The Tragedy of Agriculture
I was watching a Tivoed episode of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” yesterday and, before talking about how to cook crown roast of lamb he offered some general thoughts on the lamb. In the course of doing so, he mentioned that man had shifted to ranching and farming as an alternative to hunting for food because hunting was time-consuming and labor-intensive. This is commonly believed and seems to be common sense, but it’s actually mistaken. The transition to agriculture was, to the best of our knowledge, associated with a catastrophic drop in living standards — longer hours of work, worse health, and less happiness.
Even modern-day hunter-gatherers, who in the nature of things don’t inhabit the most promising land, work shorter hours and enjoy happier lifestyles than do the poorest of modern-day subsistence farmers. The problem with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t — and isn’t — that it’s too labor intensive, it’s that it was too land-intensive. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only support a small number of people on a given parcel of land. If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up. That facilitates the division of labor and the creation of specialized warrior castes and so forth. Consequently, a settled society will probably be able to conquer a hunter-gatherer population and/or drive them off their land. Thus, once this quality-of-life-destroying innovation comes into being it tends to spread inexorably. The higher level of inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be better-off than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure quantity of people alive goes way up, a la Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. It’s only with the coming of the industrial revolution that societies with higher average quality-of-life than those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers come into existence. And over time, that circle of beneficiaries of industrialization has tended to spread.
112 Responses to “The Tragedy of Agriculture”
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December 23rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm
But surely you should consider the benefit of knowing that your next meal is actually coming. Stockpiles that could be achieved through agriculture got our ancestors through the lean times, so that has to count for something, and something big, no?
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
@amorphous: Yeah, it’s a good thing that our modern lifestyle isn’t prone to sudden failures which result in major hardship.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Doesn’t Jared Diamond argue the opposite in his discussion of the emergence of the Fertile Crescent in “Guns, Germs and Steel?”
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Didn’t Marvin Harris basically cover all of this 30 years ago?
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Also, less starvation. That needs to be factored into your health and happiness metrics.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
@ BryklynLibrul, Jared Diamond actuallywrote (pdf) this same analysis back in 1987 in Agriculture – “The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race.”
It’s a fun read.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:26 pm
ck, agriculture leads to more starvation, due to it upping the number of people in an area and reducing the variety of foods available, leaving no alternatives if something goes wrong. Basically, it takes agriculture to create famine.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Between various crop and animal diseases and the perversity of weather, I’m not sure how much of a benefit that is. Once you add in the fact that the farmers tend to be on the low end of the pecking order (feudal Europe for example) and the farming lifestyle does start to suck a bit.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:30 pm
To put this in practical terms; in the late XVIII century, the average member of some Native American tribes were taller (which means their children were better fed and healthier) than the average French.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:31 pm
“So I’m not the only one who TiVos Good Eats?”
Me three!
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Rousseau figured out exactly this in his Second Discourse.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
One question is to what extent low population densities could be achieved in hunter-gatherer societies primarily through very high (by agricultural standards) homicide rates. It’s not nice to die of smallpox, but it’s not nice to die of shock after several of your arteries have been severed by an obsidian knife either.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Alot of what post-Enlightenment conservatism is about is preserving as much of the old farming culture, and its institutions, as possible.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I prefer the theory that the shift to agriculture occurred because it’s a lot more effective at generating booze — agriculture lets you not only cultivate grapes for wine but also create a grain surplus that you can brew into beer or distill into spirits. (Hunter/gatherers pretty much only had mead.)
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Another factor: optimal diet.
Humans probably evolved on a hunter-gatherer diet. The high-carb diet encouraged by agrarian culture doesn’t fit our metabolism. I’ve read that average life expectancy dropped about a decade with the advent of agriculture.
Also, consider taste preference. We, generally, really like sweet or salty things. We’ll eat sweets (carbs) well in excess of needs. A remnant of hunter-gatherer intermittent eating patterns?
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Good Eats is one of my top 5 most-Tivoed shows. God, we’re a pathetic bunch of yuppie/hipster types.
And I’ll second the “agriculture is worth is because it gave us beer” motion.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
“If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up.”
Assuming said hunter-gatherers didn’t have birth control, there’s a missing element in your analysis: population control would have been by infanticide or starvation.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Matt Y: You may want to review ‘the Kalahari debate‘.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Humans probably evolved on a hunter-gatherer diet. The high-carb diet encouraged by agrarian culture doesn’t fit our metabolism. I’ve read that average life expectancy dropped about a decade with the advent of agriculture.
From what I’ve read, the above proposition is highly speculative. There is evidence that paleolithic cultures ate a lot of tubers (potato-like root vegetables), which probably would have been plentiful and storable enough to sustain small populations when animals were scarce. Similarly, my understanding is that it appears that current hunter-gatherer populations experience cardiovascular disease in higher proportion than do non-hunter-gatherers. The Inuit come to mind.
In any event, though, it certainly is true that the current Western diet overrelies on cereals.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Well, according to “Comparative rates of violence in chimpanzees and humans”(Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller 2006, Primates 47:1)
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Some historians offer the contrary view: that most of human history is a story of two people: agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists. The agricultural society, because of their agriculture, has more weath and leisure time, and therefore more advanced culture. The non-agriculturalists are usually nomadic, warlike, and lacking in culture. Thus the nomadic peoples will conquer the agricultural society militarily, however they usually end up adopting the culture of the agricultural society as they assimilate and enjoy the wealth of cities, etc.
You can see this in the Age of Migration, where the landless nomads pushed into wealthy Rome and ended up adopting Roman culture (speaking Romance languages, adopting Roman religion – Roman Catholic – as well as Roman alphabet, rules of law, etc.). Also remember the Mongol hordes, and how the Khans became like the people they conquered. The Mongols in China became Chinese, in India became Indian, etc.
It really isn’t until a more modern age that the settled, civilized, high cultured agricultural civilizations were able to depose the nomads (really 1492 was a pivotal year wasn’t it?).
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:59 pm
I don’t think that counts among the assumptions I would make.
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Jared Diamond’s views on the matter might not be as cut and dried. I suspect he would most likely suggest that while Agriculture may have had it’s setbacks one thing it did not do is make us a weaker species. Our exposure to domesticated farm animals gave us immunity to germs that the new world’s inhabitants(Incans) had no means of defeating.
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Didn’t the legend of Cain and Abel involve all this.
Not to mention the evil agrarian Baal worshipers…
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:13 pm
To Joe: (#20) Inuit populations are not particularly analogous to ancient hunter gatherers. The Inuit/high arctic hunter/gatherer diet is atypical of hunter/gatherer diets because it is almost exclusively composed of meat. Sure, some plants were gathered during the (short) summer, but the winter diet is pure animal.
The high rates of cardiovascular disease are to be expected with a diet like this, but it is not at all a “normal” hunter-gatherer diet as it relies almost exclusively on hunting.
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Read Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel for his argument as to how the settlement of humanity down to a sedentary lifestyle has acted to cause human’s, in the aggregate, to become less intelligent. It is an interesting thesis, and very well presented.
Hunting and gathering requires more acute survival skills, thus, the wilier are more adapted to survival and pass their genes along. The denser populations resulting from settling down to agricultural pursuit facilitates the spread of germs which do not discriminate amongst their victims’ intelligence. To provide but a thumbnail.
Diamond’s book arose from his attempt to answer a question posed to him on a New Guinea beach in 1972 by Yali, “a remarkable local politician”. “Why is it”, Yali asked, “that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Cargo being the New Guinea reference to tools, medicines, consumer goods, and the other products of more developed technology and economies.
Early in the book, Diamond, in explaining his perception that folks in New Guinea “impressed me as being on average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is”, writes:
My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.
It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.
Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or 0 have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern Euroopean and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the supeerior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.
That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual disadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali’s question.
December 23rd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
European accounts of first contact with North American societies regularly feature them marveling at how tall, hale and hearty everyone is. Also, how clean the water is and how amazing the land is. There’s also accounts of how early settlers would arrive in winter and discover buried baskets of corn and dried meat, the winter food stores of local indians. Which, of course, they’d eat because they were starving to death.
There’s actually a similar story of British & Hessians invading New York City in the Revolutionary War. As they rolled up through the farms of Long Island and Brooklyn, they were shocked at how comparatively rich the colonists were–they marveled at their homes, farms, stocks of food. (And, uh, they were rather furious at us spoiled ingrates who wouldn’t do our duty and pay off the crown for winning the French and Indian war–whose territorial gains were almost solely the Ohio valley, which didn’t do the peasants on the continent a whole lot of good, now did it?)
So, it’s more complicated than just nomads vs. farmers. The trick really does seem to be land and fecundity–if you’re an American farmer, you do much better than an German farmer because you’ve got more and better land, and when your kids grow up you can just send them off for new land instead of having to squeeze them in. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer, you do better still because you’ve got TONS of land. But you’re prone to disease, and to being out-swarmed by your enemies over time. Also, if they happen to have an industrial revolution around the time they’re colonizing you, you’re totally screwed.
It’s also worth noting that most people in Europe in the 1700’s almost never ate meat. Your average Indian pretty frequently did.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Do you have any sources for this? I have not read any accounts of Eurpeans marveling at the heights of Natives. Rather, Thomas Jefferson argued with Europeans over the topography of the new world. Largely Europeans viewed it as swampy, which lead to things being smaller. Jefferson had a bison sent over, but it shrank due to the preservation techniques, and as such did not dissuade opinions. Had it arrived in tact it would have done little to dissuade such opinions as the Wisent is larger than the Bison.
Its more complicated than nomads vs farmers now, but now is the modern age. Sedinatry agrarian societies historically are more advanced than nomadic hunter gatherers. Just look at where the written language developed.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Semi-tangentially: lamb’s a mainstay in the Antipodes, and across Europe, but Americans seem averse to it, for some reason. At least, in southern pig-factory country, they do. I talked to a few sheep farmers who’d taken up the business against warnings that their herds would be eaten by predators — they use alpacas to scare away coyotes and such. But the terrain they farm would be full of sheep in other parts of the world.
Sheep farming’s near-subsistence farming, generally, on land that you can’t put cattle or pigs or grow crops. It’s the least conducive to factory-farming, which is probably why it’s not such a big part of the American agricultural machine.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:08 pm
This is too clever by half. Famines are certainly possible among hunter-gatherers, due to events both natural (e.g. climate changes) and man-made (e.g. overhunting). Agriculture increases the possible population size because it dramatically increases the amount of food available (and especially the amount of storable food), reducing the chances that any particular person will starve during a mild downturn.
Yes, if an agricultural famine occurs, more people will die, but that is just because there are now more people, period. For any individual person, the chance of starving as a farmer is much lower than the chance of starving as a hunter-gatherer.
If this were not the case, why would people have ever taken up agriculture in the first place? It’s (supposedly) more work, doesn’t provide any extra food security, and…what, exactly? People had some devious long-term plan that their descendants would be able to outnumber and overpower their hunter-gatherer neighbors?
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:14 pm
lamb’s a mainstay in the Antipodes, and across Europe, but Americans seem averse to it, for some reason.
It was explained to me when i started at the Meat Industry Research Institute of New Zealand that the North American custom of drinking very cold drinks with dinner (ice water, soda) was responsible. Lamb fat turns solid at lower temperatures than most other animal fats, and if you drink a cold drink, you get an unpleasant greasy coating in your mouth.
As to the health impact of agriculture, there should be quite a respectable opportunity for human evolution in 4000+ years. One would expect that peoples who have been eating grain based diets for a long time would be better adapted to them. You can certainly correlate lactose-tolerance and dairying this way.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Intelligence is only an instrumental value. Even if hunter-gatherers have more raw intelligence, if it is all needed for basic survival and can’t be applied to higher-order pursuits, we are still better off living in a settled society with division of labor (we get more end-value from the application of our supposedly lower intelligence).
IIRC, dolphins have bigger brains on average than humans, but I doubt they have stimulating conversations about whether they would have been better off not evolving to live in the sea.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Re: Assuming said hunter-gatherers didn’t have birth control
Hunter-gatherers in southern Africa and some parts of South America, at the very least, are believed to have made use of plants containing contraceptive compounds. (Many plants have either contraceptive or abortifacient compounds in them). More generally, hunter-gatherer groups traditionally lactated their babies for long periods of time, which also suppressed fertility through hormonal changes in the woman’s body. In a few cases (the Cheyenne of North America and the Dani of New Guinea) periodic abstinence was a widely used form of birth control, the frequency of sexual intercourse among these tribes is believed to have been very low.
I doubt that you can blame North American obesity rates on our having evolved on a hunter-gatherer diet, since the Chinese and Vietnamese seem to be pretty healthy and slender on agricultural, grain-based diets.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
The advantage hunter-gatherer cultures have is that even in cases of climate change and overhunting, they easily change foods and change locations. Farmers, not so much. Only foragers in the most absolute shittiest conditions really encounter starvation anything like that seen regularly by agriculturalists.
As for the origins of agriculture, there is an initial sort of horticulture that is nearly accidental and takes little effort that could easily be what sent some cultures down this path. After that it gets harder to figure (because agriculture is so unbelievably bad for people that it is difficult to imagine why anyone would take it up intentionally), but all it takes is one crazed toil and starvation cult to out reproduce its neighbors, chase them off, and forget how to live any other way.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:26 pm
CK,
I’m not sure. Hunter-gatherer peoples tend to be more mobile than agricultural ones, which would give them more ability to relocate when a natural disaster hit. Of course, they had less ability to store food, so it might be a wash.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Farmers are easy to exploit because almost all their wealth is tied up in land, so they can’t escape the plunderers (State). And even so, if there’s open land somewhere else, peasants can gain a generation or two of freedom by going there and starting from scratch. But to the extent that there’s nowhere to go, peasants are doomed to heavy exploitation, and demographically their plots of land get smaller and smaller by the generation as population grows. Between exploitataion and demographics, peasants tend to be wretchedly poor.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Look, you have to think about population growth. Even modest growth causes huge population increases over a few centuries. Hunter-gatherers have kids too, so kept their numbers from bumping up against the production limits inherent in their way of life? Mortality: which meant infectious disease and/or warfare. Hunter-gatherer population density was low, which interferes with disease transmission: so violent death was the main factor keeping population density below the land’s carrying capacity. Sure, there must have been famines now and then, usually from bad weather, but constant low-level warfare seems to have been the biggest factor.
With the advent of farming – the production of grain, which stores well – elites (i.e. bands of thieves) arose. Those elites could feed soldiers with the stolen grain reserves. Eventually, those elites turn into governments, which on the whole limited violence, especially local violence.
That means that some _other_ factor or factors limited population growth – disease and starvation, mainly.
In your typical king-and-peasant society, local violence was suppressed (it interfered with tax collection). Society was hierarchical, and the bottom tier was _always_ short on food, short enough that their TFR was typically sub-replacement.
The upper strata of society could feed more kids, and their TFR was greater than two: some of their descendants were constantly drifting down the social scale as they overflowed their social niche.
Those starving lower classes were malnourished, not just short on calories, because humans aren’t that well adapted to a high-carbohydrate, low-vitamin short diet that also has low protein quality.
Over thousands of years people adapted, somewhat, to these agricultural diets. Some people produce more amylase in their saliva: some continue to produce lactase through life. Their new versions of vitamin transporters. New versions of serotonin transporters too: I’d guess that was a consequence of adaptation to social hierarchy, in contrast to egalitarian hunter-gatherers (who then was a gentleman?).
In few places, intense infectious disease may have been the main population limiter: in such places per-capita resources stayed relatively abundant and selection took a different path.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:36 pm
The idea that hunter-gatherers had it much better than sedentary agriculturalists is one of those counter-intuitive pop anthropology ideas that has been circulating for a while but which, in actuality, is complete bunk.
One reason for this is that so much depends on exactly which communities you cherry-pick to make your arguments. For example, I could point to the inhabitants of ancient Egypt, who pretty much just had to plant their seed and sit around building pyramids while they waited for the Nile to rise and miraculously fertilize and water their crops, then reap the immense resulting harvests.
The argument also requires one to count literature, learning and technology as worth precisely zero.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:43 pm
You gotta admit, the bundt pan was a genius move.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Actually, it holds up in the averages, just like the lower violent death rate I posted earlier. You can only make things seem close by cherry-picking on both sides.
Hmmm, what to do in a choice between inflicting 10k+ years of abject misery on billions of people and never developing blogging…?
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Forgive me, but this is pretty unconvincing. Agriculture appeared independently in several different parts of the world. It seems rather questionable to attribute that to this sort of semirandom, irrational group behavior.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Remember, agriculture led us to Teacher’s unions! It must be bad.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
What would be surprising about the same sort of sucky but successful strategy coming up randomly among the multitude of cultures that have ever existed? We get plenty of independent repeats with everything else.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Good thread, nice discussions.
The Sentinelese certainly seem hale and hearty and the spontaneous orgies sound like fun.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Benny Lava’s comment about nomads is what I was thinking, except that it’s kind of embarrassing to admit that where I got the idea from is H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, which, aside from being really old, has some awfully silly ideas in it (Aryan Conquest Theory, anyone? Steve?). Good writin’ though.
Anyways, it just seems less likely to me that people would have said, “Let us begin farming, so that we may attain high enough population density to maintain a warrior caste which will be able to conquer our fellow hunter-gatherers,” then that they said, “Damn, it’s getting crowded. We need more food!”
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:12 pm
People abandon hunting and gathering for agriculture when they have no other choice. You get better at hunting, your weapons improve, your population increases, you hunt large mammals to extinction, and there you are. Agriculture is essentially the result of a man-made ecological catastrophe.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:13 pm
The advantage hunter-gatherer cultures have is that even in cases of climate change and overhunting, they easily change foods and change locations.
Assuming of course, that there are no hunter-gatherers already in the new location.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:32 pm
An agricultural, sedentary lifestyle may have decreased our happiness for a few millenia, but that doesn’t mean we should all switch to nomadism to maximize our happiness. A structured lifestyle has allowed us to create wonderful, life-improving technologies like cures for diseases, instant communication, transportation, democracy, etc. Hardly any of the great inventions originated in nomadic societies. We may have worsened our lives for a while- until after the Enlightenment- but we needed structure to begin methodically investigating our surroundings.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Props to #48…
I think the “citing books you haven’t read” post may apply here. “Guns Germs and steel” is all about things like this. Everyone is asking why people chose agriculture over hunter-gatherer lifestyles if it was indeed so much worse. One of the main points in that book was that agriculture arose AFTER all the big animals were eaten. Basically, people eat the food that’s walking around right in front of them, until it’s all gone, then they start farming cause otherwise they’d be fucked.
Regarding birth control, hunter-gatherer societies often practice natural birth-control, or infanticide.
Anyway, I don’t really blame anyone for not finishing guns, germs and steel… Jared Diamond could put a meth-addict to sleep.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I remember Diamond talked a lot about the extinction of large animals by hunting, but I don’t think he saw this as the cause of agriculture. After all, we have plenty of large animals in the west. They’re called “cows.” One of Diamond’s major points was that the reason some societies fail to domesticate animals is because they lack animals suitable to domestication, whether because of extinction or plain bad luck.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:56 pm
…or geography, the thing about N/S-oriented continents being unsuitable to relocating species. See? I read it!
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Alright, folks, what’s the consensus of the thread — do I continue agriculting, or hunt & gather?
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Is the Sahlins’ hypothesis about hunter-gatherer’s leisure time really that well settled by the data? I had thought there were was more ongoing debate over this than appears in the post, but I can’t find what I’m thinking of on a quick search.
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
This, too, does not sound particularly plausible. Among North American Indians, for example, there were many groups that practiced agriculture and many others who remained nomadic (over extremely large areas). Was the North American large mammal supply extinguished, or wasn’t it? Likewise, did people living near the Nile run out of large mammals while those living in other parts of North Africa didn’t?
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
One of the main points in that book was that agriculture arose AFTER all the big animals were eaten. Basically, people eat the food that’s walking around right in front of them, until it’s all gone, then they start farming cause otherwise they’d be fucked.
This is most definitely NOT one of Diamond’s points. In fact, he talks about how having large domesticatable mammals around was useful for sedentary societies. Also, he mentions that at the time agriculture was developed in the fertile crescent, the place was teaming with gazelle.
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Also, people are exaggerating the benefits of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Diamond makes it clear that their standard of living depended on how productive their environments were. The non agrarian highlanders of New Guinea seemed to have a pretty shitty life until Southeast Asian crops like Taro arrived in part because their diet was so low in protein. Diamond suggests this is why cannibalism was so common amongst them.
So many cultures have adopted agriculture almost as soon as the proper crops were available that there must have been immediate benefits to them. I think folks are dramatically underestimating the shittytness of having to walk all the damn time.
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Interesting points on the switch from hunter/gatherers to agriculture. As some have stated, the switch from one to the other resulted in the average height of humans dropping by a foot. There are several accounts regarding the extreme height of one group or the other, and the distinction was the amount of meat in the diet.
Additionally, hunting and gathering are more FUN than agriculture – working on a farm is work, whereas hunting requires active thinking, planning and then you get to chase things. The Adam and Eve story has been said to be an allegory to the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
On the other hand, agriculture is a much more dependable food source, and allowed for future planning and the growth of civilization. The drop in height, as well, can be explained by the lack of meat in diet, not in overall health.
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:46 pm
In North America there was an awful lot of land, not that many people, and no horses. You get down as far as Mexico and people resorted to cannibalism. Given horses and rifles the indiginous people would have wiped out the buffalo soon enough on their own if the Europeans hadn’t decided to make it a policy. In Africa nature was just too strong to overcome.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Arrgh! So much information in so little space. Generally, see “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, by Gary Taubes.
For starters, the Inuit had much better cardiovascular health until they started eating a western diet.
Agriculture is interdependent with power structures that make possible the large cities, storage, specialization of labor, etc. No agriculture, no kings.
Contemporary studies of the few hunter-gatherers left show that they have much more leisure time than agriculturists.
Agricultural societies have more concentration of wealth, not more wealth per capita. Think peasants.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I call bullshit on MY comparing hunter gatherers to the “poorest subsistence farmers.” Why choose that cohort? Why not choose some dude in Iowa with a John Deere who can feed himself and thousands like him for years? Both are part of the “agricultural” reality. So much for “reality based” blogging.
Moreover, I love the guy who said this:
“First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries.”
Uh… big cities and big government. Things MY likes, no?
Stupid agriculture!
I blame it all on Allan Tate.
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
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December 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 pm
oldest hunter-gatherer ceremonial site, ‘gobekli tepi’, near site of earliest grain domestication site in fertile crescent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe.
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:48 pm
I don’t see why people would have to choose farming because it was objectively better for them; some could have just chosen it because they preferred it. When they really got it to work, it could support much more people, and there you are. It could be more like evolution than choice, with from a pure-utility viewpoint the initial choice being random.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:43 pm
People really did abandon agriculture and go and live with the Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indians, on the other hand almost never wanted to come and live with the Europeans. This was remarked on a great deal at the time.
But speaking of agriculture, there are different kinds. The Africans of the Sub-Sahara and the peoples of New Guinea were simple gardeners, who use a stick. Of course that is a simplification, as there are pastoralists and fishermen in Africa and fishing in Oceana. It was generally women who did this kind o gardening.
And there is pastoralism. The mongols were pastoralists. They were an aggressive, conquering people, needing new land. In the Sudan you have a conflict between pastoralists and farmers going on right now. Some pastoralists practice transhumance. The men go away for several months with the flocks and the women run things in their absence.
Then there were the irrigation cultures of East Asia and the Near East.
Europeans had a mixture of agriculture and pastoralism that was quite unforgiving and required a lot of planning and forethought. European plough agriculture was a late and advanced development as was the discovery that you could keep animals going over the winter by growing hay. These inventions allowed for a rise in living standards in Europe.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:49 pm
In prehistoric Denmark the land actually supported more people with hunting and gathering than with agriculture! (According to How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory). Hunting and gathering has a fairly flat distribution of income. But agriculture can support plutocracy. Think of the pharaohs and their pyramids, the enclosures, and the clearances.
Agriculture is always great if you’re in charge. If you’re not, until recently, only maybe.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Anyways, it just seems less likely to me that people would have said, “Let us begin farming, so that we may attain high enough population density to maintain a warrior caste which will be able to conquer our fellow hunter-gatherers,” then that they said, “Damn, it’s getting crowded. We need more food!”
I doubt any discrete group of hunters-in-transition-to-farmers said anything. It was probably a very gradual progression — influenced by both population pressures and climate change — playing out over millennia — the first step being increased awareness of and expertise about the life cycles of food source species. There was certainly no conscious effort at transformation from one mode of living to another. What started out as mere expertise about which plants are good to eat and which animals are most worth hunting evolved — over hundreds of generations — to become the first agricultural villages of 10,000 BCE.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:22 am
The idea that hunter-gatherers had it much better than sedentary agriculturalists is one of those counter-intuitive pop anthropology ideas that has been circulating for a while but which, in actuality, is complete bunk.
It’s not counterintuitive at all. Anatomically modern humans spent tens of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, and their immediate ancestors spent hundreds of thousands of years as hunter gathers. Not surprisingly, they (we!) became organisms highly adapted for such a lifestyle. And also not surprisingly, the relatively rapid shift to being cereal-eating agriculturalists — while helpful in increasing numbers — was disastrous for health and well-being. You tend to be healthier (and as a result happier) when you’re living they way your DNA has equipped you to do. Just a guess, but I think the flawed view you’ve expressed is colored by life as it is lived in rich, technically advanced western nations — a lifestyle impossible without high productivity, intensive farming. While I wouldn’t trade my non hunter-gatherer lifestyle for that of a denizen of the New Guinea Highlands, I’m under no illusions that most non hunter-gatherers since the dawn of agriculture live as I do.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:28 am
OK, but that isn’t funny at all.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:31 am
I remember Diamond talked a lot about the extinction of large animals by hunting, but I don’t think he saw this as the cause of agriculture.
He didn’t. Indeed, the survival of some large animals was integral to the development of animal husbandry. In Diamond’s view (IIRC — I read the book when it first came out), old world large animals managed to survive better than their new world counterparts because they evolved alongside humans, and so developed survival mechanisms over the millennia to cope with the increasingly sophisticated threat posed by hominid hunters. A (very) few such species proved amenable to domestication. Alas, their new world cousins weren’t so lucky, for when they first encountered hominids, it was the fully modern, highly efficient hunter-gatherer variety. They didn’t stand a chance.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Yeah, he made the same point about Australia, but he also notes the lack of such animals in Africa, despite not having experienced that…Again, he seemed to think that what made Eurasia unique was its E-W orientation (and very large size), so potentially useful animals and plants could travel over extremely long distances while remaining in hospitable climates.
December 24th, 2008 at 1:43 am
THe Germanic peoples who destroyed Rome, and the Mongols who created an empire around the 13th century were not hunter gatherers. Hunting may have supplemented their food supply, but their principle food source was their livestock and its by products. These were domesticated or semi domesticated animals.
Even the plains Indians use of the bison bordered on animal husbandry. Before 1492, they burned down large sections of forest to create pastuage, then drove selected animals over cliffs to kill them as needed.
I would bet that these are the larger, more successful peoples that are mislabelled as hunter gatherers. It is really an extreme opportunism that is not readily available to most peoples of the world. It is also the kind of situation that is likely to morph into genuine agriculture and animal husbandry. So if you compare agriculturalists to their immediate predecessors, they look small and unhealthy. But their immediate ancestors are not really hunter gatherers.
December 24th, 2008 at 2:19 am
OK, but he didn’t say they were hunter gatherers, he said they were typically nomadic “non-agriculturalists” Maybe not the best term, but I guess people think of nomads as having livestock.
December 24th, 2008 at 2:28 am
OK, that last comment is definitely a sign that I’ve been in this thread too long. Bye.
December 24th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Archaeologist here!
A few points need clarification:
1. the rise of agriculture was not inexorable, was not inevitable and was not linear. Practicing agriculture (plant and/ or animal) came in and out of fashion in different places in the world at different times depending mostly on social things like the relative importance of sedentism and gift exchange/ prestige competition between communities. To give you a great example: the Netherlands c. 3500 BC everyone was a hunter-gatherer, but semi-permanent settlements existed (seasonal or task related like fishing camps), c. 3000 BC lots of settlements, long-houses and garden agriculture supplemented by plant agriculture, c. 2500 BC little garden agriculture but highly mobile populations who really really valued cattle herding, c. 2000 BC long houses and grain agriculture again, and it seems an emphasis on alcoholic drinks made from grain, c. 1500 BC settlements are known, but shepherding is very socially significant and sheep are very important.
2. Native americans at the time of European contact WERE NOT hunter-gatherers. In the east they farmed jerusalem artichokes, sunflower, gourds/squashes, corn and a number of other native plants. They had permanent settlements and large territories in which their farms and settlements shifted. They hunted to supplement this garden agriculture. Their society had been decimated by Spanish diseased during the 15/16 centuries, but prior to that trade and communication networks stretched from the gulf coast to wisconsin. Large cities with 10-30,000 inhabitants existed up and down the mississippi valley.
3. Jared Diamond is a biologist. He does not understand human society at all. Take everything he says with a grain of salt. A big grain.
December 24th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Actually, EU-expat is correct. Among the very few hunter-gathering tribes with no gardening or animal husbandry extant today (or until relatively recently) are the Kalahari bushmen and Ituri Pygmies and a few isolated others in SA and Oceana. The confusion arises because people think theirs must represent the earliest kinds of human economy.
The Germanic people who sacked Rome were already Christians. Attila the Hun was a Christian, for example.
Numbers of these Germanic tribes, such as the Lombards, were not Roman Catholic but Arian Christians who had adopted Christianity before the Council of Nicea. They had their own Bible, translated into their own languages. Of course, the Roman Catholics did not consider them Christian, but that is another story.
December 24th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Someone mentioned this, but it has been well documented that the Inuit were extremely healthy prior to the introduction of the European diet full of grains, vegetables, etc. And most of the Inuit’s calories came from fat–something like 75%, with the entire diet composed of animal products.
December 24th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Various points . . .
– Whenever anyone starts talking about intelligence in a general sense, particularly across cultural lines, they are no longer discussing science, they are editorializing. The concept of “intelligence” is too undefined to be rated outside of a defined set of problems to be solved. If we are discussing algebra, I am smarter than a Cro-Magnon hunter. If we are discussing mammoth hunting, he’s quite a bit smarter than me or you.
– There are two fundamentally different agricultural cultures that evolved in the Neolithic era: farmers and pastoralists. Farmers stay in one place, plant crops, raise a limited number of domestic animals. Pastoralists migrate seasonally with grazing herds. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are in competition with both of them. Nomadic hunter-gatherers can harass agriculturalists in border zones between farming and hunting regions but they haven’t the manpower to conquer them. Pastoralists, particularly with riding horses, are always a threat to farming cultures, as tending and protecting herds is better practice for warfare than planting rice.
– In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond takes up the question of why some societies developed agriculture, cities, and military power and conquered other societies that lagged a bit in doing so. He makes the case that it was contingent, mainly the luck of taking up agriculture in parts of the world that had plenty of useful plants and animals to domesticate. His comments about relative “intelligence” among New Guineans and the West are, as I noted, just editorializing.
– There is plenty of evidence nowadays that increased population among human hunter/gatherers causes large animal populations to crash. An interesting modern case is described in The Comanche Empire. The Comanche, after acquiring domestic horses from the Spanish, grew from a hunting tribe of several hundred people to a hunting/raiding nation of 30,000 people in about a century. They controlled buffalo pasture with about 6,000,000 head at one point, all the high prairie from southern Colorado to central Texas. In spite of all this wealth they suffered from repeated famines and their hunting cut the size of the herds by a third or more before Mexican and American market hunters even arrived on the scene. They also were obliged to trade with farming tribes in the region to gain beans and corn to supplement their diet. The buffalo was a useful creature, but lacked certain proteins for developing fetuses and newborns.
– People of all cultures will sacrifice a lot to keep their kids fed. Adults can flourish on a binge/starve diet, such as the mixed hunting/farming communities of eastern north America practiced before European settlement. At some point, however, a culture might notice that eating regularly all year round keeps babies alive all year round.
December 24th, 2008 at 9:33 am
An agricultural, sedentary lifestyle may have decreased our happiness for a few millenia, but that doesn’t mean we should all switch to nomadism to maximize our happiness.
Well, first of all, most of us would have to be eliminated. The survivors might be pretty happy.
Whenever Jared Diamond comes up in the Internet circles I frequent, Carlos Yu pops up to cast doubt on Diamond’s anthropological scholarship generally. He says, in essence, that what’s new in Guns, Germs and Steel is not true and what’s true is not new. But I don’t know if Diamond’s statements about the superiority of hunter/gatherer lifestyles is among the untrue bits.
I do suspect that Diamond’s assertion of superior intelligence among New Guinea hunter/gatherers arises from his own values: he’s a naturalist, an ornithologist, and hunters and gatherers have to be expert naturalists. To cite another high-selling and widely-bashed author of popular nonfiction, Malcolm Gladwell once said that IQ tests really test how modern your thinking is, that is, how well your patterns of thought match a society of clerks and engineers. It’s just the flip side of the same phenomenon.
December 24th, 2008 at 9:43 am
More interesting questions raised here than answers. For instance, is height a reliable indicator of health for a given population or is it just prejdiced tallism? Do short people do better as farmers than tall ones (lot of bending over in traditional agriculture)? Do tall people need more meat? Are the Masai long-legged because they’re high-protein-diet pastoralist/hunters or are they pastoralist/hunters because they’re long-legged (having the ability to easily keep up with the herds)? Lots of potential cha-cha-cha between possible cause and effect.
And thank you eu-expat for bringing a little actual information to what has otherwise been a highly abstract discourse, kind of a proxy war in the old carnivore/veggie what-is-a-natural-human-diet debate.
BTW I’ve not read Diamond, and the glimpses of his work here do not encourage.
December 24th, 2008 at 10:25 am
The book ‘Ishmael’ has covered this in an entertaining manner. It’s the ‘Takers’ vs the ‘Leavers’.
Agriculture lead to unrestrained breeding, which alot of humans (both rich & poor) favored.
If you live in a ‘Leaver’ or hunter/gatherer culture, you must control your population growth somehow (thru war or restrictions on who can breed).
December 24th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Metacomment.
I’m enjoying this thread.
One thing that comes out is the difference between professional scholarship (EU-expat and a few others), popularization of broad ranges of science (Diamond, Gladwell), and grazing readers like me (in this field).
The integration of real scholarship into political discourse is sorely needed. The hysteria over global warming is an example. We need politicians, hopefully the Obama crew, who value scholarship, use it effectively, and help to communicate scholarly values to the electorate.
December 24th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I didn’t say they were. They were nomadic, and practised animal husbandry.
Attila the Hun was also raised in the city of Rome. The Huns at the time were not Christian.
Before the year 300? I need sources. Like most European languages, the German written language is based on Latin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language#History
Latin and Greek was used by monks to devise the Gaelic alphabet. Latin was used as the basis for the Spanish alphabet, French alphabet (remember that the Franks were a Germanic people), and Italian alphabet.
I have seen no evidence that the Germanic people had any sort of written language outside of the crude runic syllabary used by the Norse before the adoption of Christianity.
December 24th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Farming is not a leisure activity!
December 24th, 2008 at 11:54 am
morgan,
I think you do yourself a disservice by not read Jared Diamond. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel has a thought provoking point of view. It attempts to answer, in a new way, why some cultures became history’s winners and some became history’s losers.
December 24th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
…and his basic answer was “pack animals,” not farming…I think I’ve seen some suggestions here that he said Native Americans didn’t farm, but actually he didn’t. He just said they didn’t have animals to do work. Anyway, I thought it was a pretty good book.
December 24th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Well, if I had to distill Diamond down into a basic answer I wouldn’t say pack animals. Rather, he seems to argue that it was a convergence of having the right topography, domesticatable plants, and domesticable animals.
He presents intersting theories as to why these things are, which are hotly contested. For example he claims that animals which evolved in Africa evolved with humans, and therefore are better equipped for resisting human ineraction. For example the megafauna of North America died off approximately the same time as humans appear on the continent. Zebra, on the other hand, are African and cannot be domesticated. They are some of the most dangerous zoo animals, strangely enough.
It is no secret that much of the subsistence living in pre-Columbian America was very difficult because food was scarce. Just read Cabeza de Vaca. How much of our diet consists of food that is not indigenous to the Americas?
Anyways, if we want to argue over agriculture, we should keep in mind that not all agriculture is created equal. There is very little indigenous plants in New Guinea that are suitable for agriculture. Also, not all regions are suitable to hunting or farming.
December 24th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
The Comanche, after acquiring domestic horses from the Spanish, grew from a hunting tribe of several hundred people to a hunting/raiding nation of 30,000 people in about a century.
December 24th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Re: The transition to agriculture was, to the best of our knowledge, associated with a catastrophic drop in living standards
Over the long run yes. But that didn’t happen overnight, or even in a single human lifetime. In fact I think it took millennia for living standards to fall. The early agriculturists did quite well, in much the same manner the first people in on a hot investment do well: they can exploit the novelty to its fullness. Once (almost) everyone was farming and societies began to evolve social classes, then life got tough for the bottom 90% of people.
December 24th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Re: Attila the Hun was a Christian, for example.
The Huns were a Turkic people, longtime neighbors (and raiders) of China. They had migrated west originally to escape a lethal smallpox outbreak in east Asia. They were not Christians.
Re: Before the year 300?
By the mid 300s, yes. Bishop Wulfilas converted the Goths to Arian Christianity and translated the New Testament into Gothic.
December 24th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
I stand corrected about the Huns, then. The Burgundians, whom they conquered were Christian, however.
The Germans were converted by Wulfias as John F says, and they tended to be Arians, until Clovis, King of the Franks became a Roman Catholic (Clovis is an old form of the name “Louis”, by the way).
In the eighth century the Pope called in Charles Martel (Charlemagne’s father) to expel the Longobards from Northern Italy. They were resented because they had their own liturgy and churches, although one of them, the virtuous Lombard queen Theodolinda, had converted to Roman Catholicism and had sponsored Roman churches and monasteries.
It was during the time that the Donation of Constantine was concocted and the Western papacy split off from the Eastern Church, to which they had hitherto been nominally subject (as I understand it).
December 24th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
I think Benny Lava means that the German written language (as we know it today) was “constructed” in the Renaissance and at that time “modeled” on Latin — but only as far as word order and some grammar, though it was still German.
The Germans of the later Roman Empire, however, were a group of tribes — including the Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Langobards [Lombards], and so on — who spoke an assortment of Germanic languages.
I have no idea which alphabet Wulfias used, he was a Goth who had been living in Constantinople, as I recall, so it might have been the Greek alphabet.
The Franks and Visigoths adopted vulgar Latin, which was known as Romanice (from the adverb meaning speaking in the Roman way) and which evolved into modern French and Spanish.
I don’t think that lay people ought to refrain from reading, writing, and discussing popular books of science and history such as those by Diamond, though some of what he says may be questioned. Of course all of us are bound to make mistakes when we venture outside our fields of expertise (if we have one) or are dredging things out our hazy memories, more likely. The period of the end of the Roman empire, though, is certainly fascinating, if confusing.
December 24th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
A terrific thing about the internet blogs is the mix of casual knowledge with pretty sophisticated stuff. Matt, in general, does a great job of getting things started. The experts know lots of detail, and correct basic facts, but can get stuff wrong. There’s a lot of interesting thinking and mix from various perspectives that’s hard to get elsewhere. This particular thread is also remarkably snark-free.
December 24th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Harold,
The Roman church wasn’t ever precisely “subject” to the Eastern patriarchates. Prior to 1054 or so (the exact date is somewhat arguable) the five ancient patriarchates enjoyed equal status; after that point, Rome claimed primacy (in my view, incorrectly). There is a “first among equals” idea, but I’m not really sure what that meant at the time. I hope JonF will correct me if I’m getting something wrong.
I believe that Charlemagne was the son of Pepin the Short, and the grandson of Charles Martel.
December 25th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
You’re right. I forgot all about Pepin the Short! I’m sure you must be right about the patriarchates having equal status. I think what I meant to convey was that Italy (and the “West” in general) was nominally subject to the Eastern Emperor. But the Eastern empire was not providing governance, and so, at this time (the Carolingian era) both the Papal States and the Western Empire were created (or revived), arguably as a military necessity.
The Bryan Ward-Perkins writes in Oxford History of Italy that:
December 25th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Not sure about where the side-issue of Christian/non-Christian Huns came from . . .
I am pretty sure there is no case in known history of a large-scale agricultural society being conquered by hunter-gatherers. None of the Eurasian “nomads” described here were hunter-gatherers. The Huns, Alans, and Mongols were horse-riding pastoralists, who tend to have predator cultures, most of the Germans were farmers and villagers with bad attitudes. The Goths were a society of farmers with some pastoralist habits.
When the Germans migrated, they pillaged some regions and kept others partially un-ravaged so they could live off the farming peasantry they conquered and start farms themselves. The Huns and Mongols, when the mood struck them, killed off anywhere from 50% to 90% of the population in some of the areas they raided and conquered. They could do this because they could feed themselves off their herds and flocks. If they exterminated the peasantry and leveled all the towns they eliminated all oppostion and gained more grazing lands. A win-win situation.
Ghengis Khan has a plan once to exterminate all 25,000,000 Chinese living north of the Yellow River to create new pastures for his followers. A captive Chinese noble talked him out of it, convincing him that killing off 25,000,000 taxpayers would do more harm then good.
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