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.
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.