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Is Hunting and Gathering Really Better Than Agriculture?

April 21, 2024

Is Hunting and Gathering Really Better Than Agriculture?

Popcorn Overlook, Lake Burton, Georgia

Answering the question of the title of this entry, an article first published 37 years ago written by Jared Diamond says, “YES!”
Comprehending precisely why civilization is unsustainable requires a rather extensive knowledge of the technology of agriculture. But it isn’t enough to simply understand agriculture in and of itself, one must also comprehend how ALL technology use reduces and/or removes negative feedbacks which once used to keep our numbers in check with the rest of nature. Agriculture may have started this process in earnest, but it also provided for innovation in many other fields (pun intended) as I wrote about in this article. Language (both oral speech and written material such as this article) and fire and simple technologies preceded agriculture and were formative innovations. Just like everything else in this blog, these innovations were all seen to be good things by most people until we “lifted the hood to see what’s underneath.”
That’s the one true thing about this blog – that I keep finding more and more items which we were all conditioned to believe are good things which in reality have very dark sides to them. Agriculture, technology, civilization, and quite literally many more subjects (those three main topics cover a LOT of ground!) ALL have dark sides making them unsustainable. So, to be honest, we’ve been running down the road to extinction for a very long time. We just didn’t really know it, and for most people, The Limits to Growth study was probably the first time such a concept even entered one’s mind. William Catton, Jr. brought a reminder to us in 1980 in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Early humans gained energy budget by increasing rate of energy acquisition, not energy-saving adaptation

December 31, 2021

Early humans gained energy budget by increasing rate of energy acquisition, not energy-saving adaptation

Study suggests early humans gained energy budget by increasing rate of energy acquisition, not energy-saving adaptation
Major transitions in hominoid subsistence energetics.(A) The shift from great ape–like foraging to hunting and gathering (1) and the adoption of subsistence farming during the Neolithic Revolution (2) involved changes in behavior and technology to allow access to novel food resources. (B) Through these transitions, humans paid higher energy costs in order to acquire a greater number of calories in less time; transitions from left to right are as depicted in (A). Human subsistence minimizes time costs but not energy costs, resulting in improved return rates but efficiency similar to that of other great apes. Credit: Illustrations: Samantha Shields; DOI: 10.1126/science.abf0130

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has found evidence that suggests early humans gained an energy budget by increasing their rate of energy acquisition, not by taking advantage of adaptive strategies. In their paper published in the journal Science, they describe their study of energy expenditure versus energy intake in early humans.

In this new effort, the researchers noted that humans long ago diverged in significant ways from the other great apes. They wondered how this happened and decided to look at  and expenditure. People and other animals have to put in a certain amount of work (expenditure) to receive an energy intake. Climbing a tree to fetch a banana is a simple example. The amount of energy required to climb a tree far outweighs the potential benefit of eating a single banana. But if a single person is able to throw down multiple bananas, then the overall energy intake may surpass the effort of climbing a tree a single time…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis

February 20, 2021

The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis

This is our challenge: to move a world of almost 8 billion people, most involved in an economic system with tremendous inequality, a clear imperative to expand, and a chronic tendency to stagnate, toward some real rapprochement with earth. This is a monumental challenge. If nothing else, the Anthropocene idea is the truth of the moment encapsulated as a geological epoch. Yet it explains little of the cause.

The question is how to explore social evolution in order to give insight appropriate to the historical moment. Engage for a moment in an exercise to reveal the complexity of social evolution. Begin with what we know about exponential growth—that it starts out slowly and finishes very rapidly. We are on the upper neck of an exponential flight but the structure and dynamic of this trajectory were in place long before the twentieth century and even long before the present world system (capitalism) took hold. We have to ask ourselves where we mark the inflection point where we entered this present phase of our social evolution. It is important to go beyond the Capitalocene if we are to understand how we ultimately landed where we are.

Let me offer two stylized economic systems in order to highlight something about the complexity of our social evolution as it pertains to this matter. The first is a hunting-and-gathering economic system where homo sapiens lived as minimalists, surplus did not exist, feedback loops prevented expansion, and humans were mostly independent and self-reliant (most could quite literally fend for themselves). Each human had an expansive knowledge of the more-than-human world, and they used that knowledge to garner their material necessities (food, shelter, clothing). One can argue that it was an economic system embedded in the rhythm and dynamic of the more-than-human world and did not have feedback loops of expansion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lisi Krall, anthropocene, great transition initiative, economic systems, hunting-and-gathering, complex systems, feedback loops, exponential growth, evolution, social evolution

Humans Left Sustainability Behind as Hunter-Gatherers

December 2, 2020

Humans Left Sustainability Behind as Hunter-Gatherers

Many people believe that humans can have a sustainable future by using solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the only truly sustainable course, in terms of moving in cycles with nature, is interacting with the environment in a manner similar to the approach used by chimpanzees and baboons. Even this approach will eventually lead to new and different species predominating. Over a long period, such as 10 million years, we can expect the vast majority of species will become extinct, regardless of how well these species fit in with nature’s plan.

The key to the relative success of animals such as chimpanzees and baboons is living within a truly circular economy. Sun falling on trees provides the food they need. Waste products of their economy come back to the forest ecosystem as fertilizer.

Pre-humans lost the circular economy when they learned to control fire over one million years ago, when they were still hunter-gatherers. With the controlled use of fire, cooked food became possible, making it easier to chew and digest food. The human body adapted to the use of cooked food by reducing the size of the jaw and digestive tract and increasing the size of the brain. This adaptation made pre-humans truly different from other animals.

With the use of fire, pre-humans had many powers. They spent less time chewing, so they could spend more time making tools. They could burn down entire forests, if they so chose, to provide a better environment for the desired types of wild plants to grow. They could use the heat from fire to move to colder environments than the one to which they were originally adapted, thus allowing a greater total population.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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