
The Agricultural Revolution a Mistake? Not If You Count Food Processing (2016) - benbreen
http://www.rachellaudan.com/2016/01/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-terrible-mistake.html
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InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
jholman
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).

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harry8
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?

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jandrese
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.

~~~
schiffern
>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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma)

~~~
jandrese
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.

~~~
schiffern
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.

~~~
jandrese
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.

~~~
schiffern
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](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.

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Toast_25
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.

