madviking
north american scum
Not a single one of those other states is worth association.
Yea, but same with Virginia outside of Nova.
Not a single one of those other states is worth association.
Can a state be called a confederacy? I honestly don't know. But I named it Delaware because that was the prettiest name out of all the states that once existed there. Same with Georgia, Montana and Colorado.
You realize Diamond is the guy who hates civilization itself, right?
No I don't, and I have read most of his books. Perhaps you should too before writing such nonsense![]()
He wrote an article stating that the development of agriculture was the worst event in the history of the world because it led to civilization which led to (etc. etc.) but it didn't seem like he was literally saying that civilization was evil.
http://anthropology.lbcc.edu/handoutsdocs/mistake.pdf
I'm back with a map from when John McCain and Alan Keyes defeated Al Gore and Joe Lieberman in 2000.
Yes, it's an altered map, but what purpose does it serve?
He wrote an article stating that the development of agriculture was the worst event in the history of the world because it led to civilization which led to (etc. etc.) but it didn't seem like he was literally saying that civilization was evil.
http://anthropology.lbcc.edu/handoutsdocs/mistake.pdf
He didn't say it was evil, he just said it was a bad choice. Ironically, agriculture led to civilization, which led to history![]()
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny
I wish that a Republican other than George Bush was President from 2001 to 2009.
He wrote an article stating that the development of agriculture was the worst event in the history of the world because it led to civilization which led to (etc. etc.) but it didn't seem like he was literally saying that civilization was evil.
http://anthropology.lbcc.edu/handoutsdocs/mistake.pdf
Yes, Diamond's work is always interesting.
But he doesn't explain really how or why agriculture arose. Just that people adopted it because of increasing population.
I have read, somewhere (and I really forget where), that agriculture was begun in the Fertile Crescent as a natural consequence of the gathering lifestyle. Where wild cereals were so abundant that simply gathering the grain and taking it back to a, more or less, permanent camp and accidentally dropping some meant that cultivated fields arose almost spontaneously. And spontaneous selective cultivation led to modern grain crops.
It seems very unlikely that, simply, with increasing population, some people sat down and pondered what to do and came up with the idea of agriculture.
I think it was more or less an "accident". By that I don't mean humans invented agriculture purely by accident and not by a long trial-and-error process. I mean that the dependency on agriculture was probably unintentional consequence of its invention.
I picture it like this (in veeery simple terms): people find out how to grow certain plants. It may be less pleasant than hunting and gathering, but it is a bit more convenient. They still do a lot of hunting and gathering anyway, and the few fields they till only supplement their diet. Over time, the relative weight of farmed food vis-a-vis gathered food increases due to the fact that farming is by default a more productive activity (more food from smaller land area), and perhaps also because it doesn't require so much skill. Any half-wit can do the menial tasks associated with farming; hunting on the other hand requires physical fitness, perseverance, patience, and great skill, and even then positive results are not assured (and there is a greater risk of getting injured or even killed, since the world is still full of predatory animals).
Therefore, little by little, what was originally a predominately hunter-gatherer community doing a little farming on the side becomes a predominantly farming society which supplements its diet with some hunting and gathering. Since farming produces more food and removes some of the pressures that force people to have fewer children, the population starts growing fast. Suddenly these people can't go back to pure hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because the surrounding lands can't support all of them. They could migrate (and I am sure that happened in thousands of separate cases) to find more land, attack other groups of people and drive them out of their hunting grounds, or intensify farming to make food for the increased number of people. This further reduces the viability of hunting-gathering in the area and its importance for the society's survival, so it declines both relatively and absolutely.
From there, the vicious circle continues to the modern era, where (some) people finally managed to stop themselves from popping out kids every year and a half since reaching sexual maturity.
Wikipedia on Neolithic Revolution said:It is often argued that agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, but this has been disputed by the finding that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter, in part due to diseases. Average height, for example, went down from 5' 10" (178 cm) for men and 5' 6" (168 cm) for women to 5' 3" (165 cm) and 5' 1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels.
That's a very nice explanation for one group. It doesn't explain the phenomenon of the adoption of agricultural practices in general.I think the dominant theory today is that people first settled down because they found a place that was so fertile that a nomadic lifestile was not necessary anymore. Later the environment changed because of pressure from hunting humans and climate change. The hunter/gatherers knew very well how plants and animals reproduce but they had long lost the knowledge they needed for a nomadic lifestyle. To avoid starvation, they had to domesticate animals and grow their own crops.