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feedmegin posted:Hmm. If opium is better than heroin or cocaine and easy to make then how come everyone does heroin or cocaine now instead of opium? People do opium all the time these days, it's called Vicodin.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:38
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goose fleet posted:People do opium all the time these days, it's called Vicodin. no it isn't
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Jul 7, 2015 15:40
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I'm saying that in the sense that it's an opioid drug with very widespread, chronic abuse.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:44
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goose fleet posted:Between the rise of agriculture and the first cities, how did most ancient humans live? They had to be tied down to one place because they were growing crops, so I'm guessing small villages? Why did it take thousands of years before these turned into cities? I'm no expert but that sounds about right. Hunter-gatherers lived in groups of 20-30 people. When they turn farmers you still have to build up a population to where you can specialize labor and sustain even a small city which would be a few thousand people at the earliest. Takes a while to make more humans.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:29
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SeaWolf posted:I'm no expert but that sounds about right. Hunter-gatherers lived in groups of 20-30 people. When they turn farmers you still have to build up a population to where you can specialize labor and sustain even a small city which would be a few thousand people at the earliest. Takes a while to make more humans. Given the amount of beer-brewing equipment found at about the same time agriculture started (and that barley was generally one of the first crops cultivated), many paleontologists have postulated that brewing beer was one of the prime motivators for planting crops. Bread may have been developed as a by-product of brewing technology.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:36
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Also farming is very labour intensive and has a lot of negatives that make it less attractive than hunter-gatherer situations. I think it's something like.. hunter-gatherers would work a couple days a week (or month?) and get as much food, of higher quality, than a farmer who has to work every day for several months at a time during the farming season - and then still has to worry about food the rest of it. It was definitely not a no-brainer in the early days when agriculture was first being developed, it starts to become viable and necessary as populations rise and the tradition become a bit more established. I think it started with pastoralist cultures more frequently than hunter-gatherers, your main bread and butter was herd animals but as you cycled locations year after year you'd take some time to farm for a little bit, and as the benefits become more evident and the population increases enough to both enable and necessitate serious farming, the culture shifted to more sedentary exploitation of the land.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:40
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feedmegin posted:Hmm. If opium is better than heroin or cocaine and easy to make then how come everyone does heroin or cocaine now instead of opium? Both are easier to get into countries, and I'm pretty sure heroin is way cheaper as well.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:51
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Also farming is very labour intensive and has a lot of negatives that make it less attractive than hunter-gatherer situations. I think it's something like.. hunter-gatherers would work a couple days a week (or month?) and get as much food, of higher quality, than a farmer who has to work every day for several months at a time during the farming season - and then still has to worry about food the rest of it. So what IS the advantage of agriculture over hunting-gathering? The main thing I can think of is being able to reliably produce more food per given area of land, which wouldn't matter to a small hunter-gatherer tribe that's already well-fed by what they can pick up, but which WOULD matter to a larger population that can't find enough food to feed itself within easy reach without growing more.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:36
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Tomn posted:So what IS the advantage of agriculture over hunting-gathering? The main thing I can think of is being able to reliably produce more food per given area of land, which wouldn't matter to a small hunter-gatherer tribe that's already well-fed by what they can pick up, but which WOULD matter to a larger population that can't find enough food to feed itself within easy reach without growing more. The advantage is that things are really great if you're really rich. But really, there isn't any. As far as I know, studies have shown that modern and ancient hunter-gatherers were healthier, better fed and had far more free time as opposed to members of settled people even to this day. Maybe defence was easier? Who the gently caress knows, human behaviour isn't always terribly rational.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:45
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Tomn posted:So what IS the advantage of agriculture over hunting-gathering? The main thing I can think of is being able to reliably produce more food per given area of land, which wouldn't matter to a small hunter-gatherer tribe that's already well-fed by what they can pick up, but which WOULD matter to a larger population that can't find enough food to feed itself within easy reach without growing more. It seems that settlements appeared first, in particularly lush areas where hunting and gathering could support them all year. There's a big place in Turkey that had lots of people but no agriculture, as I recall. Agriculture came later, probably as a result of needing more food than the area could supply as the population grew. Also, as I mentioned earlier, out of a desire for brewing fermented beverages with the grain.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:45
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Friendly Tumour posted:The advantage is that things are really great if you're really rich. But really, there isn't any. As far as I know, studies have shown that modern and ancient hunter-gatherers were healthier, better fed and had far more free time as opposed to members of settled people even to this day. Maybe defence was easier? Who the gently caress knows, human behaviour isn't always terribly rational. For one, I think you can support much larger populations in a stable location. So yeah, your military capabilities greatly expand. People are still going hunting and herding within this, but since you have that backbone to support much larger populations, you can then carve out a much larger slice and keep it. The hunter-gatherers may have been far healthier but the increased population that comes with agriculture is an undeniable advantage. Plus with agriculture you get sedentary locations and more complex society starts to develop which means you can then start thinking about having dedicated soldier castes, training, equipment, logistics, tithes etc etc which are all indispensable for gaining an edge in sustained conflicts with your neighbours.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:57
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But why did it take so long for all of this to happen?
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Jul 7, 2015 18:58
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Tomn posted:So what IS the advantage of agriculture over hunting-gathering? The main thing I can think of is being able to reliably produce more food per given area of land, which wouldn't matter to a small hunter-gatherer tribe that's already well-fed by what they can pick up, but which WOULD matter to a larger population that can't find enough food to feed itself within easy reach without growing more. An individual tribe is going to be happier and healthier with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but since agriculture supports a much denser population, a tribe that does adopt agriculture is going to be able to force them off their land just by virtue of being more numerous. You can look at agriculture as a sort of Faustian bargain.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:02
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I learned it in high school AP world history as conflicts over land use inevitably happening and that "twenty starving farmers beat one healthy hunter." Sooooooo no idea if that's up to date with current scholarship. e: I guess it's in line with current thinking then, seeing as everyone managed to post it before me. goose fleet posted:But why did it take so long for all of this to happen? It takes time for populations to curve out, lots of land is pretty marginal without the right technology and/or significant investments in labor, no one was going out of their way to kill each other for shits and giggles. the JJ fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 19:03
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goose fleet posted:But why did it take so long for all of this to happen? Getting together suitable plants to work with and how to grow them effectively is hard to do from scratch.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:05
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:For one, I think you can support much larger populations in a stable location. So yeah, your military capabilities greatly expand. People are still going hunting and herding within this, but since you have that backbone to support much larger populations, you can then carve out a much larger slice and keep it. The hunter-gatherers may have been far healthier but the increased population that comes with agriculture is an undeniable advantage. Plus with agriculture you get sedentary locations and more complex society starts to develop which means you can then start thinking about having dedicated soldier castes, training, equipment, logistics, tithes etc etc which are all indispensable for gaining an edge in sustained conflicts with your neighbours. If you think on social darwinian level yes, but for the individuals involved, the life was much more miserable than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries outside the cities. That's really where the religion part comes in methinks. The only way you can hold people in cities when life is objectively so much better outside of them is by telling them it's the gods' will. goose fleet posted:But why did it take so long for all of this to happen? Obliterati posted:On the cities point, there are varying theories but no real solid consensus. Suffice it to say that large settlements are less a question of how to feed those people as how to organise them - particularly to stop the 'fissioning' of groups where they split up, which is a common behaviour in the Neolithic and earlier. With rare exceptions like Catal Hoyuk in Turkey, 'cities' seem to appear around the same time as centralised authoritarian structures, but which is the chicken and which is the egg is anyone's guess. It just took while to develop them I suppose! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyzi9GNZFMU lollontee fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 19:06
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goose fleet posted:But why did it take so long for all of this to happen? Because "cities" and "agriculture" are extremely complicated ideas that only look simple to us because we have the benefit of hindsight. Your average hunter-gatherer isn't going to just suddenly grasp the concept, it's something that's slowly put together over long periods of time. It's also worth mentioning that plants themselves need to be domesticated just like you would domesticate wild animals. It took centuries of humans selecting the best plants and spreading their seeds, both on purpose and inadvertently, for wild strains of plants to evolve into the so-called "founder crops" of agriculture like wheat and barley. So for a long time you wouldn't have been able to practice full time agriculture even if you did manage to develop some semi-domesticated strain of wheat or whatever.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:07
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I'm definitely not the person to be asking about this but I'll give it a shot. Essentially I'm cribbing from various books I've read over the years. 1. As mentioned, the immediate disadvantages outweigh the advantages over hunter-gathering societies. 2. The crops we all know and love didn't start out that way. Everything we eat nowadays is the product of thousands of years of continuous selection, breeding for positive attributes (bigger fruit, less seeds, hardier, faster growing or fruiting, salt or drought tolerance etc). Picture a banana the size of your pinkie and absolutely full of these indigestible seeds and ask yourself if you'd bother cultivating a bunch of that when you could just pick some berries and eat a buffalo you killed. Bananas obviously weren't the first things cultivated but I don't know how barley etc changed over the thousands of years we've been breeding it. It's not like there's a single beautiful crop out there screaming "cultivate me and ye shall eat for a thousand summers!" 3. They had to figure this poo poo out as they went, using natural observation; they didn't have the scientific method, they didn't have written records, they relied upon personal observation and oral tradition for a science that hadn't been invented yet. 4. They typically came from a tradition of semi-nomadic pastoralism. There's just very little infrastructure (human or fixed) to support the idea of staking out a patch of land, tilling the soil, planting seeds (are you going to be the first one to discover that new plants grow from seed and that different seeds produce different plants?), watering it, tending it, protecting it from human or animal menace over a period of months and months, and harvesting it before your enemies (human or animal) do? etc Sulla Faex fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 19:10
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Safety was definitely a reason. its a whole lot easier to defend yourself when everyone is in one spot all the time, and you can even afford to pay steve to make the good kind of spears and bows all day, and i heard he even got kevin to make shields! Hunter gatherer society could be extremely violent with bands competing for the best hunting and foraging grounds. I know some anthropologists have claimed it was like Mad Max and have been criticized, but no one disagrees that it was really violent. They may have been healthier and more fit, bu they were also more likely to die from a rival during a raid.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:12
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Friendly Tumour posted:If you think on social darwinian level yes, but for the individuals involved, the life was much more miserable than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries outside the cities. That's really where the religion part comes in methinks. The only way you can hold people in cities when life is objectively so much better outside of them is by telling them it's the gods' will. Oh yeah, definitely. There was nothing in my post that implied conditions for the agriculture-based humans were pleasant at all, but from a survival standpoint their tribe or ethnic group can swarm over their neighbours and protect the genetic line. Isn't there some thing where average human quality of life has only relatively recently (last few centuries maybe - or more recently still, post-industrialism?) reached that of our hunter-gatherer forefathers? Could be mistaken on that.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:13
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Safety was definitely a reason. its a whole lot easier to defend yourself when everyone is in one spot all the time, and you can even afford to pay steve to make the good kind of spears and bows all day, and i heard he even got kevin to make shields! Hunting animals was also quite dangerous in and of itself. Neanderthal skeletons have many of the same injuries found today in rodeo riders. There's a whole new skill set required to grow plants, but at least they don't fight back when you're harvesting them.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:15
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Arglebargle III posted:To further my point about losing cities versus losing control of tariff policy: in 2012 the GDP of Shanghai* the city was about $300 billion dollars, while China's net balance of trade was about $2 trillion. Shanghai is tied with Beijing for most valuable city in China, and you would be better off signing away ten Shanghais than reversing that trade balance.* But trade concessions is exactly the sort of thing the Qing government tended to give away in its treaties after minor engagements with European powers. Although the world was not as interconnected then as it is now, global trade was still important. The few piddly concession cities that people tend to remember as the big deal were unimportant compared to the hugely unfair trade concessions that left China hemorrhaging silver faster and faster. And I mentioned already how badly the Qing government mismanaged the silver currency within its borders as well. Those numbers are measuring completely different things and it really doesn't make any sense to stack them up against each other.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:20
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Oh yeah, definitely. There was nothing in my post that implied conditions for the agriculture-based humans were pleasant at all, but from a survival standpoint their tribe or ethnic group can swarm over their neighbours and protect the genetic line. Isn't there some thing where average human quality of life has only relatively recently (last few centuries maybe - or more recently still, post-industrialism?) reached that of our hunter-gatherer forefathers? Could be mistaken on that. Well even up to this very day we still work on average more hours per day than the remaining hunter-gatherers so I dunno. I guess we got more 'cargo' and live longer on average, but you can certainly interpret that in various ways if you happen to be, say a Marxist... As for survival, yeah I guess. But war is a pretty natural thing for us humans and I'm not sure if I believe the narrative that ancient hunter-gatherers would've cared enough to asses their likelihood of dying violently if they just settled down as opposed to continuing as they were.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:22
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Ras Het posted:...I don't think I am? Are you saying that there's supposed to be some particular human urge to have sex with people from different ethnic groups? I don't think that's true, but also, if it would be true, I don't think you could pull up an easy evopsychohistorical explanation for it. I missed this. The evolutionary advantage is imho pretty obvious, since increasing geneflow and genepool diversity in populations is a definately something that evolution favours. As to the question of whether or not it could explain our seeming obsession with screwing foreigners I don't have clue but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that there might just be a neural structure whose function would be just that.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:25
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One thing that definitely drives people towards sedentary lifestyles is active coercion. If your particular band of hunters is the strongest it is much easier to extract resources out of sedentary agricultural populations. If you can force competing bands to farm land and tax them then you're going to do it. Not everyone is CHOOSING a sedentary lifestyle even if they are capable of sustaining themselves on agricultural activity.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:44
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I was actually going to propose another hypothetical which meshes with that, then I had to take a shower and got distracted and forgot. The idea is that people living a relatively comfortable and stable lifestyle (as proficient hunter-gatherers in times of plenty would be, even pastoral groups) don't willingly undergo radical social change that carries high risks and no obvious immediate reward. So some groups who made the shift from pastoralism or hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones might have done so as the result of territorial pressure - their ranging areas (pastoralism requires a lot of ground nominally under your control) might have been constricted by more powerful neighbouring groups such that they can't sustain their old way of life. So they swap over to this farming thing which they've kind of been mucking around with over the years and start to really give it an honest shot. Over time their population explodes, their neighbours may or may not subjugate them during this period, but after a while the strength of numbers with this agricultural thing really becomes apparent and then everybody has to do it or just get squeezed out. One theory, anyway. Another theory - aliens.
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Jul 7, 2015 22:59
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I'd also point out that the worse nutrition of an agricultural lifestyle might not represent a bad tradeoff as such. If it for example is easier to fill your stomach with buckwheat than by hunting elks and picking lingonberries, then basically what you're looking at is "why do people eat so much more pizza than kale?".
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Jul 7, 2015 23:12
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Having a big pit filled with grains and lots of guys with spears to guard it also helps with food security. It's not like hunter-gathering is naturally food-secure. If your foraging ground runs out and the next one along the line collapsed for some reason, you're pretty hosed unless you have enough food to get to the next-next foraging area along the line.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:23
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Phobophilia posted:Having a big pit filled with grains and lots of guys with spears to guard it also helps with food security. It's not like hunter-gathering is naturally food-secure. If your foraging ground runs out and the next one along the line collapsed for some reason, you're pretty hosed unless you have enough food to get to the next-next foraging area along the line. hence significant amounts of violence over who owns which foraging grounds
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Jul 7, 2015 23:36
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feedmegin posted:Hmm. If opium is better than heroin or cocaine and easy to make then how come everyone does heroin or cocaine now instead of opium? If you read the articles, the author claims it is due to difficulty in smuggling and loss of traditional opium smoking techniques. Deteriorata posted:Given the amount of beer-brewing equipment found at about the same time agriculture started (and that barley was generally one of the first crops cultivated), many paleontologists have postulated that brewing beer was one of the prime motivators for planting crops. Bread may have been developed as a by-product of brewing technology. I presume you mean leavened bread. Unleavened bread probably predates agriculture by tens of thousands of years.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:58
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I want to know who drank milk from a cow's udders for the first time, and why they thought this was a good idea. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 8, 2015 01:58
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Well, they had seen babies drink from women and calves drink from cows and were probably really hungry.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:03
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JesustheDarkLord posted:Well, they had seen babies drink from women and calves drink from cows and were probably really hungry. Or maybe some dude was just desperate to suck on any sort of tit.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:06
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How would they make the correlation in their heads without any understanding of biology? Cow udders don't look like the equivalent human parts at all.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:06
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Plus, despite what insane libertarians would try to have you believe, raw milk is seriously gross and carries a potential shitload of bacteria that will do anything from give you the shits to kill you, possibly both.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:09
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goose fleet posted:Plus, despite what insane libertarians would try to have you believe, raw milk is seriously gross and carries a potential shitload of bacteria that will do anything from give you the shits to kill you, possibly both. This is not true, hth. Why are you waging a war on milk in the Roman history thread? Kaal fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 02:10
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goose fleet posted:How would they make the correlation in their heads without any understanding of biology? Cow udders don't look like the equivalent human parts at all. i don't think it takes a huge amount of deduction to figure out how udders work if you're surrounded by goats every single day of your bloody life
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Jul 8, 2015 02:11
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goose fleet posted:Plus, despite what insane libertarians would try to have you believe, raw milk is seriously gross and carries a potential shitload of bacteria that will do anything from give you the shits to kill you, possibly both. 10,000 years ago raw milk was far cleaner than just about anything else they had to drink.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:13
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goose fleet posted:Plus, despite what insane libertarians would try to have you believe, raw milk is seriously gross and carries a potential shitload of bacteria that will do anything from give you the shits to kill you, possibly both. Only if it's old because it spoils a lot faster and tends to spoil worse. Fresh raw milk is perfectly ok and what most people drank for centuries before pasteurization was invented.
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Jul 8, 2015 02:13
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Milk does not contain bacteria when it departs the tits
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Jul 8, 2015 02:15
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