Why did Humanity choose to be Farmers instead of Hunter-Gatherers?
>>521957
>choose
>>521957
Chasing one's food gets tiring after a while.
>>521957
More stable source of food
>>521963
>>521964
>>521966
Bullshit.
>>521957
Societies which didn't become agricultural, horticultural or herders were displaced, murdered or assimilated by societies which did.
Societies which didn't assimilate often had higher protein intakes than ones which did assimilate, but they had lower population sizes.
Societies which didn't assimilate required fewer hours of engaged behaviour ("work") than ones which did assimilate, but they had lower population sizes.
>humans controlling their society
This ain't FULL COMMUNISM mate.
>>521957
IIRC around the time it first developed in the middle east was suffering from a drought (general bad conditions etc), while there had been a period of good conditions prior to this, so much so that some hunter gatherer populations were sedentary rather than nomadic, and that the populations were denser than hunter gatherers in many other regions due to it being a bountiful region. So pretty much due to the relatively high population density and worsening climatic conditions, it could be seen that the development of agriculture was a 'necessity is the mother of invention' scenario.
Found this on wiki just now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture
>The Natufian culture was an Epipaleolithic culture that existed from 12,500 to 9,500 BC in the Levant, a region in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was unusual in that it was sedentary, or semi-sedentary, before the introduction of agriculture. The Natufian communities are possibly the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world.
>>521957
They traded freedom for safety
>>521957
Much of humanity didn't, but it turned out to be part of the winning strategy when the game is power.
>>521957
farmers breed out of control and none of the second generation have skills to do anything else.
it's literally cancer.
A continuous food supply and a guaranteed warm shelter mean that you can have more children survive into adulthood. Which means you will eventually outnumber the hunter gatherers, field armies, kill the men and take the women as trophies.
>most megafauna became extinct around 12000 years ago
>most of humanity started transitioning to farming about 12000 years ago
It went like this:
>men go out to hunt
>find a herd of animals
>decide to target and kill the biggest one
We simply hunted the prey to extinction. Eventually, all that remained were animals so small that hunting them for sustenance was not feasible any longer.
>>522042
Lol are you really saying agriculture is cancer?
>>521974
> calls bullshit on it being because it was a more stable source of food
> states that H/Gs died out to farmers because they had lower populations and were eventually assimilated
> then makes a random statement about humans controlling their society and communism
You get exactly one guess as to WHY the farmers had a significantly higher population than the H/Gs.
There's actually a few reasons, but they all pivot around the same fact.
Take your time.
>le farming was more "stable"
I'm not buying it, how is farming a more "stable" source? I'm talking about stone age farming, not modern industrial farms. Your crops are always at chance to fail, by weather, wild beasts, just being planted wrong, tempereature being off, the soil being unsuited for farming, pests and diseases. And if your years harvest is fucked, then you starve. Wild animals on the other hand, are always there, and hunting is always a possibility for food.
>>522063
did i stutter nigga
>implying that the switching to agriculture meant the end of hunting and gathering
Ffs start thinking you do them all at the same time fucking mongoloids
>>522073
it's still far more safer and better than running through the woods hunting boars and picking berries
And it wasn't just regular farming, another steady source of food was tending livestock so you could have fresh meat for most of the year instead of going hunting
>>522073
For starters, farming societies almost always started near rivers and lakes, so there were fish as a supplementary source of food and there was a supply of water that did not depend on weather. So it is not like primitive farming was more stable than hunting-gathering everywhere, but in the places where it was stable, the populations were able to grow at rates three to five times higher than hunter-gatherers.
>>522069
Farming reduced food stability due to reduced food source dependence.
It also lowered calorie intake per person.
Having hordes of disposable unwanted males maturing each year gives you military technical advantages.
Take your time. You'll be able to work out that peak volume isn't stability and that total social calories aren't calories per head.
>>522089
Yes, hunting and gathering survived but not anymore as a primary source of food as it was
>>522062
Nice little hypothesis you've got yourself there. Shame it's bullshit.
>>522062
Then why do people still hunt today
>>522135
Because it's fun.
>>521957
because most of the humanity is far more hedonistic than say stoic and other doctrine which do not take as serious the desires for materiality.
Even the hedonists who try to meditate stick to a hedonism which is non-material, but it remains a hedonism.
Then there is women who are explicitly hedonistic and histrionics and most men trying to please women contribute to further hedonism.
ans most people love to love their desires anyway. it is not as if most people are on earth to adhere to another doctrine.of course, hedonistic parents will do anything to have children like them. so it is not as if you can escape form this.
the original Farmers have faith in the rationality, through the induction, which permits to manufacture a framework for ''objectivity'' which shows how much the humanity clings to the abstraction of certainty in a desperate attempt to refuse the contingency of events [and it is a choice, in the first place, to think in such terms of contingency/necessity of life/events].
science/technology has always been easing in our life, and conflating this explicit purpose with ''giving us knowledge in accessing truths about the objective reality'' and other realist-rationalist fantasies to legitimate the development of this field [pure hedonism having always bad press] entice people to adhere to this doctrine.
then you have the liberals and libertarians who created the concept of progress in science and this progress would somehow gives progress in society . this positivism has obviously failed which leads to rationalist to fall back on his faith in his concept of ''inter-subjectivity''.
>>522193
Of course, the connection of the speculations, by the rationalist, to ''the reality and objectivity'' is bogus which leads the rationalist to say, once you ask him the relevance of what he calls science, that ''only science can bring computers and everybody knows that we cannot live without them'' like you find so many here.
so there you are : we love our desires, our pleasures so much and despise our pains so much that we would have faith in any conventions promising to alleviate our hardships and reassuring us with ''certainty truth, knowledge, objectivity, universality''.
>>522154
Well, fuck you too, good sir.
>>522135
Allow me to illustrate this simple idea, my man. First, there were plenty of animals in nature. More than enough to support the population of man. But people bred, and always grew in numbers. The more people that exist, the more animals we had to hunt, and the more we hunted the more we could breed. Eventually there were not enough prey to feed us all, we had to adapt or perish. So we switched our main source of sustenance from hunting, to agriculture. To some extent agriculture and farming have always existed side by side, it's just that we preferred ro rely on hunting while that was feasible. When we could not any more, we switched to farming. Hunting still took place, but not to the same extent.
>>522211
Do you have any sources? Because that all sounds like it was manufactured in your rectum.
>>521957
>humanity
You're trolling right? There are still hunter-gatherers living with us today in Africa m8. It's not like humanity stops doing something just because they start doing shit in some parts of the world.
It's like saying the Stone Age ended because we ran out of stone.
>>522215
The source is me, that's my own take on what happened. For my inspiration, start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
>>522109
It was a gradual transition.
>>522220
Maybe you should read your sources again and realize that none of it actually suggests what you're proposing here:
>Allow me to illustrate this simple idea, my man. First, there were plenty of animals in nature. More than enough to support the population of man. But people bred, and always grew in numbers. The more people that exist, the more animals we had to hunt, and the more we hunted the more we could breed. Eventually there were not enough prey to feed us all,
Just because certain species died off it doesn't suggest that there wasn't enough prey to support human populations.
>>522239
>Just because certain species died off it doesn't suggest that there wasn't enough prey to support human populations.
That's exactly what i mean. If men would have continued to rely on hunting instead of switching over to agriculture as their main source of sustenace, they would have hunted the animals to extinction. And then they wouldn't be able to live off of hunting. And woul either way be forced to switch over to agriculture.
>>522243
>they would have hunted the animals to extinction
Yeah but there's nothing to support that idea. It's completely unfounded speculation. Exactly how big of a role humans had in the mega fauna extinctions is hotly debated. If anything hunting seemed more sustainable than agriculture considering hominids practiced it for millions of years without mass extinctions.
>>522108
>Farming reduced food stability due to reduced food source dependence.
Farming is not entirely stable due to being limited to fewer species as sources of food, which makes it vulnerable to plagues. That is true. It is still more stable than hunting, since:
Your buddy won't make a mistake during farming,which could cause his death and the escape of the animal go in the process, causing your clan to starve for a few days. The likely hood of plagues wiping out your crops is infinitely small compared to some guy slipping on wet mud and smashing his brain open, increasing the amount of food you now have to obtain per hunt to feed his woman and children.
It is not like every animal is an ideal prey. Other carnivores and omnivores will often be parasite-ridden.
If you want your population to grow, every hunter will have to produce food for 5. So every hunter in the tribe will have to kill roughly 40 pounds worth of animal every day. That is more than enough to drive populations of the better preys to extinction, or at least force them into the territory of another tribe.
And if your preys move into the territory of another tribe, you will have to fight them for the territory.
And we know hunter-gatherers struggled for territory, which means they struggled quite a bit for food. The most violent societies in human history, based on the amount of humans killed by other humans, were hunter-gatherers, which clearly means that they did not have an easy time acquiring food most of the time.
>It also lowered calorie intake per person.
It definitely lowered protein intakes. I would like some source on the lowered calorie intake, since outside of a few tropical areas, hunter gatherers would probably have to spend months without fruits as a calorie source and have to rely on things like animal fat for calorie sources. Plants don't produce usable food all year long.
>>521957
Because hunter gatherer societies are trash
See : Africa
>>522281
Even chimpanzees have hunted monkey and bird species to extinction.
>>522281
>Yeah but there's nothing to support that idea.
Yes, common sense supports it. Kill an animal - it dies and it can't bear offspring. Kill too many of the animals - they can't sustain a population any longer. Kill them all - they go extinct. A logical and not far-fetched theory is that humans brought the large animals to extinction, why? Well you want to kill the largest animal in the herd of course, it has the most meat.
>>522243
>If men would have continued to rely on hunting instead of switching over to agriculture as their main source of sustenace, they would have hunted the animals to extinction
It's almost as if you don't think stable hunter-gather populations existed. By your logic they would have all starved to death long ago as they never adapted to agriculture.
clearly y'all niggaz never played Banished
Hunting and gathering gives a varied food source with relatively little work, but it takes up a lot of space, and it cannot sustain large populations
>>522307
Source? Genuinely curious about that.
>>522309
You keep ignoring climate. This is how you logic seems to work. "We killed off the mega fauna so we were doomed to kill off all other creatures we hunted". But you don't consider that maybe climate was a sigficant if not the most sigficant factor in killing off mega fauna.
>>522334
http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/chimpanzees-are-over-hunting-their-prey-local-extinction
>>522316
Did you check my graph? It clearly shows that the hunter lifestyle subsisted even after the agricultural revolution.
>>522334
I'm not buying into the climate change theory. By occam's razor, overhunting seems the more reasonable explanation, to me. What evidence is there of climate change causing the quaternary extinction event?
>>522309
There is a certain degree of truth to this, but it's not like agriculture isn't also wildly damaging to wildlife.
In fact, it may be more so, since you not only kill the animals, you also take their habitat, ensuring that ALL the animals disappear.
>>522340
> what evidence was there for climate change
Gee, I don't know, it might be that the mammoth isn't a particularly efficient animal once the climate gets warmer?
>>522344
This is a thing, and you're right. But the alteration of the land due to agriculture can also be a positive thing for certain species. It can be both good and bad, some specied thrive in the landscapes created by agricultural techniques.
>>522348
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#Arguments_against_the_temperature_hypothesis
>More recent research has demonstrated that the annual mean temperature of the current interglacial that we have seen for the last 10,000 years is no higher than that of previous interglacials, yet some of the same large mammals survived similar temperature increases. Therefore, warmer temperatures alone may not be a sufficient explanation.[47][48][49][50][51][52]
In addition, numerous species such as mammoths on Wrangel Island[53] and St. Paul Island survived in human-free refugia despite changes in climate. This would not be expected if climate change were responsible.
>>521957
Because it provided us with more free time and assurance. We aren't assured we'll catch prey on the hunt, but we sure in hell is sure we'll grow some tomatoes.
>>522340
Your graph is shit and proves nothing. Isolated tribes that had nothing to do with agricultural revolution went about their business completely unaffected one way or another.
>>522334
And your insistence that climate change killed the megafauna is also shit. Those animals survived plenty of ice age cycles just fine, even if individual populations were trained.
>>522357
strained*
>>522357
>Isolated tribes that had nothing to do with agricultural revolution went about their business completely unaffected one way or another.
I know. That piece of fact is fully compatible with my graph. Hunter lifestyles subsisted, but not as the main source of increased human settlement and civilisational development.
>>522316
>It's almost as if you don't think stable hunter-gather populations existed. By your logic they would have all starved to death long ago as they never adapted to agriculture.
They existed because their population remained VERY low. And they also regularly fought other tribes, maintaining that low population.
>By your logic they would have all starved to death long ago as they never adapted to agriculture.
In many parts of the world they would have starved to death (and probably many did) had they not switched to agriculture.
Look at all our extinct cousin species who died without ever meeting us.
>>522355
there might actually be something to this, it's quite interesting.
It also sort of explains why 'civilization' was so slow to develop in Africa, since the resident rival species might have been more competitive than the ones in Europe
>>522370
you can learn quite a lot of interesting things, just by looking at the evidence and using your ability to reason.
>>522339
>local extinction
Well I was talking about real extinction. Still interesting.
>>522340
How is over hunting the simpler answer? Massive climate shifts are pretty good at killing off animals. One species being solely or even mostly responsible for the extinction of all those animals is pretty radical.
>>522304
Those are specifically hunter gatherer societies though.
Even in West Africa and South Africa they had farmers and domestication.
You can say this about the bushmen though.
>>522375
> one species is prettty radical
But that happens all the time.
Rats, cats and dogs have whiped out plenty of species in Australia, for instance, and they are a lot less efficient killers than humans.
>>521957
The same reason your mom decided not to abort you -
Social economic benefits.
>>522387
A single lone cat also whipped out an entire bird species in some Pacific Island in less than a decade, I think.
>>522387
Well nobody is arguing that climate was the culprit in those cases. I just don't really think you can really pull out Occam's razor here.
>>522393
it did indeed, though it is debatable if it was only one cat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephens_Island_wren
>>522396
you can, though.
As another guy pointed out, the introduction of humans is actually the only thing that correlates all the cases of megafauna going extinct.
Besides, these animals aren't very efficient, mammoths took years to reach sexual maturity, so their population was slow to recover. They were also dependent on the elder animals to communicate where the good supply of food was located, once they died out, the younger ones didn't have the same knowledge of the land.
>>521957
it was a stochastic process
took 700,000 years for a hit
>>522408
Well I suppose you're right about that. But I still don't see anything that would lead me to believe that the over all supply of animals decreased.
>>522435
>But I still don't see anything that would lead me to believe that the over all supply of animals decreased.
I have reason to believe then that you are blind.
>>522435
well, plenty of animals have been whiped out by hunting.
Bison, for instance, only took a couple of hundred years.
>>522457
>I don't see why other more adaptable species wouldn't have filled in the gaps.
Humans?
>>522467
No like deer or elk.
>>522457
>Why is that? Sure some species died out but I don't see why other more adaptable species wouldn't have filled in the gaps.
Because there aren't rules. There's limits, but no rules, pham.
>>522471
Not to be an ass, but you're kind of a slow thinker.
>more stable source of food
No, not really.
I don't believe hunter gatherers were somehow unususlly good at predicting/planning ahead (bearing in mind that often farmers had a worse diet than hunter-gatherers)
So.. alcohol maybe? Makes sense kinda
>>522474
>humans kill mammoths
>this leaves open grassland
>local deer population explodes
Humans and large herbivores don't directly compete for food.
>>522479
actually birch forests took over when the mammots disappeared.
>>522479
But it doesn't always happen like this.
>Humans kills mammoths
>Open grasslands
>Local deer attempts at roaming grasslands
>Provide new buffet for local wolves.
>>522480
Well humans don't eat birch trees either.
>>522073
In al those scenarios your crop is rarely completely destroyed. I don't know what neolithic yields were but in modern times a disaster is making less than your inputs farmers still have grain.
>>522484
YOU don't eat birch trees.
>>522484
well humans literally chopped down every single forest in europe. but that's the subject of another thread.
>>522482
Given their history I think the deer can survive wolf attacks without getting wiped out.
>>522495
Yeah smart guy I know that.
>>522501
I'm saying, don't generalize, you don't know what the fuck I do and I don't know what the fuck you do. Keep it like that.
>>522520
D-do you eat birch...?
>>522520
If you don't want me the generalize then prove it, because I've never seen that shit.
>>522471
>>522457
Depends strongly on the area. Some species would have taken the ecosystem niche in some continents, but not really in others.
Islands, peninsulas and closed valleys would have been more than likely fucked up for tens of thousands of years.
And either way, fast growing species are usually small and not really that good for humans. You could actually starve to death by attempting to sustain yourself on rabbits and the like.
Hunting and gathering actually means you don't have to spend much time working, which means more sexy time, which means more kids (mouths to fee) so more time working is needed, along with a stable food source.
Not the only reason, but it may have been a contributing factor.
>>522529
Not saying I do, but I'm not saying I don't
>>522577
>sustain yourself on rabbits and the like
Which is why I said deer or elk. I guess I could throw in bison. Hunter-gather societies survived for a long time after most of the mega fauna went extinct.
>>521957
Probably had something to do with women.
A good in between route would have been nomadic flock tenders.
>>522594
But that depends on deer, elk and bison already living in the existing area, or a nearby area, and tolerating local predators and natural barriers with the success of the mammoths. It seems unlikely to happen in Islands and would take quite a while to happen in other isolated ecosystems.
Plus, these elk and deer would be followed by wolves, their natural predators, so you could indeed make the area being bad for humans for decades, until the populations in the ecosystem readapt to a lost member. Possibly leading to this hunter-gatherer group moving out of their territory due to temporary scarcity and coming into conflict with another hunter-gatherer group.
Because it's more efficient to be farmers than hunters, in many ways.
Just like we choose fossil fuels over "green energy".
>>521957
Crops can't run away.
Its a lot fuckin easier.
>>522906
crop have diseases and can burn and the fruits can be stolen
>>521957
not all of them did.
t. steppe nomads.
>>521987
But native Americans developed it independently, can't be blamed on a middle-eastern drought
>>525428
Yea and several other places including Papua new guinea, I used that example because it's been extensively studied and it's the first ever development of farming.
>>525428
>>525469 me
Pure conjecture, but I wonder if the population putting a strain on the available resources of a regions was a large factor in most if not all cases where farming developed. I know that the highlands of Papua are notoriously poor in food resources (the largest native mammal is the tree kangaroo).
Not sure about America specifically, I know that it would have taken a long time for the domestication of Teosinte to even approach the productivity of corn.
>>525094
Yeah, so?
That clearly didn't do much to impede human progress.
>>521957
The same reason do most every thing, it's easier
Because the meaning of life is to find the next place to sit that made it easier to do so
>>522906
no its easier to hunt and eat meat
thets why people had to start digging dirt and growing things
they ate all the meat
