Hunter-gatherers in the Philippines who adopt farming work around ten hours a week longer than their forager neighbours, a new study suggests, complicating the idea that agriculture represents progress. The research also shows that a shift to agriculture impacts most on the lives of women.
[...] Every day, at regular intervals between 6am and 6pm, the researchers recorded what their hosts were doing and by repeating this in ten different communities, they calculated how 359 people divided their time between leisure, childcare, domestic chores and out-of-camp work. While some Agta communities engage exclusively in hunting and gathering, others divide their time between foraging and rice farming.
The study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, reveals that increased engagement in farming and other non-foraging work resulted in the Agta working harder and losing leisure time. On average, the team estimate that Agta engaged primarily in farming work around 30 hours per week while foragers only do so for 20 hours. They found that this dramatic difference was largely due to women being drawn away from domestic activities to working in the fields. The study found that women living in the communities most involved in farming had half as much leisure time as those in communities which only foraged.
Also, hunting comes with beer.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:47AM (10 children)
and when you hunt out an area, you move or starve.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:06AM
you follow the buffalo .... oh yeh, they farmers divided up the land and had the buffalo slaughtered.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:32AM (8 children)
Ain't remotely BS. Farming's some of the longest hours and hardest work you'll find anywhere.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:15AM (6 children)
Try sleeping in caves (if you were lucky) and starving for days on end.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday May 22 2019, @08:45AM (4 children)
looks around only to find bricks and concrete
k, Now what?
What's luck got to do with it? It's easier and less time-consuming to dig a cave on the mountain's side than it is to plant a tree. We can't survive the elements without clothes. So we center our days around where we can process materials safely. Other apes do this with trees.
Humans adapted to the wilderness can survive on as little as earthworms and dew collection if need be: http://www.eattheweeds.com/cooking-with-earthworms-2/ [eattheweeds.com]
It's modern people that die out of starvation while surrounded by insects and small mammals. It's the civilized that don't have the knowledge and experience about packing up and leaving to forage when local resources become too tight.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:17AM (3 children)
Scientists are learning now that many cultures addressed local resource scarcity by practicing permaculture. It's less labor intensive than straight up agriculture but stands up to constant harvesting better. For example, when Europeans arrived on the East Coast of North America 1 in 4 trees was a chestnut tree; it wasn't random. The natives planted them everywhere because it was an excellent food source that kept well through the winter.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:43AM (2 children)
Was recently reading about the clam gardens on the west coast, tastier then chestnuts.
https://clamgarden.com/clamgardens/ [clamgarden.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 23 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
Cool link, thanks for that. I read recently that Indians on the East Coast used fish weirs [wikipedia.org] to farm the sea also. I think there's a video on YouTube of some modern fishermen who still use an old one in the Bay of Fundy to catch herring. One of its most interesting features is how sustainable it is. The catchment pond at the bottom of the "V" keeps the fish alive so they can let the little ones, or the species they don't want, go.
Permaculture is a fascinating approach to food culture. Doesn't lend itself to mass production and predictability from an industrial perspective, but it works very well from a human level.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday May 24 2019, @02:59AM
Yea, fish weirs are cool technology. Not sure if the natives used them here or just used a natural constriction but the natives used to work like hell for a couple of weeks when the salmon ran and had a years worth of food. Pretty well all the hunter-gatherers on the coast were rich when it came to food and did little actual work depending on how you define work. (Does a hunting trip for fun and/or variety count as work or fun? Same with a dugout to take a holiday in Hawaii)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:26AM
That's pretty much no work at all.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:25AM
lol! If 30 hours is the longest anywhere, wtf am I doing working 40 hours? I must be a chump!
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:50AM (2 children)
You need some grain to make that beer. Farming is how you get grain, unless you're going to hunt the farmer next door.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @08:09AM
as all the hunter-gatherers in the world can confirm
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:10PM
You can ferment all kinds of plants to make alcohol. There are people in the Amazon that do it by chewing roots and spitting it back into a bucket; their saliva ferments it. Really, really gross, but they like it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:56AM (18 children)
Those people are working 20-30 hours per week, while here in the "civilized" world wage-earners are slaving away for 40-70 hours per week.
Progress!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:04AM (9 children)
> ...slaving away for 40-70 hours per week...
Seems likely to me that the first few hours of work/week in the "civilized" world buys you the same standard of living that the primitives get for working their 20-30 hours. After that civilization gets you luxuries (things that you don't *really* need, although you may think they are necessities).
In fact, no work at all (disability payments or welfare) in the civilized world might might be enough to match the labor of the primitives?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:18AM
Give me my fucking UBI check, you primitives.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:22AM (1 child)
What's the price of 40 acres in your town?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:52AM
In Coastal Central California, around 1 to 5 Million depending on view, access to water and developed roads.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @03:47AM (5 children)
Not entirely true. Let's reduce what you 'need' to just food, travel/shelter and clothing. As the average earning goes up in a given area, so does the rent. Someone has to pay for the landlord's luxurious lifestyle. Same applies to food in a given region - food prices will float to what the market has established, and those spending at the market are mostly working 40 hour+ weeks. Travel is relative to how close you live to work. If you're lucky it might be walking distance, but in most cases, being able to live that close to where you work/shop usually costs more, offsetting any monetary advantage that would be required for travel. Most clothing can be had for free or close to nothing since people give/throw it away chasing the latest fashion, so I'll give you that.
Rent (share house / single room in a multi room apartment/house) alone generally costs a typical low wage worker (ie. someone close to minimum wage) approximately 2 to 3 days of work per week. The rest of the week provides food, bus fare (or gas) to get to work, and essential utilities for urban living (water, gas/electricity for cooking - not for anything else). There might be a tiny bit left over to save for emergency medical, and a cheap phone with a cheap plan.
Luxuries to avoid: heating/cooling (just wear appropriate clothing indoors), internet (no expensive cell phone, cable TV, etc), hot showers (don't want to impact on the electricity/gas bill and cold showers are liveable), owning a car (maintenance and registration costs can be high even for old/cheap cars), electronic entertainment (even a free TV from a junk pile uses electricity, and a computer generally requires internet for anything useful), and of course children (yeah, they cost a lot of money to raise properly). You don't want to use too much 'space' either - tiny room (or share a single room with someone else), and no back yard that isn't the local park.
Things to do to keep sanity that don't cost much if anything: press the flesh with friends, take a nice walk in the local park, read a book at the library, and maybe meditation.
So in the end, unless you're on some insane salary (probably built up over years of working normal/long hours to build experience/reputation) or mooching off someone else, there's no way you can contract/pair down to a couple of hours a week for the same standard of living as a hunter gather culture. Those guys live fulfilled lives with friends, self made entertainment, and low stress. To even come close to that in modern society, you're dealing with lots of external costs, and therefore lots more hours of work.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:57AM (4 children)
Actually all you really need is a warm dry place to sleep and access to water and food. Anything else is luxury.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:02AM (1 child)
And for the sake of everyone else, somewhere to shit and shower.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:13PM
In my dorm in Beijing the toilet was a hole in the floor of the shower.
Yes, I can hear your 'Ewwwwwww!' from here.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:47AM
Some company is nice as well, especially of the opposite sex. Hunter-Gatherers spent a lot of time sitting around the fire telling stories, and had no ads.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:26AM
[1] In some less civilized places prison labor is common so YMMV.
[2] Some people are so tied to their jobs they actually don't really have that much freedom when compared to prisoners in more civilized countries.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:11AM (7 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:48PM (4 children)
Back when I was salaried, I got assigned to a project that was planned to require significant overtime continuously over about a 7-month period, and thanks to the laws governing overtime those didn't apply to techies like myself. When I asked my boss what I should expect to get as a reward for that kind of effort, I was told that I would get to keep my job.
A few months after that project was completed, and my boss's prediction proved completely accurate (he was a decent fellow enforcing absolutely boneheaded policies) I joined the exodus of tech staff. Nowadays, I work hourly, also for basically the same reason, and can definitely confirm that it's a lot more pleasant to work long hours when there's money flowing into your bank account as you do it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:43PM (3 children)
I have to ask why you (and the rest of the tech staff) stuck around in the first place? I mean the boss flat out tells you not to expect any reward for all that overtime, and you all wait until the project is done and he conclusively proves it to jump ship? Do you all have a lot of experience with receiving substantially greater rewards than promised? Or had they previously earned your loyalty well enough for you to see them through the rough patch before you left?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @05:16PM
The first time or two you run into that kind of thing you might not have any other irons in the fire. After that you learn to never not have two or three others ready to go.
It's the main reason I support national health care, because when you have a family and kids you can't afford to have your coverage interrupted because you change jobs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 22 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)
1. This was right in the middle of the big recession, and I don't live in Silicon Valley or other places where techies are in ridiculous demand, so I didn't want to jump ship without the next ship available. I could have lasted for a while from my savings but did not see any benefits to doing so.
2. When you're working long hours, the amount of available time to job-hunt is limited.
3. Companies in the middle of stuff like this are also too busy to hire anybody new, so had I jumped then that would have resulted in my colleagues having to put in even more time to cover my absence, also for no reward. They're decent folks who deserved better than that.
4. Yes, they had created a fairly good work environment prior to that. It all began to go very wrong after a shift in management 3 levels above me, when somebody who had run 2 of the company's brands into the ground for 8-figure losses somehow secured a promotion and immediately started firing all the competent people. A couple years ago, she had managed to run her 9-figure division into the ground and it was folded under someone else's authority. A couple of weeks ago, everybody who was still left in that division was fired.
There are some circumstances I'd be running rather than walking for the exits: You ask me to do something illegal, for instance. But in this case, I strolled out rather than ran out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 23 2019, @03:17PM
Where do you live?
I'm curious because I'm getting tired of living in the big city. It's been fun and all, but now I'm pining for the big open spaces again and the blessed peace and quiet. The trouble is, when there are not that many tech opportunities around situations like the one you're describing seem particularly nettlesome. It's easy to feel trapped. It's good to have options, especially when we're in an industry as volatile as tech, but there aren't that many when you move out from hubs like Silicon Valley or NYC.
Just generally curious how other Soylentils have negotiated tech careers in more rural areas.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:30PM (1 child)
Something that periodically gets brought up related to this is Keynes's prediction that by 2030 (I think it was), we'd all be working something like 15-hour weeks. The idea was that increased productivity would mean we wouldn't have to work as hard to earn the same amount of money and maintain a standard of living.
Well, guess what? The productivity increases he predicted DID happen (and then some). If the excess monetary capital produced went into the hands of workers, we could all work 15-hour or so weeks, even despite standard of living increases in the past century.
Instead, most of the gains in profits from increased worker productivity were funneled into the salaries of the executives and other top workers, while gains for the average folk remained modest -- hence the great disparities in levels of wealth these days.
I imagine there are only a few workers who really love their work (or are at least obsessed with it) enough to want to work 60-70 hour weeks. Most places I know that folks work like that are salaried, so they don't tend to get a lot of reward for all the extra hours (maybe a little more in a bonus check).
I think this situation is maintained in the U.S. instead by a combination of management greed, stupid young men who are afraid of losing a job (and don't have enough life out of work to demand better), and a tradition of a sort of "hazing" ritual (also common among stupid men). The traditional salaried workforce was primarily male, and they first work long hours to seem competitive and get promoted. Then they tell themselves they are working long hours to provide for their young family (who many times would be happier if they just came home more often). By the time they creep up to mid-management and are older, they can take a more flexible schedule if they want, but they look down on the young folk and think, "Heck, I had to work hard to get where I am -- they should too!" It's fraternity hazing expanded to the workforce. (See the stupidity of medical resident work schedules, which literally results in deaths and injuries due to mistakes from tired physicians, but "that's what I had to do when I started out!" is the mentality, though it is changing.) And thus they demand long hours. Meanwhile, the top bosses and executives are all very happy with such a plan, because it allows them to force some extra work and hours without hiring the number of staff they really should.
It's all more cultural than actually providing noticeable rewards, though. Sure, an ignorant boss might be impressed by seeing you at your desk late at night when you're young, but a smart boss rewards promotions based on productivity and achievement, not sitting at your desk for many hours. Those who work long hours are more prone to burn-out, more prone to extended periods of less activity, even more prone to illness. So, even the upper-level management would see diminishing returns on forcing workers to fill in the gaps rather than hiring more staff.
It's all rather silly. Europe has a healthier attitude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:33AM
Lots of people want to invest their money for retirement where they supposedly don't have to work... e.g. X unknown years of zero hour work weeks. But a fair bit of the investment goes to making real estate more expensive thus their rents/mortgages more expensive...
Go take Bill Gate's wealth and distribute it among all the Microsoft employees and you get what? About 750k? Is that enough to work a 15 hour week?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:40AM (3 children)
Of course, it's phoenix with phys.org.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday May 22 2019, @02:53AM
by University of Cambridge
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:24AM
I cannot find any submissions by you. We always welcome good quality submissions.
The reporting site hardly important - it is the content and its origin that are rather more of interest to us.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 22 2019, @10:24AM
Phys.org shows up a lot in the Soylent RSS feed [sylnt.us]. That's where I go to find stories because it's convenient; I can find and submit half a dozen in fifteen minutes and move on with my day.
If you have better sources you'd prefer, mention them. Or, I dunno, just spitballin' here, you could submit them yourself, you lazy whiner.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @08:34AM (5 children)
but given the surprised reactions, I guess it bears repeating for the new generation. Yes, farming had made people's lives worse. But it also made people much less capable of surviving on their own. Sharp-eyed hunters with sharp spears and wicked arrows roaming the wilderness, or unarmed and untrained half-starved peasants crowded inside village's fence; which are easier to rule?
What is "progress" for the chiefs, is what improves their lot in life. For those below, it is a toss-up if they get some crumbs, or become collateral damage. You'll do fine to always keep that in mind.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:42PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @12:59PM (2 children)
but for it herding works loads better, as demonstrated pretty much every time. Peasants without training are useless as fighters, and no one really wants many of his peasants trained with weapons, now does he? Even with mongols at the gates he doesn't.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 22 2019, @11:00PM
There's plenty of counterexamples. China usually succeeds over its herding neighbors, for example, despite spectacular examples like the Mongolians.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday May 23 2019, @02:46AM
Actually, in feudal Europe, the average peasant was required to give his lord military service NN-many days per year, and might also be required to provide his own arms (and armor, if any).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:04AM
Many Hunter-Gatherer societies were pretty communistic, no rulers. You had the elders whose advice was listened to closely and thought about before perhaps ignoring and people who were good at stuff and led in that stuff. The guy with the most experience hunting big game leading the hunters, the guy who is known for his fishing leading the fishing party kind of thing. If someone took too much or didn't pull their weight, they were shunned, which would result in them smarting up or leaving.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 22 2019, @11:52AM (1 child)
Need to factor in the effect of tax revenue. They aren't keeping 100% of that farmed grain...
I remember a podcast discussion of English peasant labor and standard of living before and after commerce. Feudal peasant farmer life under no economic system was pretty relaxed per archaeological evidence until the overlords could turn grain into silver and then the standard of living (for the peasants, obviously) collapsed. When the only rent you can theoretically pay is food rent, for logistical reasons its pretty cheap because food is bulky and perishable and a PITA to transport and a relatively small number of overlords can only eat so much.
My gut level guess is darn near 100% of hunter gatherer production gets eaten by local family and friends, whereas farmer production perhaps mostly gets eaten by other people in exchange for a mixture of "we won't jail you for tax evasion" up to cell phones and such.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:07AM
Feeding a warrior cast doesn't seem that bad when your neighbours want to take your stuff. The need for scholars also became pretty apparent as the community grew.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Alfred on Wednesday May 22 2019, @01:50PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday May 22 2019, @04:13PM
Well, that's partly right at least. Studies by historians of medieval farmers (peasants) showed that they likely worked fewer hours on average than the modern 40-hour workweek, averaged over the year. (Really busy with long hours in planting and harvesting season, not so much during the winter.) Medieval farmers certainly worked a lot fewer hours than workers in factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when labor laws didn't exist, despite the fact that the industrial revolution is viewed as "progress."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 22 2019, @07:29PM
No, there were not a lot of time wasted while waiting for the crops to grow and ripen. There's also the never ending maintaining old or making new equipment. There was the care for the animals. There was the need for teaching the younger ones. There was trade/markets.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday May 23 2019, @02:59AM
Lessee... this "sitting around watching the crops grow" includes moving irrigation (may be daily, depending), spraying for various pests, fixing fence so your neighbor's cattle don't trample and eat the crop, repairing the myriad pieces of equipment that suffer wear and tear and are too expensive to replace, long drives to and from that leased field two counties away, plowing fallow fields, cleaning out storage bins, fixing your private access roads, mowing/turning/baling hay, and doubtless dozens of other tasks that don't leap to mind this instant. Farmers during the growing season are usually busy as hell. And that's just the crop farmers. Livestock farmers get to do pretty much all the same and then some, plus during calving they get to enjoy the finest weather that bitch Mother Nature has to offer.
As to the price of combines, well, so long as you like to eat, and a combine costs $200k, and the average farmer doesn't have that much laying around in cash... they're gonna be bought on credit. And then that dumb hick farmer will use a variety of fancy tech to level his fields, plan his irrigation layout, minimize use of pesticides and fertilizer, calculate seed rates and projected harvests and fuel requirements, and generally apply a good deal more brainwork than your average cubefarm type ever does.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday May 23 2019, @04:11AM
Primitive farmers had lots to do while the crops grew. Just making clothing, maintaining fences/hedgerows, preserving food, looking after the livestock though they also had a lot of holidays.