This was very interesting, Tove! More importantly, it could turn out to be a very fruitful line of thinking. You've written elsewhere that you sometimes feel as though you have trouble expressing your ideas. I'm not sure how often that is the case, but, I do have a sense that some of the nuances of this idea may not be coming through clearly. I think this subject is worth writing more about, even if you don't develop the idea at all, if only for the sake of exploration and clarity.
You are right that this post consists of too big ideas in a too small text. I have tried to write about these ideas several times but never managed to build a readable text around them before.
Basically, I think Napoleon Chagnon made a great discovery: A pre-Malthusian society. Almost all social theory is based on Malthusian societies. Probably in part because most social theory was made up in the 19th century, when people felt the Malthusian condition straight into their bones. People were very, very occupied feeding their children, so Karl Marx and his contemporaries naturally assumed that the greatest challenge for humans throughout history was feeding their children. Then Chagnon came home from the jungle and proposed that was not the case. Men throughout history didn't struggle to feed their children, but to have children in the first place. Instead of acknowledging Chagnon's great discovery, academics and journalists smeared him for challenging their concepts. Like they understood the significance of the discovery much better than Chagnon himself, who was not really man of theory. Hm, maybe I could write about that.
>The process of overcoming male reproductive greed was very gradual and uneven.
One argument against it being gradual is that the first evidence of organized warfare is at the same time as domestication, about 14k years ago. Perhaps we were more docile in the past. We organized to settle down, but this organization also brought the tools to raid the next tribe.
>It did so at different times in different ecologies. First it happened in the most suitable ecologies, like the Fertile Crescent and ancient Egypt.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is that, to first approximation, it happened at the same time everywhere. Modern humans emerge something like 200k years ago, wait ~190k years. Then all over the world settle down at roughly the same time (plus or minus a few thousand years). Agriculture was invented independently about a dozen times! Hard to explain that with ecology.
Last ice age ended (or really, interglacial period started) ~11k years ago. Climate change -> development of agriculture -> large scale societies able to be supported, large scale cooperation rewarded.
> it happened at the same time everywhere. Modern humans emerge something like 200k years ago, wait ~190k years.
I'm not so sure about that. Imagine the transition from foraging to horticultural subsistence happened one time 163k years ago and lasted for 13k years. How would we know? It's common to assume that what hasn't been found was never there, but stop a moment and imagine that 99.999% of humanity is destroyed next year by COVID-2, Electric Boogaloo. How much of modern civilization do you think would be around for archeologists to find in the year 152023?
In deserts and tundra, quite a bit I think. There would also be tons of evidence of increased carbon level, mining, and radiation from nuclear energy and warheads. Some of that is just since the industrial revolution. But the pyramids might also make it. Not exactly sure, but there may be evidence of the megafauna extinction 10k years ago. Certainly of the current mass extinction. There would also be genetic evidence that our population size got huge at the same time as a dramatic bottleneck on the y chromosomes.
Anyway, it *is* an interesting hypothetical, to think of what would remain.
>Agriculture was invented independently about a dozen times!
Couldn't that be a sign that agriculture was less of an invention and more of a necessity/an opportunity? People might have understood that it was possible to grow things for thousands of years, but didn't do it because gathering was easier, because they couldn't protect their crops from enemies or because the social structure of the bands didn't reward investment.
Yeah, that's one account, that it was climate change and megafauna extinction that drove humans to look for new sources of food. I'm not really happy with it though. Doesn't explain places where megafauna were not killed, like Africa. There's also a fair bit of research that says the early adopters were actually in worse health than their hunter-gatherer neighbors (though perhaps the other option was death!)
Yes, people don't need climate change or megafauna extinction to start starving. They just need to reproduce for some generations and their numbers will exceed the carrying capacity of their ecology. So I think the question is not why humans became agriculturalists, but why they did not become agriculturalists before they did. The incentives were always there, except in the most inhospitable places.
My guess is that peace made the difference. Peace made people more numerous, which increased incentives and made it possible for people to protect their crops and animals. And peace was caused by a series of cultural mutations that increased cooperation.
This was very interesting, Tove! More importantly, it could turn out to be a very fruitful line of thinking. You've written elsewhere that you sometimes feel as though you have trouble expressing your ideas. I'm not sure how often that is the case, but, I do have a sense that some of the nuances of this idea may not be coming through clearly. I think this subject is worth writing more about, even if you don't develop the idea at all, if only for the sake of exploration and clarity.
Thank you!
You are right that this post consists of too big ideas in a too small text. I have tried to write about these ideas several times but never managed to build a readable text around them before.
Basically, I think Napoleon Chagnon made a great discovery: A pre-Malthusian society. Almost all social theory is based on Malthusian societies. Probably in part because most social theory was made up in the 19th century, when people felt the Malthusian condition straight into their bones. People were very, very occupied feeding their children, so Karl Marx and his contemporaries naturally assumed that the greatest challenge for humans throughout history was feeding their children. Then Chagnon came home from the jungle and proposed that was not the case. Men throughout history didn't struggle to feed their children, but to have children in the first place. Instead of acknowledging Chagnon's great discovery, academics and journalists smeared him for challenging their concepts. Like they understood the significance of the discovery much better than Chagnon himself, who was not really man of theory. Hm, maybe I could write about that.
>The process of overcoming male reproductive greed was very gradual and uneven.
One argument against it being gradual is that the first evidence of organized warfare is at the same time as domestication, about 14k years ago. Perhaps we were more docile in the past. We organized to settle down, but this organization also brought the tools to raid the next tribe.
>It did so at different times in different ecologies. First it happened in the most suitable ecologies, like the Fertile Crescent and ancient Egypt.
One thing that continues to puzzle me is that, to first approximation, it happened at the same time everywhere. Modern humans emerge something like 200k years ago, wait ~190k years. Then all over the world settle down at roughly the same time (plus or minus a few thousand years). Agriculture was invented independently about a dozen times! Hard to explain that with ecology.
Last ice age ended (or really, interglacial period started) ~11k years ago. Climate change -> development of agriculture -> large scale societies able to be supported, large scale cooperation rewarded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
> it happened at the same time everywhere. Modern humans emerge something like 200k years ago, wait ~190k years.
I'm not so sure about that. Imagine the transition from foraging to horticultural subsistence happened one time 163k years ago and lasted for 13k years. How would we know? It's common to assume that what hasn't been found was never there, but stop a moment and imagine that 99.999% of humanity is destroyed next year by COVID-2, Electric Boogaloo. How much of modern civilization do you think would be around for archeologists to find in the year 152023?
In deserts and tundra, quite a bit I think. There would also be tons of evidence of increased carbon level, mining, and radiation from nuclear energy and warheads. Some of that is just since the industrial revolution. But the pyramids might also make it. Not exactly sure, but there may be evidence of the megafauna extinction 10k years ago. Certainly of the current mass extinction. There would also be genetic evidence that our population size got huge at the same time as a dramatic bottleneck on the y chromosomes.
Anyway, it *is* an interesting hypothetical, to think of what would remain.
>Agriculture was invented independently about a dozen times!
Couldn't that be a sign that agriculture was less of an invention and more of a necessity/an opportunity? People might have understood that it was possible to grow things for thousands of years, but didn't do it because gathering was easier, because they couldn't protect their crops from enemies or because the social structure of the bands didn't reward investment.
Yeah, that's one account, that it was climate change and megafauna extinction that drove humans to look for new sources of food. I'm not really happy with it though. Doesn't explain places where megafauna were not killed, like Africa. There's also a fair bit of research that says the early adopters were actually in worse health than their hunter-gatherer neighbors (though perhaps the other option was death!)
Yes, people don't need climate change or megafauna extinction to start starving. They just need to reproduce for some generations and their numbers will exceed the carrying capacity of their ecology. So I think the question is not why humans became agriculturalists, but why they did not become agriculturalists before they did. The incentives were always there, except in the most inhospitable places.
My guess is that peace made the difference. Peace made people more numerous, which increased incentives and made it possible for people to protect their crops and animals. And peace was caused by a series of cultural mutations that increased cooperation.