Agriculture is the Original Sin, the fledgling ruling classes used that Forbidden Fruit to lure people out of Eden and into the hell of class based society
I just read the comic Sapiens, which argues that the agricultural revolution has been a horrible deal for humanity on the whole. We traded in a relatively chill, egalitarian, communal and unconstrained existence, for one of endless toil, exploitation and subjugation by elite classes.
The forbidden fruit was malt
But they’re also going to create Communism!
Things went sideways when that stupid fish learned to walk.
Look how happy they are.
top 10 most punchable faces in history
i only see 1 face… if you can even call it that
But if no agriculture, no beer
Hear me out, could still collect psychedelic mushrooms.
if anarcho-primitism was a beer
That is a downside, true. Alcohol production, while not impossible, is way more difficult for nomads than it is for sedentary people. But there are plenty of other mind altering substances that would be available to your average hunter-gatherer. Psychedelic mushrooms are an option like RFKjr mentioned, but there’s also evidence of nomadic hunter-gatherers engaging in a low intensity farming of tobacco and cannabis (planting it, leaving it, and returning for the harvest).
One of the only constants in history is that people like mind altering substances and will go to great lengths to procure them. Including inventing agricultural society and all the ills that come with that
We kinda screwed ourselves out of the psilocybes when we started migrating away from the tropics - sure, they’re present in temperate climates but they’re rarer and harder to find in quantity. Maybe we should go back in time and teach primitive Europeans how to inoculate straw bales.
you can still make liquor out of shit
new theories suggest that its not black and white but that the Nomads would Plant seeds where the soil was richt and then would periodicly visit these places again for Harvest. As the eralies farming would have the most prime locaton (literally no location is allready taken) Farming wouldnt be that Hard … at the Riverbanks you just need to put seed in the soil … Only with the Space gradually getting smaller and more Precious the need for “labor intensive” farming and its techniques and forms of society would arise…
The Dawn of Everything,
Great book!!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Microplastics can’t be worse than getting some terrible injury or disease before modern medicine
Diseases at least, got 10x worse once we started doing sedentary animal agriculture, until very recently, other than a plague here and there
hopefully
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Abandon your homes! We’re going nomadic!
follow your rulingclass
“No, I’m not afraid of computers”
Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, also comes to mind.
I wouldn’t have made it to two without modern medicine so I agree wholeheartedly
i think most of us couldn’t, but i wonder sometimes if i’d been born before agriculture what it’d be like.
i wonder what it’d be like to just generally live in simpler times.
There was more ambient danger and death, sure, yeah. You had to dedicate way more of your grey matter to surviving your environment - sounds like it sucks
but we weren’t meant for whatever this is, and there’s no way to make it more like what we were meant for without abandoning it all outright. at least that stuff is closer to who we actually are.
I think it varied quite a lot depending on the location and the time. We’re talking really hard to comprehend lengths of pre-historic time. Like 300,000 years of what we consider a modern human.
And the differences between hunting and gathering, and agriculture as @xj9@hexbear.net says are not as clear cut. Many “Hunter-Gatherer” societies might be moving between semi-permanent seasonal camps (sometimes leaving behind structures and dwellings) where they had planted different crops along the routes and at the places, so they could change with the climate and animal migration
Other permanent “agricultural” settlements, might have been permanent communities with crops growing, livestock etc, but also significant portions of their population going on hunting trips that might take weeks or pasturing livestock in different regions. And almost certainly some amount of foraging local areas. We know even medieval peasants still did that.
At any rates both might have had periods of peace and abundance, versus scarcity and extreme violence. There’s probably some hunter-gatherers whose lives were like the garden of Eden, others who it was like The Road. Likewise there’s probably farming communites who were like “we’ve cracked the code free food forever” and others a constant life of paranoia peering over your hill fort’s walls incase a neighboring tribes is going to attack, loot your granary and kill you.
Some places also just have consistently good weather, while others are seasonal, and then others have decades long cycles that decimate a region every once and a while, like the wrath of god, as well.
My understanding of nomadic life is that (at least in my NA region historically) its more like you move between areas to stay in comfy weather. Each camp has its own jobs and crops and such that are taken care of during a season and left alone until the next time you come back around. I think hunting and gathering is often not represented in a sensible way.
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no more half measures walter