Noble Savages? The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden some suggest

Economist.com ^ | December 19, 2007

[rellimpank]

-bflr-

[hellbender]

The early agriculturalists had another advantage: cereal grains are easier to store and preserve than wild hunter-gatherer foods, therefore providing protection against famine. Also, the article neglects a whole life style: pastoralism, and the benefits of domesticated livestock. It’s a lot easier to get protein if one has milk and meat produced right in the village, requiring no hunting. Domestic oxen provided power far beyond that of human beings, and horses gave mobility, making it easier to migrate in times of famine.

[SouthTexas]

another advantage: cereal grains

Ah....beer.

[LibFreeOrDie]

More here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1946604/posts

[RockyMtnMan]

ping for later

[Matchett-PI]

The last sentence is the most laughable.

[Fractal Trader]

I really get tired of full posts from The Economist. I pay $125 for my subscription. I don’t appreciate this copyright infringement,

[mnehring]

You may want to check fair use laws. It allows for copyrighted materials to be used for the sake of criticism or analysis.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

[MainFrame65]

==> “When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting for us.” <==

Reducing atmospheric CO2 will reduce food crop production, which may finally induce the masses of humanity to eat the environmentalists, which is all that they are good for.

[metmom]

Geez, where do they get this stuff?

[irv]

So was agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?

I read one of Diamond's books for a class a couple years ago and remember thinking at the time that there had to be something wrong with his reasoning. If agriculture was really so much less healthy a lifestyle, then people would have tried it for a while then the survivors would have gone back to the old ways.

This article gives a plausible explanation for what really happened. Once people recognized that more of their children were surviving than used to, they would put up with a lot of other problems rather than go back.

[RightOnline]

Get over yourself. Sheesh.

[hinckley buzzard]

Once upon a time there was a discipline called cultural anthropology. It died at the hands of the postmodern critical theory marxists perhaps twenty years ago. This kind of half-baked pastiche of idle speculations and armchair theorizing is what replaced it.

[Fraxinus]

the article neglects a whole life style: pastoralism, and the benefits of domesticated livestock.

I believe that pastoralism is ignored for two reasons:
1)there is archaeological evidence that pastoral lifestyles came after farming and evolved as a way to exploit land that were marginal at best for grain crops.
2)The authors may have considered pastoralism another type or extension of farming (despite the long tradition of hostility between pastoralists and farmers).

[editor-surveyor]

"HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers."

"Geez, where do they get this stuff?"

Out of their p00p shutes would be my guess. The second generation of humans were growers and shepherds; when were there any significant numbers of hunters?

[editor-surveyor]

" I pay $125 for my subscription. I don’t appreciate this copyright infringement"

If you pay money to read this kind of rubbish, you're not a discriminating buyer! Few readers of the economist have any discernment of reality, so they get away with it.

[metmom]

It’s not even the hunter-gatherer stuff, it’s the speculations about what happened, why, how,....

All that from a few fossils.

Must be some dandy stuff they’re smoking...

[SunkenCiv]

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Note: this topic is from 1/01/2008. Thanks billorites. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[bert]

“War is normality. Peace is anomaly, the interlude between wars.” Bert