I think I've made that clear. Where else in the world has a hunter-gatherer lifestyle afforded the caloric surplus necessary to do this much manual labor?
Hunter gatherers didn’t exactly live in a state of deprivation. We also a lot of examples of cultures that didn’t farm building giant earth works, like those found at Poverty Point in Louisiana[1]. We know that a number of pre-Colombian societies shunned agriculture and developed quite complex societies like the people along the gulf coast, or the Coast Salish to name to areas of interest. Pre-agricultural forbears of the Iroquois were probably mining copper. Agriculture doesn’t seem to be necessary for organization or communal work.
I thought it was well established that the transition to agriculture caused a decline in general health and nutrition for most humans, shorter, smaller brains, etc.
Suppose that their diets are equally good for health (which is a big supposition). Suppose a hunter-gatherer and a farmer both get sick with the same thing. Why would the first die and the second not?
Having access to an excess of calories? Doesn't make sense. Yes, agri societies make more food, but people are always starving all the same, because the count of people goes up until you once again have food scarcity.
I’d think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as they didn’t have nutrition science (even we barely do) and would have to rely on what they could get to grow, mainly grains. Most likely they weren’t actually fully agricultural and were using the farms to make beer or feed their animal herds.
But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more active participation and can’t provide a surplus to feed as many idle hands.
The population growth problem is the purpose of religion whose main thing has always been telling people to not have sex.
> I’d think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as they didn’t have nutrition science
More likely, agriculture was less healthy because it had less in common with what humans had been consuming over recent evolutionary time. Animals eating mostly grain over millions of years, would be able to produce vitamin C themselves, for instance.
> But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more active participation and can’t provide a surplus to feed as many idle hands.
I think the data from recent hunter-gatherer tribes indicate that they work fewer hours per day to gather food than farmers.
> The population growth problem is the purpose of religion whose main thing has always been telling people to not have sex.
I think the main reasons why agricultural societies tend to build more buildings, are:
- Agriculture allows the production of more calories within a geographical area, allowing much higher population densities.
- Agriculture ties people to a geographical area, while most hunter gatherers will relocate now and then (or even all the time). Pastorial cultuers can go in either direction.
- In fertile areas, not everyone needs to be a farmer. Specialized soldiers, priests, artisans, etc evolve.
- Agriculture creates a dependency on the protection of the land until the time of harvest, which increases the need for some kind of military organization to resist raiding tribes. This develops into something like kingdoms pretty easily, where a single (or a few) individuals control a large number of people.
So, agriculture increases population density, promotes specialization, and encourages local investments in land and buildings, and requires some kind of soldier and ruling class. Over time, it's not strange that the ruling class invent non-violent means of retaining control, such as buildings that are impressive/and or easy to defend, social structures and religions that justify their "right" to power, etc.
For hunter-gatherers, the hunter and warrior roles overlap. Essentially, the same tools are used for providing food and protecting territory, so no special warrior class elite develops. In consequence, the chieftain is likely to be a first-among-equals, who participates in the hunting and fighting just like the others, and who is more likely to have his role due to personal ability rather than inheritence. With every man being a warror, a semi-democratic system would typically exist, since any sub-group that had the support of more than half the men would be the strongest one in a fight.
Just as an analogue, democracy in the West just happened to come at the same time that conscript armies armed with cheap firearms replaced elite knights/men-at-arms. A similar pattern could be seen in Greece and Rome, both of which had some kind of rule by the people for as long as their armies remained citizen armies. (When Rome switched to professional soldiers, it only took a couple of generations for Sulla, Ceaser and Octavian to arrive.)
Exactly how many calories does one need to do this? What is the cutoff? What papers are researchers are you building your claims on?
How long can they work on such tasks? Maybe, if they build slowly, then one needs almost no "caloric surplus".... There's so many holes in such a wild and absolute claim that I don't see it as much of an argument against the experts that have built on previous knowledge and have published peer reviewed papers on this topic.
Yup, without any doubt, because a society can not possibly work stone without eating meat. Just look at the the lack of stonework in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures. Oh, wait...
I think I've made that clear. Where else in the world has a hunter-gatherer lifestyle afforded the caloric surplus necessary to do this much manual labor?