Billy wrote:
Billy wrote:

uhoh, quoting is messed up below...


...
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds
ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported
from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose
between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
(Search for it on the web: mistake_jared_diamond.pdf)

well, i'll say i don't agree with many of
his assumptions and so that won't lead me to
much harmony with his conclusions.

Wouldn't want to amplify on that would you? You disagree with what
assumptions?

that agriculture was the cause of class divisions.
that he's making valid comparisons between cultures
on the whole. that he's doing much other than picking
what suits the conclusions he's already made.

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
diet,

a prime example of my point. there are many
hunter-gatherer societies that do not live off
a varied diet.

Humor me with an example.

pick any of the far northern tribes.
i'm not sure what the names are now, but
they used to be called Inuit or Athapaskans
or something like that. fairly limited
diet for large parts of the year. also
they are small people (like the many rain
forest tribes of Africa and South America).


American Plains Indians would follow the buffalo , or what ever from
place to place. They were working an environment that they knew.

most of their food came from the buffalo.
that society was not long running, as the
last ice-age was only recently gone.


while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops.

plenty of hunter-gatherers were/are in the
same situation.

Again, humor me. I'm not seeing it.

the native groups of the eastern US used
cattail, acorns, corn and wild rice as their
major starches. that's about it, four isn't
a great variety.


The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and
corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species,
yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential
to life.)

reads like begging the question to me.

It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild
plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish
farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

you won't have hundreds of thousands of bushmen
in the same area to have that kind of problem, but
i would be very surprised if there were not various
events which caused starvation in bushmen too.

i think you understand that many who starved
during the potato famine starved because of
political reasons. the Irish were still shipping
food to England even as their own people were
starving.


Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

if you were an idiot farmer then yeah.
there were likely idiot hunter-gatherers
who starved too.
�he Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created
the famine�.

yep in that case and in many many other
cases too, it's often politics or wars
which cause a lot of starvation.


You don't have to be an idiot to starve, but we can talk more about
corporations later.



Finally, the mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies,

the mere fact is that it is likely that
there were people clumping together for
reasons other than agriculture long before
agriculture came along.

Perhaps, my understanding is that groups of hunter/gatherers were rather
clanish, and not looking for recruits. When groups got too large, they would
divide ans separate. I'd probably have to do some digging thought to come
up with supporting references though. Unless you'd be willing to accept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-
gatherer#Social_and_economic_structure
Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical,
egalitarian social structures. This might have been more pronounced in
the more mobile societies.

According to archaeologists, violence in hunter-gatherer societies was
ubiquitous. Approximately 25% to 30% of adult male deaths in these
societies were due to homicide, compared to an upper estimate of 3% of
all deaths in the 20th century. The cause of this is near constant
tribal warfa "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." [16]

does that sound like a great way to live?
i think not... but that was a part of how
they controlled their populations to keep
within the bounds of what that land could
support (in addition to infanticide and
elder-suicide).


Full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by
these societies.[17][18][19] In addition to social and economic equality
in hunter-gatherer societies there is often, though not always, sexual
parity as well.[17][20] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together
based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.[20]

i think most have some kind of respected
elder or shaman role which is held apart.


many of which then carried on trade with other crowded
societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some
archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument,

the whole thing is a chicken-and-egg argument...


because
crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't
take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly
shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise
of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped
bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.

this is the point in dispute isn't it? i claim
that class divisions existed in groups long before
agriculture.


Hunter-
gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day.

this is a very limited view of hunter-gathering
societies, which happens to ignore some groups
which do store food (because they live places
where it stays cold enough to freeze meat) or the
herders who have large stores of food on the hoof.
it also ignores the many groups which lived in
northern climates which required them to have
food stores for the winter or they'd die. so
clearly there is a bias in his writings, observations
and comments which exclude peoples who clearly
survived just fine for thousands of years without
agriculture who also had class divisions in their
groups.

Sedentary hunter/gatherers? I'll need to think about
that for awhile. I've never heard of such a thing.

the far north coastal tribes, gather from the
sea, they cannot wander in the extreme cold.


Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs
at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than
commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and
had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing
teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

perhaps to be an elite you had to be healthier
to begin with? perhaps there are other reasons
for the elite being healthier? like they had
personal servants who kept things clean? that
could make a difference in disease rates apart
from nutrition...

Being an "elite" was based on a physical??!

no, being an elite means you may have been
bigger to start with. much as in today's
society there is an elite based upon looks
or how tall someone is.


In any event, things were kept clean by the hunter/gatherers moving away
from all their manure, and garbage, and going over the next hill, or
across a valley where there was fresh, clean land.

surely that's a big help if you don't know
how to compost or are too lazy to bury your
wastes.


i don't find his arguments well thought out
and too much of the conclusion is biased by
his preconceptions.

"One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from
skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece
and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the
end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With
the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had
reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights
were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have
still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

again this could be some other aspect
happening. not that i'm sure it is, but it
could be. selection for taller or shorter
people is possible and is independent of
nutrition to some degree (not completely,
but possible, after all those herders in
Africa are tall (so they can see their
cattle and see predators? i'm not sure
why actually, but they do seem to select
for tall), but they also live on a fairly
restricted diet (meat, milk, blood being
their major foods)).


Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian
skeletons from burial mounds in the lllinois and Ohio river valleys. At
Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and lllinois
rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a
picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer
culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by
George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of
Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found
livelihood. Compared to the hunter- gatherers who preceded them, the
farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative
of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia
(evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold
rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an
increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a
lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the
preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos,
"but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years. So these
episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously
affecting their ability to survive."

ah now we've finally gotten a long enough
study of one society to see it happen. ok,
yay! one society is not the whole of the
world. the Tikopians and the Amazonians
practiced agriculture and seemed to be
healthy for long periods of time (thousands
of years in both cases).

what you really are coming up with is the
case that poorly done agriculture is bad for
the health of certain peoples. which is not
a blanket condemnation that they seem to be
trying to come up with.

one counter-example is good enough to
disprove the universal claim.

right now, we have a very broad variety
in many different agricultural societies.
this is currently being supported by
fossil fuels so diversity in local crops
isn't as quite a problem as it could be.
as oil gets more expensive more and more
people will raise local crops for diversity
because they'll be forced to. otherwise
they'll be subject to the malnutrition that
you are speaking of. this is the difference
between modern times and times past. more
people know better.


-----

Would you settle for his post conceptions? If you read the archiological
record, I don't know what other conclusion you could come to.

Hunter/gatherer: healthy
Farmer: malnourshied, and sick.

the archaeological record is biased too.
only some societies practiced burials in
places that could be found later. the
more stable the society the more likely
they did this. which means that the more
stable societies have an archaeological
record, maybe even a fairly complete one,
but they are trying to compare that
society against a hunter-gatherer bone
record which may not be even close to
being complete. they are missing the ones
who died in infancy and were discared or
the elderly who went off to die alone if
that was the accepted way.

i accept that some societies are healthier
than others, but that's about it. clearly
(at least to me ) not in all cases is the
health of the people determined alone if they
practiced agriculture or not.


If we consider a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents
100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began
at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We
lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight
through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted
agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of
famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will
we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind
agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?

i'd suggest finding a better approach, but
shoddy thinking isn't too likely going to help
much at all.

I think it's called putting things into perspective.

i think putting 20-30% deaths by murder into
perspective is a pretty good counter-point.


...
i did, i don't agree with too many of his
assumptions.

What, that a division between the people who did the actual work, and
the planners didn't lead to a stratification of society?

i'll repeat myself. all groups stratify.
period. full stop. end of statement.

Deference to an individual, because of their hunting kills isn't
stratification
isn't social stratification. When one individual benefits all, and I mean
ALL,
there will be deference, just as there will be for the best stone
chipper, healer, singer, or painter, but that isn't social stratification.

what is it then? i think it is the basis
for stratification. that is how craft-guilds
get started, how priesthoods get started,
because the specialised knowledge starts
getting complicated enough that it requires
years of study to get it right, which means
if the society values those practices it
has to support the setting of some people
apart and come up with a way of feeding
them and protecting them. and that then
pushes agricultural practices along too. it
is a transformation that happens all together
and is not "the result of agriculture".


And your example of that in a hunter/gatherer group would be . . . ?

strong and smart person is likely at
the top of the heap. most likely that
person will even be more on top if they
are considered good looking or have
charisma, if they have many children
or many wives or husbands.

children, elders, injured, chronically
sick, mothers, fathers, those who know
the plants and animals well.

there are many different types of
layering going on, one person may be
at the bottom of the heap in one aspect
but near the top in another.

So it isn't stratification.

last i knew stratified is just
another word for layered.


It used to be, if you didn't like your neighbors, or the local strong
man, you walked away. The food was there for the taking anyway.

i think that's not very likely. families
stick together even in the face of some
rather rotten behaviors and situations.
many many stories of police getting called
into a domestic dispute to help break it up
only to find that both parties start in on
the police officer. there's a good reason
why police hate domestic trouble calls...


function
of the species/brain. we group, divide up,
regroup, etc. constantly. even the most rigid
of the religious societies fragment and divide
once the charismatic leader dies or something
happens which sets enough people off into another
direction. it's just what we do.

any group of people of more than one person
has a class system, rankings, etc. they may be
unspoken and there are likely many different
ones in operation.


The word
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, meaning city or city-state.

You saw his argument on hunter/gatherers superior health?

and i don't agree, he's sweeping a lot of
things under the rug.

Such as?

all the stuff i wrote above.

That's a bit dodgy to say, but if you'll just respond
to what I've responded, we can get on with it.

i have done that.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/086...29546060_email
_1p_1_ti

Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and
Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against
both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists,
biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own
travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation,
erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in
the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers
personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to
resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and
the planet's.
-----

I know it doesn't prove anything, but at least I, and Jarod Diamond,
aren't alone in this belief.


I can't believe that I found another book to read :O(

hehehe, always more to read.

alas, i'm getting into planting season, and my
health is better than any hunter-gatherer. especially
if you consider i'd have never lived past a day in
a society that didn't have some form of medical
science and an incubator.

i'm still rather fond of the much less than 20-30%
murder rate too, but perhaps that is only a temporary
lull in the mayhem of human existance. if the future
goes wild and crazy we might get back to mass
starvations and high rates of murder as the planet
answers the question of over-population and abuse
of resources.

i certainly hope for better, i don't think a
return to hunting-gathering is likely for a vast
number of people. a subset might be able to do
it as urban hunter-gatherers or those who can
be rich enough to afford enough land and have
some way of protecting it from intruders or
governmental confiscation. the next real hunter-
gatherer societies are likely to be either those
of the post-apocalyptic or on another planet.
if that other planet is one we've had to
engineer then it's pretty likely we've also had
a good shot at doing good work here on this planet
too. at least i try to remain optimistic about
either of those cases. the world can heal itself
given time. we see this in the geological record
after huge events. so, yeah, i am optimistic,
the world will continue, the question is with
or without us?


songbird