The Evolution of Farming in the Near East
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- How did humans go from hunter gatherers to farmers? Climate change? Intensive use of resources? Population growth? A little bit of everything?
As always the information here is subject to change as new archaeological discoveries are made and evidence is analysed. Feel free to double check my work or look in to things more deeply with these sources. It's these people who do all the real work.
Sources:
Birch-Chapman, Shannon, et al. “Estimating Population Size, Density and Dynamics of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Villages in the Central and Southern Levant: an Analysis of Beidha, Southern Jordan.” Levant, vol. 49, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-23., doi:10.1080/00758914.2017.1287813.
Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. “When the World's Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition.” Science, vol. 333, no. 6042, 2011, pp. 560-561., doi:10.1126/science.1208880.
Bocquet-Appel, Jean-Pierre, and Ofer Bar-Yosef. “The Neolithic Demographic Transition and Its Consequences.” 2008, doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-8539-0.
Larsen, C. Spencer. “Biological Changes in Human Populations with Agriculture.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24, no. 1, 1995, pp. 185-213., doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.24.1.185.
Scarre, Christopher. The Human Past World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies. Thames and Hudson, 2018.
Shennan, Stephen. The First Farmers of Europe: an Evolutionary Perspective. Cambridge University Press., 2018.
Verhoeven, Marc. “The Birth of a Concept and the Origins of the Neolithic: A History of Prehistoric Farmers in the Near East.” Paléorient, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 75-87., doi:10.3406/paleo.2011.5439.
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www.stefanmilo.com
Historysmilo
historysmilo
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The whole collab: Watch it, love it, live it, pass it on to your grandchildren.
czcams.com/play/PL0MwcDYjQCaNWvMbxAcLoTxvqOxfC24MW.html
Will do.
What about your golden finger Stefan?
As an old farmer, watching this, and reminiscing about the "old days", passing it on to grand children and great grand children, has a rather poignant feel to it. It's bad enough that most grade school kids don't know where there food comes from, in the West. They are so far removed from the reality of the world.
As an old farmer, watching this, and reminiscing about the "old days", passing it on to grand children and great grand children, has a rather poignant feel to it. It's bad enough that most grade school kids don't know where there food comes from, in the West. They are so far removed from the reality of the world.
As an old farmer, watching this, and reminiscing about the "old days", passing it on to grand children and great grand children, has a rather poignant feel to it. It's bad enough that most grade school kids don't know where there food comes from, in the West. They are so far removed from the reality of the world.
The possibility that the invention of agriculture was probably not deliberate and was gradual as a response to ancient climate change is so awesomely logical that it perfectly explains both how agriculture could be invented in 11 separate places independently and why humans would invent it in the first place if it had such negative effects on our health. I''d never thought of nor heard of that idea before somehow.
Yeah I find the evidence for it very compelling. Thanks for watching!
@@StefanMilo You're welcome! Keep up the good work!
Yes, it's a nice feeling getting new info that broadens one's world view! The climate also explains why agriculture wasn't done anytime BEFORE.
There is also the series "Stories from the Stone Age" which explains all this (and more), with nice footage from the actual landscapes (or landscapes similar to what they looked like back then), and good reenactment scenes
@@StefanMilo You are well informed and updated. Your videos are right in line with current archeological knowledge and thinking, though of course the interpretations of what we find is an ever ongoing project
@@AreHan1991 Thanks for the tip!
You’re a subtly hilarious person. Thanks for your incredibly blazed speculation on the deep past. It’s amazing.
lol thanks man!
7:27 "See this? 💸 Got this by selling corn. Comes out of the f*cking ground, couldn't believe it!"
Great video, love the editing and crisp quality. All those other revolutions would not have occurred if there wasn't a David Mitchell around thousands of years ago.
That's it, just a bunch of crafty ancient gizzas
I love coming back to videos a year or two later, seeing a funny comment, going to hit “like”, and finding that I already liked it when the video first came out.
I love these collaboration collections. that's how I discovered Stefan
Yeah they're good fun, thanks for watching!
I wonder what sort of strange ancient food that superancient humans used to eat, that have been lost to time because monoculture was adopted.
I imagine a lot of very starchy soups.
Mammoth stew.
They loved pistachios
Well the peak of biodiversity was probably during the Victorian era. So we really should look into period cook books.
It is very shocking how poor was food just a few hundred years ago in Europe. Lots of the spices were missing, and the knowledge of preparing food was very limitted. Like potato was not known before 1536. Preservation was also limitted, so you could use only what was fresh around you.
Why isnt this channel more popular man
I honestly thought I subscribed months ago.
“Why the hell are we still walking south every year? It’s not even that cold anymore.”
“Damn dude you wanna make a village?”
“What’s a village?”
“I don’t know but the urge is there.”
“How do we start?”
“Wooden huts.”
“And then what?”
“C O N T A I N T H E G O A T S”
One other thing. Once the invention of pottery came along, it allowed for cooking of soups & stews or porridges which would have provided easier to consume food both for young children (with developing teeth) and older people (who may not have many teeth left) because it didn't require a lot of chewing.
Lovely stuff man. Can tell you are going to go places from your gesticulating history broadcaster hands :D
Lol I try not to gesticulate in public. It's gotten me in trouble many times.
If you think he's good try PBS Eons: pure hand porn
@@StefanMilo nice
Perhaps the best introductory to a CZcams video ever
Basically, my recollection of Anthro 101 accords with this. We got trapped by increasing population and declining resources! New to me is the possibility that plants, like the dog, may have co-adapted as much as been deliberately domesticated. Brilliant job.
my wife doesn't think cereal is food either
Even though I'm a grown man, a bowl of coco pops is a treat I'll rarely turn down.
@@StefanMilo as an American who moved to Europe, I discovered marshmallow cereals are total contraband here.
Stefan Milo I like captain crunch.
@@StefanMilo Sugar Puffed Wheat is my go to snack.
give me Chex or give me death
Months ago you mentioned pre-civilization farming and animal domestication. This video really lays out the evidence and the timeline.
Thanks! Yeah I do get a little annoyed when people say things like "hunter-gatherers couldn't make Gobekli Tepe" because the people at this time may not have been farmers in the strictest sense but they were well on their way and had a lot more in common with farmers than nomadic hunter-gatherers.
@@StefanMiloYou stumbled on the issue of "property" and the concept of land ownership necessary for farming. The question of "first civilization" should be "first agrarian state" imo. One land, one king... sovereignty (??)
Thank you. Your videos are great, it's nice to see some sane voice reporting what we actually know so far. The huge majority of "archeological" videos on CZcams are made by people with little to no knowledge of the topics at all, and therefore come to wild conclusions (UFOs building the pyramids, ancient giant people, high tech far back in deep time, etc.)
Keep up the good work, you are needed! 👍
I’ve got to quibble with your assertion that farming would require the concept of private property. It makes a lot more sense that one village would work their land communally, especially in the early stages when they were culturally similar to hunter gatherers.
I had the same exact thought and objection. I do think though that the far longer shelf life of excess grain compared to excess meat means that an essential resource could have been stockpiled in a way that was previously impossible. Much more than extra pots or extra arrowheads, extra shelf-stable food means the ability to directly provide for people, so that accumulation could have led to unequal distribution of "wealth" which could have led to the accumulation of goods, power, demanding tribute from other groups, etc. Both land as private property and grain as wealth are similarly potential explanations for the development of hierarchical and oppressive relationships around the same time, but it is an important distinction. Have to admit though, that's just what makes sense to me, and I'm not basing it on archeological evidence.
So the native indians of California did a form of agriculture, they didn’t plant but every year they would lite fires that burned away brush and made the land favorable to oak trees and the grasses they used for seed, grinding acorn was the staple along with grass seed, so would that be true agriculture or not? It worked for them around four thousand years
This gentleman transfers a LOT of information in a compact space. This is really good work.
I think this video is great because the shift to agriculture is often brushed as a very quick sudden thing. Before 10k years bc hunter gatherers, after agriculture 🎉. Or at least that's how I feel it was talked about in my high-school class.
Question: are there some good pop history / science books that talk about this shift in reasonable but not tedious detail?
Yeah that was the idea before but as with all things the more we look the more we learn and with each year we appreciate the sophistication of these pre-agricultural societies a little more.
I don't know of any pop science books about this particular period unfortunately. The first farmers of Europe, one of my sources in the description, is an archaeology book but the detail isn't tedious because he's trying to explain the general expansion of farming from the Near East to Scandanavia. So each area of the middle east and Europe gets about a 30 page chapter. I really like it, only came out in 2018 too so it has the most recent research in it.
The question I'd be most interested in : when did we get domesticated by cats.? (!!!)
hard to say. Most more or less agree that this is an ongoing process of gradual domestication where cats keep finding new uses for their humans with new technology they develop.
They actually thinks its happened twice with some admixture from widcats also once in china and once in the near east.
Having seen how farm crops (especially maize) attract white tail deer, I suppose capturing goats, sheep, ... might've been easier as a farmer than hunter-gatherers. Just lay a trail of seeds into the corral ...
When just scrolling and your mug pops up I have to stop and watch. Such a great and bubbly character you are!
Yeah Stefan, How's that relatable! :D
COZ I'M TALKING ABOUT OATS AND STUFFFFF!
This is the single best discussion on these collective matters I have seen. Well done.
PS: The big chicken was a hen but I did not get a good look at the small one. Roosters are rare on farms. We raised chickens to sell the eggs and never had a rooster. We would by little chicks by the dozen and raise them up in the "brooder house".
You would be a great professor. You get ideas across so well and make it really enjoyable
As someone who has six kids even though I'm a German atheist, I've thought about this issue a lot.
But you downplayed how much sicklier the farmers were circa 11bp. Kudos for the cavities mention though. It was just shocking, tons more people but who were all 10 inches smaller, disease riddled, died young, worked too hard all their lives, etc.
Basically we turned from strong, healthy smart Hunter gatherers, 2 per 100sq miles, to have tons of kids in absolute luxury at first as we developed farming.
See the garden of Eden story type in all those early civilizations. But then overcrowding set in, forests got cut down and never recovered, etc. Basic population cycle.
Thankfully times are changing again. In the future we might not need farming at all, but make food industrially. Would free up a lot of land.
What does being an atheist have to do with wondering how farming began? I don't see the connection. Is farming specifically a Christian thing, in your mind?
@@practicalintuition4030 The connection is having 6 kids while atheist. The presumption is that religious people have more kids. I am not sure if settled people died younger? It seems unlikely. There is a reason why hunter-gatherer lifestyle went extinct, It is because it was hardly sustainable and the only reason they might seem to be healthier is because of brutal natural selection. Which settled people have greatly overcome.
@@user-hh2is9kg9j dude, that doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't even make sense. Lol.
Make food industrially? Out of what.. food? LOL
galanie
Lol
I gave that a thumb up.
I think it's really interesting how a lot of the earliest civilizations famous for being warriors were people who traditionally herded Sheep.
The Ancient Hebrews rampaged through Canaan, later making it into Israel, and Shepherding was a substantial enough part of their culture that it gained religious symbolism.
The Mongol Empire was founded by Pastorialists who at one point debated committing a genocide in northern China for the sake of opening up grazing land for their Sheep.
Oh goodness, your channel is right up my alley!
Have you heard of the book 'Forager, Farmers, and Fossil Fuel' -Ian Morris?
Awesome vid, as always, my man! Keep up that unique charm
Most likely the transition was even more gradual. All known hunter-gatherer societies tend to have set routs and return to the sme spots every year or every two years. And, contrary to popular belief, nomadic societies are not always on the move but make camp for a few weeksor months at a time. So they all, unconciously or conciously tend to influence the plant life in these spots they regularly visited. It is quite doubtful that a truly pre-agricultural society that didn't actively influence their natural environement has ever existed.
Even back in the neolithic, when all the necessary calories were gained throgh hunting and gathering, there was most likely "proto-farming" for medical herbs, spices, dyes and cosmetics, and, of course, psychoactive plants.
All of this is likely, at least, but it wouldn't have left any archeological traces. So, all the evidence is only incidential. First, the fact that all modern hunter-gatherers behave like this. And the quality of paleolithic cave paintings and artifacts as well as their, often surprisingly effective, medical treatments.
Great editing, brilliant info's, wow 10/10 would watch again
I really enjoy your videos Stefan, always interesting and excellently researched topics and I like your languid presenting style. Keep up the good work buddy 👍
Thanks I appreciate it. I do have an issue sounding enthusiastic, even about topics I love.
Interesting video! I wonder what the thought process behind the first guy to domesticate a cow type ancestor was...."I want that big fella to do my work and he is probably tasty too" maybe something like that...and hence the first Butcher Bill emerged :)
Hey hello epimetheus
I think hunter-gatherers were changing their environment for centuries, planting fruit trees where they had stop last summer and wheat in the spring, bringing salmon eggs in the river they crossed this winter and strawberry near that bush where the summer camp is. And after his wife had another baby, the hunter-gatherer decide to stay at his summer camp and to sow more wheat for his family.
I was just reading about this. Man I love your videos.
Your video may be unlisted, but I will always be watching your vids.
Tigeeerrrstaaaaaaaarrrrrrr!
With domestication of live stock we also became more vulnerable to disease!
We sure did
@@StefanMilo that needs a video!
OMG!! I just had an epiphany - scarcity of meat = forced to eat plants = less energy = less mobility = accidental replanting (Pool) = denser plant/grain growth = complaisance = farming.....
Good stuff, love your videos. Wish this one was more in depth. So many questions about a sudden world wide "convergence" of agriculture at the same time with no apparent contact. Resource depletion, population and climate make sense for the middle east, but all continents at the same time? What are the statistical probabilities on something like that? Save the hate mail, just asking the obvious.
I wouldn't call it sudden, the world wide adoption of agriculture happened over 8000 years. Each of these civilizations in their own way would've benefited from the warmer, more stable climate. Even if the increased intensity of resources had a different trigger in each region.
What uninteresting kinda people could possibly find any of this boring I personally find all this super exciting to learn about and totally love everything to do with early human history and evolution
Thanks. This is the best explanation of the transition from HG to farming I've seen. Of course it's still going on and were killing each other over crap we think we own, rather than running around chasing stuff barefoot. I'm with you, nothing here's happening on purpose. But it does mean I can watch these fascination videos ;)
Dog domestication could have been part of that story maybe? The decreased fight / flight distance that wolves would encounter trying to scavenge from a stationary group of humans vs mobile ones would naturally select for tameness. Once the semi tame wolves started chasing away 2 & 4 legged predators from the garbage pile & livestock pens, the humans might have made sure they got some extra treats to insure they hang around, and both dogs & humans benefit. Watch a Great Pyrenees protect a flock of sheep.
Can confirm being a -nomadic, hunter gatherer- woman is tough going
Well, I'm not eating chocolate dipped ice cream cones for a while.
You're always smiling, I love it
Started my Project Revolution watching @ Emperor Tigerstar. Now to you. Interesting video.
10:44 "I don't know anything about chickens or farming" - proceeds to explain where, when, who, how and why chickens and farms exist. Isn't this guy modest. Well, please continue with this channel.
Stefan - big fan, keep truckin man I love it.
I love love love ready Brek!! I ordered some once from online and I think I paid $7 for one large box. I discovered I can make it at home with quick cooking oats and the food processor! :-)
Check what CO2 levels during this period. The Natufians emerged when CO2 rose above 250 ppm for the first time since the last ice age started. Then the Younger Dryas occurred, CO2 fell again, Natufians went away. CO2 back to 250 ppm at 11,800 years ago, Gobekli Tepe emerges. The answer is that when CO2 levels are under 250 ppm, C3 plants like wheat and barley do not reproduce well enough for farming. That is the answer. We have lived through 28 ice ages when CO2 was too low for farming or even extensive gathering. We mainly hunted meat during the ice ages. During the interglacials, farming might have started but we were not technological enough the current one happened.
Good video. I think I know a bit on the issue and all of what you said made sense to me.
Man you are amazing! Great video as always, History is one of my hobbies💕
If farming was invented 11 separate times in the blink of an eye, doesn't that tell us that there was a prior more important bottleneck/development that led to it? It seems like it was primed to happen by some other key adaptation that did not occur so easily
So, chickens are women and roosters are men. You always make great videos. Thank you.
Hens are females. Roosters are males. Chickens are just what they are.
I really enjoy your videos! I think two unanswered questions do not get enough attention:
1- why did farming appear after hundreds of thousands of relative genetic stability *in different sites*. why not 100,000 years ago? why not at a single place? I think that we need to discover a precursor that enabled farming, going back much longer, or several of them.
2- how did farming and even metallurgy appear in the Americas at a similar time like in Africa-Asia-Europe if the folks doing it had been separated from Asia before farming, in theory as very archaic stone age people, and had two full continents to offset climate specific conditions. Why did they become like westerns but Aborigenes in Australia did not and remained stone agers until contact?
Great video!
This Stephan's masterpiece.
I think you glossed over the fact that humans went from semi nomadic to building the structures with the largest stones ever used in construction without any gap in between. The Romans didnt even move stuff as big as at the first sites in turkey
2:22] Stefan, I have a possible answer for your question, "What compelled our ancestors to go from hunter-gatherers to farmers?" Or at least a hint in the right direction. David Berlinski proposed a similar question for physicists, "What compels the electron to stay in its orbital?" What force? So, what we are looking for is a compelling force, rather than just a series of marginal advantages of two competing food production systems, when prior to the invention of agriculture its advantages might not have been obvious - or maybe its problems were well understood by the hunter-gatherers, thus not pursued until forced to do so. So, bear with my reasoning without any evidence, we can look for the evidence later - like all good scientists.
Maybe the compelling force operating on hunter-gatherers to settle down and pick up the hoe and put down the spear was *other hunter-gatherers.* As modern human hunter-gathers continued to evolve it seems reasonable to suppose that they would have gotten better and better at hunting and gathering and their range and populations would continue to expand. Past a certain point, as groups of hunter-gatherers became more numerous and wide spread they would start to come into competitive contact more and more often, especially if the big game started to become more scare and was crossing into the hunting grounds of other tribes. Prior to this, when humans were still very rare, the concept of hunting grounds, or 'our hunting grounds' may not have existed. At this point in history we should look for the development of more tribe like behavior generally.
At this point, Stefan, you start to answer your own question. If you practice a very, as anthropologists put it, *extensive* economy it does not take a large change in population, or decrease in available hunting/herding range to create a large pressure to adopt a more *intensive* economy. The evolution of Saami culture, for instance, away from its more extensive neolithic form to its more classical form [what we all think of when we think of Saami culture is supposed to be] was the pressure brought about by the influx of a bunch of Scandinavians to their lands. Possibly the 'compelling force,' was a 'restraining force' experienced particularly for humans stuck between Africa and Eurasia, with not much more than rabbits and grass seeds to eat.
It is also worth mentioning, my mentor Terrence Mckenna was fond of pointing out that the nutritional potential of grass seeds, which early agriculturalists would trick into becoming cereal grains, was very well understood by the hunter-gatherers for a very long time. He was also fond of of pointing out that if your ancestors had been in the habit of trailing along after large ungulate herds across the verdant, mushroom-dotted plains of Africa for the last five hundred thousand years, that as soon as things started to dry up your society's religiosity which had been based around the boundary dissolving tremendum of the psychedelic mushroom on the new and full moons would eventually be replaced with a religiosity based upon getting drunk on meade or beer every week.
Still, looking for actual evidence for that one.
Loving your content. Today's vid makes me want to stay on my keto/Paleo diet.
Great vid! Hoping you'll get a nice ol' subscriber boost from the collab!
Thanks, I hope so but it's just fun taking part in these big collabs.
I love how you incorporate dank memes to your videos.
Such a cool video. Sucks you’re such a young channel and my CZcams appetite in enormous. I wish you had a decade long back log, I love your style. Guess I’ll have to be patient.
It wasn't aliens? Good video keep them coming :-)
History channel: * confused screaming *
This is pretty cool, being a vegetable gardener I've am interested in the history of agriculture.
Thanks, this is one of my favourite periods in human history.
Awesome video on a fascinating subject. Care to share the music at the end mate ?
Thanks man. Sure it's called Teahouse Event by someone called SINY. It's royalty free but is also a quality tune.
@@StefanMilo Thanks !
Yeah, goat poop in archeological sites. A classic. Ooh, i know this pain..... i know this pain so much...
The domestication of cattle was for a work animal. Humans have only used cattle exclusively for either meat or milk for the last 400 - 500 years. It is still the number one power source for agriculture today.
12:06
I am unfamiliar with this euphemism. Do explain :-)
To eat meat (your natural food) you have to hunt it down, you get that one piece and it's hard to keep it from spoiling. You can eat it as soon as you can or let it go to waste. If you're near ice and snow you can keep it for a while or if you have enourmous amounts of salt you can keep it in salt, but we're talking 15000 years ago. The only way to have food "on demand" and have some certainty of not dying of hunder during winter etc. is to farm, produce large amounts of stuff that can be turned into a million different things (flour, bread, meal, animal feed, pasta, beer etc.). As the weather warmed, farming became easier. The problem is, plants in general, especially cereals, aren't what we evolved on. That's why you start seeing cavities, shorter people, smaller brains, traces of new diseases on bones, cancers etc.
Very nicely presented.
Fantastic content man. What about security in familiar land and home that early man would surely be after. Stability
Very cool thanks!
Excellent, I found this interesting, maybe I'm getting old.
Can you also please do a video explaining the mystery of gobekli tape in Turkey?!
At some point yeah, working on it now.
great content!
0:38 I didn't realize you were a Tim and Eric fan.
I just couldn't find a nice smooth transition I liked so I thought if it's going to be jarring and ugly I may as well have fun with it.
watching this video raises a question on the flips side why was the holoecene so climatically stable when you make it sound like the exception not the norm?
So much to learn from the Levantine environmental decay of the pre pottery A and B eras - to forestay the disagreements of climate change. It is environmental sustainability that failed early urban civilisation.
grit from grindstones causes tooth wear
It has always been suspicious to me that so many places independently developed agriculture, all at roughly the same time (on the time scale that our species has existed). Europe being ice-bound is no excuse; north Africa was much wetter and more fertile then, and it in fact retained its fertility long enough to become a major source of wheat for ancient Rome. So what could have coordinated them?
MAYBE it has to do with the domestication of dogs. Some genetic research (www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170718113516.htm) places the domestication of dogs in "the 20,000 to 40,000 years ago range." That would have been before the first people crossed Beringia. Once one animal species has been domesticated, though, it might suggest the domestication of other animals and even plants.
Aşıklı Höyük
Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, China, Mekong Delta, Melanesia, South America, Central America, North America. Various parts of Africa.
Interesting the gradual nature of this revolution. True that , with the tools we have now, we see that the advent of farming as a lifestyle signaled a rise in population levels, and a decline of health and stature of the individuals whom survived to adulthood. The understanding is that no given generation would have had a way to observe this trend. The benefits would have been apparent (don't have to move to find resources, humans would have spare time to develop writing, art, architecture, medicine, etc.) The drawbacks would have taken place slowly and to a more complacent and sedentary population, which had mostly lost the skills and vigorous health of their hunting-gathering ancestors.
My theory (not only mine) is that someone found out that if you ferment grain you get alcohol, so maybe the desire to make beer led the boom in grain management?
what resources d you draw from? are there any books you would recommend?
What is ironic about that is that the region where we have the first evidence for agriculture is in a war to decide "who owns what land" to this very day
This lads humour be tickling my mustard
Entertaining and provocative. You and Graham Hancock have different views on the extent of agriculture at the time of the building of Gobekli Tepe, quite different in fact. How does one determine correctness?
sacredgeometryinternational.com/prehistory-decoded-part-1-video/?mc_cid=ee54784477&mc_eid=567d943369
Yeah, in his books, you can watch him transform his opinions into facts in about a paragraph!
That red pickup truck at about 10 minutes is an artifact.
Could these family’s growing in size have lead to a royal hierarchy , if you had 12 kids and a powerful family , your power would be more with lots of powerful decedents ?
great video
Watching and adult human whom doesn't know the difference between hems and roosters made my morning 😅
No, agriculture doesn’t actually necessitate private property. We know those things developed separately, and there is in fact ample evidence in the archeological record of not just agriculture but even cities with no class distinctions and presumably no private property.
What a beautiful farm!
Yeah it's nice. Part run by an Englishman too which is always a bonus.
11:15 "Sussex" chickens looking at Stefan: "didn't I see you in Thropshire UK last year?"
Thanks.
It now seems that neander were also occasional practitioners, the clearings in Scandinavia being the evidence.80,000 BC.
So after this, what are your thoughts on those who argue that farming is the worst thing to happen to mankind?
I see it in an economics way. Yes, the average human was less capable than their hunter-gatherer counterparts but they were much more numerous, which has proven to be better over time. For example, crossbows and guns come to replace bows because it allowed for much larger armies. I think, unconsciously, mankind made an economic calculation and found that quantity was more important than quality.
As usual, great video Stefan. You went the extra mile with the editing of this one. Thanks for chocolate ruining ice-cream for me...
It’s why we beat our cousins and spread across the whole planet. We found social complexion and cultural development to be extremely beneficial for hominids considering our brain power and lifespans.
We weren’t the strongest, or smartest, or arguably the best at anything but working together in a group. And being cultured. That allowed us to develop things to make us best at everything.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 Excellent point.
This is Barris! - French History looking at humans. Communication and group cohesion might not seem like our strong suit. But it undoubtedly is. Our ability to manifest metaphysical properties with words and ideas. Is leaps and bounds beyond anything that’s evolved on this earth thus far. Taboo, stigma, vice, and virtue. Social elements that some find primitive. Are actually the key to our success. And should be cherished by a civilization.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 Oh I definitely think we strive by our ability to communicate and cooperate. I remember reading about how successful octopuses could be if they were able to teach each other. They learn from each other but they don't go out of their way to teach like humans do. The fact that we transfer knowledge rather than rediscover it each time is one of our greatest ability imo
Great vid, great observations and extrapolated, very original, filler observations..
Hopefully ya Mrs appreciates ya gifting :-)
What do you think about The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow? Does their thesis agree with your assessment?