Alternate Development of Civilization

Dirk

Banned
So, as I understand it what happened in OTL was that human hunters, due to persistence running and intelligence, were so effective that they could spend just a little time hunting and gathering, and the rest of the day mostly boning (because, what else is there to do?). Then theeir population would rise too quickly, and there wouldn't be enough food, and members of the tribe would die of starvation until a threshold level was reached. And so it went, with cycles of prosperity and starvation, until the Agricultural Revolution.

My question is: Is there a way that some tribal chief or wise man or anybody can get others to stop boning/impregnating, and shrewdly and carefully manage the population levels? A combination of accidental discovery of condoms and pulling out could help this a lot...what do you think, is it possible? In this way, agricultural would never be necessary and humanity wouldn't settle in one place. We'd be roaming the plains right now with our dogs and sheep and domesticated deer in tow, hunting capybaras and gathering fruits and veggies as we walked.
 
Last edited:

RousseauX

Donor
My question is: Is there a way that some tribal chief or wise man or anybody can get others to stop boning/impregnating, and shrewdly and carefully manage the population levels? A combination of accidental discovery of condoms and pulling out could help this a lot...what do you think, is it possible? In this way, agricultural would never be necessary and humanity wouldn't settle in one place. We'd be roaming the plains right now with our dogs and sheep and domesticated deer in tow, hunting capybaras and gathering fruits and veggies as we walked.
Agriculture is immensely advantageous to a society because the population level is order of magnitudes higher than hunter-gatherers. Not only that, but agricultural society produces surplus necessary to build up a class of professional soldiers and bureaucrats to lead and organize armies.

Therefore said society will, outside of special circumstances such as the Central Asian steppes (where nomads and semi-nomads are viable), be able to crush any opposition to it because it has larger armies and more effective armies.

I know this because this is what happened at every single instance an agricultural society have contested with a hunter gatherer one over land and resources.

So really, this only works out if nobody ever settles down because if only 20% of the population in any given area does it they will become 60% pretty soon and wipe out everyone else.

Also you are playing up the noble savage imagery quite a bit when in reality life as a hunter-gather was more violent on a per capita basis than agricultural ones(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization).
 
Last edited:

PhilippeO

Banned
Uh, Hunting and Gathering have Fewer children than Agricultural society.
They have to move constantly, women give children milk longer to children as contraception, unskilled labor not as valuable in hunting unlike farming, men had difficulty maintaining enough surplus for polygamy, etc

Agricultural society have more severe cycles of prosperity and starvation, with periodic famines.

cause of Agricultural Revolution is unknown. it could be religious, some temple sites exhausted games because of number of pilgrim. climate change, drying climate reduce number of game. etc
 
When the agricultural LBK culture encroached toward the Ertebolle hunter fishers, they did not wipe them out. The two cultures contended for several hundred years before they came to a synthesis, in which the former foragers hd the upper hand. I think this is reflected in the myth of the Aesir and Vanir. And Hegel's idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis may be a distant reflection of this
 
Military surplus isn't the only advantage agricultural societies have. Once their population is dense enough, they can support a disease pool that tends to wipe out isolated hunting bands.
 
Although the original post has a lot wrong, I would not consider Keeley's book the definitive work on the origins of the state and civilization. There is abundant ethnographic, ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence that people (especially men) in hunter-gatherer societies were healthier, better nourished, and had more leisure time than the majority of people in pre-industrial farming societies. Also, many prehistoric and early historic-era hunter-gather societies in the temperate parts of the world such as western Europe, East Asia, the NW Coast of North America and Eastern North American woodlands were able to develop largely sedentary and complex cultures without agricuture.

People did not choose to become agricuturalists and then decide to live under in complex states because they wanted to. People became agriculturalists and subjected themselves to the authority of a heirarchical state because the combination of constrained environments and population increase essentially gave them no other choice. If you wanted to live here and not deliberately kill off your offspring, people needed to band together and establish systems to manage resource exploitation in a more intensive and planned manner. Not all people did that. But those who did were the ancestors of the great civilzations of the old and new worlds.
 
There was an intermediate step of intensive hunter-gathering where people found a nice environmental niche and improved it for their own purposes, intensive hunter gathering. Jared describes it in his LoRaG TL, in particular the improved wetland of the Condah Swamp which is near my brother's house.

The fact of the matter is even before agriculture people were prepared to undertake back-breaking work to improve and stabilise food supplies, it wasn't because they were boning and having too many babies.
 

Maur

Banned
Although the original post has a lot wrong, I would not consider Keeley's book the definitive work on the origins of the state and civilization.
I wouldnt, either. He brings up examples that are long removed from prehistory and pretends they are representative of it. Its bad.
 
Top