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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Science Memes
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I know it’s a joke but this is science memes and it plays into a widespread misconception about early humans that we were some kind of blood drenched carnivores. Not true. Humans have always mostly eaten plants supplemented with some meat or other animal foods.
Also it's not like "getting food is easier" is the only hypothesis out there as to why we settled down. Another one, IMO much more in line with human nature, is that we figured out how to ferment beer and for that reason planted buttloads of grain.
Since there’s no written record, it’s hard to know for sure but I believe it was because agricultural communities were able to reproduce much faster and live at much higher densities, so they tended to win conflicts and displace societies based on foraging—even though foragers had better quality of life and didn’t normally experience the food shortages people imagine.
That said, modern foraging societies have largely converted to agriculture after being subjugated and not because they were hungry. So there is some evidence to support this hypothesis.
Also the foraging people might end up living on the periphery of a settlement, foraging and then trading what they foraged with the settlement to make thier lives easier.
The loss of roaming territory to the sedentary oppressors might also have something to do with the transition.
Right, that’s what I mean. Agricultural societies were likely better organized and more populous and so better able to defend and expel rivals from their lands. Foragers were forced into increasingly marginal lands over time, and all forager societies today exist on land that is essentially unsuited for agriculture, which is the only reason they have survived to this day.
I don't know how suitable this is, but I instantly thought of it as sort of comparable to bacteria in the wild, compared to the same bacteria moved to a sterile environment and being fed growth medium. The latter can grow to vastly larger quantities in a comparable area, maybe even in a giant vat. But if there's enough of a problem with the single source of growth medium, some kind of contamination or just no more supply, the whole colony dies. It's a more successful colony, but in a potentially far less stable state unless the conditions can continue to be kept that good.