origins of modern humans and "cultural explosion"
Stephen J. Fromm
has an article on the origins of modern humans,
particularly the cultural explosion thought to take place 40,000 or so
years ago.
(link (registration req'ed):
http://nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/social/26HUMA.html)
I don't understand how Dr. Richard G. Klein's view is consistent with
our understanding of biological evolution. The notion that a sudden
genetic mutation drove a cultural explosion is bizarre.
I've been intrigued by this ever since realizing that there's another
inconsistency. Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's work on "genetic
archaeology" indicates that humanity began branching apart *before*
the 40,000 before the present cultural explosion. Yet humans all over
are biologically quite uniform---in particular, they all have the
genetic propensity for human cultural adaptation, however that's
genetically encoded.
This also reminds me of the out-of-Africa debate. As I understand it,
the folks against the out-of-Africa theory posit that genetic changes
occured in hominids across the world, simultaneously and in parallel.
This just isn't consistent with views on speciation (though this is
perhaps not so clear cut, since there would be genetic
cross-fertilization amongst hominid groups).
Of course, I don't believe that making a priori biological arguments
like I just have should be the final say, but my impression (perhaps
uninformed) is that they have less of a say in the debate than they
should.
sjfromm
Ralph Lindberg & Ellen Winnie
stephe...@verizon.net (Stephen J. Fromm) wrote:
> The New York Times in late February
> has an article on the origins of modern humans,
> particularly the cultural explosion thought to take place 40,000 or so
> years ago.
> (link (registration req'ed):
> http://nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/social/26HUMA.html)
>
> I don't understand how Dr. Richard G. Klein's view is consistent with
> our understanding of biological evolution. The notion that a sudden
> genetic mutation drove a cultural explosion is bizarre.
>
Actually it is an interesting why to explain the very sudden cultural
change.
> I've been intrigued by this ever since realizing that there's another
> inconsistency. Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's work on "genetic
> archaeology" indicates that humanity began branching apart *before*
> the 40,000 before the present cultural explosion. Yet humans all over
> are biologically quite uniform---in particular, they all have the
> genetic propensity for human cultural adaptation, however that's
> genetically encoded.
>
We have to remember that the genetic diversification dates are based
on estimates of how fast this occurs, these could be wrong.
--
Ralph Lindberg personal email n7...@amsat.org
RV and Camping FAQ http://kendaco.telebyte.com/rlindber/rv
If Windows is the answer I would really like to know what the question is
Jim McGinn
"Stephen J. Fromm" <stephe...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:b4cc5e7c.02031...@posting.google.com...
Your impression is very similar to mine. When I read things like this my
first reaction is, "This guy can't be serious. How is it possible for
somebody to be so ignorant of evolutionary processes and recieve a PHD."
It's surreal. But what I've come to find is that the whole discipline of
paleoanthropology is littered with ignorance based notions like this. They
literally believe that speciation is as whimsical as expressed by Klein.
Klein is no exception to the rule. And it's just about impossible to
disavow an anthropologist of their belief in the serendipitous, whimsical
nature of evolution because they are indoctrinated such that if you
challenge them on this they break out into hissy fits of ad hominen.
Might I add that everything you are saying here, point by point, makes
perfect sense.
Jim
Tim Johnson
news:a7107e$n...@dispatch.concentric.net...
From an archaeological perspective also, the whole "cultural revolution"
idea is looking increasingly untenable, and I can't believe Klein is simply
able to ignore this. All you need is a bit of common sense. Large parts of
the world underwent fairly major changes once farming was adopted, or when
we see the first urbanism etc. Both took place across the world on the same
kind of timescale as this "cultural revolution", i.e. 50 thousand years in
the future they would appear simultaneous. Nobody starts positing a major
genetic change across the world to account for this.
To be fair, he is an archaeologist and not a palaeoanthropologist, but this
doesn't excuse him from having a thoroughly unrealistic view of human
evolution. This also applies to people like Chris Henshilwood, rambling on
about "symbolism" and "modern human behaviour" without stopping for a second
to think what exactly they're talking about.
AFAIC, what Gamble and White are saying in this article is the most
sensible: "modern behavioural capacities" such as they were, already existed
in AMHs before all these changes happened, then some form of social
competition inspired the invention of various new forms of behaviour. This
is also distinct from the kind of argument Gamble was using a few years ago
about population pressure and nebulous, passive processes of "stylistic
messaging".
Most Palaeolithic archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists still do have a
lot to learn before they start making any kind of sense on such important
issues.
Tim Johnson
firstjois
"Stephen J. Fromm" <stephe...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:b4cc5e7c.02031...@posting.google.com...
: has an article on the origins of modern humans,
: particularly the cultural explosion thought to take place 40,000 or so
: years ago.
: (link (registration req'ed):
: http://nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/social/26HUMA.html)
It seems to me as if many interesting or new ideas in the paleo
anthropology area are not "stand alones" but are centered on the OoA vs
MREH debate. The end result of Klein's cultural explosion, several genetics
studies by "this" group and a batch by "that" group, and of course, the
great fuss about Neanderthals all are colored by the central debate of OoA
vs MREH. Is it impossible to look at Klein's view of the cultural
explosion 40,000 years ago without filtering it first through OoA or MREH?
I bet it would be really difficult! And I'm still waiting to hear from
someone who says that there was no cultural explosion at all, but a steady
and gradual change over thousands and thousands of years.
Klein covers his view of this topic over several pages in "The Human
Career" and it doesn't seem that outrageous. What is the opposing
explanation? Is there an individual or school proposing it?
Jois
Bob Keeter
firstjo...@hotmail.com wrote on 3/17/02 12:29 PM:
>
> "Stephen J. Fromm" <stephe...@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:b4cc5e7c.02031...@posting.google.com...
> : The New York Times in late February
> : has an article on the origins of modern humans,
> : particularly the cultural explosion thought to take place 40,000 or so
> : years ago.
> : (link (registration req'ed):
> : http://nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/social/26HUMA.html)
>
> It seems to me as if many interesting or new ideas in the paleo
> anthropology area are not "stand alones" but are centered on the OoA vs
> MREH debate. The end result of Klein's cultural explosion, several genetics
> studies by "this" group and a batch by "that" group, and of course, the
> great fuss about Neanderthals all are colored by the central debate of OoA
> vs MREH. Is it impossible to look at Klein's view of the cultural
> explosion 40,000 years ago without filtering it first through OoA or MREH?
> I bet it would be really difficult! And I'm still waiting to hear from
> someone who says that there was no cultural explosion at all, but a steady
> and gradual change over thousands and thousands of years.
>
Im still toying with the idea that there might have been several "cultural
explosions" in hominid history. Perhaps the first being the transition from
the trees and the margins of the forest, over to the margins of the forests
and the "savanna". Until hominids had the ability to exists for extended
periods of time "out in the open" they were effectively blocked into the
forests/jungles of Africa. (is there ANY sign of chimps or chimp ancestors
in the middle east Asia?).
The second may have occured somewhere around 100kya or so. Maybe bone tools
(although I dont know what that would do it), maybe better communications,
maybe the start of the canine-hominid symbiosis, maybe just the brain
evolved to "critical mass" and started to do more "thinking" rather than
just devoting itself to the house-keeping tasks of eating and shelter, but I
think that SOMETHING pulled a trip wire somewhere between 135kya and about
75kya. Too many things associated directly and round-about ways to hominid
evolution seem to start right about then.
The next "cultural explosion" may have been the "world-wide" radiation of
HSS (no matter what the point of origin, which Id suggest MIGHT not be the
point from which this radical radiation necessarily started from). For
example, if HSS got his start in central, eastern or southern Africa,
piddled along doing his thing with gradual "improvements" along the way,
another "quantum event" of unknown type could easily have occured anywhere
along the fringes of the HSS "domain". If this event (perhaps an
adaptation, biological, technological or cultural), led to a major
advantage, it would have reasonably spread fairly rapidly. In my tortured
view of the world, this could have been the 40kya "whatsit" that led to HSS
breaking out on the world.
Just my $0.03 worth! (Cost of living raise with imflation you know!) ;-)
Regards
bk
firstjois
"Tim Johnson" <tim.j...@keb.ox.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:a727dh$oga$1...@news.ox.ac.uk...
[snip]
:
: From an archaeological perspective also, the whole "cultural revolution"
:
Thank you for answering a good portion of my question before I could frame
and post it. I'll wait a little longer before posting next time I have a
question. :)
Jois
Tim Johnson
news:zv3l8.28622$Ib6.2...@bin7.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com...
>
[snip]
> It seems to me as if many interesting or new ideas in the paleo
> anthropology area are not "stand alones" but are centered on the OoA vs
> MREH debate.
Personally I'd say few credible theories are now associated with MREH. One
of my favourite quotes:
"The multiregional hypothesis is dead. It is dead because it is
unproductive, it is uninteresting, and it is wrong". F. Clark Howell.
I'd say most of the debate here, if you ignore people who still cling on to
MREH and nobody really listens to like Robert Bednarik, is talking about a
principal distinction between "before-OoA" and "after-OoA" theories about
"cultural origins". What we really need is to abandon the "origins" thing
once and for all.
The end result of Klein's cultural explosion, several genetics
> studies by "this" group and a batch by "that" group, and of course, the
> great fuss about Neanderthals all are colored by the central debate of
OoA
> vs MREH. Is it impossible to look at Klein's view of the cultural
> explosion 40,000 years ago without filtering it first through OoA or MREH?
> I bet it would be really difficult! And I'm still waiting to hear from
> someone who says that there was no cultural explosion at all, but a steady
> and gradual change over thousands and thousands of years.
By far the most sensible recent article on the debate, and it says exactly
this:
S. McBrearty & A.S. Brooks. 2000. The revolution that wasn't: a new
interpretation of the origins of modern behaviour. Journal of Human
Evolution 39, 435-563.
As far as I am concerned there is no need whatsoever to argue for any
cultural revolution. The whole thing is teleological: we are arguing from a
standpoint in the here and now, trying to justifty what makes Us in the
present different from Them in the past, rather than looking for the
similarities. Since people like Thomsen, the whole typochronological thing
in archaeology has encouraged us to start periodising everything, and where
one period ends and another starts, people like V.G. Childe popularised
"revolutions", i.e. the Neolithic Revolution: the adoption of farming, the
Urban Revolution, etc. etc. Antonio Gilman was a Marxist archaeologist (like
Childe) who coined the term "The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution" in Europe in
the early '80s before anybody had formalised OoA and realised the European
"cultural explosion" was a demographic effect created by the influx of Hs
into Europe. People simply haven't been able to let go of it since. Couple
with this the recent explosion in evolutionary psychology and you get the
perfect recipe for the continuation of this kind of theory.
So basically, the whole idea was rooted in Eurocentric ideas based on a
misinterpretation of palaeodemographic shifts. As McBrearty and Brooks
suggested, and is continually being confirmed, we're seeing elements of what
we now call "modern behaviour" emerging among early Hs populations in
Africa. The Human Revolution idea is basically without foundation.
Tim
Sverker Johansson
>
> The New York Times in late February
> has an article on the origins of modern humans,
> particularly the cultural explosion thought to take place 40,000 or so
> years ago.
> (link (registration req'ed):
> http://nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/social/26HUMA.html)
>
> I don't understand how Dr. Richard G. Klein's view is consistent with
> our understanding of biological evolution. The notion that a sudden
> genetic mutation drove a cultural explosion is bizarre.
>
> I've been intrigued by this ever since realizing that there's another
> inconsistency. Dr. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's work on "genetic
> archaeology" indicates that humanity began branching apart *before*
> the 40,000 before the present cultural explosion. Yet humans all over
> are biologically quite uniform---in particular, they all have the
> genetic propensity for human cultural adaptation, however that's
> genetically encoded.
According to McBrearty & Brooks (ref below), the "explosion" was both
earlier and less explosive than is commonly believed. Modern humans
with rich culture turn up in Europe, suddenly, about 40k years ago.
But Europe isn't the world -- McB & B document plenty of evidence
of modern human behavior older than 40k in Africa.
McBrearty, S & Brooks, A (2000) 'The revolution that wasn't: a new
interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior',
J Hum Evo 39:453-563
> This also reminds me of the out-of-Africa debate. As I understand it,
> the folks against the out-of-Africa theory posit that genetic changes
> occured in hominids across the world, simultaneously and in parallel.
> This just isn't consistent with views on speciation (though this is
> perhaps not so clear cut, since there would be genetic
> cross-fertilization amongst hominid groups).
Agreed. Or rather, it could be consistent with anagenetic change in
a population, but only if there is so much gene flow across the
world that it would wipe out most regional differences.
But the anti-OOA crowd invokes preserved regional differences
as evidence of their MRH. They thus want _both_ heavy gene flow
in order to preserve the integrity of the species, _and_ barriers
to gene flow, to preserve the integrity of the regional variants.
I could buy one or the other, but I have a hard time buying both.
[snip]
--
Best regards, HLK, Physics
Sverker Johansson U of Jonkoping
----------------------------------------------
Definitions:
Micro-evolution: evolution for which the evidence is so
overwhelming that even the ICR can't deny it.
Macro-evolution: evolution which is only proven beyond
reasonable doubt, not beyond unreasonable doubt.
Stephen J. Fromm
> In article <b4cc5e7c.02031...@posting.google.com>,
> stephe...@verizon.net (Stephen J. Fromm) wrote:
>
> > The New York Times in late February
> > has an article on the origins of modern humans,
> > particularly the cultural explosion thought to take place 40,000 or so
> > years ago.
> > (link (registration req'ed):
> > http://nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/social/26HUMA.html)
> >
> > I don't understand how Dr. Richard G. Klein's view is consistent with
> > our understanding of biological evolution. The notion that a sudden
> > genetic mutation drove a cultural explosion is bizarre.
> >
> Actually it is an interesting why to explain the very sudden cultural
> change.
Interesting, perhaps. Plausible, no.
sjfromm
P Bowles
>earlier and less explosive than is commonly believed. Modern humans
>with rich culture turn up in Europe, suddenly, about 40k years ago.
>But Europe isn't the world -- McB & B document plenty of evidence
>of modern human behavior older than 40k in Africa.
The problem with the cultural explosion hypothesis is that it is rooted in the
assumption that such things as religious practice conveniently emerged at
exactly the same time that art was developed which could depict said practices
- the age of the 'cultural explosion' is no more than the age of the earliest
known pictographic art. Realistically, it is likely that the various practices
depicted in the paintings date back a good deal further - after all, the fact
that cave paintings depict bison doesn't mean that bison only came into
existence 40-odd thousamd years ago. Rather, like the later development of
writing, the development of art simply allowed the first permanent recordings
of behaviours and beliefs stretching back thousands of years earlier - I very
much doubt there ever was a sudden cultural explosion.
Philip Bowles
Jim McGinn
> news:a7107e$n...@dispatch.concentric.net...
<snip
> > . . . the whole discipline of paleoanthropology
> > is littered with ignorance based notions like this.
> > They literally believe that speciation is as
> > whimsical as expressed by Klein. Klein is no
> > exception to the rule.
<snip>
> From an archaeological perspective also, the whole
> "cultural revolution" idea is looking increasingly
> untenable, and I can't believe Klein is simply able to
> ignore this. All you need is a bit of common sense.
> Large parts of the world underwent fairly major
> changes once farming was adopted, or when we
> see the first urbanism etc. Both took place across
> the world on the same kind of timescale as this
> "cultural revolution", i.e. 50 thousand years in the
> future they would appear simultaneous. Nobody
> starts positing a major genetic change across the
> world to account for this.
Yes. I agree.
What is also perplexing is why they refer to it as
a "cultural" revolution. Farming and urbanism
are practices that are dependent upon and that
facilitate rationality and knowledge, not culture.
> To be fair, he is an archaeologist and not a
> palaeoanthropologist, but this doesn't excuse him
> from having a thoroughly unrealistic view of human
> evolution. This also applies to people like Chris
> Henshilwood, rambling on about "symbolism" and
> "modern human behaviour" without stopping for a
> second to think what exactly they're talking about.
Again I agree. It's comical how they seem to think
that symbolism represents some kind of great leap
of intellectual ability. What they are finding is a
sudden increase in symbolic artifacts. This sudden
increase can be explained in the context of an
increase in group size (possibly facilitated by an
increase in trade) that afforded more division of
labor. Symbolism has been around even before
our split with chimps. Symbolism does not
represent any great leap of intellectual ability.
> AFAIC, what Gamble and White are saying in this
> article is the most sensible: "modern behavioural
> capacities" such as they were, already existed
> in AMHs before all these changes happened, then
> some form of social competition inspired the
> invention of various new forms of behaviour. This
> is also distinct from the kind of argument Gamble
> was using a few years ago about population
> pressure and nebulous, passive processes of
> "stylistic messaging".
I think the environment was the most important factor
that held our species in check. It wasn't until the
continental glaciers melted that we were able to
establish farming and cities. This afforded the ability
to begin to store knowledge from one generation to
the next and thereby establish mastery over out
environment. Most notably we broke free from the
constraints that seasonality placed on us and which
we'd been struggling with since we split with chimps.
> Most Palaeolithic archaeologists and
> palaeoanthropologists still do have a lot to learn
> before they start making any kind of sense on such
> important issues.
As explain in my recent post entitled The Human
Network I contend that the origins of humans/hominid
involves, among other adaptations, the emergence of
culture in the earliest years of hominid evolution.
Thus the supposition that culture is some kind of
recent (within the last 100,000 years) adaptation
seems immediately ridiculous to me. Even more
ridiculous is this notion that our earliest hominid
ancestors suddenly started to understand the benefits
of employing tools and weapons and that this
explains the emergence of human intellect. So as far
as I'm concerned modern anthropology has the
causal sequence all backwards. They have us being
rational logical back when we were primarily
developing along the lines of being cultural,
communicative, and emotional. And now that we
have developed rationality, logical, and even
science--most notably over the last 8,000
years--modern anthropology is trying to tell us that it
is because we suddenly developed culture!
puttster
Maybe you have a lot between the lines there I don't see, Jim. But I'm
wondering - if all that is needed to begin to be human is the mental side,
i.e., being cultural, communicative, and emotional, then why aren't chimps
human? What was holding them back?
Thanks,
Puttster
Jim McGinn
"puttster" <toms...@pdq.net> wrote in message
news:1DEE77B713F76326.3FC94245...@lp.airnews.net...
> Maybe you have a lot between the lines there I don't see, Jim. But I'm
> wondering - if all that is needed to begin to be human is the mental side,
> i.e., being cultural, communicative, and emotional, then why aren't chimps
> human? What was holding them back?
Good question.
It's not a matter of being held back. Afterall we did evolve from chimps.
Chimps had no need to evolve our adaptations because their rainforest
habitat did not (and still does not) present them with the predicament of
seasonal dessication. Our chimpanzee-like ancestor, on the otherhand, got
caught in parts of Africa where the rainforest habitat disappeared leaving
them in an environment that presented them a very serious problem, seasonal
dessication. Human adaptations (including the adaptations you mention
above) are the solution to that problem.
Jim
Kenneth Kinman
It is really interesting how the debate over a human "cultural
explosion" parallels that of the debate over a "Cambrian explosion" of
animal phyla (and body-plans). The so-called Cambrian "explosion" was
also earlier and less explosive than what a simplistic analysis of the
evidence would lead one to believe.
Just as art began to leave a more complete record of human
culture, changes at the beginning of the Cambrian suddenly made possible
a more complete fossil record of various body-plans (through increased
mineralization of body parts). The question here is whether this was
initially triggered by changes in genes and the expression of those
genes (intrinsic) or triggered by a sudden change in geochemistry
(extrinsic).
Either way, Gould's notion of a phyletic explosion at the
beginning of the Cambrian is just as much a stumbling block as is the
notion of "cultural explosion" among humans some 40,000 years ago.
Documentation of human evolution is just as uneven (and difficult to
interpret) as is metazoan evolution. And the temptation to label
certain "accelerations" (punctuations) as "explosions" is an easy trap
to fall into.
------- Ken Kinman
puttster
tools/weapons/logic have to be added to the mix?
Jim McGinn
> Would those adaptations be sufficient to make us human or would
> tools/weapons/logic have to be added to the mix?
I don't know that they would have to be.
Jim
Acme Optics
Actually, modern humans are the product of genetic engineering
experiments conducted upon Homo Erectus some 800,000 years ago by
friendly space aliens. They were trying to keep us from becoming
technologically advanced without still being frightened of and
destroying everything we did not understand.
The experiment was a complete failure.
deowll
know to lie to their friends. That about as human as you can get.
deowll
"Acme Optics" <acmeo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:hhu8ausc23062npc6...@4ax.com...
They were not friendly and the experiment worked out fine. They took the
slaves home and left the rejects.
Helen
news:iIJr8.22431$ml2.1...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
:
: "Acme Optics" <acmeo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
:
Hmmmmmmm been reading Erich von Daniken have we?
--
Helen.................
helen dot bray at mjrcontracts dot co dot uk
Stewart Millen
"Jim McGinn" <jimm...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:ac6a5059.02032...@posting.google.com...
(snip)
> Yes. I agree.
>
> What is also perplexing is why they refer to it as
> a "cultural" revolution. Farming and urbanism
> are practices that are dependent upon and that
> facilitate rationality and knowledge, not culture.
Because these changed the culture in other radical,
unforeseen ways?
(snip)
> I think the environment was the most important factor
> that held our species in check. It wasn't until the
> continental glaciers melted that we were able to
> establish farming and cities. This afforded the ability
> to begin to store knowledge from one generation to
> the next and thereby establish mastery over out
> environment. Most notably we broke free from the
> constraints that seasonality placed on us and which
> we'd been struggling with since we split with chimps.
I think that the environment might have played a role.
Really, I don't think we know.
But the Neolithic revolution for sure wasn't the product
of some breakthrough in knowledge. Late-surviving
hunter-gatherering peoples know that if you plant seeds
in the ground, you can grow food. It's not rocket science.
They just believe that it's too much hassle, and too much
work. And they're right. Agriculture forced people to
work harder and placed them at much higher risk for
bouts of cyclic famine and resource depletion. Nor do I
think that it afforded that much in improving the storage
of knowledge--that really had to wait until the printing
press and mass publishing.
What counts is that once a people start practicing
agriculture, their population expands beyond what can
be substained by hunting and gathering, so you can't
go back. Even if you wanted to.
Stewart
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Jim McGinn
"Stewart Millen" <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:a8vej3$vfcos$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
> But the Neolithic revolution for sure wasn't the product
> of some breakthrough in knowledge. Late-surviving
> hunter-gatherering peoples know that if you plant seeds
> in the ground, you can grow food. It's not rocket science.
>
> They just believe that it's too much hassle, and too much
> work. And they're right. Agriculture forced people to
> work harder and placed them at much higher risk for
> bouts of cyclic famine and resource depletion.
This is just plain wrong. The economic benefits of
agriculture are so obvious as to be beyond dispute.
Agriculture is one of many aspects of society that afford
us the leisure time to pursue such trivialities as
speculating about human origins. Agriculture is what
released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
depletion.
> Nor do I
> think that it afforded that much in improving the storage
> of knowledge--that really had to wait until the printing
> press and mass publishing.
A sedentary agricultural lifestyle simply makes it
easier to pass information down from one generation
to the next. If you don't think that us modern humans
depend more on knowledge now than we did in the
past then I can only suggest that you take a look around.
The benefits of human knowledge are everywhere.
>
> What counts is that once a people start practicing
> agriculture, their population expands beyond what can
> be substained by hunting and gathering, so you can't
> go back. Even if you wanted to.
We wouldn't want to.
Jim
John Wilkins
> "Stewart Millen" <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:a8vej3$vfcos$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
>
> > But the Neolithic revolution for sure wasn't the product
> > of some breakthrough in knowledge. Late-surviving
> > hunter-gatherering peoples know that if you plant seeds
> > in the ground, you can grow food. It's not rocket science.
> >
> > They just believe that it's too much hassle, and too much
> > work. And they're right. Agriculture forced people to
> > work harder and placed them at much higher risk for
> > bouts of cyclic famine and resource depletion.
>
> This is just plain wrong. The economic benefits of
> agriculture are so obvious as to be beyond dispute.
> Agriculture is one of many aspects of society that afford
> us the leisure time to pursue such trivialities as
> speculating about human origins. Agriculture is what
> released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
> depletion.
No, actually agriculture only benefits the political alpha class. Those
who do the farming live shorter lives, have smaller stature, suffer from
more disease due to monocultural diets, work longer hours (roughly
double that of a hunter gatherer), and to add to this it means that
territorial disputes become more violent since so much more is at stake.
Why did agriculture spread then? Because the increase in available
energy permitted a higher population density.
You might like to look at
Rindos, David. The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective.
Orlando: Academic Press, 1984.
>
> > Nor do I
> > think that it afforded that much in improving the storage
> > of knowledge--that really had to wait until the printing
> > press and mass publishing.
>
> A sedentary agricultural lifestyle simply makes it
> easier to pass information down from one generation
> to the next. If you don't think that us modern humans
> depend more on knowledge now than we did in the
> past then I can only suggest that you take a look around.
> The benefits of human knowledge are everywhere.
>
> >
> > What counts is that once a people start practicing
> > agriculture, their population expands beyond what can
> > be substained by hunting and gathering, so you can't
> > go back. Even if you wanted to.
>
> We wouldn't want to.
Don't bet on it.
>
> Jim
--
John Wilkins
Occasionally making sense for over 46 years
Stewart Millen
"Jim McGinn" <jimm...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a91vtp$h...@dispatch.concentric.net...
>
> "Stewart Millen" <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:a8vej3$vfcos$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
>
> > But the Neolithic revolution for sure wasn't the product
> > of some breakthrough in knowledge. Late-surviving
> > hunter-gatherering peoples know that if you plant seeds
> > in the ground, you can grow food. It's not rocket science.
> >
> > They just believe that it's too much hassle, and too much
> > work. And they're right. Agriculture forced people to
> > work harder and placed them at much higher risk for
> > bouts of cyclic famine and resource depletion.
>
> This is just plain wrong. The economic benefits of
> agriculture are so obvious as to be beyond dispute.
> Agriculture is one of many aspects of society that afford
> us the leisure time to pursue such trivialities as
> speculating about human origins. Agriculture is what
> released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
> depletion.
No, what you said is just about the opposite of what
is actually true.
Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time than agriculuralists:
studies show that they spend no more than about 15-20
hours a week in activity that we might call "work" (obtaining
food and shelter). Add to that, based on calculations done
on Kung! women, 1-3 hours day for domestic chores
(which we don't count as "work" in our society, btw).
The Kung! living in an arid environemnt, need no more
than to "work" three days a week. The rest of the time
can be spent visiting relatives and friends in other bands,
entertaining visitors, or for those "arts and crafts and
hobbies" we were speaking of in the other thread.
Compare this to studies done on Javanese peasants, who
work (farm work only) spend up to 3 times more--44
hours a week to get a diet much less varied and much
poorer than what even today's hunter-gatherers (who
survived by living on pieces of real estate that no one
else wanted).
Indeed, you *can't* work any harder by hunting and
gathering. A group of hunter-gatherers who had the
Protestant work ethic and went about purposefully
hunting and gathering all the food that they could would
only end up collecting a bunch of food that they couldn't
possibly eat before it spoiled. And then they'd go hungry,
because they would have drained the ecosystem around
them of resources. Their way of life counts on low-
intensity use of resources.
And what do hunter-gatherers get from this? The answer
is, a better quality of life than almost anyone else had
up until very recent times in the industrialized West.
And I'm not talking in romaticized Rousseauean terms,
either, but in crass materialistic ones and in terms of
politcal freedom.
They ate better than the agricultural peoples that followed
them. How do we know this? By comparing the life
expectancy rates and skeletal materials of both surviving
hunter-gatherers and prehistoric ones versus those of
agricultural peoples who followed. For instance, prehistoric
hunter-gatherer skeletons of 20,000 years ago were taller
(5'11" for males), had fewer missing teeth (2.5), were
older at age of death, and were otherwise generally healthier
than those of Roman citizens (5'6" tall and who had 6.5
missing teeth). Indeed, since the population density of
hunter-gatherers is much lower than of agricultural peoples,
epidemics are pretty much unkown--there's simply not
enough population to "support" them. For most people,
the non-elites in the so-called "great civilizations" that
came later, "civilization" was a very bad deal.
Which leads us to your next contention: famine. It's not
hunter-gatherers who suffer famine, though they may
suffer temporarily from lean periods when food is scarce.
That's in part because, not being tied to one area, they
can simply pack up and move to somewhere else where
the pickings are better, which is very likely because
their population density is by necessity low. That's not
true for agriculturalists. Locked on their lands having a
simplified ecosystem, typically produced by agriculture,
once a blight or a swarm of insects or drought wipes
out their crops, they starve in large numbers. With their
human popuation and agricultural practices having driven
out other potential food sources, they literally have no
way to support their popualation (much denser than that
of hunter-gatherers).
Again, we can see this in their skeletal remains. The
bones of prehistoric hunter-gathering populations
typically show Harris lines--which are caused by
cessations in bone growth during childhood when
food intake is reduced for short periods of time.
Agricultural populations, OTH, frequently show
dental hypoplasias--which are caused by prolonged
periods of starvation. Hunter-gatherers suffer temporary
short-term periods of hunger; agriculturalists *starve*
from time to time.
And this makes perfect sense in historical times.
Even though they live on miserable pieces of real
estate, who ever heard of mass starvation among the
Kung!, or the Inuit, or the Machiguenga? But you
read of it all the time in ancient Egypt (the Bible,
anyone?) in India, in China, in medieval Europe,
in Ireland in the 1840s, and in Russia in the 20th
century. The flip side of the greater population density
that agriculture can support is the greater risk that
the whole system can fail and produce mass starvation.
Finally, there is the question of political freedom.
As many commentators have noted, hunter-gatherers
are very equalitarian and are the freest people on
the planet--having no kings, presidents, prisons,
bosses, or CEOs. No one has the power to coerce
anyone to act in any way; their "leaders" have only
the power of their reputations and are quite careful
to avoid directly criticizing anyone, choosing instead
to lead by example and by platitudes. Contrast this to
the situation of agriculturalists after state-level societies
developed, who were punished for the smallest of
infractions, who had to surrender a portion of what
little wealth that they could generate to their rulers,
who had to send children to serve in the armies of
the rulers, and who had to grovel before their rulers
who frequently took upon themselves the title of
*gods*.
And all this is part of some tendency towards
"rationality"?
> > Nor do I
> > think that it afforded that much in improving the storage
> > of knowledge--that really had to wait until the printing
> > press and mass publishing.
>
> A sedentary agricultural lifestyle simply makes it
> easier to pass information down from one generation
> to the next. If you don't think that us modern humans
> depend more on knowledge now than we did in the
> past then I can only suggest that you take a look around.
> The benefits of human knowledge are everywhere.
Wrong again. Writing did little for passing knowledge
from one generation to the other, at least not until the
invention of the printing press. For starters, few people
could read--as David Kahn notes in _The _Codebreakers,
writing itself was a type of "code" that common people
couldn't decipher (in fact, writing was tinged with "magic"
for this very reason). OTH, lacking writing, people made
more efficient use of their ability to memorize than people
today do. The memory of pre-literate peoples is often
astonishing (recall Alex Haley's story in "Roots").
Once publishing became available, OTH, did memory
become less important. People could then take full
advantage of writing and use it as a substitute for what
they had to do previously--which was go out search
for an "expert" in a field from which to learn.
> > What counts is that once a people start practicing
> > agriculture, their population expands beyond what can
> > be substained by hunting and gathering, so you can't
> > go back. Even if you wanted to.
>
> We wouldn't want to.
Ever heard, in the New World, of European settlers
"going Indian?". If you read accounts of Jamestown,
you'll find that, to the anger, horror, and chagrin of
the authorities, that a number of Englishmen and their
families abandoned the settlement to go live with the
Chickahominy Indians. Although they weren't hunter-
gatherers (they were a pre-state chiefdom practicing
hunting and agriculture and external warfare, to be
more precise) these particular Englishmen noted
correctly that, unlike them, the Chickahominy weren't
starving and had plenty of food.
What's more, the English authorities took stern
measures against any colonists who did just this.
They would go to Powhatan, who they saw as the
"king" of the Chickahominy, and demand that he
order these Englishment to return. The chronicle states
that Powhatan gave them "proude and disdainfule
lookes". I strongly suspect instead that Powhatan,
although the leader of a chiefdom and having far
more power than a leader of hunter-gatherers, was
by no means a "king" and had no power to order
anyone to return. And I wonder if he may have tried
to communicate this to the English, who couldn't
understand anything outside the paradigm of top-
down political power as they knew it.
When refused, the English retaliated with their
superior warfare technology by attacking
Chickahominy villages, burning their corn crops, and-
by their own account--slaughering Chickahominy
women and children in a display of indiscriminate
brutality. But this didn't solve their problem of them
not being able to feed themselves. Soon they were
back visiting Powhatan and parleying with him for
more food. This demand/slaughter/beg cycle continued
for a while, until Powhatan (?) actually threatened
to pick up his people and *move away* to leave the
English to starve once and for all.
And, in my humble opinion, that's exactly what
he should have done.
Stewart
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zolota
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
> "
SNIP
>
> And this makes perfect sense in historical times.
> Even though they live on miserable pieces of real
> estate, who ever heard of mass starvation among the
> Kung!, or the Inuit, or the Machiguenga? But you
> read of it all the time in ancient Egypt (the Bible,
> anyone?) in India, in China, in medieval Europe,
> in Ireland in the 1840s, and in Russia in the 20th
> century. The flip side of the greater population density
> that agriculture can support is the greater risk that
> the whole system can fail and produce mass starvation.
>
Less thant 100 years ago there was a major starvation event for the Inuit
witnessed by missionaries. Canada finally sent food aid in, changing a
policy of non interference.
Z
Stewart Millen
"zolota" <zol...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:5yvt8.17817$ir6.8...@news1.calgary.shaw.ca...
>
> Stewart Millen <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:a95h1c$d3tf$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
> > "
> SNIP
> >
> > And this makes perfect sense in historical times.
> > Even though they live on miserable pieces of real
> > estate, who ever heard of mass starvation among the
> > Kung!, or the Inuit, or the Machiguenga? But you
> > read of it all the time in ancient Egypt (the Bible,
> > anyone?) in India, in China, in medieval Europe,
> > in Ireland in the 1840s, and in Russia in the 20th
> > century. The flip side of the greater population density
> > that agriculture can support is the greater risk that
> > the whole system can fail and produce mass starvation.
> >
>
> Less thant 100 years ago there was a major starvation event
> for the Inuit witnessed by missionaries. Canada finally sent
> food aid in, changing a policy of non interference.
I'd like to see more on this. Like, how did their food
source fail them? They're population density is low
(less than 0.3 people per square mile) and they're not
growing crops.
Could this--being in historical times with missionaries present
- --be something that resulted from intrusion of Europeans into
the scene? (like whites overharvesting fish, seals, caribou,
etc?).
Stewart
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deowll
"Helen" <he...@dead-spam-address.co.uk> wrote in message
news:7dps8.2292$_T.2...@news-binary.blueyonder.co.uk...
fiction. I'd already read to many books to believe him. I prefer Edger Rice
Burroughs, Doc Smith, or H. G. Wells. At least they could spin a good yarn
and didn't insult people by claiming their work was nonfiction.?8^)
deowll
deowll
>
> "Stewart Millen" <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:a8vej3$vfcos$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
>
> > But the Neolithic revolution for sure wasn't the product
> > of some breakthrough in knowledge. Late-surviving
> > hunter-gatherering peoples know that if you plant seeds
> > in the ground, you can grow food. It's not rocket science.
> >
> > They just believe that it's too much hassle, and too much
> > work. And they're right. Agriculture forced people to
> > work harder and placed them at much higher risk for
> > bouts of cyclic famine and resource depletion.
>
> This is just plain wrong. The economic benefits of
> agriculture are so obvious as to be beyond dispute.
> Agriculture is one of many aspects of society that afford
> us the leisure time to pursue such trivialities as
> speculating about human origins. Agriculture is what
> released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
> depletion.
>
grow and the rains don't come and the locusts do people starve to death in
huge numbers.
This might not be happening today where you live but check historical
records. People are starving to death in large numbers in some places today.
Studies have shown that during a bad drought the bushmen were working fewer
hours per week to live than 99.9% of modern humans.
The inability to get babies through more often than about one in four or
five years and a decent death rate keep hunter gatherer population in line
with what can be fed for a reasonable amount of work.
Farming increases the population but signs of malnutrition go up not down
when farming is adopted.
> > Nor do I
> > think that it afforded that much in improving the storage
> > of knowledge--that really had to wait until the printing
> > press and mass publishing.
>
> A sedentary agricultural lifestyle simply makes it
> easier to pass information down from one generation
> to the next. If you don't think that us modern humans
> depend more on knowledge now than we did in the
> past then I can only suggest that you take a look around.
> The benefits of human knowledge are everywhere.
>
> >
> > What counts is that once a people start practicing
> > agriculture, their population expands beyond what can
> > be substained by hunting and gathering, so you can't
> > go back. Even if you wanted to.
>
> We wouldn't want to.
>
> Jim
>
>
>
>
deowll
deowll
populations have boom/bust cycles. If the hunting fails people die. Please
note hunting is the only way we can get food out of this biome in the winter
nor can we grow crops there.People who live off the Taiga or the Tundra get
most of their calories by hunting. The only other option is to import it.
deowll
Stewart Millen
"deowll" <deo...@usit.net> wrote in
news:8aOt8.3930$3z3.3...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net:
>
> "Stewart Millen" <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> message news:a96l4s$pj9e$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
>> "zolota" <zol...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
>> news:5yvt8.17817$ir6.8...@news1.calgary.shaw.ca...
(snip)
>> > Less thant 100 years ago there was a major starvation
>> > event for the Inuit witnessed by missionaries. Canada
>> > finally sent food aid in, changing a policy of non
>> > interference.
>>
>> I'd like to see more on this. Like, how did their food
>> source fail them? They're population density is low
>> (less than 0.3 people per square mile) and they're not
>> growing crops.
>>
>> Could this--being in historical times with missionaries
>> present - --be something that resulted from intrusion of
>> Europeans into the scene? (like whites overharvesting
>> fish, seals, caribou, etc?).
>>
>> Stewart
>>
> They live in an impoverished biome. They can't gather in
> the winter. Animals populations have boom/bust cycles. If
> the hunting fails people die. Please note hunting is the
> only way we can get food out of this biome in the winter
> nor can we grow crops there.People who live off the Taiga
> or the Tundra get most of their calories by hunting. The
> only other option is to import it. deowll
If hunting fails among hunter-gatherers, they typically pick
up everyting and *move* to somewhere better.Which is consistent
with the prehistoric bone evidence which shows evidence of
temporary periods of hunger, but not the of out-and-out
starvation that we see in agricultural populations.
It is true the Innuit live on rather poor real estate. But
SHG who do so compensate by controlling the number of
offspring they raise. I would expect likewise from them.
Since this was in historical times, I still strongly suspect
that this episode was the direct or indirect result of European
intrusion. Plains Indians went hungry too, when the Europeans
started reducing bison populations.
Stewart
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zolota
Lay off the White mans guilt trip. People living in the tundra are always on
an edge. Bad weather can cause the cariboo to migrate elsewhere, and
starvation results. The incident I weas quoting occured in the 1940's, later
than I remembered.
http://www.nadn.navy.mil/Oceanography/courses/SO426/labs_polar/arctic_climat
ology/HTML/PRIMER/00INTRO/inuit_climate_know_full.htm
Z
John Brock
Stewart Millen <Stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>If hunting fails among hunter-gatherers, they typically pick
>up everyting and *move* to somewhere better.Which is consistent
>with the prehistoric bone evidence which shows evidence of
>temporary periods of hunger, but not the of out-and-out
>starvation that we see in agricultural populations.
>
>It is true the Innuit live on rather poor real estate. But
>SHG who do so compensate by controlling the number of
>offspring they raise. I would expect likewise from them.
>
>Since this was in historical times, I still strongly suspect
>that this episode was the direct or indirect result of European
>intrusion. Plains Indians went hungry too, when the Europeans
>started reducing bison populations.
This sounds a bit like the old Noble Savage routine, where everyone
lived in harmony with nature until the arrival of the Evil Europeans.
Mc understanding is that even before the Europeans arrived the
Indians still starved on occasion, they still caused occasional
ecological disasters, they still massacred each other and stole
each others lands (but not all equally -- some Indian nations were
fairly peaceable, while others were viciously warlike), they still
had madness and neurosis, they had good leaders and bad leaders,
reformers and messiahs, and pretty much all the same virtues and
failings found in the rest of the world (although of course not in
exactly the same mix).
The problem with the idea of the Noble Savage is not just that it
unjustly demonizes the Europeans (although it does do that), but
that it also kind of dehumanizes everyone else, treating them as
though they lived outside of history until the White Man showed up
and corrupted them. In fact they were perfectly capable of corrupting
themselves, and screwing up their own lives, just like the Europeans.
The single unique European contribution was the technology to do
this on a larger scale, and if the Europeans hadn't created this
technology someone else would have sooner or later!
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Stewart Millen
jbr...@panix.com (John Brock) wrote in
news:a9aaeh$87f$1...@panix2.panix.com:
This strikes me as sort of a "stock reply". No, I don't believe
I'm talking about a romanticized "Noble Savage" at all. Let me
explain.
We're talking about the difference between hunter-
gatherers and agriculturalists. And if we're talking
about Native Americans, by the time that the Europeans
arrived, the majority of them were no longer hunter-
gatherers, and had not been for several hundred years
or more. Many were quite advanced along the cultural
evolutionary "curve", so to speak, practicing quite
advanced agriculure, organized into pre-state "chiefdoms",
and practicing long-range external warfare.
Would it help if I told you that many Native American
groups who practiced external warfare brutally tortured
(and sometimes ate) captives? That the Chickahominy waged
a war of extermination against the Delaware? The advanced
agriculture-chiefdom-external warfare model that many Native
American poeples had evolved to by the time of European contact
would make them analogous with the early Vikings in terms of
cultural evolution. And no one has ever claimed that the Vikings
were just a group of peace-loving farmers.
I have no doubt that if the New World had been left unmolested
by the Old World, that the same cultural evolutionary trajectory
would have occured there. The states of Mesoamerica and the Inca
empire showed the same absolutist politcal power, environmental
degradation, and proclivity towards warfare that their Eurasian
counterparts did.
So you are correct insofar as you go. But I'm talking about
hunter-gatherers, people who practice little or nothing in the
way of agriculture and animal husbandry. These peoples are
indeed typically peaceable and while they experience temporary
bouts of want, they don't typically starve like agricultural
peoples do when their crops fail. And their leaders lead by
example and reputation only; they have no power to coerce.
In short, it matters where you are on the cultural evolutionary
path.
Stewart
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John Wilkins
While I agree with your overall claim - that agrarian lifestyles tend to
encourage the generation of alpha male dominated societies with war on
their collective minds, I do have to object to the notion of an
"evolutionary path", cultural or otherwise.
Some cultural solutions to the problems posed by agriculture result in
this sort of behaviour. But it doesn't seem to me that it necessarily
will. Moreover, there is no real sense of advancement involved, which
was the problem with the turn of the 20th century Cultural Evolutionism
that developed out of Comtean positivist sociology and athropology.
Let's not fall back into bad habits.
Some refs:
Maschner, Herbert D. G. Darwinian Archaeologies, Interdisciplinary
Contributions to Archaeology. New York: Plenum Press, 1996.
O'Brien, Michael J., ed. Evolutionary Archaeology: Theory and
Application, Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 1996.
Teltser, Patrice A. Evolutionary Archaeology: Methodological Issues.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995.
The O'Brien volume is perhaps the best place to start - I recommend
Rindos' papers.
Stewart Millen
"zolota" <zol...@shaw.ca> wrote in
news:GR_t8.27952$ir6.1...@news1.calgary.shaw.ca:
>
> Stewart Millen <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> message news:a96l4s$pj9e$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
>> "zolota" <zol...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
It's a "White Man's Guilt Trip" to say--quite correctly--that
the evidence supports the contention that hunter-gatherers may
experience bouts of hunger, but don't starve? (Unless someone
else destroys their food supply)
> People living in the tundra are always on an edge.
Which they normally compensate for by controlling their
population. This means both infanticide and (with the Innuit)
geronticide (sp?). For the Innuit,this meant that they have one
of the lowest population densities observed (< 0.3 people per
square mile).
No people, not even agriculturalists, try to raise the absolute
maximum level of population that a region can support. People
always stop when more mouths to feed mean diminishing marginal
resource returns for everyone. This in practice means that human
groups build into their populations a "margin of safety" which
acts as a "buffer" against typical variations in food supply.
It's the atypical catastrophic failures which bring starvation.
And those catastrophic failures are much more likely to occur
with agriculturalists, with their simplfied food-producing
sources and who are locked to their lands, than with mobile
hunter-gatherers.
> Bad weather can cause the cariboo to migrate elsewhere, and
> starvation results.
When the food's not there, hunter-gathers pick up and move
elsewhere. Why should they just sit and starve? There's nothing
to keep them at any one place, unlike agriculturalists.
> The
> incident I weas quoting occured in the 1940's, later than I
> remembered.
Then I strongly suspect that it was likely the result of
European action, either direct or indirect. In fact, they
probably weren't even hunter-gatherers by the 1940s.
You can always demonstrate me wrong, you know, by posting
the details of the famine.
Stewart
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Jim McGinn
"John Wilkins" <john.w...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:1fagxup.jax10l12hq7jeN%john.w...@bigpond.com...
> > Agriculture is what
> > released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
> > depletion.
>
> No, actually agriculture only benefits the political alpha class.
It supports *all* classes. Now the population on this planet is upwards of
6 billion. 10,000 years ago it was, maybe, 6 million. Most of the
additional 5.994 billion owe there existence directly to agriculture.
Those
> who do the farming live shorter lives, have smaller stature, suffer from
> more disease due to monocultural diets, work longer hours (roughly
> double that of a hunter gatherer),
Where are you getting your stats? American farmers are not shorter of
stature. And the only econonic problem they have is that they're
effficiency is so high that we need less and less farmers.
and to add to this it means that
> territorial disputes become more violent since so much more is at stake.
This is simply wrong. Territorial disputes have been a constant in our
species going back 6 million years. (Don't bother trying to find any
evidence that contradicts this. There is none.) If anything they have been
more desperate in the past since group existence depended so much on their
ability to maintain possession of a valued territory.
The only reason yourself, Stewart, and other Anthropologists tend to assume
otherwise is because you are extrapolating from modern day hunter-gatherers
which is inaccurate due to the fact that modern day hunter-gatherers live in
a relatively political free environment. The reason mondern-day
hunter-gathers don't go around killing each other is because if they did
they'd find themselves in a modern jail. This was not the situation 10,000
years ago.
>
> Why did agriculture spread then? Because the increase in available
> energy permitted a higher population density.
This is correct. More people due to there being more resources that support
more people.
Jim
Jim McGinn
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Agriculture is what
> > released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
> > depletion.
>
> No, what you said is just about the opposite of what
> is actually true.
>
> Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time than agriculuralists:
> studies show that they spend no more than about 15-20
> hours a week in activity that we might call "work" (obtaining
> food and shelter).
I've seen these studies. They are worthless because they are based on
modern day hunter-gatherers. They don't tell us about the success of (or
leisure time) of premodern day hunter-gatherers. Modern day
hunter-gatherers have a population pressure outlet: modern society.
Anthropologists tend to ignore the political realities that would have been
in place back then. Back then it was normal to hunt down and kill anybody
that was not in your group.
Another thing also, who told you that leisure time was a good measure of the
economic success of people? It's not. Bums have a lot of leisure time.
<snip>
]> Compare this to studies done on Javanese peasants, who
> work (farm work only) spend up to 3 times more--44
> hours a week to get a diet much less varied and much
> poorer than what even today's hunter-gatherers (who
> survived by living on pieces of real estate that no one
> else wanted).
The problem american farmers have is that there productivity drives prices
down.
> Their way of life counts on low-
> intensity use of resources.
Yes. They are poor, unsophisticated and can't defend themselves against
larger groups who come in a take their land away from them. This is what
has been happening to hunter-gatherers over the last 10,000 years. They are
disappearing because they are not competitive.
>
> And what do hunter-gatherers get from this? The answer
> is, a better quality of life than almost anyone else had
> up until very recent times in the industrialized West.
BS. They can't defend themselves. They are poor.
> And I'm not talking in romaticized Rousseauean terms,
> either, but in crass materialistic ones and in terms of
> politcal freedom.
They only political freedom they've had has been the result of
preservationist movements by modern people. If we removed modern society
they'd go back to being the less than noble savages that humans in tribal
groups often can be.
>
> They ate better than the agricultural peoples that followed
> them. How do we know this? By comparing the life
> expectancy rates and skeletal materials of both surviving
> hunter-gatherers and prehistoric ones versus those of
> agricultural peoples who followed. For instance, prehistoric
> hunter-gatherer skeletons of 20,000 years ago were taller
> (5'11" for males), had fewer missing teeth (2.5), were
> older at age of death, and were otherwise generally healthier
> than those of Roman citizens (5'6" tall and who had 6.5
> missing teeth). Indeed, since the population density of
> hunter-gatherers is much lower than of agricultural peoples,
> epidemics are pretty much unkown--there's simply not
> enough population to "support" them. For most people,
> the non-elites in the so-called "great civilizations" that
> came later, "civilization" was a very bad deal.
So you're saying that roman citizens were smaller and had better teeth than
ancient peoples so therefore they ate better? I'd say that height is a
false indicator and that refined food would cause tooth decay. You're just
picking and choosing stats that paint a pretty picture of the noble savage.
The reality is that agricultural societies support more people and thus
potentially can field bigger armies, etc.
>
> Which leads us to your next contention: famine. It's not
> hunter-gatherers who suffer famine, though they may
> suffer temporarily from lean periods when food is scarce.
You have no data that contradicts the supposition that famine was not a big
factor over the last 6 mya of human existence.
> That's in part because, not being tied to one area, they
> can simply pack up and move to somewhere else
What if somebody else is alreading living there? You make this sound so
romantic. Keep in mind that in those days very few people could even
communicate with tribes that lived only a few miles away. You seem
blissfully clueless about the political realites that would have existed
back then.
where
> the pickings are better, which is very likely because
> their population density is by necessity low. That's not
> true for agriculturalists. Locked on their lands having a
> simplified ecosystem, typically produced by agriculture,
> once a blight or a swarm of insects or drought wipes
> out their crops, they starve in large numbers.
You currently live in an agriculture based society. When was the last time
you noticed stavation in large numbers in your vicinity. Agriculture
supports the existence of 6 billion people on this planet. 6 billion!
With their
> human popuation and agricultural practices having driven
> out other potential food sources, they literally have no
> way to support their popualation (much denser than that
> of hunter-gatherers).
>
> Again, we can see this in their skeletal remains. The
> bones of prehistoric hunter-gathering populations
> typically show Harris lines--which are caused by
> cessations in bone growth during childhood when
> food intake is reduced for short periods of time.
> Agricultural populations, OTH, frequently show
> dental hypoplasias--which are caused by prolonged
> periods of starvation. Hunter-gatherers suffer temporary
> short-term periods of hunger; agriculturalists *starve*
> from time to time.
Yes. HG's suffer hunger only on a seasonal basis. The strategy of an
agriculturist involves freedom from annual cycles but this does not
necessarily free them from multiannual cycles of starvation. Nevertheless,
agricultural groups are bigger because agriculture affords bigger groups.
Political realities being what they are, bigger groups is the measure of
evolutionary success, not leisure time.
<snip>
> Finally, there is the question of political freedom.
> As many commentators have noted, hunter-gatherers
> are very equalitarian and are the freest people on
> the planet--having no kings, presidents, prisons,
> bosses, or CEOs.
BS. They just live in smaller--more brutal--groups.
<snip>
> Wrong again. Writing did little for passing knowledge
> from one generation to the other,
You don't know what you are talking about. And it wasn't just writing. A
sedentary lifestyle simply affords the preservation of knowledge from one
generation to the next. More importantly it rewards inventiveness. We
don't see much of this in premodern people.
<snip>
> Once publishing became available, OTH, did memory
> become less important. People could then take full
> advantage of writing and use it as a substitute for what
> they had to do previously--which was go out search
> for an "expert" in a field from which to learn.
So you're saying that the technological advances that preceded the printing
press were not afforded by a sedentary lifestyle? Why would you expect
anybody to believe this?
Jim
Jim McGinn
"Stewart Millen" <Stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns91EF6631A8B...@130.133.1.4...
> I'm talking about
> hunter-gatherers, people who practice little or nothing in the
> way of agriculture and animal husbandry. These peoples are
> indeed typically peaceable and while they experience temporary
> bouts of want, they don't typically starve like agricultural
> peoples do when their crops fail. And their leaders lead by
> example and reputation only; they have no power to coerce.
>
> In short, it matters where you are on the cultural evolutionary
> path.
The cultural evolutionary Path? What is this. What makes you think that
any such thing actually exists in reality rather than in the musings of
anthropologists.
I cut and pasted something you stated earlier in this thread below:
**** begin cut and paste ****
But the Neolithic revolution for sure wasn't the product
of some breakthrough in knowledge. Late-surviving
hunter-gatherering peoples know that if you plant seeds
in the ground, you can grow food. It's not rocket science.
They just believe that it's too much hassle, and too much
work. And they're right. Agriculture forced people to
work harder and placed them at much higher risk for
bouts of cyclic famine and resource depletion. Nor do I
think that it afforded that much in improving the storage
of knowledge--that really had to wait until the printing
press and mass publishing.
What counts is that once a people start practicing
agriculture, their population expands beyond what can
be substained by hunting and gathering, so you can't
go back. Even if you wanted to.
**** end cut and paste ****
So, to encapsulate, what you are saying here is that HG people were smarter
because they had more leisure time. And the fact that they were replaced by
modern people is not because modern society is more sophisticated its
because modern people weren't smart enough to recognize all the leisure time
and freedom from worry that hunting gathering afforded. And modern
innovations really don't count until the printing press was invented. So we
can dismiss all the innovations that occurred in the 8,000 years that
preceded the invention of the printing press. And population expansion is
not a good thing, leisure time is the measure of what is good or bad.
Jim
John Wilkins
> "John Wilkins" <john.w...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:1fagxup.jax10l12hq7jeN%john.w...@bigpond.com...
>
>
> > > Agriculture is what
> > > released us from annual bouts of famine and resource
> > > depletion.
> >
> > No, actually agriculture only benefits the political alpha class.
>
> It supports *all* classes. Now the population on this planet is upwards of
> 6 billion. 10,000 years ago it was, maybe, 6 million. Most of the
> additional 5.994 billion owe there existence directly to agriculture.
>
> Those
> > who do the farming live shorter lives, have smaller stature, suffer from
> > more disease due to monocultural diets, work longer hours (roughly
> > double that of a hunter gatherer),
>
> Where are you getting your stats? American farmers are not shorter of
> stature. And the only econonic problem they have is that they're
> effficiency is so high that we need less and less farmers.
Jim, don't do the usual Merkian thing of making modern American
conditions representative of the rest of the world or of the rest of
history. Modern farming practices are able to deliver a wider variety of
staples and hence avoid the sorts of vitamin deficiencies that farmers
from c9000BCE to the 19th century in the west and many still have, due
largely to mechanised farming techniques and a distribution system that
also owes a lot to mechanical transport.
Until that distribution system, and such things as refrigerated goods,
canned goods, and the like, all you could eat was what was grown in your
region, and farmers had much harsher lives. Hunter gatherers, in
contrast, spend less time getting, and have a much wider array of, food
and are not subject to the deficiencies in diets that the vast majority
in agrarian societies were.
And I'm getting my stats from
Rindos, David. The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective.
Orlando: Academic Press, 1984.
To my knowledge, he's not been disproven yet. See also Diamond's Guns,
Germs, and Steel.
>
> and to add to this it means that
> > territorial disputes become more violent since so much more is at stake.
>
> This is simply wrong. Territorial disputes have been a constant in our
> species going back 6 million years. (Don't bother trying to find any
> evidence that contradicts this. There is none.) If anything they have been
> more desperate in the past since group existence depended so much on their
> ability to maintain possession of a valued territory.
In places like Papua New Guinea, where hunter gatherers have until
recently had to defend fairly sparse territories (in the sense of sparse
food sources), territorial disputes have been largely ritualised, with
few deaths. With the rise of agrarian sedentary populations, wars become
much more violent and fatal. The bigger the city-state, the more violent
the wars.
>
> The only reason yourself, Stewart, and other Anthropologists tend to assume
> otherwise is because you are extrapolating from modern day hunter-gatherers
> which is inaccurate due to the fact that modern day hunter-gatherers live in
> a relatively political free environment. The reason mondern-day
> hunter-gathers don't go around killing each other is because if they did
> they'd find themselves in a modern jail. This was not the situation 10,000
> years ago.
>
> >
> > Why did agriculture spread then? Because the increase in available
> > energy permitted a higher population density.
>
> This is correct. More people due to there being more resources that support
> more people.
More *energy* (ie, carbohydrates), but not more protein, vitamins, etc.
Higher population densities permit bigger armies and social
institutions, which benefits the leaders of those institutions. While
fewer children die under the age of 5 in agrarian societies than among
hunter gatherers, the life span of adults is much shorter and
disease-ridden.
Until fairly recently, of course.
And I'm a philosophy student, not an anthropology student.
Jim McGinn
> all you could eat was what was grown in your
> region, and farmers had much harsher lives. Hunter gatherers, in
> contrast, spend less time getting, and have a much wider array of, food
> and are not subject to the deficiencies in diets that the vast majority
> in agrarian societies were.
Well, this is the first I've heard of any widescale vitamin deficiency among
ancient agriculturists. I doubt it was anywhere near as dramatic as you
suggest. I also doubt that hunting-gathering is any better in terms of
vitamins. But as for harshness, what could be harsher than to be a
hunter-gatherer and have your land taken away from you from you by a large
agrarian society leaving you to starve or with little choice but to die
fighting to get your land back.
All this talk about hunter-gatherers supposedly having a leisurly, carefree
existence and such is really irrelevant to the issue as to whether culture
or knowledge is the driving force behind the success of human over the last
10,000 years. Does anybody seriously want to suggest that the difference
between our lifestyle at present and that of our ancestors let's say 25
thousand years ago does not greatly involve an increase in our ablity to
harbor, store, and employ knowledge to take better advantage of the
opportunities in our environment. Sure you can go on speculating that
premodern humans had significant leisure time. But what's this got to do
with the issue as to whether culture or knowledge is the driving force
behind the success of modern humans?
<snip>
> In places like Papua New Guinea, where hunter gatherers have until
> recently had to defend fairly sparse territories (in the sense of sparse
> food sources), territorial disputes have been largely ritualised, with
> few deaths.
Few deaths due to war, maybe. But this is only because other factors
relieve the population pressure. If and when it comes down to life and
death struggle the Papua New Guinea populace is just as capable of malstrom
as the rest of us.
With the rise of agrarian sedentary populations, wars become
> much more violent and fatal. The bigger the city-state, the more violent
> the wars.
And also much less infrequent.
<snip>
> > This is correct. More people due to there being more resources that
support
> > more people.
>
> More *energy* (ie, carbohydrates), but not more protein, vitamins, etc.
That's speculation.
> Higher population densities permit bigger armies and social
> institutions, which benefits the leaders of those institutions.
It benefits all members of these societies.
Jim
ejudy
> In short, it matters where you are on the cultural evolutionary
> path.
>
> Stewart
>
>
>
Just for the record, if there is a certain irritation named "Jim Mcginn"
in this thread, he suffers everyone to listen to his sort of
written form of tourettes syndome where he can't help but throw nasty,
weirdly insultive, ignorant,
badgers-style statements out and about right and left.
The common way to deal with this problem is the simple killfile mode.
He starts out fairly normal and degrades everything to a peeing contest.
;-)
ejudy
Jim McGinn
> No people, not even agriculturalists, try to raise the absolute
> maximum level of population that a region can support.
Agriculturist *do* raise the maximum level of population that a region can
support. Nobody seriously disputes this contention.
> People
> always stop when more mouths to feed mean diminishing marginal
> resource returns for everyone. This in practice means that human
> groups build into their populations a "margin of safety" which
> acts as a "buffer" against typical variations in food supply.
> It's the atypical catastrophic failures which bring starvation.
>
> And those catastrophic failures are much more likely to occur
> with agriculturalists, with their simplfied food-producing
> sources and who are locked to their lands, than with mobile
> hunter-gatherers.
Catastrophic failures are not more likely with agriculturists. However
since they have larger populations their failures are more likely to be
dramatic. The biggest catastrophy that hunter-gatherers experienced is the
fact that agrarian societies took all their land leaving them with little
choice but to either join up with the agrarian society or move on in the
hope of finding new land..
This image you have of hunter-gatherers moving about freely has nothing to
do with reality. Our ancestors have always been highly territorialistic and
communal and this means that human to human conflict was a constant.
Jim
zolota
appear to be part of your itinerary. True, the Inuit practiced infanticide
into the 20th century and the ability of their elders to "take the long
walk" amazed europeans. But if the food supply was insufficient in a given
winter, they starved.
> No people, not even agriculturalists, try to raise the absolute
> maximum level of population that a region can support. People
> always stop when more mouths to feed mean diminishing marginal
> resource returns for everyone. This in practice means that human
> groups build into their populations a "margin of safety" which
> acts as a "buffer" against typical variations in food supply.
> It's the atypical catastrophic failures which bring starvation.
>
> And those catastrophic failures are much more likely to occur
> with agriculturalists, with their simplfied food-producing
> sources and who are locked to their lands, than with mobile
> hunter-gatherers.
>
> > Bad weather can cause the cariboo to migrate elsewhere, and
> > starvation results.
>
> When the food's not there, hunter-gathers pick up and move
> elsewhere. Why should they just sit and starve? There's nothing
> to keep them at any one place, unlike agriculturalists.
One cariboo herd migrates between the big lake you see on the Sask-Manitoba
border and the high artic. Inuit there had a week, at best two, to fill up
their larders for the winter. If the animals went on a different route they
would have no idea where to look and would starve that winter unless smaller
prey could be found. Inuit were mobile, but not nearly as much as you seem
to think. IMHO they are a coastal people, they did not trapse across land in
great distances. And you seem to be unaware that by migrating they would be
affecting the food of other groups. Not that Inuit fought each other, but
they dispersed into family sized groups to forage in some seasons and only
congregated along the migration routes when it was an advantage.
> > The
> > incident I weas quoting occured in the 1940's, later than I
> > remembered.
>
> Then I strongly suspect that it was likely the result of
> European action, either direct or indirect. In fact, they
> probably weren't even hunter-gatherers by the 1940s.
>
They were part-time hunter-gatherers until the Europeans idiotically banned
the importation of seal skin furs a few years ago. Today they are welfare
recipients with wounded pride. They only all moved into villages in the
50's. I've met some that were born on the move. They made their first
feature film last year.
> You can always demonstrate me wrong, you know, by posting
> the details of the famine.
>
I though I did in my first post, the Cariboo did not show up. Try key words,
Igloolik, famine. The scandal at the time was that the government was not
intervening. Besides food aid, the government has since pushed them into
fixed settlements.
Z
Stewart Millen
"John Wilkins" <john.w...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:1fampsx.1sj86qy17ar1x5N%john.w...@bigpond.com...
(snip)
> While I agree with your overall claim - that agrarian
> lifestyles tend to encourage the generation of alpha male
> dominated societies with war on their collective minds, I do
> have to object to the notion of an "evolutionary path",
> cultural or otherwise.
>
> Some cultural solutions to the problems posed by agriculture
> result in this sort of behaviour. But it doesn't seem to me
> that it necessarily will.
Neither do I. In fact, most didn't---most agricultural peoples
agriculture with redistributive systems in place. There was
more warfare, and poorer overall health, to be sure. But
the "alpha male" class of which you speak really took off
with the development of states.
>Moreover, there is no real sense of advancement involved, which
> was the problem with the turn of the 20th century Cultural
> Evolutionism that developed out of Comtean positivist
> sociology and athropology. Let's not fall back into bad
> habits.
John, while I think that there is "cultural evolution", with its
driving force being humans having to solve similar problems
using given levels of technology in given environments (in
short: you use the tools you have in a way that makes sense
where you are). However, there is an additional complication
in that different cultures have different antecedents (cultural
evolution, like biological evolution, travels from somewhere
to somewhere else) so that cultural "traits" which are neither
adaptive or maladaptive will often be retained too--which
is why we should be careful to avoid "just so" stories.
However, like biological evolution, there is no "purpose",
"meaning", or "progress" to any of this. And even "adaptive"
or "maladaptive" are terms which only apply within given
contexts. What might be an adaptive trait in one context
might be maladaptive in another.
In short, I think that there is an analogy. It's just that
many people misunderstand biological evolution too, and
give it a "purpose" than they should.
> Maschner, Herbert D. G. Darwinian Archaeologies,
> Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. New York:
> Plenum Press, 1996.
>
> O'Brien, Michael J., ed. Evolutionary Archaeology: Theory and
> Application, Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry. Salt Lake
> City: University of Utah Press, 1996.
>
> Teltser, Patrice A. Evolutionary Archaeology: Methodological
> Issues. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995.
Thanks for the refs.
Stewart
ac
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Stewart Millen
"Stewart Millen" <stewart...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:a9et81$2gasv$1...@ID-116415.news.dfncis.de...
> Neither do I. In fact, most didn't---most agricultural peoples
> agriculture with redistributive systems in place.
Sheesh. I meant to say:
"Neither do I. In fact, most didn't--most agricultural peoples
have restribution systems in place."
And:
> In short, I think that there is an analogy. It's just that
> many people misunderstand biological evolution too, and
> give it a "purpose" than they should.
"that they shouldn't".
Editing snafus, in a rush. Please excuse.
Stewart
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John Wilkins
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>
> "John Wilkins" <john.w...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:1fampsx.1sj86qy17ar1x5N%john.w...@bigpond.com...
>
> (snip)
>
> > While I agree with your overall claim - that agrarian
> > lifestyles tend to encourage the generation of alpha male
> > dominated societies with war on their collective minds, I do
> > have to object to the notion of an "evolutionary path",
> > cultural or otherwise.
> >
> > Some cultural solutions to the problems posed by agriculture
> > result in this sort of behaviour. But it doesn't seem to me
> > that it necessarily will.
>
> Neither do I. In fact, most didn't---most agricultural peoples
> agriculture with redistributive systems in place. There was
> more warfare, and poorer overall health, to be sure. But
> the "alpha male" class of which you speak really took off
> with the development of states.
Sure. And states require agrarian economies to develop, either directly
or by conquest.
>
> >Moreover, there is no real sense of advancement involved, which
> > was the problem with the turn of the 20th century Cultural
> > Evolutionism that developed out of Comtean positivist
> > sociology and athropology. Let's not fall back into bad
> > habits.
>
> John, while I think that there is "cultural evolution", with its
> driving force being humans having to solve similar problems
> using given levels of technology in given environments (in
> short: you use the tools you have in a way that makes sense
> where you are). However, there is an additional complication
> in that different cultures have different antecedents (cultural
> evolution, like biological evolution, travels from somewhere
> to somewhere else) so that cultural "traits" which are neither
> adaptive or maladaptive will often be retained too--which
> is why we should be careful to avoid "just so" stories.
Vestigial retention and neutral drift are as much a part of biological
as of cultural evolution :-)
>
> However, like biological evolution, there is no "purpose",
> "meaning", or "progress" to any of this. And even "adaptive"
> or "maladaptive" are terms which only apply within given
> contexts. What might be an adaptive trait in one context
> might be maladaptive in another.
Complete agreement.
>
> In short, I think that there is an analogy. It's just that
> many people misunderstand biological evolution too, and
> give it a "purpose" than they should.
Ditto.
>
> > Maschner, Herbert D. G. Darwinian Archaeologies,
> > Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. New York:
> > Plenum Press, 1996.
> >
> > O'Brien, Michael J., ed. Evolutionary Archaeology: Theory and
> > Application, Foundations of Archaeological Inquiry. Salt Lake
> > City: University of Utah Press, 1996.
> >
> > Teltser, Patrice A. Evolutionary Archaeology: Methodological
> > Issues. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995.
>
> Thanks for the refs.
>
> Stewart
>
> ac
>
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deowll
Larry Caldwell
> Jim, don't do the usual Merkian thing of making modern American
> conditions representative of the rest of the world or of the rest of
> history. Modern farming practices are able to deliver a wider variety of
> staples and hence avoid the sorts of vitamin deficiencies that farmers
> from c9000BCE to the 19th century in the west and many still have, due
> largely to mechanised farming techniques and a distribution system that
> also owes a lot to mechanical transport.
Mechanized agriculture allowed the transition from an agrarian society,
but it was exploration and trade that improved the agricultural diet.
The productivity of agriculture exploded every time agrarian cultures
came into contact. A handful of seeds were a cheap local commodity that
could yield immense wealth on a different continent. Peas, rice and
chickens were developed in Asia, sorghum came from India, and pears from
Persia. Added to lentils, oats, wheat, barley, onions, turnips and
apples, medieval Europeans had a fairly adequate diet. Then came the
explosion of food from the new world, including maize, beans, squash,
peanuts and potatoes, just to name a few crops. New world strawberries
crossed with European strawberries yielded a large fruit that was worth
growing and picking.
With all the alternative food crops, life got very easy for farmers. In
fact, it got so easy that they could invent mechanized agriculture and
eliminate their entire culture. Food went from being a rare commodity to
being nearly free in only a few generations. With the increased
availability of cheap vegetable protein and carbohydrates, food animals
became more plentiful. Meat moved back into the European diet, aided
greatly by the chicken. The agricultural revolution created the
industrial revolution, not the other way around.
deowll
"Larry Caldwell" <lar...@teleport.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.172925e85...@news.earthlink.net...
including fossil fuels made both possible.
You can get more food per acre using intensive hand labor on a small plots
than you can using high tech machines. Without to a surplus of food nobody
is going to be doing anything other than growing food or maybe stealing it.
Using grain to feed livestock is basically nothing more than proof of a huge
surplus of food or at least a surplus of food that can be bought. You are
trading a lot of calories in one form for a lot less calories in another.
Larry Caldwell
deo...@usit.net writes:
> You can get more food per acre using intensive hand labor on a small plots
> than you can using high tech machines.
That is not true. China's move to agricultural self-sufficiency involved
moving much of the population off the land and into the city, so that
modern agricultural methods could be adopted. The result was a
tripling of yield per acre. Small plot agriculture is inherently
inefficient, and will not support a modern urban society.
> Without to a surplus of food nobody
> is going to be doing anything other than growing food or maybe stealing it.
> Using grain to feed livestock is basically nothing more than proof of a huge
> surplus of food or at least a surplus of food that can be bought. You are
> trading a lot of calories in one form for a lot less calories in another.
You almost have it right. Animal feeds are priced according to protein
content. Calories are nearly irrelevant. Any ruminant or ungulate can
break down cellulose to component sugars and create calories from
substances totally unfit for human consumption. It is protein content
that is at a premium. Alfalfa hay can be 10% vegetable protein by
weight. While some people claim to like alfalfa sprouts, most people
prefer to get their protein in a more palatable, and nutritionally
complete, form.
John Brock
Larry Caldwell <lar...@teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <s9iw8.20946$3z3.1...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
>deo...@usit.net writes:
>> You can get more food per acre using intensive hand labor on a small plots
>> than you can using high tech machines.
>That is not true. China's move to agricultural self-sufficiency involved
>moving much of the population off the land and into the city, so that
>modern agricultural methods could be adopted. The result was a
>tripling of yield per acre. Small plot agriculture is inherently
>inefficient, and will not support a modern urban society.
I think a carefully tended garden will produce more food than the
same piece of land raked over by machines. However modern methods
are certainly more efficient in terms of the number of people
involved and the amount of labor and resources invested.
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Lorenzo L. Love
Yes. While "You can get more food per acre using intensive hand labor on
a small plots than you can using high tech machines." is certainly true,
once you subtract the overhead of feeding the farmers, you have far more
surplus food using modern agricultural methods.
I find it odd that James Watt is practically worshiped as the founder of
the industrial revolution but most people think Jethro Tull is just the
name of a band.
Lorenzo L. Love
http://home.thegrid.net/~lllove
"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
Cicero
Larry Caldwell
> I think a carefully tended garden will produce more food than the
> same piece of land raked over by machines.
That belief is not surprising, considering the lack of contact most
people have with modern agriculture, but it is not true. Most food is
not grown in gardens and most land is not suitable for gardening. The
water resources alone will not support it. Most food is grown as cereal
grains, where machine methods produce about 3x more food than manual
methods per acre.
Even with vegetable gardening, manual methods produce a crop so expensive
that a large part of the population could not afford to purchase
vegetables. In an industrial society, gardening is a leisure activity
that will not scale to feed millions of people.
John Brock
Larry Caldwell <lar...@teleport.com> wrote:
>In article <aa01q0$kav$1...@panix2.panix.com>, jbr...@panix.com writes:
>> I think a carefully tended garden will produce more food than the
>> same piece of land raked over by machines.
>That belief is not surprising, considering the lack of contact most
>people have with modern agriculture, but it is not true. Most food is
>not grown in gardens and most land is not suitable for gardening. The
>water resources alone will not support it. Most food is grown as cereal
>grains, where machine methods produce about 3x more food than manual
>methods per acre.
Can that be right? Are you telling me that a factory farmer running
a tractor over an acre of land can grow THREE TIMES as much wheat
as a farm family carefully tilling that same acre? That doesn't
make sense! Where did you get that number from? I suspect that
you may be talking about what can happen when impoverished peasants
settle on redistributed land, which is hardly an fair comparison,
since they typically don't have the money for fertilizer, weed-killers,
or the latest high-tech seeds, and might not know how to use them
if they did.
>Even with vegetable gardening, manual methods produce a crop so expensive
>that a large part of the population could not afford to purchase
>vegetables. In an industrial society, gardening is a leisure activity
>that will not scale to feed millions of people.
I think you may be overstating the case a little. Plenty of people
can afford "organic" vegetables, they are not *that* much more
expensive. Still, the basic point is unchallengeable. You can't
beat factory farming in terms of return on resources invested.
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Larry Caldwell
> Can that be right? Are you telling me that a factory farmer running
> a tractor over an acre of land can grow THREE TIMES as much wheat
> as a farm family carefully tilling that same acre? That doesn't
> make sense! Where did you get that number from? I suspect that
> you may be talking about what can happen when impoverished peasants
> settle on redistributed land, which is hardly an fair comparison,
> since they typically don't have the money for fertilizer, weed-killers,
> or the latest high-tech seeds, and might not know how to use them
> if they did.
<Grin> The numbers come from China, which went from being a massive food
importer to a net food exporter in a single generation by moving the
peasants off the land. It's not hard to figure out why mechanical
methods are so much more productive than hand methods, even neglecting
the improved biotechnology that mechanized agriculture makes possible.
Where does your virtuous peasant walk? Live? Just by trampling crops,
your peasant cuts into the yield. Machines can distribute the seed much
more evenly, planting an optimum crop for the land. However, the big
factor is the unforgiving nature of nature. You have a tiny window to
get the crop in the ground, and another tiny window to get the crop
harvested. A farmer sitting on a tractor often works 18 hours a day,
performing feats of endurance that would kill a peasant on his hands and
knees.
> I think you may be overstating the case a little. Plenty of people
> can afford "organic" vegetables, they are not *that* much more
> expensive. Still, the basic point is unchallengeable. You can't
> beat factory farming in terms of return on resources invested.
Organic does not mean manual; it means no pesticides. In large scale
organic farming, the land is still tilled mechanically, planted
mechanically and harvested mechanically. In most cases, if you could
educate consumers to tolerate a few bugs in their vegetables, organic
yields could approach conventional yields. My local organic producer had
worms in their corn last year. Every ear had a worm in it, but the worm
didn't eat much. Perhaps 10% of every ear had to be discarded. I didn't
mind, but the farmer had a lot of trouble selling to the general public.
deowll
> In article <s9iw8.20946$3z3.1...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> deo...@usit.net writes:
>
> > You can get more food per acre using intensive hand labor on a small
plots
> > than you can using high tech machines.
>
> That is not true. China's move to agricultural self-sufficiency involved
> moving much of the population off the land and into the city, so that
> modern agricultural methods could be adopted. The result was a
> tripling of yield per acre. Small plot agriculture is inherently
> inefficient, and will not support a modern urban society.
>
varieties and how much to big fields? Some of the tricks I know work aren't
amiable to "modern" agriculture because they are much to labor intensive.
> > Without to a surplus of food nobody
> > is going to be doing anything other than growing food or maybe stealing
it.
> > Using grain to feed livestock is basically nothing more than proof of a
huge
> > surplus of food or at least a surplus of food that can be bought. You
are
> > trading a lot of calories in one form for a lot less calories in
another.
>
> You almost have it right. Animal feeds are priced according to protein
> content. Calories are nearly irrelevant. Any ruminant or ungulate can
> break down cellulose to component sugars and create calories from
> substances totally unfit for human consumption. It is protein content
> that is at a premium. Alfalfa hay can be 10% vegetable protein by
> weight. While some people claim to like alfalfa sprouts, most people
> prefer to get their protein in a more palatable, and nutritionally
> complete, form.
>
> --
> http://home.teleport.com/~larryc
>
Many animal feeds could feed more people than animals but many people starve
because they can't afford the feed much less the animals the feed is fed
to!
deowll
few years ago U.S. wheat farmers were burning more calories in their
machines than they were growing in their fields. Thus Gasohol was an energy
loser. I think things have improved some.
pete
`
` "Larry Caldwell" <lar...@teleport.com> wrote in message
` news:MPG.17305386b...@news.earthlink.net...
`>
`> Organic does not mean manual; it means no pesticides. In large scale
`> organic farming, the land is still tilled mechanically, planted
`> mechanically and harvested mechanically. In most cases, if you could
`> educate consumers to tolerate a few bugs in their vegetables, organic
`> yields could approach conventional yields. My local organic producer had
`> worms in their corn last year. Every ear had a worm in it, but the worm
`> didn't eat much. Perhaps 10% of every ear had to be discarded. I didn't
`> mind, but the farmer had a lot of trouble selling to the general public.
`>
` Actually it depends in large part on the cost of fossil fuels. I read that a
` few years ago U.S. wheat farmers were burning more calories in their
` machines than they were growing in their fields. Thus Gasohol was an energy
` loser. I think things have improved some.
One should also consider that fossil fuels are used in the manufacture
of industrial fertilizers. A significant part of the modern level
of agricultural production is due to this source of nutrients, and
it is essentially unsustainable. Around about the time we start
running out of oil to run our transportation, the supply of fertilizer
is going to decline, while costs rise substantially. Just one more
datum for how we're hurtling faster and faster toward a brick wall, and
not much in the way of planning and resources are being allocated to
ameliorate the catastrophe.
--
==========================================================================
vincent@triumf[munge].ca Pete Vincent
Disclaimer: all I know I learned from reading Usenet.
bull.net Cal King
kennet...@webtv.net (Kenneth Kinman) wrote:
>Dear All,
> It is really interesting how the debate over a human "cultural
>explosion" parallels that of the debate over a "Cambrian explosion" of
>animal phyla (and body-plans). The so-called Cambrian "explosion" was
>also earlier and less explosive than what a simplistic analysis of the
>evidence would lead one to believe.
> Either way, Gould's notion of a phyletic explosion at the
>beginning of the Cambrian is just as much a stumbling block as is the
>notion of "cultural explosion" among humans some 40,000 years ago.
I agree that Gould is a "stumbling block"...to gradualist thinking. The
Cambrian explosion may not be as explosive as scientists once thought,
but it is no less remarkable, since all of the phyla that we recognize
today existed in the Cambrian, and none has evolved since. In fact,
many of the Cambrian body plans that are used to define phylum level taxa
have become extinct. Disparity, it appears, has decreased. The Burgess
Shale organisms do not seem to adhere to Wagnerian ground plan
divergence, unlike the cladists. No wonder cladistics has failed
miserably in ascertaining the phylogenetic relationships of the Cambrian
weird wonders.
ejudy
> In sci.anthropology.paleo deowll <deo...@usit.net> wrote:
> `>
> ` Actually it depends in large part on the cost of fossil fuels. I read that a
> ` few years ago U.S. wheat farmers were burning more calories in their
> ` machines than they were growing in their fields. Thus Gasohol was an energy
> ` loser. I think things have improved some.
> `
> One should also consider that fossil fuels are used in the manufacture
> of industrial fertilizers. A significant part of the modern level
> of agricultural production is due to this source of nutrients, and
> it is essentially unsustainable. Around about the time we start
> running out of oil to run our transportation, the supply of fertilizer
> is going to decline, while costs rise substantially. Just one more
> datum for how we're hurtling faster and faster toward a brick wall, and
> not much in the way of planning and resources are being allocated to
> ameliorate the catastrophe.
And why aren't we preaching this in the churches?
Because nobody would drop the coins and bills into the baskets.
And why don't we teach this on TV?
The public will turn the channel and not drop the coins into the
advertiser's pockets.
And why don't we focus on teaching the children to shift the values
towards sustainable lifestyles?
The mass of human parents would not vote for the schools to keep the
teachers...
And why doesn't the leadership of our beloved country talk about these
things?
It goes back to the coins and bills in the baskets....
etc.....
Big problems ahead...
ejudy
Larry Caldwell
writes:
> One should also consider that fossil fuels are used in the manufacture
> of industrial fertilizers. A significant part of the modern level
> of agricultural production is due to this source of nutrients, and
> it is essentially unsustainable. Around about the time we start
> running out of oil to run our transportation, the supply of fertilizer
> is going to decline, while costs rise substantially. Just one more
> datum for how we're hurtling faster and faster toward a brick wall, and
> not much in the way of planning and resources are being allocated to
> ameliorate the catastrophe.
The fossil fuel used in manufacturing fertilizer is natural gas. Since a
substantial part of the Earth's original methane atmosphere is apparently
deep in the crust dissolved in water deposits, we aren't going to run out
of natural gas any time soon. Water resources are much more critical.
Ajo Wissink
wrote:
> Since a
>substantial part of the Earth's original methane atmosphere is apparently
>deep in the crust dissolved in water deposits, we aren't going to run out
>of natural gas any time soon.
Would you have any documentation to support that statement?
--
Ajo Wissink
Larry Caldwell
You can find an article about the general abundance of methane hydrates
at http://www.techreview.com/articles/voss0102.asp. The origin of the
methane is still being debated, with the bacteria camp having the general
lead. I'm in the paleo-methane camp. I just did a web search and keep
running into statements like:
"At greater burial depths, metamorphism may drive off all hydrogen atoms
from organic compounds and leave a residue of carbon, often in the form
of graphite. Under certain conditions in the deep crust, graphite may
react with water; this reaction results in the recombining of carbon and
hydrogen into methane. Recent studies on quartzvein systems indicate the
presence of large fluxes of deep crustal gases and fluids; the volume of
methane transported can be as large as 50 to 500 trillion cubic feet for
a single giant vein system. "
Ref: http://www.energysource.com/energyexperts/natural_gas_facts/
I think they are in denial and the methane has been down there for over a
billion years, remnant of the earth's original reducing atmosphere.
Ajo Wissink
wrote:
>In article <5rkucukta823seq4g...@4ax.com>,
>awis...@nb.sympaticoREPLACEbyDOTca writes:
>> On Tue, 30 Apr 2002 14:05:09 GMT, Larry Caldwell <lar...@teleport.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Since a
>> >substantial part of the Earth's original methane atmosphere is apparently
>> >deep in the crust dissolved in water deposits, we aren't going to run out
>> >of natural gas any time soon.
>> Would you have any documentation to support that statement?
>You can find an article about the general abundance of methane hydrates
>at http://www.techreview.com/articles/voss0102.asp. The origin of the
>methane is still being debated, with the bacteria camp having the general
>lead. I'm in the paleo-methane camp. I just did a web search and keep
>running into statements like:
>
>"At greater burial depths, metamorphism may drive off all hydrogen atoms
>from organic compounds and leave a residue of carbon, often in the form
>of graphite. Under certain conditions in the deep crust, graphite may
>react with water; this reaction results in the recombining of carbon and
>hydrogen into methane. Recent studies on quartzvein systems indicate the
>presence of large fluxes of deep crustal gases and fluids; the volume of
>methane transported can be as large as 50 to 500 trillion cubic feet for
>a single giant vein system. "
That would be a lot of gas, but these are just presumptions, aren't they? I
will have to do some more reading on the subject since I am not aware that
such huge quantities of methane could be involved in these processes.
>Ref: http://www.energysource.com/energyexperts/natural_gas_facts/
>
>I think they are in denial and the methane has been down there for over a
>billion years, remnant of the earth's original reducing atmosphere.
Larry, thanks for the links. I think that it was about a year ago that I
read something about chunks of methane hydrate that had been dragged from
the bottom of the ocean in a fishing net. Somewhere off the NW of the
North American continent. I never saw a follow-up. I'd rather trust in
these deposits than in remnants of an ancient atmosphere. There is very
little outcrop, or presence at reasonable shallow depth, of formations that
date from those times.
In the meantime, I believe that, instead of being too optimistic about our
future energy situation, we should conserve as much as we can.
Thanks again,
--
Ajo Wissink
zolota
Only a fraction of fertilizer is made from methane. The X - Y - Z numbering
system used is for the three components and if only one is present then, for
example, potash is 0-0-60. Potash is usually in the form of KCl which is
mined as a salt. For plants that cannot take chlorine it is converted to
potash (K2O). No methane is used. Phosphorous is usually available as PO4
and it is made from phosphate rock and sulphuric acid. No methane is used.
Nitrogen is made available as ammonia (NH3) and that is the only one made
from methane. 1996 world consumption was 79 million tonnes of nitrogen, 31
million tonnes of phosphate, and 21 million tonnes of potash.
http://www.tfi.org/Statistics/worldfertuse.asp
How many years of phoshphate reserves are there?
> --
> http://home.teleport.com/~larryc