I think Chagnon was only half right. A significant part of their diet was plantains and it would take about a year to get their plantain operation going. He does mention in his book how when a village fissions the people that move away have to trade their women for plantains as even a group of 50-60 people cannot get all their calories from hunting by just staying in one place in the jungle.
So the fact that it is actually somewhat challenging to move away probably fuels conflicts. Also the terrain doesn't help, it is probably dangerous to move through a jungle with a large group without having a protected place to sleep at night for a sustained period. Due to Jaguars and possibly hostile enemy villages.
Still doesn't negate the fact that most conflicts are started over women, but I would bet if it was easier to move around for larger groups, and without the thick jungle, there would not be as much violence.
What bothers me most about all this is that by the looks of it, there wasn't a single other anthropologist that put in a similar amount of work as Chagnon. So his collagues basically sat on the sidelines trashing him, but they couldn't be bothered to set up their own operation and collect data to try and prove him wrong. There was no shortage of villages either as tens of thousands of Yanomamo lived in the area, a lot of them never having seen a white man even near the end of Chagnon's data gathering.
You really are a great writer and I thoroughly enjoy your posts. Every post of yours I read encourages me to one day hopefully openly share and explore my own ideas on this medium. Looking forward to more.
What you've written is unobjectionable. You've just run into the same visceral aversion experienced more explosively by Chagnon. People have no trouble rejecting facts and logic if these threaten their most cherished model of how the world and the humans in it to behave rather than the model than accords with evidence. We see this play out every day. Perhaps it's ironic that this rejection on the part of elite opinion (and it is elite opinion) entails a rejection of evidence from evolution and behavior throughout the animal kingdom. You're actually a good and thoughtful writer and the pushback you're getting has nothing to do with the quality of your writing. IMAO.
It is a classic paradox, why did almost nothing change during the 300 000 years before the introduction of agriculture? All evidence point to early humans being anatomically similar to us. They should be just as smart, creative and capable of solving problems as us. Fully capable of inventing all kinds of technologies. Why didn't they?
While small-scale fighting between tribes surely have had an impact, I find it more interesting to go back to first principles and ask ourselves why change happens in the first place. Why do we make inventions? Why do we work to solve problems and change things?
It may seem like a tautology, but the obvious reason is that there are things we are unsatisfied with and want to change.
What if they were just satisfied with how things were?
Thank you for this interesting essay. I agree with your perspective that writing in bite-sized form is a great way to spark interest and conversation, at the risk of incompleteness in terms of documentation. I also agree that this conversation would shed light on the most interesting paths to explore outstanding scholarship and complement the body work -- it's *such* a big world out blah-blah out there. It takes a lot of heart to come out like this in a world of gatekeepers and fragile experts, and I find this inspiring and encouraging. Now I want to read more on the topic, and also to put my own work out there, even if it doesn't feel perfect.
1. Chagnon was a brave man and worthy scientists. Just blind to evidence when claiming the Y. were "well fed": see https://www.regenwald.org/photos/article/wide/xxl/52640430517-6a0d694b0c-k.jpg or any pic of Y. They are small. But not pygmies. Stunted growth. And specific research on Y living in the jungle (not in new habitats with more food - fishing) showed their meat-protein intake is indeed below a Big Mac a day. Thus Marvin Harris had no need to eat his hat. But was most likely right in reversing the "logic" of Chagnon: "If they "just" wanted more girls, they just needed to treat baby girls better and their pregnant wifes better. They do the exact opposite. That IS adaptive because they DO live in a Malthusian trap. 'Hunting in the amazon' 2020 or 1960 or 1820 is a far worse "business model" than it was a few thousand years before." - 2. Constant warfare was a feature in Europe after the Pax Romana ended. Had its downsides, but did assure progress on several fronts. Competition. (Stone age warfare among jungle tribes does not lead to progress further than poisoned arrows.)
The Yanomamö are indeed short. If nothing else, that is obvious when one reads Chagnon's books and looks at the pictures he took of himself beside his Yanomamö friends.
The question is how tall they really should be. Native Americans are often short also with adequate childhood nutrition. Stunting is a tricky phenomenon. I have read about stunting in current Indian and Chinese children. The children get stunted although the adults around them are not underweight. I see that as a sign that feeding children is rather difficult. Even if there is enough food, making it suitable and appetizing for children is not easy. I know everything about that, all my children preferred drinking massive amounts of gruel to actually eating food until they were at least two years old. I fear my children would have been much smaller if I didn't have access to cowmilk based food for them.
Although short, the Yanomamö don't look especially thin on the pictures Chagnon took. I can't easily find any reliably dated pictures on the internet, but in general people of both sexes tend to look normal weight and not very muscular.
I don't think the Yanomamö or any other people in their situation could have gotten more women through treating their women better and killing less daughters. Smaller groups were vulnerable to attack. And only adult males counted. So if one Yanomamö group got the idea to keep more daughters alive because they liked women so much, that group would be more vulnerable to raids from equally big neighbors who had raised more sons. The women would simply get stolen. Being many brothers and half-brothers was also a successful way of obtaining more wives through intimidation, according to Chagnon. And many brothers can be created through prioritizing male offspring.
Ultimately, no technologically primitive society is very far from starvation. But I think it is crucial to look at what evolutionary pressures individuals are facing in different societies. If women could feed children well enough with little male investment, men who focused on feeding their children did not become the evolutionary winners. Only when female labor is no longer enough to make children grow up, men who prioritize food production become winners.
I do not disagree, nor do I see a disagreement with the Harris-Hypothesis. Getting their population number stable/stagnant by a) neglecting baby-girls b) not "over-investing" in boys c) ignoring women's needs + some in-fighting some out-fighting is all well in line with being in the Malthusian trap and adapting by getting population-growth stable/stagnant - instead of ending up starving.
Sure, "men only count" . Sure, men grow from boys only . But just as sure: Only women give birth to boys, and they can not chose the gender before birth. You do not get a higher absolute number of boys in your tribe by treating the girls born as "useless mouths to feed". The "normal logic of war" is: More girls-more women-more kids-more boys-more men-more warriors. That is why e.g. Putin revived the title "Mother Heroine", last year. (And it is the strategy of some tribes elsewhere, who then end up doing even more and deadlier wars. Being in the Malthusian trap.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
Btw: Chagnon sent a PhD-student to the Y. to analyse the food-intake (to prove Harris wrong). The young guy later married a Y-girl. Her first pregnancy ended carrying too much stuff around. Not that he demanded it, ofc, it was just "the way things are done here". - Later they left the tribe and got 2 kids in the US. - It's been decades since I read his book, will try to recover name&title and add later, but I remember it as: a) He found Y are not exactly eating well, at least not constantly. The hunts were often/mostly disappointing. Their banana-harvesting seemed to be a relatively recent thing to compensate. Fishing was unknown before "contact". b) On receiving this "bad news" Chagnon kinda dropped his PhD-student. Or so he felt. He got later hired by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt ("founder of human ethology" / master-student of Konrad Lorenz) for fieldwork with the Y.. I-E-E remembered him well in his autobiography. I read both books in German (+Harris' theory about Y-warfare) years before I encountered Pinker's The blank slate (My fav. book ever. Pinker was a friend of Chagnon and showed in detail the brutal cancelling Chagnon suffered for showing Y as "fierce" instead of Rousseau's "noble savages". Seems to me, Pinker overdid by disparaging even fair critics of Chagnon's findings.)
As for "why so little/slow progress in the first 280k of the last 300k years" there is another interesting take by Erik Hoel: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap Fun to read, highly speculative, and also probably wrong(?) I guess. Hmm ... .
Which seems to mean his eldest son might be David Good - author of "The Way Around: Finding My Mother and Myself Among the Yanomami" - whose Y-mother left the US+Kenneth+kids for home when he was 5. And David followed her 20 years later. Btw: He looks rather tall for a (half)-Y. Guess what my next Y-book will be. ;) (Sorry for Y, but I mix up the letters too often.)
Yes! Alexandra Elbakyan is an angel opening the world of science to us mere mortals. But anthropology really is tricky. There is so much old knowledge buried somewhere. Many invaluable observations were made more than a hundred years ago, when there were more primitive societies out there. Some of that knowledge is printed in books and digitalized, but some is just buried in some database of some university that only gives access to real, initiated people.
With some time, knowledge, and, unfortunately, quite a lot of money, I will also be able to build an anthropological library. But it's not going very fast and I genuinely wish that those with access to old anthropological source material made an effort to make it more accessible to ordinary people.
Perhaps we in the developed world had returned to pre-Malthusian conditions over the past several decades. Certainly when viewing my own life, I never thought much about obtaining the basic necessities of life; but rather of convincing some woman to be my partner. The difference between the Yanomamö and Western society is that we don't literally use violence to steal women, although "thug game" seems to be a real thing, but try to acquire enough resources to convince a woman that we are the better provider. Unfortunately it seems that as obligatory monogamy fades away; it takes a lot of resources and other attributes to be and stay partnered.
We're in the post-Malthusian condition! And yes, it has some similarities with the pre-Malthusian condition. Primal instincts get another place in an environment of plenty.
When people live in an environment that they evolved to live in why should they change? The idea of development and progression is the problem here. Their environment provides everything that they need, why create a civilization that would destroy that environment? Civilization is an invention of peoples in environments that do not provide all resources nearby and require long distance trade. This also does not address why civilization did not advance for most of human existence. All humans make war and fight over women to spread their genes in the next generation. The real reason is that civilization and megafauna are not compatible. Agriculture is not possible with megafauna herbivores around. Permanent wooden structures will not survive a megafauna raid. Once humans killed all the megafauna then civilization was possible where it was needed. On continents where megafauna still exist civilization is smaller and less developed. What were we doing for 300,000 years? We were fighting the megafauna and trying not to be hunted by the megafauna predators or killed by megafauna herbivores.
That's not a totally implausible theory: After all, who wants to have their fields overrun by elephants or buffalos? But how do we know those extinction events were continual over tens of thousands of years? As Ted Cross wrote in a comment on this other post https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-develop/comments
there was a climate change event about 12 000 years ago. The climate became warmer and wetter worldwide, which enabled a higher level of population growth. That climate change and that population growth was probably not good for the megafauna. That might have pushed humans into a more herbivorous diet and spurred domestication of animals, whenever memes that allowed such a lifestyle occurred. (Socially, to start owning animals and stop sharing meat group-wide probably was a big thing.)
I'm not only wondering what our ancestors did for 300 000 years. I'm wondering why peoples get stuck in the stone age at all. My favorite example, the Yanomamö, developed horticulture. Then they just continued doing that for millennia, as far as anybody knows. It can't be that rainforests are totally hopeless places for civilization, because the rainforest areas of South East Asia were overtaken by civilizations a long time ago. Rather it seems like the Yanomamö just lacked outside pressure. Until the 20th century, no civilization wanted their land so they could conutine doing what they were doing: Fighting over fertile and hard-working women.
"wondering what our ancestors did for 300 000 years" They raised families and enjoyed their time alive.
"why peoples get stuck in the stone age at all"
A long and complicated technology tree is the consequence of surplus energy and stable environment. Stability and surplus lead to a larger population. Larger populations enable division of labor and the collection of still greater amounts of resources.
It wasn't until the invention/discovery of agriculture that people were able to bootstrap this process, and discovery of agriculture was a happy accident.
Yes. And part of that stable environment could be more peaceful relations with other people.
How to we know discovery of agriculture was a happy accident? As far as I know, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers lived side by side in Europe for thousands of years. I think that is a sign that agriculture might hsve been more of a social innovation than a technical innovation. Agriculture requires other norms for ownership and sharing than hunting and gathering. And obviously some peoples didn't adopt agriculture although they knew about it. That fact raises the question whether figuring out how to sow and harvest was pretty easy compared to figuring out who would have what share in the harvest.
The technology necessary to reliably do agriculture on a scale that would sustain a population requires a large surplus of time and labor to invent, which means it would be unlikely for foragers to invest the meager surplus they had from foraging in developing activities that had no benefit in their environment over the many generations it would take to develop them. It is hypothesized that the surplus came from the accidental discovery of seasonal bounties in areas that were incredibly fertile (such as the banks of the Nile) and this naturally existing surplus was what spurred the technological innovation necessary to manage it.
"[T]echnology" in this case being specifically what was necessary for functional agriculture, that is written records and mathematics of measuring and accounting times, amounts, and spaces in detail. This isn't to say that foraging people don't have forms of these, but the ones that agricultural people developed had to be suitable for agriculture. Your observation that social norms had to be modified in order to facilitate this transition is apt, some of us see social norms as a form of technology that facilitates large scale coordination of people (much like language can be seen as a form of technology).
Some articles and sources that inform my perspective on the topic:
Another thing to consider is that we've spent the last 10,000 years collectively improving the efficiency of agriculture, and this really took off in the last 300 or so years with the industrial revolution. Many times the reason to not expand agriculture may simply have been that those territories were not fertile enough to farm at that time with that technology. I am told Fernand Braudel discusses this in his legendary 4 volume series on Capitalism and Civilization but I must confess I have not done more than flip through it on archive.org.
One last thought, harvests are yearly (this is the origin of interest and debt) so if a population is surviving on agriculture then there must be both stable rights in farmland (otherwise you wouldn't sow your seed in your field, you would eat it or sell it) and stable property rights in time-structured transactions (otherwise no one would loan anything or sell anything contingent on payment in future goods). This is probably why prohibitions on usury emerged.
Somehow I imagine the discovery of agriculture as something rather trivial. First and foremost, it should have been made by women. Women were always main responsible for vegetable foods and they typically do most farmwork until a certain degree of civilization. So I find it a bit difficult to imagine that men would have invented farming.
I think that for example, a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers lived at a certain distance from a good field of grass with big seeds. In general, transportation is much of an issue for hunter-gatherers, so the women were annoyed the distance was too long. Maybe women belonging to an enemy group competed for the field and took much of the seeds. They women might have gotten the idea to sow some seeds right outside their village out if sheer annoyment. Does it have to have been much more complicated, really?
The idea requires resources to have been dense enough for hunter-gatherers to be sedentary. And such places existed. Places that might have been great in many ways, but that lay to far away from the good grass seeds.
"One last thought, harvests are yearly (this is the origin of interest and debt) so if a population is surviving on agriculture then there must be both stable rights in farmland (otherwise you wouldn't sow your seed in your field, you would eat it or sell it) and stable property rights in time-structured transactions (otherwise no one would loan anything or sell anything contingent on payment in future goods). This is probably why prohibitions on usury emerged."
I cannot see how property rights are a prerequisite for agriculture. Agriculture definitely predates every form of law, statehoods and anything resembling formal property rights.
Instead I would speculate that agriculture is more related to organized armies than might be apparent at first blush. Pre-statehood agriculture would then depend not so much on your ability to farm but rather more on your ability to defend your farmland. This sort of correlates with pre-statehood Germanic societies where a farmer was more or less equated with a warrior. A farmer was not primarily a person who farmed the land but rather a person who could defend a patch of land effectively enough for someone to farm the land. This spilled over into the Middle Ages when actual farming was done by peasants but the land was controlled by whomever held the military-political power over that area.
"I cannot see how property rights are a prerequisite for agriculture."
Because without the legitimate right to exclude people from your field, then people will trample your crops or poach them, or poach from your stored harvest (which you need for seeds for the next season and for food until the next harvest).
"Agriculture definitely predates every form of law, statehoods and anything resembling formal property rights."
Its not 'formal' in the way moderns would perceive it, its more 'get off my lawn' style practical where the aborigines (neighboring tribes) were just as much of a threat as the animals that were also trying to eat your crop.
"Instead I would speculate that agriculture is more related to organized armies than might be apparent at first blush."
This is absolutely the case. The surplus population for an organized army did not exist prior to agriculture.
"Pre-statehood agriculture would then depend not so much on your ability to farm but rather more on your ability to defend your farmland."
This is the enforcement side of the property rights mentioned above.
"A farmer was not primarily a person who farmed the land but rather a person who could defend a patch of land effectively enough for someone to farm the land. This spilled over into the Middle Ages when actual farming was done by peasants but the land was controlled by whomever held the military-political power over that area."
The invention and construction of social norms and physical technology to maintain this hierarchy are part of the process of development Tove addresses in the original article.
Notice that the resolutely Marxist anthropologist Christophe Darmangeat studies war in "primitive" societies and so far concludes that people do war for many reasons, resources, women, prestige... almost anything goes. Check his book "Justice and Warfare in Aboriginal Australia" and his "Aboriginal Conflicts Database".
Sounds interesting! I will look at those books if I can get hold of them.
In general, I'm not saying anything about what Marxist anthropologists are thinking here and now. I don't even say anything about what all Marxist anthropologists thought in the 1970s. I just told a story about the conflicts that arose when a particular anthropologist reported the results of his research. I think those conflicts obscured the embryo of a very interesting theory.
More than a Marxist POV, from what I've read Chagnon has been the victim of some sort of Rousseauist dominant ideology in anthropology, the myth of the "good savage" if you want :)
Yes. It was he himself who complained about Marxists who refused to believe in his observations in the 1970s. Those who took him down for real, in the 1990s, seem more like "good savage" proponents.
Great idea. I've often wondered, how could humanity have taken over a hundred thousand years to graduate from stone tools to agriculture, and then yet more several thousand years to finally approach the level of innovation we're used to today. What were they doing this entire time?
This is more or less the theory behind differential evolution by continent.
Some societies had to compete to feed children, those are the high IQ ones.
Some societies had to compete for women, those are the low IQ ones.
There are many other (important) details to fill in but you get the gist.
What's interesting is civilization itself. The ability to securely store calories allowed certain men to cultivate many many women, often with low status men as slaves. In barbarian societies this took the form of controlling herds of animals, and in "civilized societies" it meant controlling storable and non perishable carbohydrates.
This was a great thought provoking post. A question I have is this: Are the warfare fatality numbers quoted really enough to stabilize a population? Marvin Harris has claimed in "Cannibals and Kings" that population growth is checked only by greatly reducing the number of females. In warring societies, this most likely happens by female infanticide either directly or via neglect as males are favored since they will eventually become warriors. So, is warfare over females really what slowed population growth?
A quick google search turns up research that says Yanomami practice infanticide but that it tends to keep the adult male/female ratio even and the major population control factor is disease.
A very interesting question. I don't know any population growth estimates for the Yanomamö. But I read Aché Life History by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado, published in 1996. Hill and Hurtado meticulously gathered information about all births and deaths from the Aché people of Paraguay, who were hunter-gatherers until the early 1970s. Hill and Hurtado noticed more than 2 percent population growth during that time if I remember it right. They concluded that such rates of population growths were impossible during human history. For that reason, they hypothesized that either the Aché were abnormal or populations grew and declined in a boom and bust pattern.
I guess that is applicable to many primitive populations: They grow for generations, until some disater happens.
When it comes to infanticide I have most of all read this study from 1976. https://www.jstor.org/stable/674415 William Divale and Marvin Harris compiled population data from 112 primitive societies. They concluded that warfare and female infanticide was highly related. That way, I think, war is a form of (unintended) female-centered population control. Since populations at war need to raise more males, they kill off females at birth. That leaves fewer females to breed.
I don't know whether it leaves few enough females to make populations entirely stable. My guess is that it doesn't, because of the above mentioned boom and bust theory. But in any case, warfare reduces population pressure through encouraging female infanticide.
I think Chagnon was only half right. A significant part of their diet was plantains and it would take about a year to get their plantain operation going. He does mention in his book how when a village fissions the people that move away have to trade their women for plantains as even a group of 50-60 people cannot get all their calories from hunting by just staying in one place in the jungle.
So the fact that it is actually somewhat challenging to move away probably fuels conflicts. Also the terrain doesn't help, it is probably dangerous to move through a jungle with a large group without having a protected place to sleep at night for a sustained period. Due to Jaguars and possibly hostile enemy villages.
Still doesn't negate the fact that most conflicts are started over women, but I would bet if it was easier to move around for larger groups, and without the thick jungle, there would not be as much violence.
What bothers me most about all this is that by the looks of it, there wasn't a single other anthropologist that put in a similar amount of work as Chagnon. So his collagues basically sat on the sidelines trashing him, but they couldn't be bothered to set up their own operation and collect data to try and prove him wrong. There was no shortage of villages either as tens of thousands of Yanomamo lived in the area, a lot of them never having seen a white man even near the end of Chagnon's data gathering.
Obligate reference: https://www.gocomics.com/poorly-drawn-lines/2015/10/26
You really are a great writer and I thoroughly enjoy your posts. Every post of yours I read encourages me to one day hopefully openly share and explore my own ideas on this medium. Looking forward to more.
Than you! It would be great if more people discussed these issues openly.
What you've written is unobjectionable. You've just run into the same visceral aversion experienced more explosively by Chagnon. People have no trouble rejecting facts and logic if these threaten their most cherished model of how the world and the humans in it to behave rather than the model than accords with evidence. We see this play out every day. Perhaps it's ironic that this rejection on the part of elite opinion (and it is elite opinion) entails a rejection of evidence from evolution and behavior throughout the animal kingdom. You're actually a good and thoughtful writer and the pushback you're getting has nothing to do with the quality of your writing. IMAO.
It is a classic paradox, why did almost nothing change during the 300 000 years before the introduction of agriculture? All evidence point to early humans being anatomically similar to us. They should be just as smart, creative and capable of solving problems as us. Fully capable of inventing all kinds of technologies. Why didn't they?
While small-scale fighting between tribes surely have had an impact, I find it more interesting to go back to first principles and ask ourselves why change happens in the first place. Why do we make inventions? Why do we work to solve problems and change things?
It may seem like a tautology, but the obvious reason is that there are things we are unsatisfied with and want to change.
What if they were just satisfied with how things were?
Thank you for this interesting essay. I agree with your perspective that writing in bite-sized form is a great way to spark interest and conversation, at the risk of incompleteness in terms of documentation. I also agree that this conversation would shed light on the most interesting paths to explore outstanding scholarship and complement the body work -- it's *such* a big world out blah-blah out there. It takes a lot of heart to come out like this in a world of gatekeepers and fragile experts, and I find this inspiring and encouraging. Now I want to read more on the topic, and also to put my own work out there, even if it doesn't feel perfect.
1. Chagnon was a brave man and worthy scientists. Just blind to evidence when claiming the Y. were "well fed": see https://www.regenwald.org/photos/article/wide/xxl/52640430517-6a0d694b0c-k.jpg or any pic of Y. They are small. But not pygmies. Stunted growth. And specific research on Y living in the jungle (not in new habitats with more food - fishing) showed their meat-protein intake is indeed below a Big Mac a day. Thus Marvin Harris had no need to eat his hat. But was most likely right in reversing the "logic" of Chagnon: "If they "just" wanted more girls, they just needed to treat baby girls better and their pregnant wifes better. They do the exact opposite. That IS adaptive because they DO live in a Malthusian trap. 'Hunting in the amazon' 2020 or 1960 or 1820 is a far worse "business model" than it was a few thousand years before." - 2. Constant warfare was a feature in Europe after the Pax Romana ended. Had its downsides, but did assure progress on several fronts. Competition. (Stone age warfare among jungle tribes does not lead to progress further than poisoned arrows.)
The Yanomamö are indeed short. If nothing else, that is obvious when one reads Chagnon's books and looks at the pictures he took of himself beside his Yanomamö friends.
The question is how tall they really should be. Native Americans are often short also with adequate childhood nutrition. Stunting is a tricky phenomenon. I have read about stunting in current Indian and Chinese children. The children get stunted although the adults around them are not underweight. I see that as a sign that feeding children is rather difficult. Even if there is enough food, making it suitable and appetizing for children is not easy. I know everything about that, all my children preferred drinking massive amounts of gruel to actually eating food until they were at least two years old. I fear my children would have been much smaller if I didn't have access to cowmilk based food for them.
Although short, the Yanomamö don't look especially thin on the pictures Chagnon took. I can't easily find any reliably dated pictures on the internet, but in general people of both sexes tend to look normal weight and not very muscular.
I don't think the Yanomamö or any other people in their situation could have gotten more women through treating their women better and killing less daughters. Smaller groups were vulnerable to attack. And only adult males counted. So if one Yanomamö group got the idea to keep more daughters alive because they liked women so much, that group would be more vulnerable to raids from equally big neighbors who had raised more sons. The women would simply get stolen. Being many brothers and half-brothers was also a successful way of obtaining more wives through intimidation, according to Chagnon. And many brothers can be created through prioritizing male offspring.
Ultimately, no technologically primitive society is very far from starvation. But I think it is crucial to look at what evolutionary pressures individuals are facing in different societies. If women could feed children well enough with little male investment, men who focused on feeding their children did not become the evolutionary winners. Only when female labor is no longer enough to make children grow up, men who prioritize food production become winners.
I do not disagree, nor do I see a disagreement with the Harris-Hypothesis. Getting their population number stable/stagnant by a) neglecting baby-girls b) not "over-investing" in boys c) ignoring women's needs + some in-fighting some out-fighting is all well in line with being in the Malthusian trap and adapting by getting population-growth stable/stagnant - instead of ending up starving.
Sure, "men only count" . Sure, men grow from boys only . But just as sure: Only women give birth to boys, and they can not chose the gender before birth. You do not get a higher absolute number of boys in your tribe by treating the girls born as "useless mouths to feed". The "normal logic of war" is: More girls-more women-more kids-more boys-more men-more warriors. That is why e.g. Putin revived the title "Mother Heroine", last year. (And it is the strategy of some tribes elsewhere, who then end up doing even more and deadlier wars. Being in the Malthusian trap.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
Btw: Chagnon sent a PhD-student to the Y. to analyse the food-intake (to prove Harris wrong). The young guy later married a Y-girl. Her first pregnancy ended carrying too much stuff around. Not that he demanded it, ofc, it was just "the way things are done here". - Later they left the tribe and got 2 kids in the US. - It's been decades since I read his book, will try to recover name&title and add later, but I remember it as: a) He found Y are not exactly eating well, at least not constantly. The hunts were often/mostly disappointing. Their banana-harvesting seemed to be a relatively recent thing to compensate. Fishing was unknown before "contact". b) On receiving this "bad news" Chagnon kinda dropped his PhD-student. Or so he felt. He got later hired by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt ("founder of human ethology" / master-student of Konrad Lorenz) for fieldwork with the Y.. I-E-E remembered him well in his autobiography. I read both books in German (+Harris' theory about Y-warfare) years before I encountered Pinker's The blank slate (My fav. book ever. Pinker was a friend of Chagnon and showed in detail the brutal cancelling Chagnon suffered for showing Y as "fierce" instead of Rousseau's "noble savages". Seems to me, Pinker overdid by disparaging even fair critics of Chagnon's findings.)
As for "why so little/slow progress in the first 280k of the last 300k years" there is another interesting take by Erik Hoel: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-gossip-trap Fun to read, highly speculative, and also probably wrong(?) I guess. Hmm ... .
It should be this book: Good, Kenneth: Into The Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami - this (kinda negative) review nailed it: https://www.amazon.de/gp/customer-reviews/R1YXAK2JVVFEZW/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0673982327 (the enthusiastic reviews are true, too)
Which seems to mean his eldest son might be David Good - author of "The Way Around: Finding My Mother and Myself Among the Yanomami" - whose Y-mother left the US+Kenneth+kids for home when he was 5. And David followed her 20 years later. Btw: He looks rather tall for a (half)-Y. Guess what my next Y-book will be. ;) (Sorry for Y, but I mix up the letters too often.)
sci-hub helps to get the articles
Yes! Alexandra Elbakyan is an angel opening the world of science to us mere mortals. But anthropology really is tricky. There is so much old knowledge buried somewhere. Many invaluable observations were made more than a hundred years ago, when there were more primitive societies out there. Some of that knowledge is printed in books and digitalized, but some is just buried in some database of some university that only gives access to real, initiated people.
With some time, knowledge, and, unfortunately, quite a lot of money, I will also be able to build an anthropological library. But it's not going very fast and I genuinely wish that those with access to old anthropological source material made an effort to make it more accessible to ordinary people.
Perhaps we in the developed world had returned to pre-Malthusian conditions over the past several decades. Certainly when viewing my own life, I never thought much about obtaining the basic necessities of life; but rather of convincing some woman to be my partner. The difference between the Yanomamö and Western society is that we don't literally use violence to steal women, although "thug game" seems to be a real thing, but try to acquire enough resources to convince a woman that we are the better provider. Unfortunately it seems that as obligatory monogamy fades away; it takes a lot of resources and other attributes to be and stay partnered.
We're in the post-Malthusian condition! And yes, it has some similarities with the pre-Malthusian condition. Primal instincts get another place in an environment of plenty.
I’m finding this a really interesting theory and and keen to hear more. Thanks for writing!
When people live in an environment that they evolved to live in why should they change? The idea of development and progression is the problem here. Their environment provides everything that they need, why create a civilization that would destroy that environment? Civilization is an invention of peoples in environments that do not provide all resources nearby and require long distance trade. This also does not address why civilization did not advance for most of human existence. All humans make war and fight over women to spread their genes in the next generation. The real reason is that civilization and megafauna are not compatible. Agriculture is not possible with megafauna herbivores around. Permanent wooden structures will not survive a megafauna raid. Once humans killed all the megafauna then civilization was possible where it was needed. On continents where megafauna still exist civilization is smaller and less developed. What were we doing for 300,000 years? We were fighting the megafauna and trying not to be hunted by the megafauna predators or killed by megafauna herbivores.
That's not a totally implausible theory: After all, who wants to have their fields overrun by elephants or buffalos? But how do we know those extinction events were continual over tens of thousands of years? As Ted Cross wrote in a comment on this other post https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-develop/comments
there was a climate change event about 12 000 years ago. The climate became warmer and wetter worldwide, which enabled a higher level of population growth. That climate change and that population growth was probably not good for the megafauna. That might have pushed humans into a more herbivorous diet and spurred domestication of animals, whenever memes that allowed such a lifestyle occurred. (Socially, to start owning animals and stop sharing meat group-wide probably was a big thing.)
I'm not only wondering what our ancestors did for 300 000 years. I'm wondering why peoples get stuck in the stone age at all. My favorite example, the Yanomamö, developed horticulture. Then they just continued doing that for millennia, as far as anybody knows. It can't be that rainforests are totally hopeless places for civilization, because the rainforest areas of South East Asia were overtaken by civilizations a long time ago. Rather it seems like the Yanomamö just lacked outside pressure. Until the 20th century, no civilization wanted their land so they could conutine doing what they were doing: Fighting over fertile and hard-working women.
Daniel Quinn addresses this in his work:
"wondering what our ancestors did for 300 000 years" They raised families and enjoyed their time alive.
"why peoples get stuck in the stone age at all"
A long and complicated technology tree is the consequence of surplus energy and stable environment. Stability and surplus lead to a larger population. Larger populations enable division of labor and the collection of still greater amounts of resources.
It wasn't until the invention/discovery of agriculture that people were able to bootstrap this process, and discovery of agriculture was a happy accident.
Yes. And part of that stable environment could be more peaceful relations with other people.
How to we know discovery of agriculture was a happy accident? As far as I know, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers lived side by side in Europe for thousands of years. I think that is a sign that agriculture might hsve been more of a social innovation than a technical innovation. Agriculture requires other norms for ownership and sharing than hunting and gathering. And obviously some peoples didn't adopt agriculture although they knew about it. That fact raises the question whether figuring out how to sow and harvest was pretty easy compared to figuring out who would have what share in the harvest.
Regarding the invention of ag:
The technology necessary to reliably do agriculture on a scale that would sustain a population requires a large surplus of time and labor to invent, which means it would be unlikely for foragers to invest the meager surplus they had from foraging in developing activities that had no benefit in their environment over the many generations it would take to develop them. It is hypothesized that the surplus came from the accidental discovery of seasonal bounties in areas that were incredibly fertile (such as the banks of the Nile) and this naturally existing surplus was what spurred the technological innovation necessary to manage it.
"[T]echnology" in this case being specifically what was necessary for functional agriculture, that is written records and mathematics of measuring and accounting times, amounts, and spaces in detail. This isn't to say that foraging people don't have forms of these, but the ones that agricultural people developed had to be suitable for agriculture. Your observation that social norms had to be modified in order to facilitate this transition is apt, some of us see social norms as a form of technology that facilitates large scale coordination of people (much like language can be seen as a form of technology).
Some articles and sources that inform my perspective on the topic:
https://mises.org/library/evolutionary-psychology-and-antimarket-bias
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Another thing to consider is that we've spent the last 10,000 years collectively improving the efficiency of agriculture, and this really took off in the last 300 or so years with the industrial revolution. Many times the reason to not expand agriculture may simply have been that those territories were not fertile enough to farm at that time with that technology. I am told Fernand Braudel discusses this in his legendary 4 volume series on Capitalism and Civilization but I must confess I have not done more than flip through it on archive.org.
One last thought, harvests are yearly (this is the origin of interest and debt) so if a population is surviving on agriculture then there must be both stable rights in farmland (otherwise you wouldn't sow your seed in your field, you would eat it or sell it) and stable property rights in time-structured transactions (otherwise no one would loan anything or sell anything contingent on payment in future goods). This is probably why prohibitions on usury emerged.
Somehow I imagine the discovery of agriculture as something rather trivial. First and foremost, it should have been made by women. Women were always main responsible for vegetable foods and they typically do most farmwork until a certain degree of civilization. So I find it a bit difficult to imagine that men would have invented farming.
I think that for example, a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers lived at a certain distance from a good field of grass with big seeds. In general, transportation is much of an issue for hunter-gatherers, so the women were annoyed the distance was too long. Maybe women belonging to an enemy group competed for the field and took much of the seeds. They women might have gotten the idea to sow some seeds right outside their village out if sheer annoyment. Does it have to have been much more complicated, really?
The idea requires resources to have been dense enough for hunter-gatherers to be sedentary. And such places existed. Places that might have been great in many ways, but that lay to far away from the good grass seeds.
"One last thought, harvests are yearly (this is the origin of interest and debt) so if a population is surviving on agriculture then there must be both stable rights in farmland (otherwise you wouldn't sow your seed in your field, you would eat it or sell it) and stable property rights in time-structured transactions (otherwise no one would loan anything or sell anything contingent on payment in future goods). This is probably why prohibitions on usury emerged."
I cannot see how property rights are a prerequisite for agriculture. Agriculture definitely predates every form of law, statehoods and anything resembling formal property rights.
Instead I would speculate that agriculture is more related to organized armies than might be apparent at first blush. Pre-statehood agriculture would then depend not so much on your ability to farm but rather more on your ability to defend your farmland. This sort of correlates with pre-statehood Germanic societies where a farmer was more or less equated with a warrior. A farmer was not primarily a person who farmed the land but rather a person who could defend a patch of land effectively enough for someone to farm the land. This spilled over into the Middle Ages when actual farming was done by peasants but the land was controlled by whomever held the military-political power over that area.
"I cannot see how property rights are a prerequisite for agriculture."
Because without the legitimate right to exclude people from your field, then people will trample your crops or poach them, or poach from your stored harvest (which you need for seeds for the next season and for food until the next harvest).
"Agriculture definitely predates every form of law, statehoods and anything resembling formal property rights."
Its not 'formal' in the way moderns would perceive it, its more 'get off my lawn' style practical where the aborigines (neighboring tribes) were just as much of a threat as the animals that were also trying to eat your crop.
"Instead I would speculate that agriculture is more related to organized armies than might be apparent at first blush."
This is absolutely the case. The surplus population for an organized army did not exist prior to agriculture.
"Pre-statehood agriculture would then depend not so much on your ability to farm but rather more on your ability to defend your farmland."
This is the enforcement side of the property rights mentioned above.
"A farmer was not primarily a person who farmed the land but rather a person who could defend a patch of land effectively enough for someone to farm the land. This spilled over into the Middle Ages when actual farming was done by peasants but the land was controlled by whomever held the military-political power over that area."
The invention and construction of social norms and physical technology to maintain this hierarchy are part of the process of development Tove addresses in the original article.
Notice that the resolutely Marxist anthropologist Christophe Darmangeat studies war in "primitive" societies and so far concludes that people do war for many reasons, resources, women, prestige... almost anything goes. Check his book "Justice and Warfare in Aboriginal Australia" and his "Aboriginal Conflicts Database".
Sounds interesting! I will look at those books if I can get hold of them.
In general, I'm not saying anything about what Marxist anthropologists are thinking here and now. I don't even say anything about what all Marxist anthropologists thought in the 1970s. I just told a story about the conflicts that arose when a particular anthropologist reported the results of his research. I think those conflicts obscured the embryo of a very interesting theory.
More than a Marxist POV, from what I've read Chagnon has been the victim of some sort of Rousseauist dominant ideology in anthropology, the myth of the "good savage" if you want :)
Yes. It was he himself who complained about Marxists who refused to believe in his observations in the 1970s. Those who took him down for real, in the 1990s, seem more like "good savage" proponents.
Also in the 60s the structuralists were dominant AFAIK.
Great idea. I've often wondered, how could humanity have taken over a hundred thousand years to graduate from stone tools to agriculture, and then yet more several thousand years to finally approach the level of innovation we're used to today. What were they doing this entire time?
Nice one.
You may enjoy this post as a complement to yours:
https://kvetch.substack.com/p/wife-economics-and-the-domestication
Thank you! I will check it out.
This is more or less the theory behind differential evolution by continent.
Some societies had to compete to feed children, those are the high IQ ones.
Some societies had to compete for women, those are the low IQ ones.
There are many other (important) details to fill in but you get the gist.
What's interesting is civilization itself. The ability to securely store calories allowed certain men to cultivate many many women, often with low status men as slaves. In barbarian societies this took the form of controlling herds of animals, and in "civilized societies" it meant controlling storable and non perishable carbohydrates.
This was a great thought provoking post. A question I have is this: Are the warfare fatality numbers quoted really enough to stabilize a population? Marvin Harris has claimed in "Cannibals and Kings" that population growth is checked only by greatly reducing the number of females. In warring societies, this most likely happens by female infanticide either directly or via neglect as males are favored since they will eventually become warriors. So, is warfare over females really what slowed population growth?
A quick google search turns up research that says Yanomami practice infanticide but that it tends to keep the adult male/female ratio even and the major population control factor is disease.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12334855/
A very interesting question. I don't know any population growth estimates for the Yanomamö. But I read Aché Life History by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado, published in 1996. Hill and Hurtado meticulously gathered information about all births and deaths from the Aché people of Paraguay, who were hunter-gatherers until the early 1970s. Hill and Hurtado noticed more than 2 percent population growth during that time if I remember it right. They concluded that such rates of population growths were impossible during human history. For that reason, they hypothesized that either the Aché were abnormal or populations grew and declined in a boom and bust pattern.
I guess that is applicable to many primitive populations: They grow for generations, until some disater happens.
When it comes to infanticide I have most of all read this study from 1976. https://www.jstor.org/stable/674415 William Divale and Marvin Harris compiled population data from 112 primitive societies. They concluded that warfare and female infanticide was highly related. That way, I think, war is a form of (unintended) female-centered population control. Since populations at war need to raise more males, they kill off females at birth. That leaves fewer females to breed.
I don't know whether it leaves few enough females to make populations entirely stable. My guess is that it doesn't, because of the above mentioned boom and bust theory. But in any case, warfare reduces population pressure through encouraging female infanticide.