{"id":65297,"date":"2023-04-23T06:01:12","date_gmt":"2023-04-23T11:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65297"},"modified":"2023-04-23T06:01:12","modified_gmt":"2023-04-23T11:01:12","slug":"our-hunter-gatherer-future-climate-change-agriculture-and-uncivilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65297","title":{"rendered":"Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
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Highlights<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2022<\/span>The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/span>Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/span>Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3\u00b0C-4\u202f\u00b0C by 2100 and by as much as 8\u00b0\u201310\u202f\u00b0C after that.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/span>Future climate change will return planet Earth to the unstable climatic conditions of the Pleistocene and agriculture will be impossible.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/span>Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n

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For most of human history, about 300,000 years, we lived as hunter gatherers in sustainable, egalitarian communities of a few dozen people. Human life on Earth, and our place within the planet\u2019s biophysical systems, changed dramatically with the Holocene, a geological epoch that began about 12,000 years ago. An unprecedented combination of climate stability and warm temperatures made possible a greater dependence on wild grains in several parts of the world. Over the next several thousand years, this dependence led to agriculture and large-scale state societies. These societies show a common pattern of expansion and collapse. Industrial civilization began a few hundred years ago when fossil fuel propelled the human economy to a new level of size and complexity. This change brought many benefits, but it also gave us the existential crisis of global climate change. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3\u00b0C-4\u202f\u00b0C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8\u202f\u00b0C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-run extremes of climate change, aggressive population reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world\u2019s remaining indigenous cultures.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization Highlights \u2022The stable climate of the Holocene made agriculture and civilization possible. The unstable Pleistocene climate made it impossible before then. \u2022Human societies after agriculture were characterized by overshoot and collapse. Climate change frequently drove these collapses. \u2022Business-as-usual estimates indicate that the climate will warm by 3\u00b0C-4\u202f\u00b0C […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[341,4179,5329,4182,33816,32191],"class_list":["post-65297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-future","tag-homo-sapiens","tag-humanity","tag-hunter-gatherers","tag-john-gowdy","tag-science-direct"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65298,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65297\/revisions\/65298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}