BeaArthur wrote:
I gather - and somebody correct me if I'm wrong - that the shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies involved people largely staying in one place. The linked article states that women typically became members of whatever clan they married into, while men remained members of their originating clan. So nubile women were portable whereas men were not.
We have now reached the outer limits of my ability to talk about this stuff. Genetic anthropology and archaeology are way beyond my ken. I tried to read one of the articles linked to the history.com article, and found too many concepts and words that were new to me.
It's the poorest understood aspect of human history to be honest. No other species has moved from nomadic to stationary, so there's not fossil evidence of other species that could help either. You are correct on the leading theory though. It goes like this: nomadic humans are just like nomadic animals, they followed game trails as the seasons change. The men would hunt for animals and the women would collect fruits and vegetables as the group progressed through it's game trail. Eventually someone noticed that the seeds they spit out from the plants grew the exact same plant in that location a year later on their next migration. A light bulb turns on, and the tribe realizes they no longer have to make the arduous journey year in and year out, they can plant the seeds and live in a single location all year round. If this theory is indeed correct, it means several things: the person that figured it out was an Einstein level intellect for that developmental phase of human (highly probable it was a female too since they were in charge of plant gathering), second that would be the point humans started looking in 3 + 1 dimensions (the standard three x,y,z dimensions we're all familiar with, the + 1 represents time, the unique attribute said discoverer noticed).
After agriculture comes civilization, now that humans are stationary they need to protect the agriculture from other animals as well as other nomadic humans, so they erect structures such as huts, walls, and develop weapons. The article you linked doesn't mention it, but 7,000 years ago coincides with the earliest archeological evidence we have of civilization. Due to that I propose this theory: when human tribes that were still nomadic ran across a civilized group of humans, the civilized group stole the women (not necessarily killing the men, or enslaving them, just stealing) and hid behind their walls and weapons, forcing the nomadic group on their path without the females. I propose this because integration into a community is hard work: the new members need to learn the customs of the tribe, a new language, and at that point they needed to be taught about agriculture and tool making since they were the key to early civilization. Warring with the remaining nomadic males would decline the population of the civilized ones and there wasn't much room for margin of error as far as human labor was concerned (early agriculture was harder work than it was even during Egyptian times some 1000-2000 years later, and the yield on crops was extremely low compared to today's standards). Likewise, gaining slaves means you need to feed slaves on top of overseeing them, and the efficiency just wasn't there at that point to have a group of non-producers (overseerers).
One interesting tidbit that's closely related to the advent of transitioning from hunter-gatherer to civilization: hunter-gatherers are commonly thought to have spent 2-4 hours a day hunting/gathering on average, whereas early civilized humans were thought to have worked 7-10 hour days farming, building, etc. That's a tough sell, and no doubt there was violence over division of labor since people were working 3x as much as they were used to.
13 Jun 2018, 8:24 am
