What does /his/ think about this famous article by Jared Diamond?
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
>le hunter gatherer maymay
If they're so smart, how come they're dead? Oh yeah, that's right, they got rekt by farmer armies.
>>856553
>yfw
also, wouldn't we need to kill a good proportion of humanity to return to le hunter maymay?
>implying any sane person would want us to be Earthbound and go extinct when the sun decides to enter its red giant phase
>>856553
farmer armies are shit against le hunter barbars
hunters just got lazy once they realized what farming was and became like everyone else
>>856646
>hunters just got lazy once they realized what farming was
I'm sorry anon, but this is wrong. Hunter-Gatherers are more lazy than farmers. They work far less, play far more, and have been observed to possess a "laziness" trait that causes them to shirk hard labor. Farming up until the creation of combine harvesters was a backbreaking and miserable affair.
>>856358
>le civilization is bad meme
Fuck you, Rousseau.
>>856358
>live life just like the one before you without any change
>history
Also
>progressivist
>mights makes right
>most succesful and longest lasting lifestyle
If he posted here he would be called making a bait.
>>856358
>Thinks being at the mercy of nature somehow a good thing
>bases most of his argument on modern hunter-gatherers and assumes they're representative of ancient societies
>Not having to practice infanticide and other brutal population controls is somehow a bad thing
>le marxist class struggle meme
>le sexism meme
Guy is a joke.
>>856668
Aren't we always at the mercy of nature though?
>>856698
Not sense air-conditioning mate.
90% percent shift in lifestyle. Cause not sweeting balls is a good thing.
>>856668
>le tragic social stratification since the dawn of time meme.
>>856646
>farming
>easy
Wtf, why are you even on /his/?
You are clearly not qualified to be here. This is basic history knowledge.
>>856662
There were still innovations in hunter gatherer societies, such as the bow and arrow, spear thrower, needle, fishing hooks, various stone tools and various ways to make fire, it's just that the very low population density made innovation rare and spread very slowly.
>>856698
Yes but it's not a popular truth.
>>856553
>>856646
Didn't Von Clausewitz say in 'On War' that barbarian societies were just stronger and better at warfare than settled civilizations, but training and military discipline bridged the gap between them? The Germanics spent hundreds of years fighting the Romans who sometimes pushed their shit in, but also sometimes got their shit pushed in.
>The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
Listening to Jews.
I mean, I don't want to gas them or anything, but can we just ignore them? It has been established that Jewish intellectuals can't be trusted because they use their intellectual skills in the service of revolutionary propaganda, so why do we still take them seriously?
>>858381
There's a difference between Hunter-gather society and barbarians. For example the Germanics were only semi-nomadic and did practice agriculture, and there conquest of Rome was due to many factors not just martial supremacy. Then you have societies like those of the steppes that routinely conquered settled societies, who are not hunter-gathers in the traditional sense, and famously would always convert to the culture and lifestyle of the people they conquered.
Generally though, unless they have some advantage innate to their geography hunter-gathers tend to lose against farmer societies to the ability of farming societies to have larger armies and to keep them in field longer due to food storage.
I'm pretty sure hunter gatherers weren't that much into equality and pacifism either
>>857070
>spear thrower
The arm was an innovation?
>>858405
>deaths caused by warfare
>not realizing that those numbers are skewed "Cain killed Abel and in doing so wiped out 25% of the human population"
>>858472
He means an atlatl
>>858480
What are you on?
It's still much more likely to die from war in the more primitive societies than the advanced ones.
>While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
This is literally Slave morality and aesthetics: the article.
My prior experience of this guy was that he wrote a good account of environmental influence on civilisation, if overplaying it. Now I find out the "reactionary" bogeymen were right!
>>856659
That Rousseau and even Mill are less popular than Nietzsche these days, is promising.
>>856629
Earth can sustain maybe 4-10 million people as hunter gathers.
Go figure... 99% of the people dead and we would still need agriculture.
i would say high pressure water nuclear power plants, they are insidious. Not only do thy not mak hardly any profit, they run a chance of destroying economies.
>>860659
It's mostly comparing hunter gatherers with early farmers, not modern technological society.
>>856358
Jawad Diamond is a retard
He can understand that different context lead to different developpent of humans depending on location, but he doesnt realize that these difference have been biologically ingrained by evolution resulting in some races now being superior to others
>>856658
This. Compare australian abbos to their indonesian counterparts, who th ey had contact with.
>>856358
How comfy was a hunter gatherer life though?
So apparently it was less disease infected and hunter gatherers were generally larger and lived longer than early agricultural counterparts. I'd say people just got tired of moving around and the idea of land ownership appeals to most societies.
>>860743
agriculture gave you a steady food supply, hunting/gathering could wipe your tribe out if you happened to stumble upon an area where another tribe was already hunting
>>860743
>I'd say people just got tired of moving around and the idea of land ownership appeals to most societies.
I think we just naturally followed the path that gave the most food. It wasn't a purely conscious decision where people thought living in their own filth was the good life, but rather simple survival instinct.
>>860682
Either way, he assumes this to be the primary "problem":
>Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off.
There's a quote from Nietzsche comparing the handsome, charismatic, healthier, pop scientist to the crooked-back, meek, specialist scholar, and then saying he prefers even the latter for their more worthwhile output. But I can't source it..
Anyone? I skimmed "We Scholars" and didn't see it. Possibly in Human..
>>860840
Agriculture can sustain a larger population in a smaller area, but obviously if crops fail it's harder to sustain said large population in a small area.
If an equivalent area had 100 HG's or 1000 farmers you see the problem.
>>856358
>muh noble savage
Jared Diamond's argument is that hunter gathers who switched to farming experienced a temporary food supply boom, until population increases ate into that surplus and led the farmers to end up leading miserable, unhealthy lives. Except that hunter gatherers wouldn't have had any more birth control that the farmers, so how exactly does Jared Diamond think that hunter gatherer societies kept their numbers down? Partly, it was infanticide of course. He mentions this, but he doesn't seem to view it as any sort of drawback of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The other reason, of course, is that hunter-gatherers live in an almost constant state of war with neighbouring tribes, and most males die violently. Which is why hunter-gatherers were so healthy: because they had to be. Because once their population grew to the point where they started to run out of food, they would either take another tribe's lands by force, or be overcome by their neighbours as their warriors succumbed to malnutrition. The only change farming made to this pattern was that it radically altered the trade off that stretching food supplies brought - instead of granting one or two extra warriors, it granted one or two hundred, allowing the less well nourished to overcome their opponents by sheer weight of numbers.
And the really interesting part of it is that when you stop to think about it, after farming came along there were still probably more people living healthier lives. After all, if the aristocracy is, perhaps, five percent of the population, but the population is a hundred times the size it was in hunter-gatherer days, then that's still five times as many people who are living healthy lives. The only difference is that the surplus population, instead of dying to infanticide or tribal wars, gets to live. Albeit in slightly reduced circumstances, true, but doesn't mean that they lived in misery - every study done today shows that poverty /= unhappiness.
>>860865
>hunter-gatherers live in an almost constant state of war with neighbouring tribes, and most males die violently
There is no evidence that wars were any more frequent before agricultural societies. If anything, the opposite is more likely
>>860874
Why would the opposite be more likely? The motivations would be the same. Resource competition and mates. If anything I'd say that warfare happened pretty much as often in HG cultures as early agricultural cultures. The agricultural societies are different in that they can support larger scale war.
>>860874
Hunter-gatherer societies have far higher muders per capita ratios
>>856658
If hunter-gatherers are "just lazy" how the fuck did they become farmers? And you're severely, severely underestimating the difficulty in hunting and gathering. The hunting-gathering system doesn't demand as much immediate labor but try sometime gathering up enough fruits and berries and meat for just yourself and see how "easy" it is. The reason most peoples became agriculturalists, those that could, was because farming was just a more reliable extension of gathering, the most reliable part of the hunter-gatherer system. And why rely on hunting for proteins when you could just fucking raise them and slaughter them when needed? It's a logical transition once it's understood and feasible. You may as well say peasants were lazier than the proletariat since wage-laborers work longer hours and have significantly less leisure time than peasants did under medieval feudalism.
>>860874
>If anything, the opposite is more likely
I'd be very interested to know why you'd think this
In any case, you're wrong. Research done on the remaining primitive tribes of the world - mainly in Papua new Guinea, suggests that the rate of violence in many times what it is in settled societies. I also find it interesting that you use the word 'war' specifically. There's a strong predisposition among many (especially fucking hippies) that because sophisticated societies are capable of inflicting greater destruction through their modern, industrial weapons and organised armies than tribesmen, this means that civilised societies are more violent. In reality, you're just as dead if you get your brains beaten out by are rock as you are if you get a nuke dropped on you. Overall numbers of casualties might be greater when two civilised societies go to war against each other, but this is only because the populations are far higher.
Proportionately, casualties among hunter gatherers are much higher, because the violence although small is constant. If a group of ten men from one tribe come across a pair of men from another tribe hunting near the borders of their lands, they will beat them to death on general principle. Then the tribe the two men belonged to will launch a retaliatory raid, a few more will be killed, and things will settle down again. But this is constant - every year, a handful of men - from a tribe that may only have a few dozen to start off with - will be killed in inter-tribal violence. And this is a permanent state of affairs. Not war, as such, but still, violence is usually the leading cause of death among males in hunter-gatherer societies. And this goes on, until one side gets the upper hand and the losers are either slaughtered or forced to move to less bountiful lands where many will undoubtedly starve.
>>860840
>but isn't agriculture a similarly unstable food source?
It's much more unstable, but stability doesn't matter when people are only considering what immediately provides more food for more people. Hunter gatherers don't have problems with famine.
>>860888
>Why would the opposite be more likely?
Archaeological evidence shows us that an average of 25% of people in hunter-gatherer societies die violently from other hunter-gatherers. That's worse than the rate of death for Russians in World War 2.
>>860914
>Research done on the remaining primitive tribes of the world - mainly in Papua new Guinea, suggests that the rate of violence in many times what it is in settled societies.
Source? Almost all of Papua new guinea societies are agricultural though? not hunter gatherers.
>>860931
Source? I've seen people making this claim before and the data was actually for agricultural societies.
>>860955
There are still more or less uncontacted tribes in the highlands where a lot of research into primitive societies is done (Jared Diamond himself has done a lot of work on Papua new Guinea, although from the snippets of his work I've read it seems like he stuck nearer the coast, where people have more contact with the outside world).
I can't remember an exact source because there's more than one; I think a documentary or two and a couple of articles, about Papua new guinea. Also, not to do with papua new guinea but just the other day I was watching a BBC documentary (Human Planet, I think) about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. They live extremely violent lives (although that's a more complicated issue because it also involves violence from illegal Brazilian and Peruvian loggers and miners).
>>856358
>With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
stopped reading there.
why would anyone take this seriously ?
>>860996
>why would anyone take this seriously ?
Because the only interest they have in history and anthropology is as a tool to use in contemporary politics.
>>860996
>sexual inequality
It's like sexual dimorphism doesn't exist to these people. Had he lived 10,000 years ago he'd be complaining about how there need to be more women in hunting parties and how weak people are mistreated socially by strong people.
>>860996
I don't care about the politics, but off course there is greater social stratification in more complex societies (I don't know about sexual), and disease certainty increases, and despotism I guess is more easily facilitated with surplus resources. (His writing style is a bit sensationalist)
>>861014
All of these are true, but Diamond cherry picks in the extreme when it comes to the negative aspects of life in a nomadic society. Never mind the fact that we'd be essentially doomed to die with the Earth if we lived the way he's grown to love.
>>861026
>Isn't that quite an extreme inequality
Not really, because it'd apply to everyone.
WE HAVE TO TO BACK KATE
