*When I asked for guest posters in the facebook diner, Ori offered to do this post, which is sort of the “making concrete” of something I’ve believed myself for a while. So I told him “yes, please, I would like it” and he wrote it out for me. Again, the idea is of course the water is going to get choppy. Everything is changing very fast. Now, while it will continue changing for the rest of our lives (likely) maybe even faster, I believe things will get better during our life time — right now, at this moment, the tech is not going the way of a top-down big state type of society.*
Our ancestors used to roam the earth, looking for plants to pick and animals to kill, the never ending search for food for today (and maybe tomorrow) their main concern. Their wealth was limited to what they could carry, and what they could make from readily available materials in a few days of work. Then somebody came up with the bright idea of putting seeds in the ground, watching them so nothing eats them while they grow, and then harvesting them a few months later. And agriculture was born.
Agriculture produced a lot more food per acre, but the lifestyle that made it work appears completely crazy from a hunter/gatherer’s perspective. Here are some examples:
| Situation | Hunter/gatherer behavior | Agriculturalist behavior |
| You’re hungry and there’s food nearby | Eat. It is likely to spoil in a few days anyway. | Think first. Is this the seed corn you’ll need for the next planting? Is there enough food to last until the next harvest? |
| Your tummy is full, and you are feeling sleepy. You’re surrounded by your family members | Rest and relax. Things are going well. | Do you need to pull out weeds? What about animals – are there any in the field that try to eat your crops? |
| Your cousin is hungry and you have food | Share the food. It is going to spoil anyway, and some days your hunt fails and your cousin feeds you | Can you afford to share your food? Do you have enough to last until the next harvest? |
| You and a few of your buddies are mad at the rest of the clan | Split the clan. Just go somewhere else. | You have to stay where your crops are. Either figure out a solution, or fight it out. |
| Somebody and his bullyboys come and demand you giving them some food as taxes. | Remember that big beast you killed? Use the same skills, or flee. | You’re stuck where your crops are. If they really are stronger, maybe it is a better idea to just pay the taxes. |
We don’t know what people thought and felt during the transition period. They didn’t write about it, writing hasn’t been invented yet. But the differences between the behaviors they learned growing up with their hunter/gatherer parents and the behaviors they needed to be successful agriculturalists must have been difficult to deal with. We will never know how many early farmers planted a crop, got upset at their neighbors, and then left to look for food in the old ways. We will never know how many of them planted a crop, harvested it, and then ate it all and had to get back to a nomadic lifestyle to find enough food. We will never know how many rested when they should have been weeding and ended up giving up on the whole agriculture thing when the weeds overwhelmed their garden. We only know that those who did get farming to work had a lot more surviving children, and their descendants overwhelmed those who didn’t.
For most of human history, there hasn’t been another change of such magnitude. Some people lost wars and were enslaved, but they mostly grew up in slave-holding societies and had an idea what it is like to be a slave and how one behaves in that situation. Some people managed to take over territory and force others to work for them – but usually their upbringing included the master-peasant relationship, even if they learned it from their peasant parents. The overall structure of the society was fairly stable.
About three hundred years ago somebody figured out how to get reliable mechanical energy by burning coal. With that invention, the flood gates were thrown open and a wave of new technologies started flowing into the world. We are still surfing that wave today, undergoing a change as big as the one from hunter/gatherer to agriculturalist. So if it looks like nobody in our society knows what they are doing, or what the future will look like, it is because that is the truth. Economics and politics are games played in an arena whose boundaries come from technology. Until the technology stabilizes we can’t even start to figure out what habits will work with it. Embrace the chaos, it will probably outlast you.
According To Hoyt 
I didn’t write it above, but don’t you dare equate chaos with suck. My wife bore four children. We stand a reasonable chance of dying both of old age, not having had to bury any of them first. That puts us so far above the historical average for humanity that I don’t feel justified in whining about anything else.
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Yep. This I believe too.
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It’s getting close to time to harvest the buckwheat, and a sentry has noticed that the bandits are hanging around, waiting to steal the crops as soon as you harvest them.
The Emperor has dissolved the Samurai class, so just hire seven Ronin to defend you and teach you to fight.
Man, I’d love to see that movie in a theater.
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My firstborn would not have survived delivery without modern medicine. For that matter, neither would my mother and I, I suspect (inverted uteri are a rather serious issue). My brother is walking today only because of a medical technique developed less than a century ago. Those developments came out of the chaos of technological and intellectual development this nation has historically fostered. Another brother just fell into a $60k job with no college degree because he’s been keeping up on the constant changes in technology and jumping on every opportunity he sees.
America: the land of hope and chaos. God bless her.
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Chaos is opportunity. Stability is immobile.
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Embrace the chaos …
This. This, this, a thousand times this. I’ve mentioned it before: the single best thing we can do for ourselves is become as flexible as possible. Mrs. Dave and I joke that our family motto is “semper gumbi.” Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. It’s true, more or less. I’m planning a post at some point on learning to be comfortable with the chaos. I think part of that is a – and I hate to borrow from Hegel – dialectical method of thinking; a synthesis of the hunter/gatherer and the agriculturist ways of thinking. Perhaps the work ethic of the farmer, who is up before the sun, breaking his back to get the rocks out of the field, plow an acre or two, get the seeds in the earth and keep out the weeds and beasts. Another part should be the … mindfulness of one who lives in the present. Not the whimsy of the savage, who does what he will whenever the inclination strikes, but the awareness that things change, and the ability to take advantage of the change when it happens.
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A wise agriculturist will still have game available for hunting, even if he has milch cows. After all, the crop might fail, so it’s good to have steak on the hoof available.
Diversification! That’s the ticket!
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And the beauty of the market is that it allows you to diversify while simultaneously concentrating all of your effort on whatever it is you produce with maximum efficiency.
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Markets only exist if you have enough mutual trust. Otherwise, when you deliver stuff to somebody else’s territory, they are too likely to rob you instead. Which means you need to deliver it with an armed guard, which brings up the cost.
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That doesn’t mean the markets don’t exist, just that there’s overhead. And you can’t get away from security overhead, whether it’s directly hiring your own security guards or paying taxes to pay for police and courts.
It’s still better for you to focus on what you’re best at and trade for everything else – even when you factor in the overhead for that trade – than to take time from your most profitable endeavor to satisfy all your needs yourself. It’s why Bill Gates doesn’t wire his own house. It’s not that he can’t do it, it’s that his time is better spent doing other things.
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No, if you’re dealing with a tribe with an inborn propensity for stealing and then lying about it, that means there is no market where that tribe is concerned. The overhead required to keep them honest out weighs the value of anything they can supply, and they have no problem with trying to come to your house and stealing from you as long as you allow them to live among you.
Which is precisely where we are in our dealings with the Left.
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I have a slight feeling that the internet age is going to bring back something more akin to hunting and gathering, than farming.
We won’t work a single field (career _or_ company) all our lives. We’ll complete a contract and go back out to hunt down another. And if we notice a nice stand of grain, or some ripe fruit, we’ll gather it up, even though that wasn’t what we set out to do.
Only way to find out is to travel to the future (one day at a time) and see whats comes of it.
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I have that feeling as well. The industrial age was a natural extension imho of agriculture age.
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In some ways, but in some ways it was very different. In the Agricultural Age people typically lived with extended families, for example. In the Industrial Age, they moved. Jobs may have been more stable than they are now, but they were a lot less stable than serfdom.
I suspect the Industrial Age, and our age, will appear as just transitional periods.
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You are right about the extended families– you can’t farm with only a few sons and daughters… As for the Industrial Age– it was a huge change so yea, transitional.
Did I just agree with you? ;-)
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In England, the Industrial Age hit definitely after the end of serfdom, which was crumbling to nothing in the Elizabethan era — also known as the time when sheep were eating men. It was kinda unpleasant.
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That doesn’t mean that the powers that…was…weren’t trying to shore up their position for the next 300 years. The landed gentry did a number of things including the “corn laws” which were supposed to be a way of supporting the price of wheat, keeping money in the Isles instead of being spent overseas to help foreigners, and to make England self sufficient in the face of such European threats like Napoleon. It mostly subsidized the land-owning class by raising the price of wheat for bread. I have heard it argued, and agree, that the industrial revolution did knock the last of the feudalism on the head, encouraged by the landed class raising the price of bread and enclosing commons so the country population had to go to the industrial centers.
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A farmer worked one landholder’s fields for many years, but then the landholder lost his mail shirt in a clever plan, and he had to sell off some fields to buy new mail shirts, and the farmer was let go. He eventually found a place in a town, where he worked at learning a related trade for several years, but then the guild was taken over by a competing guild and again he had no place.
In his father’s time a commitment to a landholder or a guild meant a guarantee (absent war) of a secure place in the world, but that was all in the past now. Everything was changing. Maybe he should do the unthinkable and travel to a city.
Swap things around with tech companies replacing that landholder and guild and you have my career path in Silicon valley. And looking forward for me, that city that drew that farmer is now virtual, and thus everywhere.
Change is where that farmer gets away from the unchanging view of the back of a mule and ended up in a city where one bad harvest doesn’t mean the family starves. Change is where I get away from being trapped in the TRON cubical farm and become a specialist techno-hunter-gatherer, as described above.
I read Human Wave means because I believe that path we humans take leads forward, not to the perfect factory drone or new Soviet man northern perfected corporate cog, but to a better life, with better choices, for the individual optimizing their own choices in their own best interests.
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Thanks to autocorrect, the oddly placed ‘northern’ in the last para should be ‘nor the’.
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They should call it Auto-incorrect.
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I have been interested in the cultures that developed early types of agriculture or some sort of intense exploitation of resource strategies that then dropped them to go back to hunter-gatherer tactics. There are indications of this sort of development in the Pacific side of the Andes, possibly in the Amazon, and in the East of Australia. Even the lowest levels of Jericho seem to indicate a intense exploitation of resources-grading into early ag. I wonder how much of this was due to the climate changing to the point that the cultures could not continue with the lifestyle because of resource fail – Western S. America if famous for that with the Niños weather patterns – and how much is the mental leap it takes to move from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist. I will not say “yeah” to chaos, but unsettled times are also times for advances for people who can wrap their heads around and figure out how to exploit the new conditions.
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(I say “possibly the Amazons” because that may have been a combination of depopulation from disease, collapse of the cultural structures that allowed for the heavy labor of growing crops in the jungle, and everyone moving away or starving)
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IIRC agriculture requires a more stable climate at least at the beginnings. There could have been plenty of attempts that failed because the climate changed.
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Louis L’Amour wrote often about early Indian peoples – Those Who Came Before – and how when the climate changed, they died out or moved out. And I recall reading something about Aztec (?) culture spreading out as far as Georgia. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
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“And I recall reading something about Aztec (?) culture spreading out as far as Georgia.”
There’s speculation that the stepped mounds of the Mississippian culture were influenced by Central American styles, and there’s a site along the Florida Gulf Coast that shows there was trade between North American and Central America that didn’t pass through the desert.
On the other hand, the stepped mounds seem like a logical innovation from the peaked mounds of the Hopewell/Adena, and I know of a site where the Mississippians built a peaked mound on top of their central, stepped mound.
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There’s evidence that the early hunter-gatherers in the American Southwest at some point began transplanting especially useful wild plants – certain types of yucca and agave, seed-bearing grasses – and coming back to those locations at later times in a circuit. From there (one presumes) the pattern shifted to seasonal gardens (plant, go away for a while, come back and harvest or weed), and then sedentary agriculture when maize, beans, and cotton came north.
I’m not as familiar with the patterns east of the 100th meridian or south of the Valley of Mexico, but one of the BIG developments in Amazonian pre-history was the realization that many parts of the Amazon had been intensely cultivated, just with “wild” plants (cashew trees and other things) rather than corn, beans, squash, and cotton. The tip-off was the black soil and the high density of edible fruit and nut trees and bushes. The black soil had been enriched over the centuries with scraps and humanure until it became self-perpetuating by 1500.
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Rain forests in the absence of human intervention have very depleted soils.
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Removing trees so that animals you can hunt can graze easier (and for defense) is another “trick.”
Think like burning the plains so that the buffalo had a place to eat, which progresses naturally to ranching.
Staying in one place means you CAN prepare a lot more– defensive positions, better weapons, more food, decent medicine, it’s all “just” an extension of “this stuff is good– I’m going to stay here, make sure there’s lots of it, and keep anybody else from taking it.”
Cost benefit analysis.
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It’s interesting that you would see it that way. Most (especially politicians) can’t/won’t. IMO, they tend to have/acquire a “Bandit” mentality. Otherwise known as. “Take from those that have, and keep it for yourself. Using “slave/serf” labor to provide necessary fighters.
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I suspect that’s more of a city thing than a rural one. You CAN’T get that mindset unless you can start out with the assumption that you’re going to be stronger in most cases.
Cities, of course, are the result of a lot of very successful “farmers”…. (I’m going to start using “farmer” to include all growing-food-on-purpose activities)
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The bandit mentality is more natural to hunter/gatherers, which is what we evolved to be. Or maybe it is that bandits focus more on their fighting skills, so they end up winning fights.
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Hunter/gatherers don’t have to DEAL with the people they rob unless they’re part of the tribe.
So, the rule becomes: don’t rob the tribe.
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Don’t forget “…everybody else is fair game”. IIRC, hunter/gatherers don’t have strict property rights.
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Bingo!
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And often there is a comforting myth as with the Maasai. G-d gave you all the animals. those not-people are hoarding them.
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You can also invent pottery. Which is a Big Deal.
In Japan, the environment was so rich you had a sedentary hunter and gatherer society. Then they invented pottery. Population explosion.
Some foods become edible for the first time because you can boil them (or steam them open, if they’re shellfish). Perhaps more important, you can keep your wise old elders alive after their teeth can’t really chew, and wean your babies before they can eat solid food.
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You can boil food in a hole in the ground, or in rocks with a convenient pot/basin shape, or in a wooden/bark pot. All you have to do is put water in it, drop hot rocks in it, and put in the food. I think they call these sites “Fenian cauldrons” or something similar, because one of the big Finn poems describes him and his warriors cooking this way while out hunting.
However, there are obvious problems when applied to porridge instead of cooking game. (You lose a lot down the hole. The scraps attract scavengers and predators. Eating out of a hole in the ground isn’t supersanitary.)
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The Pacific NW used a lot of wooden boxes in food storage and cooking, but mostly they did things with steaming in pits like an island pig roast: put down a bed of coals in a pit, cover with wet leaves, fronds or kelp, layer in food to be steamed, cover with turf.
But pottery and pots are less labor-intensive, and it simplifies processing things like acorns that have to be soaked and rinsed multiple times to be edible.
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I read somewhere that the Incas cultivated more than 400 different varieties of potato, and even had mastered the technique of freeze-drying them for longer storage and easier transport. The Peruvian Potato Institute has more than 15,000 varieties of potato. Corn, squash, pumpkin, and a number of other vegetables were also cultivated.
The Indians of the American southwest, especially the Anasazi, cultivated squash and pumpkin on very tiny garden plots, with the vines extending down the canyon walls. The 400-year drought kind of wiped out not only the Anasazi, but most of their crop staples, as well.
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The Anasazi also deforested themselves into trouble, and the Mogollon people around what is now Phoenix AZ seem to have done similar. That, plus the changes in the area from the Little Ice Age led to population shifts to the Rio Grande valley and other places. And then the Athapaskans (the proto Navajo and Apache) arrived and added to the excitement.
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Interesting.
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Nomadic hunters might have come up with the idea of replanting some of what they gathered if they had a regular circuit they wandered around in. Especially if they had to regularly stop somewhere due to weather.
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Nomadic tribes would certainly remember and revisit favorable camping spots such as springs or caverns. And eventually somebody might notice that where had been the midden from the previous visit to a favourite site was now a bounty of plants whose seeds had been found so tasty last time the tribe visited.
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For anyone who wants to read an example of “farming bad – gathering good” that had even some of the hard-core environmentalists shaking their heads, I recommend _Against the Grain_ by Richard Manning. He advocates a return to hunting and gathering in order to cure civilization of its ills. Yeah, that horse left the barn a few thousand years ago, but if you are looking for fodder for a counterfacutal, he provides plenty.
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You could do it, it wouldn’t be hard. All you have to do is kill off 99.999% of the population.
Funny how guys like that never seem to volunteer to help eliminate the surplus population. At least not from the surplus side.
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The sad reality is that many with that “mind”set infest the agencies like EPA. Back in the 90’s (Clinton Admin.) wrote a letter to an editorial page. He advocated going back to 1900’s transportation tech. Never once considering that 1900 U.S. pop. was only about 20% of today. Today, it would mean killing the _entire_ population of both Least and Left Coast. (Maybe not such a bad idea, if there weren’t useful people living there.)
He gave no thought to what it would take, or the consequences of it happening.
If it took longer than 1-2 *days* society would be overwhelmed by the deaths. Here, in Metro Indy, with a pop. of ~800K, the “normal” death rate is > 100 per day. That means less than 12 deaths per day, per county on average.
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As I recall, around the turn of the 20th century someone calculated that New York would never get above 1(?) million people, because otherwise the city would be literally buried in horse manure.
It’s things like this that make me believe that there’s no such thing as an intelligent liberal.
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Did you pay no attention to their last mayoral election???? New York City is buried in horse manure!!!
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Bull, not horse.
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I’ve imagined an industrial hunter-and-gatherer society. On another planet where the colonists go for high-tech techniques
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Perhaps the pursuit of solar-based energy* is fundamentally a search for return to simpler times** when agriculture occupied 90+% of the Earth’s crew. It is a desire to return to times before the change, when (perceived) stability was the norm.
*For purpose of this discussion, that would be all energy directly derived from solar radiation. Solar energy banked through natural processes (coal, gas, oil) is excluded from this discussion because logic and rationality are not the purpose.
**For a given value of “simpler,” does not apply to all values because see above comment regarding logic and rationality
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In 1491 there is a great analysis of pre-Columbian America. Then came the Europeans and disease and the destruction of any cultures. Maybe Miller was right.
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LOL… Never fails: I was working on my post below this while you were posting.
1491 and 1493 are both great books–I really have to recommend a thorough reading of 1493 to anyone who thinks that Chinese triumphalism is anything new, or that the current mercenary mercantile mode of Chinese culture hasn’t always been there. The sections discussing the annual trading fleets from China to Manila are particularly enlightening, along with the destructive effects that American agricultural products like corn, peppers, and potatoes had on Chinese land use and political stability.
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OK, just to clarify, for anyone who might be getting a little confused. There are four books with semi-similar titles that overlap on this topic. There’s _1491_ by Charles Mann about the Pre-Columbian Americas, and the sequel _1493_. There’s also Gavin Menzies’s _1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America_ and the follow up _1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance_. [Dude, enough with the hyperbole! – ed.]
C. Mann’s books are well researched, and I say that knowing some of the people he’s drawn info from, like the geographer who helped discover the secret of the Amazonian black soil. Menzies . . . has an interesting hypothesis.
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Thank you for the recommendation. I got that book, it is in the short pile.
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Yeah. The mound people were suffering serious problems at the time, judging by the digs, but then the Spanish came by. Too few to fight effectively — but good enough to carry disease.
Exit that culture, stage left.
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Looking forward, you can almost call some of the transitions coming.
Assuming that we ever manage to get our asses out of this solar system, there are likely going to be several different modes of life, which will be as different from each other as settled agriculturalists were from hunter-gatherers, or herders.
One mode will likely center on earth-like planets, and not be too different from what we live today here on earth. Other modes of life will likely be entirely artificial, and focus on man-made habitats, assuming that those can be made sufficiently compatible. Yet another mode of life will likely be entirely nomadic, moving from system to system, maintaining freedom of movement, never settling in one system for too long.
The unpredictable thing is the where/when these changes in mode will take place. Will we be forced to fully develop our own solar system, before the technology arrives to make interstellar travel a practical reality? Say that we develop an interstellar means of travel before we fully exploit things here, what then?
Assuming we survive the birthing-pangs, the majority of human history is going to take place elsewhere than Earth, if only within this system. If you want to speculate on the future, it’s valuable to look back, and consider the modes of life we’ve already experienced.
I do think that the simplistic idea that there were only hunter-gatherers and then agriculturalists is a bit, shall we say, off?
There are many different ways of doing things. The shift from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculturalist fails to include the vast range of nomadic herding lifestyles, and when you really look at things, they all start to shade in together. Here in North America, for example, you apparently have stone-age peoples who managed to modify the biome to their own benefit so thoroughly that we’re still dealing with the side effects centuries after they died out. An excellent work that lays out the ideas behind this thesis is the book 1491. Read through that, and you’ll never dismiss Native Americans as primitives, ever again. Hell, their lifestyles were so much better than the Europeans even after the great die-offs that the European settlers were still having problems with their indentured servants running off to be Indians around the time of Benjamin Franklin.
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“Read through that, and you’ll never dismiss Native Americans as primitives, ever again.”
I’ve never done that. They were ignorant, not stupid.
When Squier and Davis published their “Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley” they were ridiculed for some of the illustrations. Why, they were claiming some of those earthworks were PERFECT CIRCLES! And that sites hundreds of a miles apart shared identical dimensions!
So Squier and Davis added details of their survey methods — and other people surveyed some of the same sites.
Today, their surveys are considered definitive, and used when a site is reconstructed.
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As if no one else could measure distances with standardized ropes? Weird way to think.
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*growls at a lingual shift* They were primitives– and some were dang near at animal level.
The thing is, “primitive” is a measure of technology, not ability.
I think the way that folks assume primitive means something like “stupid and lacking in skills” is a golden example of a fish not seeing water where it comes to world-view we have from Christianity. (I’ve lost count of what it synthesized– Jewish, Greek, that funky “all people are my brother” idea, etc)
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Don’t you harumph at me over linguistic shiftiness, especially at this time of year when so many of us don our gay apparel and feel a little queer over how many people acquire a few kinks over the altered meanings. Shucks, some of my corniest puns employ just such ear wrenches.
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May your days be merry and gay… ;) (runs.)
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Well Washington did just vote to legalize gay merry-age.
Though a surprisingly large percentage voted against. I guess all the rain makes for a bunch of curmudgeons.
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Fight Linguistic Shift!
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So keep your tongue out of your cheek?
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Five bucks says “with,” not “at.”
Unless you’ve become words?
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You may harrumph “with”, if you like. Historic usage suggests that one harrumphs “at,” or “over,” but with is an acceptable contraction of “in agreement with.”
However — on the internet, what have I become if not words?
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Short and fluffy?
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In the matrix….you can become whatever you want, though I understand you have to bring your own spoon.
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Ah, the wonders of semantic drift. You know, Dr. Johnson included only one perjorative meaning for “primitive” in his dictionary, and it was “overly solemn, pompous.”
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Cool, I was once primitive!
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Then there’s the Humans as cattle for alien masters mode. You left that one out. :-)
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“You’re stuck where your crops are. If they really are stronger, maybe it is a better idea to just pay the taxes.”
The birth of the dictatorship, and also the birth of civilization. Unfortunately, civilization came at a hefty price.
I’d like to believe that modern technology will enable us ‘agriculturalists’ to escape the bullyboys, but I cannot. The bullyboys keep organizing into larger groups that we call government. The bullyboys pass out a few goodies, and that causes much of the populace to support them. I don’t see how technology can rectify this situation, unless someone learns how to broadcast a signal that changes people’s beliefs.
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We ARE the bully-boys.
If the roving thieves were too bad, then we’d chip in to outfit our young guys with weapons and armor to fight them. Then we notice that, hey, we got the guys who are strong all in one group, let’s get them to move the rocks out of the paths everyone uses. And, hey, Ogg son of Mogg over there knocked old Mogg over the head, and is killing off his own sons when they annoy him– send our young guys in to kill him.
Defense, common area upkeep and law enforcement. If you’re an attacker, disagree with the uses or break the rules, they’re pretty big “bullies.”
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Some quibbles, more likely to be aimed at someone taking your wonderfully clean layout as a fully fleshed summary than at you.
Agriculture doesn’t mean that you can’t fight– it means that instead of the options being “fight or run,” they’re “fight or give in, although if the demands are too much then we’ll run anyways.” This means that those demanding tribute have to be more careful– they’d better only target farm areas that are smaller than them, because a well-fed farm kid may not be a hunter, but he’ll still go all David on your Goliath. (come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if animal husbandry largely started because you have to keep the animals out of your food-crop; some foods would be better as fodder for meat, at least the parts you don’t use as much)
In some cases, I know this would mean that the thugs got integrated into the community. Well-fed women are a lot more fertile. Having enough food means that you are less likely to have to starve the baby girls to make sure there are enough hunters in five years. Agriculture isn’t without risks, especially since “guys acting dumb to get a girl’s attention” seems to be universal. Result: more available women.
Have enough thug-groups, you are going to have your own thug-group form, probably a lot of the hunters and “problem animal” guys.
For the hungry cousin thing:
The agriculture thing encourages a culture where trading future favors is honored– if it’s not, then you have people dying off because their cousin can’t trust them to WORK next year and feed the whole family. It also encourages a guilt-for-lack-of-foresight in those who are grasshoppers to their cousin’s ant. You NEED a more complex culture to deal with the opportunities, and planning, of agriculture.
The flip side at the “mad at the rest of the clan” thing would be that you think the leader of the clan is being an idiot. In a tribe, you can (often) challenge and kill him. That doesn’t work with agriculture, since “being an idiot” is more of a laying-the-framework thing. This encourages the development of property rights, since those who don’t let each person control the land supporting their one-degree-down kin die when someone screws up.
One-degree-down: think nuclear family, plus anybody who’s older or didn’t form a family. Brothers might work together, but if they disagree– you just split the area. If there’s a matriarch or patriarch keeping folks in line, then it’ll take a lot to split.
….dear Lord, I just realized that there may not be that many folks who’ve seen the Dance of the Matriarchs, especially since so many folks only have one or two aunts and uncles!
Excuse me, I’m going to go be depressed until we start Christmas Eve!
Delightful post, thank you!
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“Well-fed women are a lot more fertile.”
I understand there are other attractions to well-fed gals as well. Once upon a time American gals deemed being known as “corn-fed” as a compliment. For that matter, ever hear any jokes about the “hunter-gatherer’s daughter”?
As for the start of animal husbandry, the guide at Colonial Williamsburg once reached into the corner and hoisted the family musket in answer to a question about how the colonists kept the deer and bunnies from reaping the kitchen garden..
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No wonder that places gets such raves, that’s unusually accurate for a history buff- sounds more SCA!
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All my aunts had sorted things out, arranged pecking order, and exchanged hostages in the form of naming a kid after a brother-in-law by the time I had come on scene. I think Mom capped it by both being the eldest and having grand-kids first.
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Merry Christmas to you all, by the way.
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Merry Christmas!
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A very Merry Christmas to all, you and yours.
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Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth, and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.”
Reconciled. There’s a whole story in that word. Christmas carols are a marvel of concision that all writers could well afford to study.
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Yes.
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Seconded.
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Merry Christmas –
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The next evolution may actually be a step backward toward self sufficiency through personal production. The advances in hydroponics and tower gardening adds a new dimension to agriculture. The monoculture system of agriculture is not sustainable and depends on greater and greater input costs, let alone the issues of increasing pest resistance to pesticides. I am not sure that this approach will renew man’s connection to the soil, but it does add an interesting twist to the system.
Merry Christmas
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Who actually only plants one crop in place for years? That’s how you get an established population of nasty stuff, almost as quickly as not using pesticides sensibly.
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Chaos can be beautiful sometimes. Especially when it means we’re growing.
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