People for the last twelve thousand years: “Hunting and gathering cannot support the needs of a growing population. We should create a system where crops can be grown efficiently and in high quantities, and animals can be bred and raised. It will be labour-intensive and require specialized knowledge, skills, and equipment, it will lead to the economic stratification of society, but it’s the best way to not have most of our people starve to death.”
One guy who recently read the Communist Manifesto (abridged version): “But food is literally free!”
I mean, yes, food is not literally free. But there are certainly ways to organize an agricultural society that don’t automatically lead to social hierarchies, and that would be vastly preferable, imo. The enclosure of the commons has been a disaster
So I went and planted a seed, I took care of that seed, I go there everyday check on the plant, protect against pests and weather and then when its finally ready some random guy just comes and “This is ours my comrade”.
Nah boi that’s MY fucking plant. Do you want to eat that plant you gona have to give me something for it.
…and to get something to give me in exchange, guess what? You gonna have to work! You’ll either have to plant something else, hunt, make something etc.
Just because you don’t like to work it doesn’t mean I owe anything to you
Edit: I just wanted to point out that work is not the problem. The problem is the economical model, some stupid ass works, monopoly etc
Nope, that started after the neolithic revolution.
Before that, people had way less kids since 1. diseases weren’t as rampant then as they were after beginning agriculture (turns out that living in close corridors and near your animals that are full of diseases and parasites may not be healthy), and 2. people breastfed their babies until 3-5 years, unlike later, when people only breastfed them for a year or so, or even used wet nurses, which allowed the mother to get pregnant again soon after giving birth.
Of course a lot of kids surely died, but not nearly as much as in later societies up until the introduction of vaccines and other parts of modern medicine.
As for infanticide, I’m not particularly knowledgeable on that, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t nearly as common when births were much rarer and attitudes towards groups that later cultures usually killed as babies, such as disabled people, intersex people, and others that were considered ‘deformed’, were much more lenient.
i remember reading that higher calorie supply makes people more willing to breed, so agriculture kinda caused people to have more kids, because they could.
was infant mortality higher for hunter-gatherers compared to Neolithic or even medieval times?
some information from a quick search (i’m not an archeologist. I was just very interested in Neolithic period at some time 🤷
After the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle with a more steady supply of high-calorie foodstuff ensured by agriculture and animal husbandry, the birth rate increased and demographics changed. Better nutrition and reduced female mobility led to shorter intervals between births, and ultimately to a significant growth of the Neolithic population. This ‘baby boom’ is also known as the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Whether a shortened period of lactation is also a factor in this development, is currently under investigation in a project led by Sofija Stefanović from the University of Belgrade, Serbia. The availability of suitable weaning foods such as cereal grains might have enabled to wean babies earlier, which led to a quicker return of mothers’ fertility.
In the typical pattern of Neolithic societies, siblings are now born in quicker succession, leaving only two to three years between births. Farming communities are known for having many children – not only because they can be supported nutritionally, but also because their labour is needed for the plentiful work in the fields. The physical toll of childbirth probably increases for the mothers, and their social position may change significantly. If they no longer go out on gathering trips as much and remain close to home, presumably with other women in the same situation, confinement and control can be one consequence.
Human hunter-gatherers, for example the Gainj of highland Papua New Guinea, have an average of 43 months between births. Pennington (2001) calculated 39 months for hunter-gatherers, taking the mean of four non sedentary populations. Three and a half to four years between children seems normal for prehistoric people before the Neolithic, i.e. the adoption of agriculture, animal husbandry and a sedentary lifestyle.
How is this child spacing achieved? Mothers breastfeed their babies for at least the first two years of life, and unrestricted breastfeeding suppresses ovulation, preventing further pregnancies. How exactly this mechanism works is still under debate – and do not try this at home: it has been shown that in well-fed, western civilisations with a limited nursing culture breastfeeding alone is not a reliable method of birth control. The continuous, around-the-clock suckling of infants produces hormones in the mother that suppress ovulation, but the energy balance of a lactating woman may also have something to do with it (Thompson 2013).
People for the last twelve thousand years: “Hunting and gathering cannot support the needs of a growing population. We should create a system where crops can be grown efficiently and in high quantities, and animals can be bred and raised. It will be labour-intensive and require specialized knowledge, skills, and equipment, it will lead to the economic stratification of society, but it’s the best way to not have most of our people starve to death.”
One guy who recently read the Communist Manifesto (abridged version): “But food is literally free!”
I mean, yes, food is not literally free. But there are certainly ways to organize an agricultural society that don’t automatically lead to social hierarchies, and that would be vastly preferable, imo. The enclosure of the commons has been a disaster
So I went and planted a seed, I took care of that seed, I go there everyday check on the plant, protect against pests and weather and then when its finally ready some random guy just comes and “This is ours my comrade”.
Nah boi that’s MY fucking plant. Do you want to eat that plant you gona have to give me something for it.
…and to get something to give me in exchange, guess what? You gonna have to work! You’ll either have to plant something else, hunt, make something etc.
Just because you don’t like to work it doesn’t mean I owe anything to you
Edit: I just wanted to point out that work is not the problem. The problem is the economical model, some stupid ass works, monopoly etc
“growing population” is a sedentary problem. Hunter-gatherers didn’t reproduce like rabbits.
They still did, a bunch of kids just died or were infanticided because that was the closest thing to birth control.
Nope, that started after the neolithic revolution.
Before that, people had way less kids since 1. diseases weren’t as rampant then as they were after beginning agriculture (turns out that living in close corridors and near your animals that are full of diseases and parasites may not be healthy), and 2. people breastfed their babies until 3-5 years, unlike later, when people only breastfed them for a year or so, or even used wet nurses, which allowed the mother to get pregnant again soon after giving birth.
Of course a lot of kids surely died, but not nearly as much as in later societies up until the introduction of vaccines and other parts of modern medicine.
As for infanticide, I’m not particularly knowledgeable on that, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t nearly as common when births were much rarer and attitudes towards groups that later cultures usually killed as babies, such as disabled people, intersex people, and others that were considered ‘deformed’, were much more lenient.
i remember reading that higher calorie supply makes people more willing to breed, so agriculture kinda caused people to have more kids, because they could.
do you have any sources for infanticide?
was infant mortality higher for hunter-gatherers compared to Neolithic or even medieval times?
some information from a quick search (i’m not an archeologist. I was just very interested in Neolithic period at some time 🤷
https://motherhoodinprehistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/prehistoric-child-spacing/
Currently reading the Bobiverse take on this. It’s still ongoing and I’m curious where the author will fall in the end.
Except that we do that and we still have people starving to death. Maybe we ought to try something different.
Sure, but the answer isn’t hunting and gathering.
No one suggested that we go back to hunting/gathering.