The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

Anyone who thinks hunter gatherers had pleasant lives should stop to think what happened to people who were too old to follow the tribe when it moved, or what happened when a mother who was already nursing had another baby.

I must rescind this statement. As a result of these discussions, I began reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, in the chapter "To Farm or not to Farm," makes clear the disconnect between agriculture and sedentary living:

"Another misconception is that there is necesarrily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently develop such a contrast, hunter-gathers in some productive areas, including North America's Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, costal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gathers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.

Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea's Lake Plains made clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has not produced. Apache Indians of the southwestern United States settled down to farm in the summer at high elevations and toward the north, then withdrew to the south and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods, during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp along regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pasturage. Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living."

(Guns, Germs, and Steel p. 106)

Indeed. I love this comic: http://static.flickr.com/100/267584452_4c7f35863f.jpg

Massive self-aggrandizing factual error in the third paragraph:

It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.

Um, Jean Jacques Rousseau? Noble Savage? Only a few decades after Hobbes?

It may not be relevant to the case being made here, but come on. I remember writing "compare and contrast" papers on Hobbes and Rousseau in high school.

One of the recurring off-topic discussions on Startup News was the evolution of humanity from nomadic tribes through the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Now that the scope of the site has expanded, it would make sense that one of the most popular discussions is still the evolution of humanity. If this topic doesn't interest you, maybe you should submit a story that you find interesting.