Do hunter-gatherers have it right?

BBC ^ | May 19, 2009 | Tom Feilden

[Sherman Logan]

Agriculture did not cause sexual inequality.

Right now in Oz there is a lot of argument over whether Australia should impose their egalitarian standards on the aborigines, in whose culture women have no say.

Actual observed hunter-gatherer cultures have generally had well-defined sex roles, with the women in much the inferior position.

The theory that ancient unobserved societies had total sexual equality tells us a great deal more about the fantasies of the "historians" than it does about the life of ancient people.

[Sherman Logan]

For the average subsistence farmer - the vast majority of the world's population - life is still pretty nasty, brutish and short.

This is really silly. Less than 1/3 of the world's population is engaged in agriculture, and a good percentage of those operate well above subsistence level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture

[Mind-numbed Robot]

The article doesn’t mention the true reason agriculturists took over. Farming can support something like 500 to 1000 or more times the population. Any tribe that refused to adopt it was quickly overrun by their newly more numerous neighbors.

Yeah, who immediately cut down the rain forest and caused global warming! :-)

In his book Connections, James Burke traces agriculture as such to the invention of irrigation rather than depending on seasonal floods. This led to individuals being able to produce more than they and their families could consume so they began to barter with others for the surplus. This led to numbers, mathematics and accounting. And so it went until here we are today with one progressive step leading to another and not always linear or expected.

It is an interesting book.

Of course if liberals, or progressives if they prefer, had their way we could trace our problems back to procreation. Without that none of our ills would exist. It is a biological fact that if your parents never had children you probably won't either.