It is not an inferior system.
You will take 80% of the calories in bland meals in exchange for a 90% chance of surviving the winter and having 60% of your children survive.
Hunting/gathering almost eliminated the human race. 800K years ago we were down to only 1200 folks.
Humanity took so long to invent agriculture - & many groups never did - because it's an inferior system.
A Sumerian farmer ate less food which was less nutritious, & had to expend more calories to grow it, than his hunting counterpart.
There had to be a pressing reason to do so
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@Sartor1836
You’re unknowingly peddling now defunct theories from people like Locke et al, it’s 300 years out of date
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@Sartor1836
People living 800K years ago were not modern humans, for a start.
Homo Sapiens is about 300K years old, and this genetic bottleneck was caused by a once-in-a-million years disaster.
Hunter-gatherer ate better, lived longer, and were healthier than early farmers. That's a fact.
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@bswagspeare
And there were far fewer of them because they lived longer only if they made it to adulthood first - something they were much worse at doing than farmers were.
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@Sartor1836
I can't believe so many people are shitting on your post when all of us are only here thanks to advances in husbandry, agriculture, horticulture and food preservation techniques that would be unattainable in a hunter-gatherer society.
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@cfcisnvil
The argument for hunter gathering is essentially the argument for anarchoprimitivism, which is also an argument for human near-extinction. John Gray sort of reasoning.
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@Sartor1836
The first story in the Bible is about how the hunter-gatherer lifestyle ruled and how humans fucked up big time for giving it up.
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@Triceratops235
The first story in the Bible is actually about how the first man was not supposed to hunt at all, but was given the world’s first and best farm “to tend it and to keep it”, and how he fumbled the bag.
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@Sartor1836
I'm ...not sure about that? Whatever caused the bottleneck 800K years ago was probably some kind of external event like the Toba catastrophe. Agriculturalists wouldn't have weathered ten years of nuclear winter much better than hunter-gatherers.
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@Sartor1836
I thought it was pretty well established that general health declined with the transition agricultural civilization (as measures by height, etc.). The carrying capacity per unit of land went up, of course, but diets became massively less diverse.
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@Sartor1836
@greg_doucette
Also - and I mean do these people ever pick up a single book? - turning grass into wheat probably took thousands of years.
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@Sartor1836
I am genuinely baffled that anyone would consider agriculture to be inferior to hunter gathering. There is no way in which this is true. Aside from language and cooking it might be the most significant human invention.
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@Sartor1836
Really love the idea that farming is worse in every way and people all over the world chose to do it for no clear reason. The real reason, especially considering the Amazon news, is probably that farming societies kept forming and getting destroyed for thousands of years
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@Sartor1836
Op said nothing about food being bland, he said it was less nourishing and provided fewer calories to survive on.
Settled agriculture increased the risk of famine.
Hunter gatherers often adopted agriculture off and on, it was getting stuck in only one mold that caused problems.
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@Sartor1836
The most meaningful downside to the hunter-gatherer mode of production vs early agriculture was space-inefficiency.
Otherwise, H/G groups enjoyed much greater redundancy than early farmers because they had the flexibility to migrate when their food supplies were disrupted.
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@Sartor1836
The question that must be asked is “do you like civilization” if not, then sure hunting and gathering is fine but TBH it’s not really a dichotomy, lots of people had cyclical systems of season ag with summer hunting but large scale societies just aren’t possible w/o some ag
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@Sartor1836
Natural selection, innit? Farming clearly offered a survival advantage. If it didn’t, the farmers wouldn’t have outmassed the gatherers over time.
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@Sartor1836
The "agriculture is bad" trope is part of a brand of exceptionalism that many modern people use in evaluating the ancient world. Yes, a healthy adult hunter in the ancient world might do better than a comparable farmer, but you wouldn't be the hunter, you'd likely be a dead baby
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@Sartor1836
lol every time someone starts with the premise the inferior system won they are wrong
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