Innocence lost / innovations = bad

Sat Jan 5 19:28:49 CST 2008

I liked this article. It hit me on a few points that seem to be up on the
mat right now. Maybe there is something good about innovations, like not
starving but instead hitting a smaller animal with a sharper faster spear,
but this article states that the tide is turning on the assumption that
agriculture helped us become stronger. But it still remains a puzzle if
Pynchon gives us a call to action to divide the bad from the good or or if
he just plays with this puzzle. Engels's quote at the end of page 129 in
the print edition makes me wonder (Have not studied much Marxist theory) if
loss of innocence (which I think is a major theme in ATD) is something that
can ever be solved with regular 3 space, and maybe it's a 4 space problem.

Hunter-gatherers 

Noble or savage?

Dec 19th 2007 
>From The Economist print edition

The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden
that some suggest

Hemis.fr 

HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as
hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of
agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with
gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the
Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who
still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimensstrong,
slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round
the waistthey are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests
that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the very first
expansion out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago.

About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture
and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming
brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new
diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six
inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was
agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race, as Jared
Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the
University of California, Los Angeles, once called it? 

Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of
Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had originated
in Africa and had colonised first their own continent, then Asia, Australia
and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the Americas. They had
spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted pictures,
decorated their bodies and believed in spirits. They traded foods, shells,
raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, told stories and prepared herbal
medicines.

They were hunter-gatherers. On the whole the men hunted and the women
gathered: a sexual division of labour is still universal among non-farming
people and was probably not shared by their Homo erectus predecessors. This
enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever trick because it combines
quality with reliability.

Why change? In the late 1970s Mark Cohen, an archaeologist, first suggested
that agriculture was born of desperation, rather than inspiration. Evidence
from the Fertile Crescent seems to support him. Rising human population
density, combined perhaps with a cooling, drying climate, left the Natufian
hunter-gatherers of the region short of acorns, gazelles and wild grass
seeds. Somebody started trying to preserve and enhance a field of chickpeas
or wheat-grass and soon planting, weeding, reaping and threshing were born.

Quite independently, people took the same step in at least six other parts
of the world over the next few thousand years: the Yangzi valley, the
central valley of New Guinea, Mexico, the Andes, West Africa and the Amazon
basin. And it seems that Eden came to an end. Not only had hunter-gatherers
enjoyed plenty of protein, not much fat and ample vitamins in their diet,
but it also seems they did not have to work very hard. The Hadza of
Tanzania work about 14 hours a week, the !Kung of Botswana not much more.

The first farmers were less healthy than the hunter-gatherers had been in
their heyday. Aside from their shorter stature, they had more skeletal wear
and tear from the hard work, their teeth rotted more, they were short of
protein and vitamins and they caught diseases from domesticated animals:
measles from cattle, flu from ducks, plague from rats and worms from using
their own excrement as fertiliser.

They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time.
Hunter-gatherers' dependence on sharing each other's hunting and gathering
luck makes them remarkably egalitarian. A successful farmer, however, can
afford to buy the labour of others, and that makes him more successful
still, until eventuallyespecially in an irrigated river valley, where he
controls the waterhe can become an emperor imposing his despotic whim upon
subjects. Friedrich Engels was probably right to identify agriculture with
a loss of political innocence.

Agriculture also stands accused of exacerbating sexual inequality. In many
peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard work. Among
hunter-gathering folk, men usually bring fewer calories than women, and
have a tiresome tendency to prefer catching big and infrequent prey so they
can show off, rather than small and frequent catches that do not rot before
they are eaten. But the men do at least contribute.

Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the
invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the serpent
in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe it was not
an 80,000-year camping holiday after all.

Hemis.fr 

In 2006 two Indian fishermen, in a drunken sleep aboard their little boat,
drifted over the reef and fetched up on the shore of North Sentinel Island.
They were promptly killed by the inhabitants. Their bodies are still there:
the helicopter that went to collect them was driven away by a hail of
arrows and spears. The Sentinelese do not welcome trespassers. Only very
occasionally have they been lured down to the beach of their tiny island
home by gifts of coconuts and only once or twice have they taken these
gifts without sending a shower of arrows in return.

Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much
more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From
the 
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in
Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost
constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War
is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death
rates are highusually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The
warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley
of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer
societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology.
But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard
Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are
the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic
homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven
LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led
academics to overlook evidence of constant violence.

MEPL 

I know it's a drag Godric, but it's progress

Not so many women as men die in warfare, it is true. But that is because
they are often the object of the fighting. To be abducted as a sexual prize
was almost certainly a common female fate in hunter-gatherer society.
Forget the Garden of Eden; think Mad Max.

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one
person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density.
Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were
dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely
swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from
chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than
being ground out of existence altogether. 

Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural peasants
swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like
an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural
idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were
indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they
had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold,
muddy, starving rural hell of their birth.

Homo sapiens wrought havoc on many ecosystems as Homo erectus had not

Eighteenth-century rural England was a place where people starved each
spring as the winter stores ran out, where in bad years and poor districts
long hours of agricultural labourif it could be gotbarely paid enough to
keep body and soul together, and a place where the putting-out system of
textile manufacture at home drove workers harder for lower pay than even
the factories would. (Ask Zambians today why they take ill-paid jobs in
Chinese-managed mines, or Vietnamese why they sew shirts in
multinational-owned factories.) The industrial revolution caused a
population explosion because it enabled more babies to
survivemalnourished, perhaps, but at least alive.

Returning to hunter-gatherers, Mr LeBlanc argues (in his book Constant
Battles) that all was not well in ecological terms, either. Homo sapiens
wrought havoc on many ecosystems as Homo erectus had not. There is no
longer much doubt that people were the cause of the extinction of the
megafauna in North America 11,000 years ago and Australia 30,000 years
before that. The mammoths and giant kangaroos never stood a chance against
co-ordinated ambush with stone-tipped spears and relentless pursuit by
endurance runners.

This was also true in Eurasia. The earliest of the great cave painters,
working at Chauvet in southern France, 32,000 years ago, was obsessed with
rhinoceroses. A later artist, working at Lascaux 15,000 years later,
depicted mostly bison, bulls and horsesrhinoceroses must have been driven
close to extinction by then. At first, modern human beings around the
Mediterranean relied almost entirely on large mammals for meat. They ate
small game only if it was slow movingtortoises and limpets were popular.
Then, gradually and inexorably, starting in the Middle East, they switched
their attention to smaller animals, and especially to warm-blooded,
fast-breeding species, such as rabbits, hares, partridges and smaller
gazelles. The archaeological record tells this same story at sites in
Israel, Turkey and Italy.

Bridgeman Art Library 

Another fine environmental mess we've got ourselves into

The reason for this shift, say Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn of the
University of Arizona, was that human population densities were growing too
high for the slower-reproducing prey such as tortoises, horses and rhinos.
Only the fast-breeding rabbits, hares and partridges, and for a while
gazelles, could cope with such hunting pressure. This trend accelerated
about 15,000 years ago as large game and tortoises disappeared from the
Mediterranean diet altogetherdriven to the brink of extinction by human
predation.

In times of prey scarcity, Homo erectus, like other predators, had simply
suffered local extinction; these new people could innovate their way out of
troublethey could shift their niche. In response to demographic pressure,
they developed better weapons which enabled them to catch smaller, faster
prey, which in turn enabled them to survive at high densities, though at
the expense of extinguishing many larger and slower-breeding prey. Under
this theory, the atlatl or spear-throwing stick was invented 18,000 years
ago as a response to a Malthusian crisis, not just because it seemed like a
good idea.

Soon collecting wild grass seeds evolved into planting and reaping crops,
which meant fewer proteins and vitamins but ample calories

What's more, the famously affluent society of hunter-gatherers, with
plenty of time to gossip by the fire between hunts and gathers, turns out
to be a bit of a myth, or at least an artefact of modern life. The
measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted
food-processing time and travel time, partly because the anthropologists
gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles and lent them metal knives to
process food.

Agriculture was presumably just another response to demographic pressure. A
new threat of starvationprobably during the millennium-long dry, cold
snap known as the Younger Dryas about 13,000 years agoprompted some
hunter-gatherers in the Levant to turn much more vegetarian. Soon
collecting wild grass seeds evolved into planting and reaping crops, which
reduced people's intake of proteins and vitamins, but brought ample
calories, survival and fertility.

The fact that something similar happened six more times in human history
over the next few thousand yearsin Asia, New Guinea, at least three places
in the Americas and one in Africasupports the notion of invention as a
response to demographic pressure. In each case the early farmers, though
they might be short, sick and subjugated, could at least survive and breed,
enabling them eventually to overwhelm the remaining hunter-gatherers of
their respective continents.

It is irrelevant to ask whether we would have been better off to stay as
hunter-gatherers. Being a niche-shifting species, we could not help moving
on. Willingly or not, humanity had embarked 50,000 years ago on the road
called progress with constant change in habits driven by invention
mothered by necessity. Even 40,000 years ago, technology and lifestyle were
in a state of continuous change, especially in western Eurasia. By 34,000
years ago people were making bone points for spears, and by 26,000 years
ago they were making needles. Harpoons and other fishing tackle appear at
18,000 years ago, as do bone spear throwers, or atlatls. String was almost
certainly in use thenhow do you catch rabbits except in nets and snares?

Nor was this virtuosity confined to practicalities. A horse, carved from
mammoth-ivory and worn smooth by being used as a pendant, dates from 32,000
years ago in Germany. By the time of Sungir, an open-air settlement from
28,000 years ago at a spot near the city of Vladimir, north-east of Moscow,
people were being buried with thousands of laboriously carved ivory beads
and even little wheel-shaped bone ornaments.

Incessant innovation is a characteristic of human beings. Agriculture, the
domestication of animals and plants, must be seen in the context of this
progressive change. It was just another step: hunter-gatherers may have
been using fire to encourage the growth of root plants in southern Africa
80,000 years ago. At 15,000 years ago people first domesticated another
speciesthe wolf (though it was probably the wolves that took the
initiative). After 12,000 years ago came crops. The internet and the mobile
phone were in some vague sense almost predestined 50,000 years ago to
appear eventually.

There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological
crises for ourselves and our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We
have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point out that each solution
only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis
has proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the
megafauna and became even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass
seeds, so in the early 20th century we faced starvation for lack of
fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look
forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic
nitrogen, genetically high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually
reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there will be another issue waiting
for us.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web.com  Enhanced email for the mobile individual based on Microsoft®
Exchange - http://link.mail2web.com/Personal/EnhancedEmail