very good post! some things I'd enjoy reading in your future posts:
-your thoughts on Against the Grain
-I've heard that according to DNA analysis, polygyny only really took off once we got agriculture and city states, and reproductive success was comparatively more equal in a pre-Malthusian world. I've not tracked down the papers so I'd be curious to see whether it's true
At first I need to google Against the Grain...it's a book a should read! Weird that I never heard of it, I must read the wrong blogs or something. But I started reading The art of not being governed by the same author.
I actually have a post on bride price versus dowry somewhere deep in the pipeline. In general, systemized polygyny is only possible where someone else than the father provides most of the calories for a child. In pre-colonial Australia it was women, making polygyny possible although people were hunter-gatherers. In the Bronze age male reproductive success was very uneven while it became more even again in the Iron age. Something like that.
Can I ask what you would have written instead? I assume you see a language mistake in it. English is not my first language, so such things are not as obvious to me as to a native speaker.
Since I am probably responsible for that particular phrase I might as well reply.
The thinking behind it is that gunpowder weapons required economic power on a whole new level. Cannon foundries and nitraries had manpower needs that were only available in cities. And in order for cities to grow you cannot squeeze them too hard.
While the above is true an even better explanation should probably include some comments on the new weaponry's impact on the social aspects of warfare. Firearms were not decisive here. Crossbows were the real game changers. With pikes and crossbows well-organized foot soldiers could take on any feudal army, something that was proven again and again by German Landsers and the whole nation of Switzerland. The power of the feudal lords decreased by a corresponding amount.
Interesting and convincing. I too was shocked and repelled by the abuse heaped on Chagnon for reporting findings that his academic colleagues disliked when I read his book ten or so years ago. I only read Demonic Males last summer and was struck by how is confirmed and complemented Chagnon. Your posts add valuable further insights.
This is interesting - the theory that some degree of narcissism/psychopathy/etc may be beneficial for society has been bounced around quite a bit. The idea that some people are so removed from social contracts that they propel society forward through their sociopathy is fun and plausible.
Yes. Although most leaders today don't seem as crazy as the successful Yanomamö guy, even today's leaders seem higher in sociopathy than the average person. Sociopaths, or at least people with sociopathic tendencies obviously serve some kind of social function.
Especially in the military, in battle, it seems to me sociopathic tendencies would be highly adaptive: cool under pressure, excited by risk, coldly calculating about human lives. Those traits can make a great soldier-leader. I myself would be paralyzed with horror if I had to make decisions in such circumstances.
Me too. I would make such a bad soldier. But I know at least one who would do great in such situations and who is still no sociopath. It could also be down to the warrior/worrier gene.
On the simultaneous development of agriculture "coincidence":
~12,000 years ago is when we left the ice ages and entered into a stable climate. We have had an incredibly volatile climate over the last 100,000 years thanks to many cycles of advancing and retreating ice sheets. These caused consistent, global climate change.
Ice ages are generally bad times to grow, across the globe. As Wikipedia puts it:
"During the Last Glacial Maximum, much of the world was cold, dry, and inhospitable, with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere. The dustiness of the atmosphere is a prominent feature in ice cores; dust levels were as much as 20 to 25 times greater than now.[15] This was probably due to a number of factors: reduced vegetation, stronger global winds, and less precipitation to clear dust from the atmosphere."
I think this actually helps your argument. There was significant migration out of Africa starting around 100,000 years ago. Not much happened in terms of developing civilization until 12,000 years ago, when all of a sudden climates EVERYWHERE became more stable, warmer, and wetter, and then boom, agriculture develops simultaneously in many locations.
That is very interesting. Basically, for about 90 000 years, people got used to living rather far away from each other, because there was not enough game and edible plants to live more densely. Then 12 000 years ago, people could provide for more children and groups of humans grew into each other's territories. Then it took just a couple of millennia in the most densely populated parts of the world for agriculture to take over, and a few more millennia in the originally less populated parts of the world. They say America was populated about 14 000-12 000 years ago. If America was very sparsely populated when the climate changed 12 000 years ago, that could explain why it took a few thousand years more to invent agriculture there.
It all sounds very plausible. Thank you for your expert input!
"It would require very much of a coincidence if, after all those years of non-agriculture, humans in such different climates as the Levant, China, South America and New Guinea experienced the same environmental shocks within the same short time span." It's not environmental _shocks_ that is the idea. It's food surplus.
Nomadic hunter-gatherers are spending their whole lives finding food, not starving to death, not getting killed by hostile/poisonous flora and fauna, and getting along with their extended family members. And roaming. When the food runs out they have to go someplace else. But we have in the historical record evidence of non-nomadic hunter-gatherers. They had a food surplus, without inventing agriculture.
Off they go, developing better art, and improved housing, and pottery, and fairly rapidly they get trade networks and better boats and so on and so forth. Civilisation! Yay!
But you can imagine a world wide food surplus caused by milder weather for a series of generations, perhaps due to increased solar activity, or less interstellar dust -- a global climate trend. If these good times of surplus ended -- either because whatever it was that caused it reversed, or just because the population grew to the point that the natural bounty did not suffice -- it is easy to imagine people in different places all deciding to save seeds and then plant crops to increase the food supply.
If this isn't the explanation, then the simultaneous development is the coincidence that needs explaining.
I read in a book called Aché Life History by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado that all foragers that have been interviewed by anthropologists say that they think they eat too little. It could be that our ancestors were dissatisfied with their food supply for hundreds of thousands of years without being able to do anything about it.
I think the "invention" of agriculture could be less about getting the thought of putting seeds in the ground and more about the art of defending the harvest. The inventions that enabled agriculture might have been military rather than scientific.
Certainly, and one idea is that the egalitarian first farmers got turned into slave farm workers by the first military band that was able to establish a state. But if it was 'how to defend the harvest and invent slavery' instead of 'how to create a reliable food surplus' that was the change, we still have to explain why it happened in so many different places at roughly the same time.
I think it was a series of coincidences fuelled by population growth that caused the push into farming and then into despotic states. A number of coincidences were required for people of one group to stop infighting over women. It took a certain time for those coincidences to appear in every part of the world. Like if a certain number of generations passed until something irregular that broke the status quo of infighting occurred.
very good post! some things I'd enjoy reading in your future posts:
-your thoughts on Against the Grain
-I've heard that according to DNA analysis, polygyny only really took off once we got agriculture and city states, and reproductive success was comparatively more equal in a pre-Malthusian world. I've not tracked down the papers so I'd be curious to see whether it's true
Thank you!
At first I need to google Against the Grain...it's a book a should read! Weird that I never heard of it, I must read the wrong blogs or something. But I started reading The art of not being governed by the same author.
I actually have a post on bride price versus dowry somewhere deep in the pipeline. In general, systemized polygyny is only possible where someone else than the father provides most of the calories for a child. In pre-colonial Australia it was women, making polygyny possible although people were hunter-gatherers. In the Bronze age male reproductive success was very uneven while it became more even again in the Iron age. Something like that.
There are certainly good thoughts here, just the part "The male labor reserve" is not up to par. It should be fact-checked.
You might want to rewrite this fragment:
"...with the advent of firearms the feudal lords were forced to lower oppression of especially towns in order to create..."
Very good post.
Can I ask what you would have written instead? I assume you see a language mistake in it. English is not my first language, so such things are not as obvious to me as to a native speaker.
"...with the advent of firearms the feudal lords were forced to lower oppression, especially in towns, in order to create..."
Although I am not quite sure why the towns were different than the countryside, but perhaps I missed something.
Since I am probably responsible for that particular phrase I might as well reply.
The thinking behind it is that gunpowder weapons required economic power on a whole new level. Cannon foundries and nitraries had manpower needs that were only available in cities. And in order for cities to grow you cannot squeeze them too hard.
While the above is true an even better explanation should probably include some comments on the new weaponry's impact on the social aspects of warfare. Firearms were not decisive here. Crossbows were the real game changers. With pikes and crossbows well-organized foot soldiers could take on any feudal army, something that was proven again and again by German Landsers and the whole nation of Switzerland. The power of the feudal lords decreased by a corresponding amount.
Interesting and convincing. I too was shocked and repelled by the abuse heaped on Chagnon for reporting findings that his academic colleagues disliked when I read his book ten or so years ago. I only read Demonic Males last summer and was struck by how is confirmed and complemented Chagnon. Your posts add valuable further insights.
Demonic Males really is a great book. Like everything else by Richard Wrangham.
This is interesting - the theory that some degree of narcissism/psychopathy/etc may be beneficial for society has been bounced around quite a bit. The idea that some people are so removed from social contracts that they propel society forward through their sociopathy is fun and plausible.
Yes. Although most leaders today don't seem as crazy as the successful Yanomamö guy, even today's leaders seem higher in sociopathy than the average person. Sociopaths, or at least people with sociopathic tendencies obviously serve some kind of social function.
Especially in the military, in battle, it seems to me sociopathic tendencies would be highly adaptive: cool under pressure, excited by risk, coldly calculating about human lives. Those traits can make a great soldier-leader. I myself would be paralyzed with horror if I had to make decisions in such circumstances.
Me too. I would make such a bad soldier. But I know at least one who would do great in such situations and who is still no sociopath. It could also be down to the warrior/worrier gene.
My new favorite substack. History, evolution, game theory. Great work!
On the simultaneous development of agriculture "coincidence":
~12,000 years ago is when we left the ice ages and entered into a stable climate. We have had an incredibly volatile climate over the last 100,000 years thanks to many cycles of advancing and retreating ice sheets. These caused consistent, global climate change.
Ice ages are generally bad times to grow, across the globe. As Wikipedia puts it:
"During the Last Glacial Maximum, much of the world was cold, dry, and inhospitable, with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere. The dustiness of the atmosphere is a prominent feature in ice cores; dust levels were as much as 20 to 25 times greater than now.[15] This was probably due to a number of factors: reduced vegetation, stronger global winds, and less precipitation to clear dust from the atmosphere."
The stability that began 12,000 years ago enabled the population densities, globally. This vox article has some good charts and quotes from climate scientists: https://www.vox.com/2015/12/12/9894234/climate-change-explained
I think this actually helps your argument. There was significant migration out of Africa starting around 100,000 years ago. Not much happened in terms of developing civilization until 12,000 years ago, when all of a sudden climates EVERYWHERE became more stable, warmer, and wetter, and then boom, agriculture develops simultaneously in many locations.
That is very interesting. Basically, for about 90 000 years, people got used to living rather far away from each other, because there was not enough game and edible plants to live more densely. Then 12 000 years ago, people could provide for more children and groups of humans grew into each other's territories. Then it took just a couple of millennia in the most densely populated parts of the world for agriculture to take over, and a few more millennia in the originally less populated parts of the world. They say America was populated about 14 000-12 000 years ago. If America was very sparsely populated when the climate changed 12 000 years ago, that could explain why it took a few thousand years more to invent agriculture there.
It all sounds very plausible. Thank you for your expert input!
You’re welcome Tove, thanks for your writing!
Perhaps violence is a good thing, then. If it leads to a stable population that doesn't stress the Earth too much.
Well, humans killing each other off is certainly good for wildlife.
"It would require very much of a coincidence if, after all those years of non-agriculture, humans in such different climates as the Levant, China, South America and New Guinea experienced the same environmental shocks within the same short time span." It's not environmental _shocks_ that is the idea. It's food surplus.
Nomadic hunter-gatherers are spending their whole lives finding food, not starving to death, not getting killed by hostile/poisonous flora and fauna, and getting along with their extended family members. And roaming. When the food runs out they have to go someplace else. But we have in the historical record evidence of non-nomadic hunter-gatherers. They had a food surplus, without inventing agriculture.
Off they go, developing better art, and improved housing, and pottery, and fairly rapidly they get trade networks and better boats and so on and so forth. Civilisation! Yay!
But you can imagine a world wide food surplus caused by milder weather for a series of generations, perhaps due to increased solar activity, or less interstellar dust -- a global climate trend. If these good times of surplus ended -- either because whatever it was that caused it reversed, or just because the population grew to the point that the natural bounty did not suffice -- it is easy to imagine people in different places all deciding to save seeds and then plant crops to increase the food supply.
If this isn't the explanation, then the simultaneous development is the coincidence that needs explaining.
I read in a book called Aché Life History by Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado that all foragers that have been interviewed by anthropologists say that they think they eat too little. It could be that our ancestors were dissatisfied with their food supply for hundreds of thousands of years without being able to do anything about it.
I think the "invention" of agriculture could be less about getting the thought of putting seeds in the ground and more about the art of defending the harvest. The inventions that enabled agriculture might have been military rather than scientific.
Certainly, and one idea is that the egalitarian first farmers got turned into slave farm workers by the first military band that was able to establish a state. But if it was 'how to defend the harvest and invent slavery' instead of 'how to create a reliable food surplus' that was the change, we still have to explain why it happened in so many different places at roughly the same time.
I think it was a series of coincidences fuelled by population growth that caused the push into farming and then into despotic states. A number of coincidences were required for people of one group to stop infighting over women. It took a certain time for those coincidences to appear in every part of the world. Like if a certain number of generations passed until something irregular that broke the status quo of infighting occurred.
Rather a straightforward language mistake (I'm a foreigner). Should be fixed now. Thank you for pointing it out!