These are claims, not evidence. Your claim appears to be you can't carve a big stone if you're a hunter gatherer although It's not clear why you think that.
I think I've made that clear. Where else in the world has a hunter-gatherer lifestyle afforded the caloric surplus necessary to do this much manual labor?
Hunter gatherers didn’t exactly live in a state of deprivation. We also a lot of examples of cultures that didn’t farm building giant earth works, like those found at Poverty Point in Louisiana[1]. We know that a number of pre-Colombian societies shunned agriculture and developed quite complex societies like the people along the gulf coast, or the Coast Salish to name to areas of interest. Pre-agricultural forbears of the Iroquois were probably mining copper. Agriculture doesn’t seem to be necessary for organization or communal work.
I thought it was well established that the transition to agriculture caused a decline in general health and nutrition for most humans, shorter, smaller brains, etc.
Suppose that their diets are equally good for health (which is a big supposition). Suppose a hunter-gatherer and a farmer both get sick with the same thing. Why would the first die and the second not?
Having access to an excess of calories? Doesn't make sense. Yes, agri societies make more food, but people are always starving all the same, because the count of people goes up until you once again have food scarcity.
I’d think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as they didn’t have nutrition science (even we barely do) and would have to rely on what they could get to grow, mainly grains. Most likely they weren’t actually fully agricultural and were using the farms to make beer or feed their animal herds.
But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more active participation and can’t provide a surplus to feed as many idle hands.
The population growth problem is the purpose of religion whose main thing has always been telling people to not have sex.
> I’d think agricultural diets were less healthy insofar as they didn’t have nutrition science
More likely, agriculture was less healthy because it had less in common with what humans had been consuming over recent evolutionary time. Animals eating mostly grain over millions of years, would be able to produce vitamin C themselves, for instance.
> But I was just thinking that hunter-gatherers need more active participation and can’t provide a surplus to feed as many idle hands.
I think the data from recent hunter-gatherer tribes indicate that they work fewer hours per day to gather food than farmers.
> The population growth problem is the purpose of religion whose main thing has always been telling people to not have sex.
I think the main reasons why agricultural societies tend to build more buildings, are:
- Agriculture allows the production of more calories within a geographical area, allowing much higher population densities.
- Agriculture ties people to a geographical area, while most hunter gatherers will relocate now and then (or even all the time). Pastorial cultuers can go in either direction.
- In fertile areas, not everyone needs to be a farmer. Specialized soldiers, priests, artisans, etc evolve.
- Agriculture creates a dependency on the protection of the land until the time of harvest, which increases the need for some kind of military organization to resist raiding tribes. This develops into something like kingdoms pretty easily, where a single (or a few) individuals control a large number of people.
So, agriculture increases population density, promotes specialization, and encourages local investments in land and buildings, and requires some kind of soldier and ruling class. Over time, it's not strange that the ruling class invent non-violent means of retaining control, such as buildings that are impressive/and or easy to defend, social structures and religions that justify their "right" to power, etc.
For hunter-gatherers, the hunter and warrior roles overlap. Essentially, the same tools are used for providing food and protecting territory, so no special warrior class elite develops. In consequence, the chieftain is likely to be a first-among-equals, who participates in the hunting and fighting just like the others, and who is more likely to have his role due to personal ability rather than inheritence. With every man being a warror, a semi-democratic system would typically exist, since any sub-group that had the support of more than half the men would be the strongest one in a fight.
Just as an analogue, democracy in the West just happened to come at the same time that conscript armies armed with cheap firearms replaced elite knights/men-at-arms. A similar pattern could be seen in Greece and Rome, both of which had some kind of rule by the people for as long as their armies remained citizen armies. (When Rome switched to professional soldiers, it only took a couple of generations for Sulla, Ceaser and Octavian to arrive.)
Exactly how many calories does one need to do this? What is the cutoff? What papers are researchers are you building your claims on?
How long can they work on such tasks? Maybe, if they build slowly, then one needs almost no "caloric surplus".... There's so many holes in such a wild and absolute claim that I don't see it as much of an argument against the experts that have built on previous knowledge and have published peer reviewed papers on this topic.
Yup, without any doubt, because a society can not possibly work stone without eating meat. Just look at the the lack of stonework in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cultures. Oh, wait...
We need more funding for experimental archaeology to provide evidence of whether it’s possible to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle while constructing large stone temple complexes.
Evidence is not the same as proof. Evidence can often be interpreted in different directions.
As more and more evidence accumulates about some topic, we can use a Bayesian process to continously update our priors, but it is common to disagree about what constitutes enough evidence to conclude.
This is partly due to us having different priors, but also often due to our tendency to not trust evidence that is in conflict to our priors.
For both of these reasons, sufficient evidence for a new proposition for it to be logically more likely than the pre-existing consensus typically exist for quite a while before it becomes the new consensus.
In many cases, what is required for the paradigm shift to eventually happen, is not so much more evidence, but rather for the old guard to retire. In the interrim, it can be 'obnoxiously obvious' for some that the evidence is already there.
In the late 80s, I (a teenager at the time) was discussing the topic of airplanes being flown by computers. I was convinced that computers would be able to fly airplanes within my lifetime, and would even replace pilots in figher planes at some point. For me, this was 'obnoxiously obvious'.
The first time, I discussed it with an engineer/hobbyist pilot. He claimed that flying an airplane was an impossible task for a computer. His argument was from chaos theory; a computer would never be able to calculate all the variables involved in turbulent airflow, so they would not be able to fly an airplane. Clearly, he ignored that humans do not do those calculations either, but I was unable to make my point.
The second time, it was a former figher pilot, then airline pilot. He did not in principle object to a computer flying an airplane, but he completely dismissed the possibility of a computer flying a fighter plane into combat.
Both are now retired. I still think it is obnoxiously obvious that computers can fly planes, and that within my lifetime, even fighters will be unmanned. Clearly, there is more evidence now, but I think that today, the evidence from the 80s would have been considered sufficient by most people my age or younger.
(Now, I'm almost 50, and maybe this time I'm the one being obnoxious, as indicated by my previous post being downvoted.)
There was plenty of evidence for this in the late 80s, from cruise missiles to the space shuttle and many other systems. It's just that 80s arguments didn't have the benefit of the internet and the web in everyone's pocket.
The thing we're dealing with here is the extraordinary-sounding claim that it was just about biochemically impossible for pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies to have carved some bigass stones. The person making it seems to have the boon of internet access to help them buttress their argument.
> There was plenty of evidence for this in the late 80s, from cruise missiles to the space shuttle and many other systems. It's just that 80s arguments didn't have the benefit of the internet and the web in everyone's pocket.
I would agree, but that was not even the evidence that I (a 13 year old kid at the time) was using to draw my conclusion. In my opinion then (and still) the main argument was that the brain is not magical, and provided that Moore's law would continue, computers would eventually be able to do most of the things a human brain is doing.
While it might take some time for computers to do all things as well as the brain, computers would have advantages in terms of cost, space requirements and not being restricted to 9g (for fighters). I think the 40 year engineer and 50 year old former fighter pilot had a model of the mind that were dualist, ie there was some ghost in the machine that allowed humans to do things that computer never will be able to.
Many famous thinkers have had similar ideas, such as Gödel, von Neumann and Penrose, all extremely intelligent.
Now, the consensus has shifted, but Penrose has not changed his mind. Recent developments in AI may be seen as pretty hard evidence that computers one day will be able to do what the brain is doing, but Penrose doesn't think the evidence is strong enough, and still looks for his ghost in the machine in quantum effects within neurons.
As for the original discussion, I actually don't have a strong opinion. But when someone claims that something is 'obnoxiously obvious', I presume good faith, and that evidence has already been presented, but not yet accepted by the community.
Maybe I was unfair in my first comment in this thread. Generally, strong claims do require strong evidence. But it IS pretty common for the Old Guard to require the evidence for a new idea to meet much higher standards than the evidence for the old idea, and if so, it is typically the case that one just has to wait and see what will become the consensus over time (often more than 1 generation).
