, the teeth! Look at meat eater teeth compared to stone ground grain
eaters teeth. Also this is a very old story which makes it unusual that they
carefully avoided relative health issues such that grain eaters shrink in
height and strength compared to the H-G eaters. So you've got Ms Hunter
looking at a short little troll of a grain eater with rotting teeth vs studly
McMeat eater... And in the other direction the ladies have little patience
with the HGs because their diet gets a little sparse in the winter and they
don't want to watch (more of) their kids starve.

HGs: Less of them per sq mile, taller, stronger, healthier, other than in
winter when the die off, great teeth.

Farmers: More of them per sq mile, shorter, weaker, less healthy, starve less
often, awful rotting teeth.

It must have been an interesting dating/social dynamic.

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ExpiredLink
Farmers were chronically underfed to modern times. They never had enough to
eat for thousands of years.

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Sharlin
Yes; it's indeed important to note that the shift to agriculture was a
quantity/quality tradeoff. Farming could sustain more people than hunting and
gathering, so by pure math, it won over in the end, but the average quality of
life decreased for thousands of years, until the industrial revolution.

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jchrisa
There's a lot of interesting history around this topic. Anyone have
recommendations?

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evincarofautumn
_Ishmael_ by Daniel Quinn is a good soft introduction to the topic, told in
parable form. You probably want a proper history book covering the Neolithic
Revolution.

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tjaerv
Obligatory link to Jared Diamond's classic essay "The Worst Mistake in the
History of the Human Race":

[http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html](http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html)

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qwerta
There are several holes in this article.

>The tribe in Central Europe ate almost exclusively freshwater fish until
around 3000 B.C

3000 BC was still stone (copper) age in Central Europe. Agriculture is very
hard with stone tools. Also climate could be much cooler for long period. At
that time I would choose fish anytime.

> Typically, he said, the arrival of farming led to widespread deforestation
> and the disappearance of wildlife

Several places in Central Europe were deforested as late as 12th century.
Early European agriculture relied on burning part of forest, using it until
ground was fertile and than moving to other place. Intensive agriculture
(which leads to widespread deforestation) was not used until middle-ages.

> Despite the fact that they were neighbours, there was little, if any,
> interbreeding between the two cultural groups, according to the results of a
> DNA analysis

> Nehlich acknowledged that lack of interbreeding may have been due to
> cultural reasons, but said that is pure speculation in the absence of
> evidence.

They probably lived in different periods, possibly separated by hundreds of
years. Culture has nothing to do with it, even neanderthals were interbreeding
with early modern humans. It was common to kidnap and marry woman from
different tribes.

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ealloc
This result is right in line with the observations of people studying the
evolution of lactose tolerance [1].

Lactose-tolerant middle-easterners (who had long been eating lactose-free
fermented milk, until they developed lactose tolerance) moved in to Europe and
took over, and rarely mixed with the native hunter gatherers. Instead, they
simply outcompeted them and largely wiped them out. It is estimated that
lactose tolerance gave them "up to 19% more fertile offspring" than the
indigenous hunter-gatherers.

That makes me muse: Maybe the two groups didn't mix because the hunter-
gatherers couldn't survive on the high-milk (and high starch?) diet of the
agricultural people. Lactose intolerance can be quite violent!

[1] [http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-
revolution-1...](http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-
revolution-1.13471)

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armenarmen
I wonder it comparing the bones side by side can give us any insights into the
legitimacy of the claims that the paleo diet crew likes to make?

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Sharlin
The diet of a hunter-gatherer is certainly almost always healthier than that
of a subsistence farmer, but people in modern industrialized societies are
hardly subsistence farmers.

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karlkatzke
Huh. An ancient tribe of Crossfit-ers. Who woulda thunk?

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rhizome
There's a reality TV series here somewhere.

