Submitted via IRC for tortured_old_man
Private property, not productivity, precipitated Neolithic agricultural revolution
Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It's one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory—but a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy shows that most explanations for it don't agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.
With farming came a vast expansion of the realm over which private property governed access to valued goods, replacing the forager social norms around sharing food upon acquisition. A common explanation is that farming increased labor productivity, which then encouraged the adoption of private property by providing incentives for the long-term investments required in a farming economy.
"But it's not what the data are telling us", says Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles, a co-author of the paper. "It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse."
[...] Bowles and co-author Jung-Kyoo Choi, an economist at Kyungpook National University in South Korea, use both evolutionary game theory and archaeological evidence to propose a new interpretation of the Neolithic. Based on their model, a system of mutually recognized private property rights was both a precondition for farming and also a means of limiting costly conflicts among members of a population. While rare among foragers, private property did exist among a few groups of sedentary hunter-gatherers. Among them, farming could have benefited the first adopters because it would have been easier to establish the private possession of cultivated crops and domesticated animals than for the diffuse wild resources on which hunter-gatherers relied.
"It is a lot easier to define and defend property rights in a domesticated cow than in a wild kudu," says Choi. "Farming initially succeeded because it facilitated a broader application of private property rights, not because it lightened the toil of making a living."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 21 2019, @03:48PM (1 child)
Well, Wikipedia isn't a particularly good source, but it indicates they did a lot of farming.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 21 2019, @04:57PM
It is possible... there's not much evidence of farming around Wakulla Springs today, but 500 years grows some pretty big trees. The park tour info focuses on the fierce warrior side of things, then they show you the giant alligator that was shot and stuffed back in the early 1900s.
Lesson of the day: historical accuracy sucks, even on Wikipedia.
Yes, I tend to find the Wikipedia story more believable, but is that just because some interpretive historians made up some stories that sound more believable, or because some archaeologists dug in the dirt and came up with a more believable story to fit the evidence they found? Truth is: it was ~500 years ago in a territory with scant written records and the records that were made were made by the most ignorant and biased people around.
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