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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 The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 21 2019, @05:55PM (4 children)
Agriculture came about because of laziness. Who the hell wants to move around all the time or risk starvation? Grow your own food and you don't have to put up with the dumbass annoyances and restrictions that hunter gatherer societies do.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 21 2019, @06:52PM (3 children)
Which agriculture? Herding goats and cows... Raising chickens... Sure. And it also explains how dogs got domesticated so I give you that much. But farming? Holy shit hell no. Just thinking about breaking new grounds with hand tools... How the fuck do you remove a tree stump without a yoke and ox? You'd be out there digging the frozen soil around the roots for days... No fucking way you're not going to get cut, infected and die. Then there's the bending over all day long to pick stones and plant... Oh God my back... Fuck this shit. Who in their right mind even thinks this is better than a 10km hike each day? When I was 20 something I used to run that much to keep fit.
There's a reason Rome had slaves and Feudalism prevented serfs mobility: Any social order that didn't force people to work the land would never have lasted long. Just look at the Roman city states or the Medieval crusades: Kids were jumping at the opportunity to kill each-other in who knows where if it meant not having to start a new colony up north.
But hey, if you think agriculture is the lazy alternative to hunting and gathering, feel free to grab a hoe and start tilting soil or something instead of fishing for a past time activity.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 22 2019, @12:56AM (1 child)
No need to remove tree trunks. Cut the tree down, build your buildings, and plant rows of crops around the stump. In several years, that tree stump will go away. Farmers 10,000 years ago didn't do things the way we do. No thousand acre fields, laid out with transit levels, no monoculture plantings, none of that. Maybe the Egyptians got into that a little, but it certainly wasn't the rule around the world.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday October 22 2019, @04:48PM
Nonsense. There's a reason all the cultures that depended on poly-culture fell apart. Polyculture is harder to get right, more fragile and takes even more labor than monoculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyculture#Effectiveness [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 22 2019, @04:38AM
As much as I hate to agree with a Texan, Runaway's dead on the money. Large scale farming came much later than farming in general. And clearing trees is only even necessary if you're forced to pick a spot that has trees on it in the first place because of mostly nonexistent at the time property rights. Farming's hard as hell work but nowhere near as hard as your kids starving to death because it was a lean year and you couldn't find enough to hunt or gather over the winter.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.