Yes. And, of course, nothing that goes wrong at age 60 has any real meaning from an evolutionary perspective, since it has essentially no impact at all on gene propagation. We’re ‘engineered’ to survive to reproduce and rear young. After that, it doesn’t much matter, though we tend to get excited about it personally.
Well, I didn’t pull it out of my butt. Here’s Jared Diamond, admittedly a controversial character and admittedly a 30 year old article.
I confess that I am not up on the latest science here, but ‘crap’ seems a tad harsh.
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9’’ for men, 5’ 5’’ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3’’ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.”
I didn’t mean that hunter gatherers were healthier than modern humans. I was thinking more of the contrast between them and post-agricultural societies for thousands of years afterward. Nor am I asserting it, just saying the claim has been made.
Medicine has come a long, long, long way in just a couple of hundred years, which is a small fraction of the time since agriculture started.
I mean… here’s the obvious reason why it’s wrong:
Societies with agriculture won in every conceivable way. If it was unhealthy and terrible, they would’ve died out back when they made the transition. Instead they lived longer, built cities, developed technology and spread across the planet.
Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things because we can’t change to it unless we start hunting each other. Then we’ll all die of Kuru anyway.
As discussed above, we are comparing individual happiness/health versus robustness of the species, and there are thousands of post-agricultural years in which said happiness/health might have been affected. Also, longer life is not a necessary condition for building cities, population growth, etc. Nor is superior health. Just having more people and a stable societal base (however pleasant or unpleasant) could easily be enough.
You’re addressing a straw man above, but in any case, I don’t have a dog in this fight and don’t particularly wish to argue it further.
If it weren’t for agriculture, 99.995% of the human race would never have lived. That might not be “happier,” but it is something.
Just to be clear, Matt_W and I were not talking about whether in the grand scheme agriculture was a good or a bad thing. At least I wasn’t. The scope of the discussion was much more constrained than that.
I’m happy there was agriculture because otherwise I wouldn’t be here and there wouldn’t be computers. I can’t speak for a Sumerian slave or a French medieval peasant, though. They would probably rather have been alive than not, but maybe they would have envied a hunter gatherer if they could see how one lived. I have no idea.
Well I’ll agree with most of your rebuttals above, that my point was that the agricultural revolution probably made most people in the immediate aftermath more miserable than the hunter-gatherers that pre-dated them. They had to work harder, had more diseases, a shorter life expectancy, more tooth decay, shorter height, etc, etc. From the linked paper:
The rise in population density, the domestication of animals, and the increase in work effort in the course of the Neolithic Revolution increased the exposure and the vulnerability of humans to environmental hazards, such as infectious diseases, and led to the decline in life expectancy during that period.
This isn’t a revolutionary idea. Those losses were eventually offset by adaptation to an agricultural lifestyle over the course of 8-10,000 years, which suggests that the adaptation is, at some level, genetic.
They didn’t live longer, at least not immediately. And my original post acknowledged that agriculture enabled conquest. Whether the culture that is best at conquest is a better culture is an open question. It’s more successful at displacing other cultures and covering the globe, yes, but is it better for its populace? Yuval Harari discusses, in his book Sapiens, why cultures didn’t revert to h-g lifestyles. It’s a ratchet. Agriculture does permit more population density. But once you have density, you can’t go back without starvation. And even if they did try to go back, it would have only taken a couple of generations–in the absence of writing–to lose the specialized knowledge (hunting and tracking techniques, edible plants, storage, migration, etc) that h-g’s rely on to be successful.
Plants do that for us.
“Survivalists” have been whispering for decades how top govt. people have predictions showing how much of the US will be underwater, and the top ranks and wealthy are buying land in certain places and building bunkers. There are also long lists of “consultants” to the rich who sell books and personal planning for where to expat from the US to avoid the most consequences, lawlessness, etc. Any truth you would like to believe will find a community of like-thinkers out there.
Before I read that paper, does it actually support this statement at all? Because nothing in the abstract suggests that it would. And the statement you are making seems absurdly subjective, and virtually impossible to prove given that prior to agriculture, humans didn’t really have real means of recording anything.
Agriculture is what gave humans the ability to actually develop real culture, art, etc… Because life as a hunter gatherer was essentially entirely based on moving around and trying to get food.
It gave some people that ability. The ones who were in charge, not the ones who were toiling in the fields. Agriculture based on manual labor is a pyramid structure, where a very large base of labor provides a kind of food and time luxury for a very small peak of beneficiaries. That’s why people who farm for subsistence even today live such dire lives, it can’t produce the results one needs at that scale; it needs large-scale farming with a large labor force. It is only quite recently, post-industrial revolution, that automation made large-scale farming possible without massive investments of human labor. In 1870, fully 50% of the people in the US were farming. Today that’s less than 2%. A billion people in the world farm today; I imagine most of them live hand to mouth and don’t experience much in the way of the benefits of leisure time.
That’s a nonsensical statement, and objectively false.
Early man, after the Neolithic revolution, still existed in small tribes where there was no dramatic difference in class. There were no Rich and poor when they first started doing agriculture or developing art.
Seriously, this entire discussion is absurd, and belongs in the “liberal stupidity” thread. The idea that we’d be better off as Hunter gatherers is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.
We’re not spouting liberal talking points here. Seriously, this is like climate change where a large percentage of folks who study this stuff for a living agree. This isn’t controversial. People in pre-neolithic h-g cultures generally lived longer, were taller, had better teeth, less disease than their farming descendants. All of this stuff is discernible from remains.
Humans (including non-sapiens) have been producing art for many tens of thousands of years, long before there was any agriculture.
Neanderthals practiced ritual burial. Do you really think singing and storytelling (i.e. music and poetry) wasn’t a thing before agriculture? Agriculture did provide for organized religion with a priest-caste, hierarchical governmental structures like monarchy, and a stratified society with task specialization. They allowed for the creation of cities. (Urbanites have, for most of human history, been markedly less healthy than their country cousins. Here’s an article about this dynamic pre-Columbian Americas.) There are advantages to agriculture, and you’re right, we’d probably have never developed the technological society we have now without it. Moderns are certainly healthier and live longer than pre-neolithic h-g’s. But the shift from a migrant h-g lifestyle to farming saw an immediate decline in standard of living for most people.
I don’t think you know what objectively false means, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to elaborate.
It means that it is not a matter of opinion. Primitive man did not go from Hunting and gathering to serfdom, as you suggested.
Seriously, if you guys want to go live as cavemen, that’s totally a thing that you can do, right now. There are tons of places on Earth where you can go live in the wilderness like an animal, if that’s really how you want to roll.
They didn’t even have written language.
Sorry man, but everyone agrees that the Neolithic revolution was a massive step in the advancement of human culture because it meant humans were able to create some stability in their lives. Agriculture is easier than spending all of your waking hours hunting and gathering.
Again, what are you basing this on? Living as a Hunter gatherer was terrible. What makes you think it wasn’t? Why would primitive man have voluntarily chosen to live a crappier life ?
I’m not seeing any actual meaningful argument being made, at all, that defends this statement you keep making. You are linking to sources, but they aren’t actually supporting your argument.
Saying that people who lived in ancient cities were sometimes less well off than those who lived outside of them doesn’t support your argument at all. Those people living outside of cities were still practicing agriculture.
You seem to be trying to suggest that the Neolithic revolution was a transition from Hunter gatherers to Urban life. It was not.
The only thing I can inside would possibly be perceived as negative is that humans probably ended up consuming a narrower variety of foods, but this was offset by the fact that they could much more consistently get necessary caloric intakes. A variety of food isn’t that important when you are always in the verge of starvation.
This is a strawman. I didn’t suggest this. In fact, I believe I said several times that we moderns are better off than any ancient humans. I also said that the agricultural revolution was almost certainly a necessary precursor for the development of our modern technological society. I outlined several advantages of agriculture over hunting and gathering. I’m not sure why you’re being so defensive.
From one of my linked sources:
- The researchers dug through data from more than 20 studies that collected clues to stature and overall health—everything from dental cavities to bone strength—from ancient skeletons. These studies focused on a wide range of cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas as they transitioned from foragers to farmers.
- The team saw that across the board, people’s height decreased and health worsened as they traded hunting and gathering for the garden and the herd.
- What accounts for the decline? While we tend to think that growing our food rather than foraging for it must be a good thing, “humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture,” anthropologist George Armelagos, one of the researchers, said in a prepared statement.
- A diet based on a limited number of crops meant that people weren’t getting as wide a variety of nutrients as when they relied on a range of food sources, leaving them malnourished—and thus, both shorter and more susceptible to disease.
- Living in agriculture-based communities likely made infectious diseases more of a problem, as well, the scientists say. Higher population density, disease-carrying domesticated animals, and less-than-ideal sanitation systems all would have helped diseases spread.
- This effect was seen over thousands of years, starting at the dawn of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.In more recent times, however, height and health have been increasing, especially in 75 years or so since mechanized agriculture began to spread.
I’m not sure how much more cut-and-dry you can get.
Why would modern humans choose to live far from our workplaces so that we have to spend a significant portion of our day driving vehicles that are gradually changing our climate in ways that will have deleterious effects on our direct descendants? Why did the Easter Islanders chop down their last trees? Why did pre-Columbian Canadian natives decimate bison herds by driving them over cliffs? I explained above how agriculture was a ratchet. Each individual irreversible step along the way made sense. For a great explanation read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Seriously, you should read it; it’s a fantastic book, with implications far beyond ancient members of our species.
For some reason the links there just keep directing to some rebel mouse WordPress thing. But I’m guessing this is taking about the paper published by Mummert?
Honestly, I’m not sure how valid that article is, I don’t think anyone else has confirmed any of her findings. It was just a paper she did while she was a grad student.
There were criticisms made of her stuff, pointing out that she made certain assumptions that weren’t actually true, ignoring things like population replacement, and misattributing the cause of things like perceived reductions in health.
Transitioning to a agricultural society was a massive shift in human lifestyle, and so it would be expected to cause issues, as humans had not evolved into it. This doesn’t quite mean the same things that Mummert suggests. Also, a big part of what you see during the Neolithic revolution was that agricultural societies were successful, and spread. You had populations of Hunter gatherers not necessarily transitioning to agriculture, but rather just being replaced by other populations. Mummert didn’t really consider this, I don’t believe.
Regardless, it’s somewhat moot, as the idea of “was this thing that happened tens of thousands of years ago good” is kind of pointless. I just balk at the idea that primitive Hunter gatherers were somehow “happier”. It seems meaningless, as they lived ridiculously harsh, short lives.
Compared to ours, sure. Compared to a Sumerian slave in 5000 B.C., maybe not so much.
I wouldn’t give up modernity for anything (the flush toilet alone is a fucking miracle, though it was really urban concentration and sedentary lifestyles that made it a necessity). But that doesn’t mean I have to deny it may have really sucked for a lot of people on the long road to modernity.
Is it pointless to debate whether the transition to agriculture was unpleasant? I guess. It’s also pointless to debate whether Julius Caesar butchered the Gauls or just ‘conquered’ them, or a billion other questions. Still makes for an interesting discussion.
That is not what I suggested. It’s like me saying not every primitive man became Voltaire after the invention of agriculture, as you suggested.