According to Jane Jacobs, cities preceded agriculture. In “Before the Dawn” Wade seems to agree with that theory, as there is evidence that people lived in settled areas for a surprisingly long time without becoming agriculturalists. I was surprised how late agriculture emerged in Japan.
A notable example of a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers that American readers may have heard about it middle school are the native americans of the northwest, who relied on the large amounts of available salmon nearby and had “potlatches” featuring the conspicuous destruction of expensive goods.
Jane Jacobs is an urban planner and an economist. While that does not mean that she is wrong, I am not terribly inclined to believe her theory in the absence of any sort of evidence; so far as I can tell, the only justification she offers is a thought experiment. Absent something convincing one way or the other, I’m inclined to consider which came first an open question.
Wikipedia cites Japan as having some form of primitive agriculture contemporaneously with the earliest settlements, but its reliability is, as ever, uncertain.
I’m not sure how fishing fits into all of this; it may be an important exception to the general trend.
In any case, unless settlements preceded agriculture by more than a couple millenia (which Jacobs doesn’t seem to claim), anatomically modern humans were still nomads for 95% of their history and nomadic foragers are still our best model of the evolutionary environment.
Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist who did a lot to oppose urban renewal. I suppose you could argue that there were some sorts of urban planning she liked (mixed use, pedestrian-friendly) but on the whole, she supported bottom-up social networks.
My “Jane Jacobs” link was to Overcoming Bias, where it was suggested (by someone other than Jacobs) that sedentary communities preceded agriculture by up to 3000 years, which I suppose would fit your “couple millenia).
Your Jomon link said that their pottery is evidence of sedentary living and described its origin as Mesolithic, or “Middle Stone Age” and preceding the Neolithic of agriculture. It also said they were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. It describes them as having “some of the highest densities known for foraging populations”, though noting that Pacific Americans were similarly high.
When humans left Africa they seem to have hugged the southeast coastline. We can expect that they had boats since they were able to reach Australia and the polynesian islands. So I think fishing was pretty important. Cavalli-Sforza writes of pre-Jomon Japan “A major source of food in those pre-agricultural times came from fishing, then as now, and this would have limited for ecological reasons the area of expansion to the coastline”.
According to Jane Jacobs, cities preceded agriculture. In “Before the Dawn” Wade seems to agree with that theory, as there is evidence that people lived in settled areas for a surprisingly long time without becoming agriculturalists. I was surprised how late agriculture emerged in Japan.
A notable example of a group of sedentary hunter-gatherers that American readers may have heard about it middle school are the native americans of the northwest, who relied on the large amounts of available salmon nearby and had “potlatches” featuring the conspicuous destruction of expensive goods.
Jane Jacobs is an urban planner and an economist. While that does not mean that she is wrong, I am not terribly inclined to believe her theory in the absence of any sort of evidence; so far as I can tell, the only justification she offers is a thought experiment. Absent something convincing one way or the other, I’m inclined to consider which came first an open question.
Wikipedia cites Japan as having some form of primitive agriculture contemporaneously with the earliest settlements, but its reliability is, as ever, uncertain.
I’m not sure how fishing fits into all of this; it may be an important exception to the general trend.
In any case, unless settlements preceded agriculture by more than a couple millenia (which Jacobs doesn’t seem to claim), anatomically modern humans were still nomads for 95% of their history and nomadic foragers are still our best model of the evolutionary environment.
Jane Jacobs was a writer and activist who did a lot to oppose urban renewal. I suppose you could argue that there were some sorts of urban planning she liked (mixed use, pedestrian-friendly) but on the whole, she supported bottom-up social networks.
My “Jane Jacobs” link was to Overcoming Bias, where it was suggested (by someone other than Jacobs) that sedentary communities preceded agriculture by up to 3000 years, which I suppose would fit your “couple millenia).
Your Jomon link said that their pottery is evidence of sedentary living and described its origin as Mesolithic, or “Middle Stone Age” and preceding the Neolithic of agriculture. It also said they were hunter-gatherers and fishermen. It describes them as having “some of the highest densities known for foraging populations”, though noting that Pacific Americans were similarly high.
When humans left Africa they seem to have hugged the southeast coastline. We can expect that they had boats since they were able to reach Australia and the polynesian islands. So I think fishing was pretty important. Cavalli-Sforza writes of pre-Jomon Japan “A major source of food in those pre-agricultural times came from fishing, then as now, and this would have limited for ecological reasons the area of expansion to the coastline”.