Did not expect to see this story in a mainstream publication, and from --twenty-- er, thirty years ago!
For more details, and options for the future, I recommend "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture"
This article successfully supports an intriguing assertion that hunter-gathering societies existed on a fitness plateau, and for humanity to achieve improvements upon that quality of life it was necessary to cross a deep valley. To extend this to making the claim that human beings were and are universally better off as hunter-gatherers than they are today is absurd.
Publishing this article in a magazine, with later distribution online, is a very special kind of irony given that hunter-gatherer societies rarely if ever developed writing systems.
It seems to me that it would be difficult to separate those valleys from the valleys you see from long term cycles in mass human behavior...under/over population of labor for example (or under/over supply of prey animals and food plants).
Since author is so preoccupied with class, sexism and progressive issues, I wonder how consent culture was in hunter gatherer communities. If a women said no to big-muscle-abe, did it mean no?
Good thing author doesn't need to worry about their next meal, and has time to write such bullshit.
Betcha that women tend to be protein deprived in hunter-gatherer groups, at least the ones where they don't get to run a bunch of buffalo off of a cliff. I should look around for a study based on dental remains.
I've always been amused by the concept of egalitarianism in tribal societies. Prison (or high school) should teach you otherwise
"In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size."
"during a month when food was plentiful"
Don't know if the article discusses the other 11 months, since the next page button doesn't seem to work on Firefox Android.
Oh, and what was that early childhood mortality rate?
In re: the San†, it's not exactly an anthropological study but the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy"‡ shows a life of relative happiness despite what seems like abject poverty. They don't know they are poor, and so it doesn't bother them. They have problems, but in their world all their problems are people-sized, if that makes sense. In contrast, our modern civilization seems Brutalist (as in the architectural style.)
Their way of life is stable, "A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BCE was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012."†
For at least 42,000 years, based on the stability of their tools. IANAAnthropologist.
> What do they do when the hunting grounds disappear? Migrate to nowhere? Curse the gods and die out?
They live in very small and widely dispersed groups, they may go years between meeting other family groups (if I recall correctly. Seriously, the movie is a treat, don't take my word for it, see for yourself.)
The result is that they live within the carrying capacity of their "range", so there may be lean years but actually starving to death is rare. Again, I am not an anthropologist, and most of what I know is from that one movie.
But, obviously, they don't die out, as they are still here 42,000 years later (from the day someone left those tools at that site.)
> Agriculture was born out of need.
We don't know why humans started agriculture. We do know that it is about the dumbest thing you can do with land. Nowadays we have science, specifically ecology, that shows the way to a much better mode of civilization using applied ecology ("Permaculture" is one prominent school of thought, founded by an ecologist.) (It's also fun and easy and solves a lot of other problems, search for Geoff Lawton "Greening the Desert".)
Discernment of mortality risk associated with childbirth in archaeologically derived forager skeletons±:
"This research explores the idea that if excess mortality is associated with first pregnancy, females will outnumber males among young adult skeletons. The sample is of 246 skeletons (119 males, 127 females) representing Later Stone Age (LSA) foragers of the South African Cape. Young adults are distinguished through incomplete maturation of the medial clavicle, iliac crest and vertebral bodies. With 26 women and 14 men in the young category, a higher mortality risk for women is suggested, particularly in the Southern Cape region. Body size does not distinguish mortality groups; there is evidence of a dietary protein difference between young and older women from the Southern Cape. Possible increased mortality associated with first parturition may have been linked to morphological or energetic challenges, or a combination of both."
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I can't access the science article and the abstract doesn't exactly spell out any conclusions from what I can tell.
As for infanticide "during times of deprivation" that is not unique to the Ju|'hoansi people. Nor death in childbirth.
FWIW famine has been a feature of agricultural societies to within living memory.
In any event, if the movie is anything to go by, they are happy. Like, really happy.
But the article does point out that agriculture was a response - folks didn’t farm until they had to.
So maybeagriculture wasn’t the blunder. The blunder was hunting and gathering so hard that you had no choice but to farm. Agriculture itself was probably the best thing our ancestors could have done given the scarcity they created for themselves.
But I don’t know anything about this, I’m just a computer programmer.
> hunting and gathering so hard that you had no choice but to farm
That's not really how it worked. No one culture made a decision to stop hunting. Even ignoring the costs in leisure time, agriculture allows for much (MUCH) higher population densities and a life in a fixed location that allows for development technologies using equipment that can't easily be carried with you (like walls, long term food storage, arsenals full of spears, etc...).
Eventually someone learned how to do it, and discovered after a generation or two that they outnumbered their competitors, who were either pushed aside or borrowed the same techniques to survive.
The book Sapiens explored some of this. I can see how agriculture has shaped us and the planet negatively. Not sure what the alternative would have been, other than remaining foragers.
Makes me think of "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. This book interprets the "Garden of Eden" as a metaphor for the hunter/gather phase. The "tree of knowledge of good and evil" is symbolic of the choice of a population to settle down on one spot and develop agriculture instead of staying on the move.
The amount of controlled agriculturally productive land correlates to more food to raise a larger army which in turn can be used to forcefully acquire more land.
I specifically remember a sentence from the book, to paraphrase: "The hungry lion does not kill the entire herd of antelope, but rather takes what it needs and the herd replenishes."
To quote Ayn Rand (channeled through her character Dominique): "Religion is class exploitation."
From the article:
"Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses."
For more details, and options for the future, I recommend "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture"
http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hum...
http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with...
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