Why did Agriculture take over the world?

Well....no, it didn't come off finished, but why did it take the form it did in America and in Europe? In some ways, despite the different technological bases, Native American cities weren't so different in overall structure from European ones. That need not necessarily be so, but it was.
Why would it be different, and how would it be different? The practice of agriculture ties a group of people to the land, meaning they would focus on more permanent and trade-specific structures.
 
I'm not saying the hunter-gatherer life was utopian. However, hunter-gatherers lasted 40,000 years in Australia, and aside from China and Persia, no state has any claim to last even 6,000 years today. The former seems a more long-term economy than the latter, but the latter has the capacity to create structures the former cannot do. That's the thing that bothers me, how Australian Aborigines could have cultures that date to 40,000 years ago, and how civilizations, China and Persia excepted, don't seem to last anywhere near as long. :(

In Australia's case, they kept up hunting/gathering because they didn't really have a choice... there were no domesticable plants or animals native to Australia. Even if someone from SE Asia contacted the place way back when and tried to introduce Asian agriculture, I wonder if it would have worked with Australia's dry-as-hell climate...
one problem with h/g is that game animal populations can be hammered only so long before they start to crash. It's thought that one of the reasons people turned to agriculture in the Middle East back in the prehistoric times was because the exploding human population in the region killed off most of the gazelles that were apparently the main prey of humans at the time...
 
Some of them, yes. But agriculture shrunk the size of the average person worldwide. Hunter-gatherers contemporary with agriculturalists show that globally hunter-gatherers were taller and stronger than their contemporaries. They also had less bone issues and other lovely side effects of early agriculture. Given the contrast between the two.....

well, a mostly-meat diet, heavy in protein, leads to larger growth, and a mostly-grain diet leads to shorter growth, in general. However, neither is particularly healthy. People today are much taller than both hunter/gatherers and early agriculturalists, because we eat a much more balanced diet with the proper vitamins, etc, and have way more calories available to us. Granted, way too many of us choose not to eat a proper balanced diet, and consume far too many calories...
 

General Zod

Banned
Granted, way too many of us choose not to eat a proper balanced diet, and consume far too many calories...

Well, to be fair to modern humans, human pleasure-reward systems are NOT geared to a proper balanced diet given modern food availability. People are genetically engineered to thrive with rather limited availability of calories.
 
There is also such as issues as heart problems and others which are more likely to strike people who eat more meat than those who eat more grain and vegetables although hunter-gatherers who didn't expect to live much past their mid-30s probably didn't worry about that.

One key advantage of agriculture is that production and results are more heavily subject to human control. All the hunting skill in the world won't help if the herds are too few or make a wrong turn while poor weather affects both groups but one can hope to have reserves.

Agriculture didn't just happen. I've read articles suggesting the key point was when people started planting some seeds but little else. Once clear that this was going to lead to a reliable and improved food supply they became much more reluctant to leave these crops for other people or wild animals to take and settling down followed almost inexorably. From there efforts were made to improve the results...
 
Why would it be different, and how would it be different? The practice of agriculture ties a group of people to the land, meaning they would focus on more permanent and trade-specific structures.

That was mainly a dig at those who think that humans can organize themselves any which way they damn well please to because we're awesome that way. That the New World civilizations, taking into account their greater isolation and lower technological base, were not much different from the Old World civilizations either in terms of organization or relationships with neighboring "lesser" peoples is an indication you can only spin human organization so far.

In Australia's case, they kept up hunting/gathering because they didn't really have a choice... there were no domesticable plants or animals native to Australia. Even if someone from SE Asia contacted the place way back when and tried to introduce Asian agriculture, I wonder if it would have worked with Australia's dry-as-hell climate...
one problem with h/g is that game animal populations can be hammered only so long before they start to crash. It's thought that one of the reasons people turned to agriculture in the Middle East back in the prehistoric times was because the exploding human population in the region killed off most of the gazelles that were apparently the main prey of humans at the time...

Also because they were isolated from major cultural contacts for longer than most peoples. Even the Indigenous Americans had some sort of contact, to judge by the spread of Maize northwards and southwards. And the Vikings show that the seal wasn't absolute. Australia wasn't so...uh...fortunate. I wonder what would have happened had the Maori contacted the Aborigines....

well, a mostly-meat diet, heavy in protein, leads to larger growth, and a mostly-grain diet leads to shorter growth, in general. However, neither is particularly healthy. People today are much taller than both hunter/gatherers and early agriculturalists, because we eat a much more balanced diet with the proper vitamins, etc, and have way more calories available to us. Granted, way too many of us choose not to eat a proper balanced diet, and consume far too many calories...

True....but then that comes from about 6,000 years of building to get to that point. I'm discussing right at the start of those 6,000 years.

Well, to be fair to modern humans, human pleasure-reward systems are NOT geared to a proper balanced diet given modern food availability. People are genetically engineered to thrive with rather limited availability of calories.

Wot 'e said.

There is also such as issues as heart problems and others which are more likely to strike people who eat more meat than those who eat more grain and vegetables although hunter-gatherers who didn't expect to live much past their mid-30s probably didn't worry about that.

One key advantage of agriculture is that production and results are more heavily subject to human control. All the hunting skill in the world won't help if the herds are too few or make a wrong turn while poor weather affects both groups but one can hope to have reserves.

Agriculture didn't just happen. I've read articles suggesting the key point was when people started planting some seeds but little else. Once clear that this was going to lead to a reliable and improved food supply they became much more reluctant to leave these crops for other people or wild animals to take and settling down followed almost inexorably. From there efforts were made to improve the results...

I've seen that settlement and sedentism predated it, which leads us right back to Neanderthals and what might have happened if they'd been around due to their stronger sedentary subsistence strategies....

On the other hand, it does make a certain amount of strategic sense. If I were about to be attacked, I would generally prefer a thousand men at my back than a thousand men scattered in ten or twenty locations; or worse, just a hundred men at my command. Agricultural civilizations can generally support more troops, and quantity has a quality all its own.

And we have to remember that this was not an immediate transition. what we are talking about is one group making a more or less gradual transition to an agrarian lifestyle, and growing as a whole as a result. Then they wind up flexing their muscles by expanding and most likely defeating their hunter-gatherer neighbors, who may as a result take up their opponent's techniques.

Finally, consider the actual likelyhood of a city getting sacked. Yes, smaller settlements would have almost always been exposed to risk of attack. But that also applies to isolated hunter-gatherer groups as well. And the more a city grows, the less vulnerable it is to tribal forces. Yes, rome was sacked in 410, and before that as well. But in between the first and second sacks is an 800 year gap, during which Rome grew immensly. But it was never sacked for centuries, because no nomadic groups threatened them. By 410, the city was in decline, and was sacked by the goths while it was a weakened shadow of its former self. As cities develop, the gap between them and their tribal neighbors grows, as the cities can raise larger, more sophisticated armies with better equipment. And finally, it is interesting to note that often after sort of sack that you describe, the nomads who did so set themselves up on top of the social pyramid in the conquered lands, and the people were never forced from their agrarian lifestyle.

A lot of that is true, and answers some of my questions. Thanks.

Well, this is true. But look it the other way round: just 10000 years after inventing agriculture, we have been able to get to the Moon, and to send probes beyond the Solar system. Cities had come and go, entire civilizations have dissappeared, thousands of language, religions and worldviews are gone; but despite this setbacks, technics and knowledge had generally improved...at an astonishing speed.

If the loss of a culture, as tragic as it is, is the price that has to be paid to avoid stagnation and push civilization foward, I don't thing it's a price that's not worth paying.

Sometimes I question whether sending people to the Moon and probing the Solar System was worth all the misery that ensued out of it. Is it worth Alexander the Great, Ghenghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, and Oscar Dirlewanger for Beowulf and music and the whole thoughsphere of the West in general?
 
I for one welcome our hunter-gathering-industrialist nomad overlords.

What would a nomadic hunter-gather society's post-industrial revolution factories be like?
 
Sometimes I question whether sending people to the Moon and probing the Solar System was worth all the misery that ensued out of it. Is it worth Alexander the Great, Ghenghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, and Oscar Dirlewanger for Beowulf and music and the whole thoughsphere of the West in general?

Yes.

Unequivocally.

The 21st Century West is far and away the best place on Earth to live in that exists or has ever existed. There's been an ungodly amount of suffering to get here, but there has always been suffering in any society. And Western Civilization, bar none, has done the most towards eliminating that. And that's not even going into the whole Art and Culture thing you mentioned above.

It has been worth it.
 
Yes.

Unequivocally.

The 21st Century West is far and away the best place on Earth to live in that exists or has ever existed. There's been an ungodly amount of suffering to get here, but there has always been suffering in any society. And Western Civilization, bar none, has done the most towards eliminating that. And that's not even going into the whole Art and Culture thing you mentioned above.

It has been worth it.

I wouldn't argue that in some ways. As a gay man, I can state that this society still has pretty damn far to go in some ways, as well. But where we've come has been incredible, even if it took, as you said, an ungodly amount of suffering on the part of the rest of the planet.
 
Except that the growth at first would have been minimal, due to the new advents of plagues and due to high infant mortality rates. And while in a few parts of the world sedentism predated agriculture, the Haida and the Salish show that hunter-gatherers can be sedentary as well. That still mystifies me.

But there are relatively few places where a group can be sedentary hunter gatherers. The Haida and Salish managed it because they were sea-coast dwelling tribes who made their livings almost exclusively by fishing. The places were one can do that are relatively few and far between. The Pacific Northwest, where the Salish and Haida lived, happens to be one of them.
 
No corner of the globe today is untouched by agriculture and the new social organizations and realities it made possible (everything from tribal societies to the large state societies like the USA, Canada, and Russia). Even the few remaining peoples that follow the first economic structure worldwide have been badly altered by this. But when Agriculture first came around, it was often a mixed blessing, with disease, the creation of the concept of social hierarchy, the beginnings of a system irreparably connected to a miserable underclass ruled by an excessively wealthy elite, and the birth of imperialism. Why did this happen, and why did it happen in places as far apart as the New World, New Guinea, Africa, and East Asia, South Asia, and Europe? Agriculture seems in some ways a strange adaptation and one that created an immense amount of misery for millions throughout history. Why, then, given that reality, did it end up spreading all across the globe? :confused:

In a word: Capitalism.
 
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