I don’t think ‘epigenetic’ means what you think it means. But anyway: yes, there is anthropological evidence of that sort (covered in Pinker’s Better Angels and in something of Diamond’s, IIRC), and height and mortality are generally believed to correlate with health and presumably then to IQ.
The problem with that is that that is a problem for all theories of civilization formation: if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
So, suppose it takes less IQ to maintain a basic civilization than to start one from scratch (as I already suggested in my Africa example), and suppose civilization has some sort of self-reinforcing property where it will force itself to remain in existence even when superior alternatives exist (as it seems it must, factually, given the poorer health of early farmers/civilizationers compared to hunter-gatherers sans civilization).
Then what happened was: over a very long period of time hunter-gatherers slowly accumulated knowledge or tools and IQs rose from better food or perhaps sexual selection or whatever, until finally relatively simultaneously multiple civilizations arose in multiple regions, whereupon the farmer effect reduced their IQ but not enough to overcome the self-sustaining-civilization effect. And then history began.
if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started?
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often ‘go native’?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often ‘go native’?
Uh, going native is exactly what the vein of thought is predicting. The question is not why did some go native, but why didn’t all the rest?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
An old suggestion, but just as old is the point that civilizations routinely fail at military matters: it’s a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
it’s a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
That does happen a lot, but the barbarians in question tend to be nomadic pastoralists, very rarely foragers. About the only exceptions I can think of happened in immediately post-contact North America, and that was a fantastically turbulent time culturally—between the introduction of horses and 90+% of the initial population getting wiped out by disease, pretty much everything would likely have been up for grabs.
I don’t know offhand how healthy or long-lived pastoralist cultures tended to be by comparison with sedentary agriculturalists. I do know that they generally fell somewhere between foragers and agriculturalists in terms of sustainable population density.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake. They are self limiting.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake.
What civilization-wide infrastructure did the Mongols destroy in the process of creating the greatest land empire in history which then doomed them and limited their spread?
I suspect the connotations of “barbarian” are getting in the way here. The Mongols were highly mobile pastoralists and raiders; this did not get in the way of setting up sophisticated and creative institutions. (Nor did the latter undo the considerable net loss in poulation and extent of cultivation that accompanied the Mongol conquests.)
I think this is basically correct, but I’d express it in terms of cultural inertia rather than brainwashing. It’s not (usually) part of a planned campaign of retention, it’s just that learning a completely different culture and language and set of survival skills is a huge risk and would take a huge amount of effort: it might be attractive in marginal cases, but most people would likely feel they had too much to lose. Particularly if the relationship between the cultures is already adversarial.
There are probably pure-win half steps, like the kind of farming where you plant in the seasonal area you always come back to at a certain time of the year, as you follow the herds, or the kind where game is so plentiful you can afford to settle, hunt, and dabble in farming vegetables beside your settlement (such as in the American Pacific north west). Farming seems to be tied to settlement. Farms stabilize settlements; settlements nurture farms. And farms domesticate crops, making farming easier and supporting a larger population.
In the Mesopotamia region, there were settlements in the rainy hills where the local wildlife was conveniently easy to domesticate but farming was hard. Those moved down centuries later into the rainless flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, where only group effort could ensure irrigation, and group surpluses were needed to stave off bad harvests, but farming worked well. The “Ubaid period” (neolithic) was pretty egalitarian, but centralization emerges in the “Jemdet Nasr period” and kingship in the “early dynastic period” (Sumerian for king is “lugal”, “lu”=man, “gal”=big, and initially it seems to have been just a word for “boss”). With centralization and kingship, empires follow fast. Civilization was co-existing with non-farming groups, but civilization tempts even non-farmers to switch from hunting to raiding. Sumer got sacked repeatedly by nearby tribes.
I am thinking there was a demographic transition point, probably quite early, when the number of people that could be kept alive—not as healthy, but alive—by farming or equally by raiding the surplus of farmers, exceeded the carrying capacity of the local game and wild plants. At that point walking away from the fields was not possible. Therefore agriculture has a ratchet effect.
if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
I tend to think of this by analogy with gene-centered evolution. Just as natural selection selects for genes which are particularly good at reproducing themselves without any special regard for the well-being of their carriers, cultural evolution selects for similarly potent memetic systems without any particular regard for the well-being of the people propagating them.
From skeletal evidence forager lifestyles seem on average a lot healthier, but they also require much lower population densities. You can fit a lot more people per unit area with an agriculturalist lifestyle: if skeletal proxies are to be believed they’ll individually be weaker, sicker, and shorter-lived, but they’ll be populous enough that the much rarer foragers are going to have trouble displacing them. Cycle that over a few thousand years and eventually civilization ends up ruling the world, with the few remaining foragers pushed into little enclaves where agriculture is unsustainable for one reason or another. We’d occasionally see defections from one lifestyle to the other, but historically they don’t seem very common.
The tricky part of this model seems to be figuring out how forager populations self-limit without lowering quality of life to agriculturalist levels. I’m not anthropologist enough to have a definitive answer to this, but I’d speculate that forager resource acquisition isn’t as linearly dependent on population as agriculture is: put too many people in a given area and you end up scaring off game, overconsuming food plants, et cetera. Over time I’d expect this to inform territorial behavior and intuitions about optimal group size. Violence is probably also part of the answer.
We’d occasionally see defections from one lifestyle to the other, but historically they don’t seem very common.
Or, at least, they end up becoming irrelevant for the same reasons that the agriculturalists won in the first place. If Roanoke disappeared because all of the settlers decided to ditch the farm and live as Indians, there were still way more Europeans coming than the few Europeans that defected, and the new colonists could support a much higher population density than the ones that went native.
I don’t think ‘epigenetic’ means what you think it means. But anyway: yes, there is anthropological evidence of that sort (covered in Pinker’s Better Angels and in something of Diamond’s, IIRC), and height and mortality are generally believed to correlate with health and presumably then to IQ.
The problem with that is that that is a problem for all theories of civilization formation: if early farming was so much worse than hunter-gathering that we can tell just from the fossils, then why did civilization ever get started? There must have been something compelling or self-sustaining or network effects or something about it.
So, suppose it takes less IQ to maintain a basic civilization than to start one from scratch (as I already suggested in my Africa example), and suppose civilization has some sort of self-reinforcing property where it will force itself to remain in existence even when superior alternatives exist (as it seems it must, factually, given the poorer health of early farmers/civilizationers compared to hunter-gatherers sans civilization).
Then what happened was: over a very long period of time hunter-gatherers slowly accumulated knowledge or tools and IQs rose from better food or perhaps sexual selection or whatever, until finally relatively simultaneously multiple civilizations arose in multiple regions, whereupon the farmer effect reduced their IQ but not enough to overcome the self-sustaining-civilization effect. And then history began.
and why did European settlers in the Americas, when presented with the direct juxtaposition of hunter gatherer lifestyle with their own often ‘go native’?
Farming solves military coordination problems that allow them to conquer neighbors. It would be a mistake to think that civilizations were successful because they provided a better quality of life for their denizens. We should expect to see the most successful civilization to be that which is able to devote a larger amount of wealth towards expansion.
Uh, going native is exactly what the vein of thought is predicting. The question is not why did some go native, but why didn’t all the rest?
An old suggestion, but just as old is the point that civilizations routinely fail at military matters: it’s a trope of history going back at least as far as Ibn Khaldun that amazingly often the barbarians roll over civilization, and conquer everything, only to fall victim to the next barbarians themselves.
That does happen a lot, but the barbarians in question tend to be nomadic pastoralists, very rarely foragers. About the only exceptions I can think of happened in immediately post-contact North America, and that was a fantastically turbulent time culturally—between the introduction of horses and 90+% of the initial population getting wiped out by disease, pretty much everything would likely have been up for grabs.
I don’t know offhand how healthy or long-lived pastoralist cultures tended to be by comparison with sedentary agriculturalists. I do know that they generally fell somewhere between foragers and agriculturalists in terms of sustainable population density.
Insufficient opportunity and brainwashing.
Barbarian hordes consume great amounts of the fruits of civilization and destroy the infrastructure that created it in their wake. They are self limiting.
What civilization-wide infrastructure did the Mongols destroy in the process of creating the greatest land empire in history which then doomed them and limited their spread?
The mongols were emphatically not barbarians, they introduced systems that were in most cases improvements over what they destroyed.
I suspect the connotations of “barbarian” are getting in the way here. The Mongols were highly mobile pastoralists and raiders; this did not get in the way of setting up sophisticated and creative institutions. (Nor did the latter undo the considerable net loss in poulation and extent of cultivation that accompanied the Mongol conquests.)
I think this is basically correct, but I’d express it in terms of cultural inertia rather than brainwashing. It’s not (usually) part of a planned campaign of retention, it’s just that learning a completely different culture and language and set of survival skills is a huge risk and would take a huge amount of effort: it might be attractive in marginal cases, but most people would likely feel they had too much to lose. Particularly if the relationship between the cultures is already adversarial.
There are probably pure-win half steps, like the kind of farming where you plant in the seasonal area you always come back to at a certain time of the year, as you follow the herds, or the kind where game is so plentiful you can afford to settle, hunt, and dabble in farming vegetables beside your settlement (such as in the American Pacific north west). Farming seems to be tied to settlement. Farms stabilize settlements; settlements nurture farms. And farms domesticate crops, making farming easier and supporting a larger population.
In the Mesopotamia region, there were settlements in the rainy hills where the local wildlife was conveniently easy to domesticate but farming was hard. Those moved down centuries later into the rainless flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, where only group effort could ensure irrigation, and group surpluses were needed to stave off bad harvests, but farming worked well. The “Ubaid period” (neolithic) was pretty egalitarian, but centralization emerges in the “Jemdet Nasr period” and kingship in the “early dynastic period” (Sumerian for king is “lugal”, “lu”=man, “gal”=big, and initially it seems to have been just a word for “boss”). With centralization and kingship, empires follow fast. Civilization was co-existing with non-farming groups, but civilization tempts even non-farmers to switch from hunting to raiding. Sumer got sacked repeatedly by nearby tribes.
I am thinking there was a demographic transition point, probably quite early, when the number of people that could be kept alive—not as healthy, but alive—by farming or equally by raiding the surplus of farmers, exceeded the carrying capacity of the local game and wild plants. At that point walking away from the fields was not possible. Therefore agriculture has a ratchet effect.
I tend to think of this by analogy with gene-centered evolution. Just as natural selection selects for genes which are particularly good at reproducing themselves without any special regard for the well-being of their carriers, cultural evolution selects for similarly potent memetic systems without any particular regard for the well-being of the people propagating them.
From skeletal evidence forager lifestyles seem on average a lot healthier, but they also require much lower population densities. You can fit a lot more people per unit area with an agriculturalist lifestyle: if skeletal proxies are to be believed they’ll individually be weaker, sicker, and shorter-lived, but they’ll be populous enough that the much rarer foragers are going to have trouble displacing them. Cycle that over a few thousand years and eventually civilization ends up ruling the world, with the few remaining foragers pushed into little enclaves where agriculture is unsustainable for one reason or another. We’d occasionally see defections from one lifestyle to the other, but historically they don’t seem very common.
The tricky part of this model seems to be figuring out how forager populations self-limit without lowering quality of life to agriculturalist levels. I’m not anthropologist enough to have a definitive answer to this, but I’d speculate that forager resource acquisition isn’t as linearly dependent on population as agriculture is: put too many people in a given area and you end up scaring off game, overconsuming food plants, et cetera. Over time I’d expect this to inform territorial behavior and intuitions about optimal group size. Violence is probably also part of the answer.
Or, at least, they end up becoming irrelevant for the same reasons that the agriculturalists won in the first place. If Roanoke disappeared because all of the settlers decided to ditch the farm and live as Indians, there were still way more Europeans coming than the few Europeans that defected, and the new colonists could support a much higher population density than the ones that went native.