You assert these things very confidently, but without any evidence. How exactly do we know that this state of affairs existed in human prehistory?
Archaeological evidence regarding the health and population density of human beings and their dietary habits. Inference from surviving examples. The null hypothesis, that we didn’t start with agriculture and therefore must have been hunter-gatherers for most of our existence as a species. The observatiion that the traits generally associated with the Malthusian trap are common experiences of agricultural societies and dependent upon conditions that don’t obtain in predominantly and purely hunter-gatherer societies.
This, however, provides no answer to the question why individuals and small groups wouldn’t defect,
regardless of the subsequent collective consequences of such defection.
They might defect, but it’d gain them nothing. Their cultural toolkits and food-gathering strategies were dependent upon group work at a set quota which it was maladaptive to under- or overreach. An individual can″t survive for long like this compared to a smallish group; a larger group will split when it gets too big for an area, a big group can’t sustainably form.
How can a society, i.e. a group, have “values” and “incentives,” if you’re not postulating group selection?
The answer to this lies in refuting the following:
As soon as even a small minority of the forager population starts cheating and reproducing above the
replacement rate (by evolving either cultural memes or hereditary philoprogenitive behaviors that motivate them
to do so), in a few generations their exponential growth will completely swamp everyone else.
“A small minority of the forager population” has to be taken in terms of each population group, and those are small. A small percentage of a given group might be just one or two people every handful of generations, here. A social umbrella-group of 150 scattered into bands of 10-50 throughout an area, versus just one or two people? Where’s the exponential payoff? The absolute numbers are too low to support it, and the defectors are stuck with the cultural biases and methodologies they know. They can decide to get greedy, but they’re outnumbered by the whole tribe, who are more than willing to provide censure or other forms of costly social signalling as a means of punishing defectors. They don’t even have to kill the defectors or drive them out; the defectors are critically dependent on the group for their lifestyle. The alternatiive will be unappealing in all but a vast majority of cases.
You need the kind of population densities agriculture allows to start getting a really noticeable effect. It’s not to say people don’t ever become tempted to defect, but it’s seldom a beneficial decision. And many cultures, such as the San ones in South Africa, have cultural mechanisms for ensuring nobody’s ego gets too big for their britches, so to speak. Teasing and ribbing in place of praise when someone gets a big head about their accomplishments, passive reminders that they need the group more than they individually benefit it.
This isn’t so much about group selection,as it is about all the individuals having their raft tied to the same ship—a group big enough to provide the necessities of life, which also provides a lot of hedonic reinforcement for maintaining that state of affairs, and a lot of non-coercive negative signalling for noncompliance, coupled with the much more coercive but morally neutral threat presented by trying to make a living in this place all by yourself.
If you break a leg in a small group, the medical practitioner splints it and everyone keeps feeding you. If you do that by yourself, it probably never heals right and the next leopard to come along finds you easy pickings. That’s what defection buys you in the ancestral environment.
a larger group will split when it gets too big for an area
Say there are two kinds of forager groups, one which limits reproduction of its members by various means, and another that does not limit reproduction and instead constantly grows and splits and invades other groups’ territories if needed. Naively I would expect that the latter kind of group would tend to drive the former kind out of existence. Why didn’t this happen?
Archaeological evidence regarding the health and population density of human beings and their dietary habits. Inference from surviving examples.
This isn’t necessarily evidence against a Malthusian equilibrium. It could be that the subsequent farmer lifestyle enabled survival for people with much poorer health and physical fitness, thus lowering the average health and fitness of those who managed to survive in the Malthusian equilibrium.
Can you give a reference that specifically discusses how a non-Malthusian situation of the foragers can be inferred from the existing archaeological evidence?
The observatiion that the traits generally associated with the Malthusian trap are common experiences of agricultural societies and dependent upon conditions that don’t obtain in predominantly and purely hunter-gatherer societies.
This is not true. Humans are (more or less) the only species that practices agriculture, but the Malthusian trap happens to non-human animals too. As long as reproduction above the replacement rate is possible, it will happen until the resource limit is reached. (Admittedly, for animals that aren’t apex predators, the situation is more complicated due to the predator-prey dynamics.)
Regarding the foragers’ supposed cooperation on keeping the population stable, I honestly don’t see how what you write makes sense, for at least two reasons:
The defectors would not need to reproduce in blatantly extraordinary numbers. It would be enough to reproduce just slightly above the replacement rate, so slightly that it might be unnoticeable for all practical purposes. The exponential growth would nevertheless explode their population in not very many generations and lead to them overwhelming others. So even if we assume that blatantly excessive reproduction would be punished, it would still leave them more than enough leeway for “cheating.”
How did this punishment mechanism evolve, and how did it remain stable? You can postulate any group selection mechanism by assuming altruistic punishment against individuals who deviate from the supposed group-optimal behavior. But you can’t just assert that such a mechanism must have existed because otherwise there would have been defection.
Moreover, you are now talking about group selection with altruistic punishment. There’s nothing inherently impossible or absurd about that, but these are very strong and highly controversial claims, which you are asserting in a confident and authoritative manner as if they were well-known or obvious.
I’d like to remind you that the ancestral environment was not completely stable, and no one is disputing that exponentially-expansive Malthusian agriculture happened. The question is why it took as long as it did, not why it was possible at all.
Essentially human for our first 2 million years of existence, human population worldwide went from about 10,000 to 4 million. Given that virtually all major models of long-run human population converge very closely, and they all assume a relatively steady growth rate, we’re talking a doubling period of 250,000 years.
Malthus’ estimates assume a doubling rate of 25 years, or a single human generation. The difference is a factor of 10,000. World population simply did not grow as fast as you’re assuming, and humanity did not start outstripping local carrying capacities in a major, systematic way until we’d developed technologies that allowed us to make those sorts of population growth leaps.
According to Michael Kremer in “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million BC to 1990”, the base rate of technological change in human societies scales proportional to population—small population, slow technological change. This equals very long inferential distances to the sorts of techniques and behaviors that make agriculture a viable prospect.
You need intermediate steps, in the form of settled horticulture or nomadic pastoralism, to really concentrate the population enough to have a chance at developing agriculture in the intensive sense. Those sorts of cultural developments took a long time to come into being, and it was a gradual process at that.
So, yes, it’s true that if you grow certain grasses and just harvest their seeds reliably, grinding them into a fine powder and mixing that with water and then heating the whole mixture somehow without actually burning it in your fire directly, you can produce a food source that will unlock access to population-doubling intervals closer to the Malthusian assumption of one doubling per generation.
But that is a series of nested behaviors, NONE of which is intuitively obvious by itself from the perspective of a forager in a world full of nothing but other foragers. Which is why the entire chain took a long, long time to develop, and why agriculture was invented just a few times throughout human history.
This is not true. Humans are (more or less) the only
species that practices agriculture, but the Malthusian
trap happens to non-human animals too. As long as
reproduction above the replacement rate is possible,
it will happen until the resource limit is reached.
Termites, leafcutter ants, certain damselfish, ambrosia beetles, and certain marsh snails all practice agriculture. But yes, it’s certainly an uncommon behavior.
What if reproduction above the replacement rate isn’t possible for the period of human evolution we’re talking about? What if the human population simply isn’t reproducing fast enough for most of prehistory to reach the resource limit? Those are the conditions I’m suggesting here—that reaching local resource limits was not the norm for much of our evolution, due to our inherent long gestation times and strong k-selection, the inherent metabolic requirements for fertility taking a long time to satisfy compared to modern conditions, the birth interval being very wide compared to Malthusian assumptions, and the techniques of food acquisition being of necessity limited by the the ease of satisfying everybody’s requirements (if everyone has a fully tummy and all their kids do too, going out and gathering MORE food at the expense of one’s kinsmen won’t do you any good anyway).
What you get is abundance—there’s room to grow, but we can only do it so fast, and when we start to reach the point where we might overtax our resource base, we’ve moved on and there weren’t enough of us using it in the first place to compromise it.
The defectors would not need to reproduce in blatantly extraordinary numbers.
It would be enough to reproduce just slightly above the
replacement rate, so slightly that it might be
unnoticeable for all practical purposes.
That kind of statistical hackery might work in a large population, but not very well in a small one. In a group of 100 humans, ANY population gain is noticeable.
The exponential growth would nevertheless explode their
population in not very many generations and lead to them
overwhelming others
Except all evidence suggests it wasn’t possible to have a population explosion, if you assume humans must have reproduced at the fastest allowable rate. Populations doubled in a quarter-million years, not 25.
How did this punishment mechanism evolve, and how did it > remain stable?
It didn’t evolve genetically, it’s a cultural punishment I’m talking about. Ju/’hoansi hunters are taken down a notch whenever they make a kill. Certain Australian aboriginal groups have meat-sharing customs where one hunter goes out and gets a kangaroo (say), and his share of the meat is the intestines or penis—the choicer cuts get distributed according to a set of other rules. Except, then people invite the hunter over to dinner; he’s not forced to actually eat crow every time he succeeds, but he’s also socially aware that he depends upon the others for it (and he gets to receive a choicer share when some other hunter makes a kill).
World population simply did not grow as fast as you’re assuming, and humanity did not start outstripping local carrying capacities in a major, systematic way until we’d developed technologies that allowed us to make those sorts of population growth leaps.
I don’t understand your argument here at all. Earlier you said that growth to the Malthusian limit was prevented by a cooperative strategy of restraining reproduction. Now you say that lack of food production technology was limiting population growth. But if foragers did breed up to the limit where food became the limiting resource, that’s by definition a Malthusian equilibrium.
You are also presenting a strawman caricature of Malthus. His claim about a 25-year doubling period refers to agricultural societies with an ample supply of land, such as existed in North America of his day. He presents it as an empirical finding. When he discusses foragers, he notes that they’ll reproduce to the point where they run against the limited food supply available from foraging, which given the low supply of food relative to farming, means a much less dense population.
Some of his discussions of foragers are actually quite interesting. He notes that among the North American hunter-gatherers, resource limitations lead to constant disputes and warfare. He also cites accounts of European explorers’ contacts with forager peoples that seem to have been on the Malthusian limit.
It didn’t evolve genetically, it’s a cultural punishment I’m talking about.
It doesn’t matter—it still needs to be explained. Humans don’t just magically develop cultural norms that solve collective action problems.
Earlier you said that growth to the Malthusian limit was prevented by a cooperative strategy of restraining
reproduction.
What I said was that growth to the point of constant warfare, competition and struggle for enough food to subsist wasn’t an accurate picture of ancestral forager lifestyles.
Some of his discussions of foragers are actually quite interesting.
He notes that among the North American hunter-gatherers, resource limitations lead to constant disputes
and warfare.
He also says that smallpox was endemic among the Indians of all these cultures. Smallpox originated in Eurasia, thrived among farmers, and Native Americans had no immunity to it. His example of the squallor and disease these people live in is an example of the conditions they were subjected to at the hands of an invading power with novel biological agents their immune systems simply weren’t adapted to handle. The nastiest conflicts.
Warfare among Northwest Coast Natives, prior to colonization, was usually over petty disputes (that is, interpersonal ones) between peoples who had long-standing trade and treaty relationships, and only occasionally over resources (usually slaves, and the institution of slavery as it was practiced here does not compare readily with slavery as it was practiced by agriculturalists in Eurasia and Africa). The bloodier wars of the inland northwest are similarly a historical novelty, unparalleled in scope or stakes until the ravages of introduced diseases and the dislocation of various tribes by white invaders into territories they’d never been in competition for caused clashes that simply hadn’t occured at such a level of intensity prior to that point. The formation of reservations only exacerbated this—we’re talking about groups with age-old rivalries who had never seen fit to exterminate one another or conquer one another’s lands, but who would happily send a war canoe full of men to go steal things because of a petty vendetta between two people that started long ago.
This isn’t war of extermination. Don’t get me wrong, it’s violent, people die, the stakes are real, but it’s not a zero-sum, winner-take-all competition for survival. A direct translation out of Old Chinook from Franz Boas’ ethnography, regarding the rules of warfare should make this clearer:
“Before the people go to war they sing. If one of them sees blood, he will be killed in battle. When two see blood, they will be killed. They finish their singing. When they sing, two long planks are put down parallel to each other. All the warriors sing. They kneel [on the planks]. Now they go to war and fight. When people of both parties have been killed, they stop. After some time the two parties exchange presents and make peace. When a feud has not yet been settled, they marry a woman to a man of the other town and they make peace.”
The fight ends when both sides have taken casualties. The opposing sides exchange gifts and make peace. They resolve outstanding feuds by diplomatic marriage. This is the Chinook idea of war, the way it was practiced with all but their very worst enemies (who lived rather a long way from Chinook territory—the Quileute weren’t exactly next door given the pace of travel in those days, and even then the wars between them were not genocidal in intent). This is completely different from war as most Eurasian-descended cultures knew it. And it was typical of forager warfare in North America before Columbus showed up.
Malthus, in looking at the conditions of North American natives during the 19th century, reports on the dire conditions of a people devastated by introduced diseases, direct conquest by white settlers, and the disruption of their social fabric and ways of life. Whole culture groups pushed beyond the breaking point and very much outside their typical context, and most of their actual problems direct effects of colonization.
Malthus, in looking at the conditions of North American natives during the 19th century, reports on the dire conditions of a people devastated by introduced diseases, direct conquest by white settlers, and the disruption of their social fabric and ways of life.
Some of the accounts presented by Malthus were given by very early explorers and adventurers who ended up deep in unexplored territory, far ahead of European conquest and colonization. For example, the one by Cabeca de Vaca would be circa 1530.
The only way these societies could have already been devastated is if epidemics had ravaged the whole continent immediately in the first decades after the first Europeans landed, ahead of any European contact with the inland peoples. I don’t know enough about the relevant history to know how plausible this is, but even if it happened, there are two problems with your claim:
Diseases wouldn’t cause famine, at least in the long run. These early explorers describe peoples who had problems making ends meet during bad seasons due to insufficient food, and who fought bitterly over the existing limited supply. If the population had already been thinned down by disease by the time they came, we’d expect, if anything, the per capita food supply from foraging to be greater than before.
If even the earliest accounts are of devastated societies, then how do we know anything about the better life they led before that? Where does this information come from? You cite an ethnography by Boas, who was born in 1858, as authoritative, but dismiss a compilation of far older accounts compiled by Malthus in the early 19th century.
Smallpox emerged in the Old World around 10,000 BC and is believed to have originated via cattle farming. It reached very high concentrations in Europe and became a common plague there; it was spread around the world to peoples who had never encountered it by European exploration and conquest. It and other Old World disease spread very rapidly among American native populations, rendering whole cultures extinct and reducing others to scattered survivors often incapable of rebuilding. The total population of the Americas lost to European diseases after the arrival of Columbus and Cortez is estimated at 90 to 95 percent.
Given that many Native nations were at least modestly dependent on agriculture (the Iroquois, Navajo, Aztecs, Incas, Mississipians—indeed, most of the well-known groups), such population losses coming so quickly are nothing short of catastrophic. Most of your resource base collapses because one person is going to have to work MUCH harder to provide enough food for themselves—fields go unplanted, vegetables don’t get tended, wild game is much more dangerous to hunt by oneself, and one cannot expect any assistance with gathering. Even a small number of people used to an agriculture-enriched lifestyle are going to be hit much harder.
It’s also worth noting that Cabeza da Vaca actually described the Coahuiltic as a healthy and prosperous people—and ant eggs, lizards and so on were just normal parts of their diet. Ant eggs in particular are STILL a cultural delicacy among the Latino groups descended from the Coahuiltecs (escamole taco, anyone?). Diet adapts to local circumstances.
The only way these societies could have already been devastated is if epidemics had ravaged the whole
continent immediately in the first decades after the first Europeans landed, ahead of any European contact > with the inland peoples.
That is precisely what happened. One infected slave from Spanish-held Cuba is believed to be the Patient Zero that transmitted an infection which would go on to wipe out about fifty percent of the Aztec population. Hernando de Soto, exploring the southeast, encountered many towns and villages abandoned just two years prior when most of their inhabitants died of the plagues. Isolated survivors often just abandoned their homes outright, since in many cases a handful of people or even a single survivor were all that was left out of a village of hundreds or thousands. Neighbors who showed up, unaware of what happened, might contract disease from the corpses in some cases, or simply welcome in the survivors who’d start the cycle anew. North America had extensive trade routes linking all major regions, from coast to coast. Foot and boat traffic carried diseases quite far from their initial outbreak sites.
If even the earliest accounts are of devastated societies, then how do we know anything about the better life
they led before that?
Because they’re not all dead, and they left their own records of what happened and there are records of contact with them in much better conditions*, and there are still plenty of Native people alive today, who often know rather more about said records of their lives before than the typical Euro-American? And because it’s generally acknowledged within anthropological, archaeological and historical fields now that modern research bears out a picture of generally healthy, sustainable populations for most of the foragers of the Americas? And quite large, complex societies that were generally not recognized as such by early Anglo scholars into the matter?
(Malthus seriously* misrepresents Cabeza de Vaca’s case—the Floridians were in a bad way, but they were also right next door to Spanish early conquest—his accounts of the Coahuiltecs of coastal and inland Texas describe them as a healthy and prosperous people...and their descendents STILL enjoy ant eggs as a dietary item; you don’t have to be desperate to eat insects and many human groups actively enjoy it .
Where does this information come from? You cite an ethnography by Boas, who was born in 1858, as
authoritative, but dismiss a compilation of far older accounts compiled by Malthus in the early 19th century.
Boas actually travelled to the civilizations he wrote about, lived among them, recorded their oral traditions and analyzed their languages, investigated their history and their environmental circumstances. For many people, especially in the Northwest, far North and other relatively late-contacted areas, these events occured within the living memory of their elders.
Malthus wasn’t an expert on Native American civilizations or history, and basically went with the prevailing account available at the time. He relied on a consensus that wasn’t yet well-understood to be false. So I reject Malthus’ picture of pre-Columbian America for the same reason I reject Lysenko’s account of evolution. The difference is that Malthus was an influential thinker within the development of Western thought, and his role means that a lot of people who agree with what insights he did make are unwittingly buying into cached arguments about related subjects (often ones that don’t support his case) which hadn’t yet been discovered as such when Malthus wrote in the first place.
Scholarship in the field since Malthus’ time has seriously changed the outlook—Charles C. Mann and Jared Diamond are good, accessible sources for a summary overview (“1491” and “Guns, Germs and Steel”). If I seem to be vague, it’s mostly because this is domain-specific knowledge that’s not widely understood outside the domain, but as domain insider it’s fairly basic stuff.
And because it’s generally acknowledged within anthropological, archaeological and historical fields now that modern research bears out a picture of generally healthy, sustainable populations for most of the foragers of the Americas?
How exactly does this modern research reconstruct the life of American foragers centuries ago, and based on what evidence? Could you cite some of this work? (I’d like to see the original work that presumably explains its methodology rigorously, not popular summaries.)
Malthus *seriously misrepresents Cabeza de Vaca’s case—the Floridians were in a bad way, but they were also right next door to Spanish early conquest—his accounts of the Coahuiltecs of coastal and inland Texas describe them as a healthy and prosperous people...
On closer look, it turns out that de Vaca’s description cited by Malthus actually refers to a people from southeastern Texas, not Florida. So while Malthus apparently mixed up the location by accident, his summary is otherwise accurate. Your above claims are therefore completely incorrect—the description is in fact of a people from Texas, living very far from the boundary of Spanish conquest at the time.
For reference, I quote de Vaca’s account at length (all emphasis mine):
Castillo and Estevanico went inland to the Iguaces. [...] Their principal food are two or three kinds of roots, which they hunt for all over the land; they are very unhealthy, inflating, and it takes two days to roast them. Many are very bitter, and with all that they are gathered with difficulty. But those people are so much exposed to starvation that these roots are to them indispensable and they walk two and three leagues to obtain them. Now and then they kill deer and at times get a fish, but this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders and ant eggs, worms, lizards and salamanders and serpents, also vipers the bite of which is deadly. They swallow earth and wood, and all they can get, the dung of deer and more things I do not mention; and I verily believe, from what I saw, that if there were any stones in the country they would eat them also. They preserve the bones of the fish they eat, of snakes and other animals, to pulverize them and eat the powder. [...] Their best times are when “tunas” (prickly pears) are ripe, because then they have plenty to eat and spend the time in dancing and eating day and night. [...] While with them it happened many times that we were three or four days without food. Then, in order to cheer us, they would tell us not to despair, since we would have tunas very soon and eat much and drink their juice and get big stomachs and be merry, contented and without hunger. But from the day they said it to the season of the tunas there would still elapse five or six months, and we had to wait that long.
Also, regarding this:
Boas actually travelled to the civilizations he wrote about, lived among them, recorded their oral traditions and analyzed their languages, investigated their history and their environmental circumstances. For many people, especially in the Northwest, far North and other relatively late-contacted areas, these events occured within the living memory of their elders.
Earlier you claimed that the native population of the entire American continent was devastated by epidemics immediately after the first European contacts in the late 15th/early 16th century, so that even the accounts of very early European explorers who traveled deep into the continent ahead of European colonization do not present an accurate picture of the native foragers’ good life they had lived before that. But now you claim that in the late 19th century, this good life was still within living memory for some of them.
It seems like you’re accepting or discounting evidence selectively. I can’t believe that all those accounts cited by Malthus refer to societies devastated by epidemics ahead of European contact, but on the other hand, the pre-epidemic good times were still within living memory for the people studied by Boaz centuries later.
I reject Malthus’ picture of pre-Columbian America for the same reason I reject Lysenko’s account of evolution.
Lysenko was motivated by politics. Baez was motivated by politics.
Physics improves, but history deteriorates. Those writers closest to events give us the most accurate picture, while later writers merely add political spin. Since 1830, history has suffered increasingly drastic, frequent, and outrageous politically motivated rewrites, has become more and more subject to a single monolithic political view, uniformly applied to all history books written in a particular period.
If you read old histories, they explain that they know such and such, because of such and such. If you read later histories, then when they disagree with older histories, check the evidence cited by older histories, you usually find that the newer histories are making stuff up. The older history says X said Y, and quotes him. The newer history say that X said B, and fails to quote him, or fails to quote him in context, or just simply asserts B, without any explanation as to how they can possibly know B.
Most of your resource base collapses because one person is going to have to work MUCH harder to provide enough food for themselves—fields go unplanted, vegetables don’t get tended, wild game is much more dangerous to hunt by oneself, and one cannot expect any assistance with gathering. Even a small number of people used to an agriculture-enriched lifestyle are going to be hit much harder.
Both Clark and Tainter (Collapse of Complex Civilizations) disagree with this claim as stated. A massive reduction in the population means that the survivors get increased per-capitas because the survivors move way back along the diminishing marginal returns curve and now have more low-hanging fruit (sometimes literally). In fact, Tainter argues that complexity often collapses because the collapse is the only way to increase per-capita wealth. Hunter-gatherers spend much less time per calorie than do advanced agriculturalists eg.
The surprise here is that while there is wild variation across forager and shifting cultivation societies, many of them had food production systems which yielded much larger numbers of calories per hour of labor than English agriculture in 1800, at a time when labor productivity in English agriculture was probably the highest in Europe. In 1800 the total value of output per man-hour in English agriculture was 6.6 pence, which would buy 3,600 kilocalories of flour but only 1,800 kilocalories of fats and 1,300 kilocalories of meat. Assuming English farm output was then half grains, onequarter fats, and one-quarter meat, this implies an output of 2,600 calories per worker-hour on average.32 Since the average person ate 2,300 kilocalories per day (table 3.6), each farm worker fed eleven people, so labor productivity was very high in England. Table 3.13 shows in comparison the energy yields of foraging and shifting cultivation societies per worker-hour. The range in labor productivities is huge, but the minimum average labor productivity, that for the Ache in Paraguay, is 1,985 kilocalories per hour, not much below England in 1800. The median yield per labor hour, 6,042 kilocalories, is more than double English labor productivity.
Or
...ranging from a modest 1,452 kilocalories per person per day for the Yanomamo of Brazil to a kingly 3,827 kilocalories per person per day for the Ache of Paraguay. Some of this is undoubtedly the result of errors in measuring food consumption. But the median is 2,340, implying that hunter-gatherers and subsistence agriculturalists ate as many calories as the median person in England or Belgium circa 1800. Primitive man ate well compared with one of the richest societies in the world in 1800. Indeed British farm laborers by 1863 had just reached the median consumption of these forager and subsistence societies.
(Quotes brought to you by my Evernote; it’s a pain in the ass to excerpt all the important bits from a book, but it certainly pays off later if you want to cite it for various assertions.)
Archaeological evidence regarding the health and population density of human beings and their dietary habits. Inference from surviving examples. The null hypothesis, that we didn’t start with agriculture and therefore must have been hunter-gatherers for most of our existence as a species. The observatiion that the traits generally associated with the Malthusian trap are common experiences of agricultural societies and dependent upon conditions that don’t obtain in predominantly and purely hunter-gatherer societies.
They might defect, but it’d gain them nothing. Their cultural toolkits and food-gathering strategies were dependent upon group work at a set quota which it was maladaptive to under- or overreach. An individual can″t survive for long like this compared to a smallish group; a larger group will split when it gets too big for an area, a big group can’t sustainably form.
The answer to this lies in refuting the following:
“A small minority of the forager population” has to be taken in terms of each population group, and those are small. A small percentage of a given group might be just one or two people every handful of generations, here. A social umbrella-group of 150 scattered into bands of 10-50 throughout an area, versus just one or two people? Where’s the exponential payoff? The absolute numbers are too low to support it, and the defectors are stuck with the cultural biases and methodologies they know. They can decide to get greedy, but they’re outnumbered by the whole tribe, who are more than willing to provide censure or other forms of costly social signalling as a means of punishing defectors. They don’t even have to kill the defectors or drive them out; the defectors are critically dependent on the group for their lifestyle. The alternatiive will be unappealing in all but a vast majority of cases.
You need the kind of population densities agriculture allows to start getting a really noticeable effect. It’s not to say people don’t ever become tempted to defect, but it’s seldom a beneficial decision. And many cultures, such as the San ones in South Africa, have cultural mechanisms for ensuring nobody’s ego gets too big for their britches, so to speak. Teasing and ribbing in place of praise when someone gets a big head about their accomplishments, passive reminders that they need the group more than they individually benefit it.
This isn’t so much about group selection,as it is about all the individuals having their raft tied to the same ship—a group big enough to provide the necessities of life, which also provides a lot of hedonic reinforcement for maintaining that state of affairs, and a lot of non-coercive negative signalling for noncompliance, coupled with the much more coercive but morally neutral threat presented by trying to make a living in this place all by yourself.
If you break a leg in a small group, the medical practitioner splints it and everyone keeps feeding you. If you do that by yourself, it probably never heals right and the next leopard to come along finds you easy pickings. That’s what defection buys you in the ancestral environment.
Say there are two kinds of forager groups, one which limits reproduction of its members by various means, and another that does not limit reproduction and instead constantly grows and splits and invades other groups’ territories if needed. Naively I would expect that the latter kind of group would tend to drive the former kind out of existence. Why didn’t this happen?
This isn’t necessarily evidence against a Malthusian equilibrium. It could be that the subsequent farmer lifestyle enabled survival for people with much poorer health and physical fitness, thus lowering the average health and fitness of those who managed to survive in the Malthusian equilibrium.
Can you give a reference that specifically discusses how a non-Malthusian situation of the foragers can be inferred from the existing archaeological evidence?
This is not true. Humans are (more or less) the only species that practices agriculture, but the Malthusian trap happens to non-human animals too. As long as reproduction above the replacement rate is possible, it will happen until the resource limit is reached. (Admittedly, for animals that aren’t apex predators, the situation is more complicated due to the predator-prey dynamics.)
Regarding the foragers’ supposed cooperation on keeping the population stable, I honestly don’t see how what you write makes sense, for at least two reasons:
The defectors would not need to reproduce in blatantly extraordinary numbers. It would be enough to reproduce just slightly above the replacement rate, so slightly that it might be unnoticeable for all practical purposes. The exponential growth would nevertheless explode their population in not very many generations and lead to them overwhelming others. So even if we assume that blatantly excessive reproduction would be punished, it would still leave them more than enough leeway for “cheating.”
How did this punishment mechanism evolve, and how did it remain stable? You can postulate any group selection mechanism by assuming altruistic punishment against individuals who deviate from the supposed group-optimal behavior. But you can’t just assert that such a mechanism must have existed because otherwise there would have been defection.
Moreover, you are now talking about group selection with altruistic punishment. There’s nothing inherently impossible or absurd about that, but these are very strong and highly controversial claims, which you are asserting in a confident and authoritative manner as if they were well-known or obvious.
I’d like to remind you that the ancestral environment was not completely stable, and no one is disputing that exponentially-expansive Malthusian agriculture happened. The question is why it took as long as it did, not why it was possible at all.
Estimates of world population growth come from:
http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/david.curry/worldpop.htm
Essentially human for our first 2 million years of existence, human population worldwide went from about 10,000 to 4 million. Given that virtually all major models of long-run human population converge very closely, and they all assume a relatively steady growth rate, we’re talking a doubling period of 250,000 years.
Malthus’ estimates assume a doubling rate of 25 years, or a single human generation. The difference is a factor of 10,000. World population simply did not grow as fast as you’re assuming, and humanity did not start outstripping local carrying capacities in a major, systematic way until we’d developed technologies that allowed us to make those sorts of population growth leaps.
According to Michael Kremer in “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million BC to 1990”, the base rate of technological change in human societies scales proportional to population—small population, slow technological change. This equals very long inferential distances to the sorts of techniques and behaviors that make agriculture a viable prospect.
You need intermediate steps, in the form of settled horticulture or nomadic pastoralism, to really concentrate the population enough to have a chance at developing agriculture in the intensive sense. Those sorts of cultural developments took a long time to come into being, and it was a gradual process at that.
So, yes, it’s true that if you grow certain grasses and just harvest their seeds reliably, grinding them into a fine powder and mixing that with water and then heating the whole mixture somehow without actually burning it in your fire directly, you can produce a food source that will unlock access to population-doubling intervals closer to the Malthusian assumption of one doubling per generation.
But that is a series of nested behaviors, NONE of which is intuitively obvious by itself from the perspective of a forager in a world full of nothing but other foragers. Which is why the entire chain took a long, long time to develop, and why agriculture was invented just a few times throughout human history.
Termites, leafcutter ants, certain damselfish, ambrosia beetles, and certain marsh snails all practice agriculture. But yes, it’s certainly an uncommon behavior.
What if reproduction above the replacement rate isn’t possible for the period of human evolution we’re talking about? What if the human population simply isn’t reproducing fast enough for most of prehistory to reach the resource limit? Those are the conditions I’m suggesting here—that reaching local resource limits was not the norm for much of our evolution, due to our inherent long gestation times and strong k-selection, the inherent metabolic requirements for fertility taking a long time to satisfy compared to modern conditions, the birth interval being very wide compared to Malthusian assumptions, and the techniques of food acquisition being of necessity limited by the the ease of satisfying everybody’s requirements (if everyone has a fully tummy and all their kids do too, going out and gathering MORE food at the expense of one’s kinsmen won’t do you any good anyway).
What you get is abundance—there’s room to grow, but we can only do it so fast, and when we start to reach the point where we might overtax our resource base, we’ve moved on and there weren’t enough of us using it in the first place to compromise it.
That kind of statistical hackery might work in a large population, but not very well in a small one. In a group of 100 humans, ANY population gain is noticeable.
Except all evidence suggests it wasn’t possible to have a population explosion, if you assume humans must have reproduced at the fastest allowable rate. Populations doubled in a quarter-million years, not 25.
It didn’t evolve genetically, it’s a cultural punishment I’m talking about. Ju/’hoansi hunters are taken down a notch whenever they make a kill. Certain Australian aboriginal groups have meat-sharing customs where one hunter goes out and gets a kangaroo (say), and his share of the meat is the intestines or penis—the choicer cuts get distributed according to a set of other rules. Except, then people invite the hunter over to dinner; he’s not forced to actually eat crow every time he succeeds, but he’s also socially aware that he depends upon the others for it (and he gets to receive a choicer share when some other hunter makes a kill).
I don’t understand your argument here at all. Earlier you said that growth to the Malthusian limit was prevented by a cooperative strategy of restraining reproduction. Now you say that lack of food production technology was limiting population growth. But if foragers did breed up to the limit where food became the limiting resource, that’s by definition a Malthusian equilibrium.
You are also presenting a strawman caricature of Malthus. His claim about a 25-year doubling period refers to agricultural societies with an ample supply of land, such as existed in North America of his day. He presents it as an empirical finding. When he discusses foragers, he notes that they’ll reproduce to the point where they run against the limited food supply available from foraging, which given the low supply of food relative to farming, means a much less dense population.
Some of his discussions of foragers are actually quite interesting. He notes that among the North American hunter-gatherers, resource limitations lead to constant disputes and warfare. He also cites accounts of European explorers’ contacts with forager peoples that seem to have been on the Malthusian limit.
It doesn’t matter—it still needs to be explained. Humans don’t just magically develop cultural norms that solve collective action problems.
What I said was that growth to the point of constant warfare, competition and struggle for enough food to subsist wasn’t an accurate picture of ancestral forager lifestyles.
He also says that smallpox was endemic among the Indians of all these cultures. Smallpox originated in Eurasia, thrived among farmers, and Native Americans had no immunity to it. His example of the squallor and disease these people live in is an example of the conditions they were subjected to at the hands of an invading power with novel biological agents their immune systems simply weren’t adapted to handle. The nastiest conflicts.
Warfare among Northwest Coast Natives, prior to colonization, was usually over petty disputes (that is, interpersonal ones) between peoples who had long-standing trade and treaty relationships, and only occasionally over resources (usually slaves, and the institution of slavery as it was practiced here does not compare readily with slavery as it was practiced by agriculturalists in Eurasia and Africa). The bloodier wars of the inland northwest are similarly a historical novelty, unparalleled in scope or stakes until the ravages of introduced diseases and the dislocation of various tribes by white invaders into territories they’d never been in competition for caused clashes that simply hadn’t occured at such a level of intensity prior to that point. The formation of reservations only exacerbated this—we’re talking about groups with age-old rivalries who had never seen fit to exterminate one another or conquer one another’s lands, but who would happily send a war canoe full of men to go steal things because of a petty vendetta between two people that started long ago.
This isn’t war of extermination. Don’t get me wrong, it’s violent, people die, the stakes are real, but it’s not a zero-sum, winner-take-all competition for survival. A direct translation out of Old Chinook from Franz Boas’ ethnography, regarding the rules of warfare should make this clearer:
“Before the people go to war they sing. If one of them sees blood, he will be killed in battle. When two see blood, they will be killed. They finish their singing. When they sing, two long planks are put down parallel to each other. All the warriors sing. They kneel [on the planks]. Now they go to war and fight. When people of both parties have been killed, they stop. After some time the two parties exchange presents and make peace. When a feud has not yet been settled, they marry a woman to a man of the other town and they make peace.”
The fight ends when both sides have taken casualties. The opposing sides exchange gifts and make peace. They resolve outstanding feuds by diplomatic marriage. This is the Chinook idea of war, the way it was practiced with all but their very worst enemies (who lived rather a long way from Chinook territory—the Quileute weren’t exactly next door given the pace of travel in those days, and even then the wars between them were not genocidal in intent). This is completely different from war as most Eurasian-descended cultures knew it. And it was typical of forager warfare in North America before Columbus showed up.
Malthus, in looking at the conditions of North American natives during the 19th century, reports on the dire conditions of a people devastated by introduced diseases, direct conquest by white settlers, and the disruption of their social fabric and ways of life. Whole culture groups pushed beyond the breaking point and very much outside their typical context, and most of their actual problems direct effects of colonization.
Some of the accounts presented by Malthus were given by very early explorers and adventurers who ended up deep in unexplored territory, far ahead of European conquest and colonization. For example, the one by Cabeca de Vaca would be circa 1530.
The only way these societies could have already been devastated is if epidemics had ravaged the whole continent immediately in the first decades after the first Europeans landed, ahead of any European contact with the inland peoples. I don’t know enough about the relevant history to know how plausible this is, but even if it happened, there are two problems with your claim:
Diseases wouldn’t cause famine, at least in the long run. These early explorers describe peoples who had problems making ends meet during bad seasons due to insufficient food, and who fought bitterly over the existing limited supply. If the population had already been thinned down by disease by the time they came, we’d expect, if anything, the per capita food supply from foraging to be greater than before.
If even the earliest accounts are of devastated societies, then how do we know anything about the better life they led before that? Where does this information come from? You cite an ethnography by Boas, who was born in 1858, as authoritative, but dismiss a compilation of far older accounts compiled by Malthus in the early 19th century.
Smallpox emerged in the Old World around 10,000 BC and is believed to have originated via cattle farming. It reached very high concentrations in Europe and became a common plague there; it was spread around the world to peoples who had never encountered it by European exploration and conquest. It and other Old World disease spread very rapidly among American native populations, rendering whole cultures extinct and reducing others to scattered survivors often incapable of rebuilding. The total population of the Americas lost to European diseases after the arrival of Columbus and Cortez is estimated at 90 to 95 percent.
Given that many Native nations were at least modestly dependent on agriculture (the Iroquois, Navajo, Aztecs, Incas, Mississipians—indeed, most of the well-known groups), such population losses coming so quickly are nothing short of catastrophic. Most of your resource base collapses because one person is going to have to work MUCH harder to provide enough food for themselves—fields go unplanted, vegetables don’t get tended, wild game is much more dangerous to hunt by oneself, and one cannot expect any assistance with gathering. Even a small number of people used to an agriculture-enriched lifestyle are going to be hit much harder.
It’s also worth noting that Cabeza da Vaca actually described the Coahuiltic as a healthy and prosperous people—and ant eggs, lizards and so on were just normal parts of their diet. Ant eggs in particular are STILL a cultural delicacy among the Latino groups descended from the Coahuiltecs (escamole taco, anyone?). Diet adapts to local circumstances.
That is precisely what happened. One infected slave from Spanish-held Cuba is believed to be the Patient Zero that transmitted an infection which would go on to wipe out about fifty percent of the Aztec population. Hernando de Soto, exploring the southeast, encountered many towns and villages abandoned just two years prior when most of their inhabitants died of the plagues. Isolated survivors often just abandoned their homes outright, since in many cases a handful of people or even a single survivor were all that was left out of a village of hundreds or thousands. Neighbors who showed up, unaware of what happened, might contract disease from the corpses in some cases, or simply welcome in the survivors who’d start the cycle anew. North America had extensive trade routes linking all major regions, from coast to coast. Foot and boat traffic carried diseases quite far from their initial outbreak sites.
Because they’re not all dead, and they left their own records of what happened and there are records of contact with them in much better conditions*, and there are still plenty of Native people alive today, who often know rather more about said records of their lives before than the typical Euro-American? And because it’s generally acknowledged within anthropological, archaeological and historical fields now that modern research bears out a picture of generally healthy, sustainable populations for most of the foragers of the Americas? And quite large, complex societies that were generally not recognized as such by early Anglo scholars into the matter?
(Malthus seriously* misrepresents Cabeza de Vaca’s case—the Floridians were in a bad way, but they were also right next door to Spanish early conquest—his accounts of the Coahuiltecs of coastal and inland Texas describe them as a healthy and prosperous people...and their descendents STILL enjoy ant eggs as a dietary item; you don’t have to be desperate to eat insects and many human groups actively enjoy it .
Boas actually travelled to the civilizations he wrote about, lived among them, recorded their oral traditions and analyzed their languages, investigated their history and their environmental circumstances. For many people, especially in the Northwest, far North and other relatively late-contacted areas, these events occured within the living memory of their elders.
Malthus wasn’t an expert on Native American civilizations or history, and basically went with the prevailing account available at the time. He relied on a consensus that wasn’t yet well-understood to be false. So I reject Malthus’ picture of pre-Columbian America for the same reason I reject Lysenko’s account of evolution. The difference is that Malthus was an influential thinker within the development of Western thought, and his role means that a lot of people who agree with what insights he did make are unwittingly buying into cached arguments about related subjects (often ones that don’t support his case) which hadn’t yet been discovered as such when Malthus wrote in the first place.
Scholarship in the field since Malthus’ time has seriously changed the outlook—Charles C. Mann and Jared Diamond are good, accessible sources for a summary overview (“1491” and “Guns, Germs and Steel”). If I seem to be vague, it’s mostly because this is domain-specific knowledge that’s not widely understood outside the domain, but as domain insider it’s fairly basic stuff.
How exactly does this modern research reconstruct the life of American foragers centuries ago, and based on what evidence? Could you cite some of this work? (I’d like to see the original work that presumably explains its methodology rigorously, not popular summaries.)
I also note that you haven’t answered Wei Dai’s question.
Regarding Malthus and de Vaca, you say:
Here is a translation of de Vaca’s original account:
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/one/cabeza.htm
On closer look, it turns out that de Vaca’s description cited by Malthus actually refers to a people from southeastern Texas, not Florida. So while Malthus apparently mixed up the location by accident, his summary is otherwise accurate. Your above claims are therefore completely incorrect—the description is in fact of a people from Texas, living very far from the boundary of Spanish conquest at the time.
For reference, I quote de Vaca’s account at length (all emphasis mine):
Castillo and Estevanico went inland to the Iguaces. [...] Their principal food are two or three kinds of roots, which they hunt for all over the land; they are very unhealthy, inflating, and it takes two days to roast them. Many are very bitter, and with all that they are gathered with difficulty. But those people are so much exposed to starvation that these roots are to them indispensable and they walk two and three leagues to obtain them. Now and then they kill deer and at times get a fish, but this is so little and their hunger so great that they eat spiders and ant eggs, worms, lizards and salamanders and serpents, also vipers the bite of which is deadly. They swallow earth and wood, and all they can get, the dung of deer and more things I do not mention; and I verily believe, from what I saw, that if there were any stones in the country they would eat them also. They preserve the bones of the fish they eat, of snakes and other animals, to pulverize them and eat the powder. [...] Their best times are when “tunas” (prickly pears) are ripe, because then they have plenty to eat and spend the time in dancing and eating day and night. [...] While with them it happened many times that we were three or four days without food. Then, in order to cheer us, they would tell us not to despair, since we would have tunas very soon and eat much and drink their juice and get big stomachs and be merry, contented and without hunger. But from the day they said it to the season of the tunas there would still elapse five or six months, and we had to wait that long.
Also, regarding this:
Earlier you claimed that the native population of the entire American continent was devastated by epidemics immediately after the first European contacts in the late 15th/early 16th century, so that even the accounts of very early European explorers who traveled deep into the continent ahead of European colonization do not present an accurate picture of the native foragers’ good life they had lived before that. But now you claim that in the late 19th century, this good life was still within living memory for some of them.
It seems like you’re accepting or discounting evidence selectively. I can’t believe that all those accounts cited by Malthus refer to societies devastated by epidemics ahead of European contact, but on the other hand, the pre-epidemic good times were still within living memory for the people studied by Boaz centuries later.
Lysenko was motivated by politics. Baez was motivated by politics.
Physics improves, but history deteriorates. Those writers closest to events give us the most accurate picture, while later writers merely add political spin. Since 1830, history has suffered increasingly drastic, frequent, and outrageous politically motivated rewrites, has become more and more subject to a single monolithic political view, uniformly applied to all history books written in a particular period.
If you read old histories, they explain that they know such and such, because of such and such. If you read later histories, then when they disagree with older histories, check the evidence cited by older histories, you usually find that the newer histories are making stuff up. The older history says X said Y, and quotes him. The newer history say that X said B, and fails to quote him, or fails to quote him in context, or just simply asserts B, without any explanation as to how they can possibly know B.
Both Clark and Tainter (Collapse of Complex Civilizations) disagree with this claim as stated. A massive reduction in the population means that the survivors get increased per-capitas because the survivors move way back along the diminishing marginal returns curve and now have more low-hanging fruit (sometimes literally). In fact, Tainter argues that complexity often collapses because the collapse is the only way to increase per-capita wealth. Hunter-gatherers spend much less time per calorie than do advanced agriculturalists eg.
Or
(Quotes brought to you by my Evernote; it’s a pain in the ass to excerpt all the important bits from a book, but it certainly pays off later if you want to cite it for various assertions.)