The Smartest people on Earth

[Artificial Hipster]

Are you my cousin? I mean seriously. My father's Mother's uncles helped put the ire in empire after the indian mutiny with the Connaught Rangers, and I'm the first person in five generations not to divide my time between the west of Ireland and Manchester.

The Thing about being a hunter Gatherer is that it's not all tropical island paradises. Mostly it's living in caves, or sleeping under trees. Generally being cold and wet, and usually not having enough to eat, and only knowing about 10 people. There's also a hell of a lot of walking. See they wouldn't be hunter gatherers in the indian ocean. They'd be hunter gatherers in the west of Ireland. Even if you were a pre famine cottier, with an acre of potatoes, the thing was that you only needed to do about 13 days of work a year to feed your substantial family, and keep a pig to pay your rent. The Issue that these people had wasn't that they were overworked. They were simply incredibly poor because they were massively underemployed. There's a huge amount of the time when farmers aren't doing anything. There were periods of time where northern european peasants essentially just hibernated for several months of the year.

Stone age Irish would, I think, have lived in wood-framed huts with deer skin roofs, and surely bands would have numbered around 50 people but I get your point. Mine was more that for the vast majority of the world's population at any point up to a couple of hundred years ago the offer of a switch from an impoverished peasant's lot to a lifestyle and a social group more akin to what several million years of evolution had prepared them for would be one that many would have given serious thought to.

Variously Roscommon, Wexford & Shinrone incidentally. I've only been to Ireland once myself though. All I know is what I found out a couple of years ago through genealogy websites.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The betting is more on thatch TBH. People were building thatched houses a surprisingly long time ago. and people generally hung out near rivers, and were apparently surprisingly sophisticated at building fish traps. The switch over from hunter gather to farmers happened around 4000 bc. A bunch of people arrived with the fertile Crescent basket of foodstuffs, and pottery to store harvests in, and the Neolithic era begins. They cut down most of the forests in the west of Ireland, which after about 1000-2000 years lead to the creation of the bogs. They found a huge field network in the ceide fields in mayo covering a couple of thousand acres. The thing is that these people also did their fair share of hunting and gathering as well to supplement their diets. People had a choice and mostly they went with agriculture. people would give up a lot for better food security. People in the US could go and live in the wilderness and be a hunter gatherer until surprisingly recently. Very few did.

[Artificial Hipster]

Not sure it's possible to have a Ben Elton earworm but your first line gave me one.

I'm curious incidentally about what you said way back about not being sure Guns, Germs & Steel achieves what it sets out to achieve. The only refutation of Diamond's argument (that the accidental invention of agriculture in areas with just the right climate, flora and fauna led to a change from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle, to the formation of city states and the rest is history) that I've come across is in a book on late pre-history I was otherwise enjoying until I reached the chapter headed Race. I can't recall whether the author's (Nicholas Wade, an ex-New York Times science editor) arguments against Diamond (his whole thesis dismissed in a couple of lines to the effect that sedentary living in fact preceded agriculture) came before his insistence (based largely on the fact Ethiopians can run long distances very quickly and that Ashkenazi Jews do well in maths tests) that we should absolutely accept the existence of distinct races. They were definitely linked though.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Hah, it's not that it's not a good book. It's that it's kind of trying to explain everything, and that's basically impossible. Though starting from the premise that everyone is basically the same is a good place to start.

[anton pulisov]

The professor whose father discovered the ceide fields managed to get a 'research' centre built near his local village in Mayo. His son runs the place now.

Great little country, isn't it

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Hold on. what?

Padraig Caulfield was the local primary school teacher, who was out digging turf and he found what looked an awful lot like a wall at the bottom of a bank of turf. It quickly dawned on him that this wall predated the bog, and became a bit of an amateur archaeologist. His Son became an proper Archaelogist, did his PhD on the ceide fields, and became professor of archaeology in UCD. The research centre and the Interpretative centre are in that village because that's where the ceide fields are. It would be really weird if they were anywhere else. His son is also an archaeologist, and he is working on the site. It's not a big conspiracy. It would be kind of odd if it happened any other way. Do you have any idea how they mapped the ceide fields? They found all those walls by walking all over several square miles of bogland, shoving long metal rods into the ground and building up a map of the bottom.

Seamus Caulfield's sister was a teacher in the local vocational school when I was growing up and was a good friend of my parents. Her son is now a film maker and he made "The pipe" about the Shell to Sea fun and games, and another film called Atlantic. I've got to say I'm pretty amazed that he's became rather a good film maker. I wonder what age he was when he first looked through a view finder.

[anton pulisov]

No, they got another place built in their local village in Mayo. I'm not talking about the heritage centre place at the ceide fields themselves.

The current son isn't an actual archaeologist, but he got a nice gig anyway.

Yes, I know about the metal rods. I think it comes from tree scientists looking for dead trees at the bottom of bogs.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

The betting is more on thatch TBH. People were building thatched houses a surprisingly long time ago. and people generally hung out near rivers, and were apparently surprisingly sophisticated at building fish traps. The switch over from hunter gather to farmers happened around 4000 bc. A bunch of people arrived with the fertile Crescent basket of foodstuffs, and pottery to store harvests in, and the Neolithic era begins. They cut down most of the forests in the west of Ireland, which after about 1000-2000 years lead to the creation of the bogs. They found a huge field network in the ceide fields in mayo covering a couple of thousand acres. The thing is that these people also did their fair share of hunting and gathering as well to supplement their diets. People had a choice and mostly they went with agriculture. people would give up a lot for better food security. People in the US could go and live in the wilderness and be a hunter gatherer until surprisingly recently. Very few did.

It's not really a choice when people have already taken up agriculture - when the best foraging grounds are taken for crops, when the best fishing streams are jealously guarded and when generations of knowledge about how to actually survive as a hunter gatherer no longer exists. It's not a choice when your family unit is too big to sustain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Hunter gatherers may have been better fed, healthier and more resistant to famine and disease than early agrarians but that doesn't mean "returning" to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is actually any sort of an option.

But people have been resistant to taking up an agrarian lifestyle. The great walls of the Bronze Age city states primarily existed to keep an enslaved populace captive. The idea that hunter gatherers had the social organisation to maintain their way of life is fanciful. Even though their quality of life may have been better than their life as a Sumerian slave.

The same is true today. I'm sure life is very hard as an indigenous hunter-gatherer Amazonian, but it's certainly a better life than that of the urban poor. People are abandoning that lifestyle not because it's unsustainable or undesirable but because they are being massacred by mining, logging and ranching interests.

[anton pulisov]

Reading about the Ceide Fields. There's a big argument as to how old they were. New radiocarbon dating suggests that they are as old as similar structures from across Europe from that time (3,500 years old roughly). Caulfield & Sons & Sons still say they are 6000 years old. If you are to believe them, then the people of Mayo invented field systems a couple of millennia before everyone else in Ireland and Europe.

[Duncan Gardner]

Oh the Ceide Fields of Mayo
They're half as old as time
Like Babylon and Sumer
And the Premordial slime

[Tactical Genius]

plants which essentially come from iraq and kind of do best in a similar climate.
[/quote]

I won't be too hard on you as you are merely a product of a eurocentric based science of anthropology which is complete bull wherever anything remotely related to Africa is concerned?

There were many contemporary civilisations around at the time of the birth of Ancient Egypt (which is actually two kingdoms). You had numerous kingdoms in Modern Southern Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia all of which had agriculture as least as sophisticated as the Egyptians.
"Kerma was evidently a sizeable political entity - [b[Egyptian records speak of its rich and populous agricultural regions[/b]. Unlike Egypt, Kerma seems to have been highly centralized. It controlled the 1st to 4th Cataracts, which meant its domain was as extensive as ancient Egypt."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerma_culture

So as you can see, there was plenty of agriculture taking place south of Egypt as well as west until the Sahara completely dried out.

Looking at that list of animals that you put up, the only one that you can fully domesticate that was indigenous to Africa were bees. And we all know about Africanized Killer bees with their large size and their big stingers that frighten all those people on Fox news. It doesn't mean that it didn't develop over time, it's just that it wasn't quite the same.

I know you were joking with the Fox news comment however there are reliefs of Domesticated animals in Ancient Egypt as well rock art scattered around the Sahara. I am happy to send you links if you like

The Thing about being a hunter Gatherer is that it's not all tropical island paradises. Mostly it's living in caves, or sleeping under trees. Generally being cold and wet, and usually not having enough to eat, and only knowing about 10 people. There's also a hell of a lot of walking.

Being a hunter gatherer in the tropics is akin to living in a Fruit and Veg section in a big supermarket. Food grows all year round, as there is an abundance and variety of food, people were healthier and lived longer than those who resorted to agriculture.

See they wouldn't be hunter gatherers in the indian ocean. They'd be hunter gatherers in the west of Ireland. Even if you were a pre famine cottier, with an acre of potatoes, the thing was that you only needed to do about 13 days of work a year to feed your substantial family, and keep a pig to pay your rent. The Issue that these people had wasn't that they were overworked. They were simply incredibly poor because they were massively underemployed. There's a huge amount of the time when farmers aren't doing anything. There were periods of time where northern european peasants essentially just hibernated for several months of the year.

Not sure I agree here, from my knowledge these farmers would spend their spare time fighting in the numerous never-ending petty civil wars that have ravaged Britain from 1066 to 1996.
And when they were not fighting each other, they were fighting the French and Spanish.

It's not really a choice when people have already taken up agriculture - when the best foraging grounds are taken for crops, when the best fishing streams are jealously guarded and when generations of knowledge about how to actually survive as a hunter gatherer no longer exists.

I believe humans developed agriculture out of Necessity more than choice. North Africa and the middle East experienced massive climate change where the land rapidly dried out and became desert. Many of the populations migrated to more amenable pastures, those that didn't coalesced around the Tigris, Euphrates and the Nile and were forced to innovate as food was very scarce.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

There were many contemporary civilisations around at the time of the birth of Ancient Egypt (which is actually two kingdoms). You had numerous kingdoms in Modern Southern Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia all of which had agriculture as least as sophisticated as the Egyptians.
"Kerma was evidently a sizeable political entity - [b[Egyptian records speak of its rich and populous agricultural regions[/b]. Unlike Egypt, Kerma seems to have been highly centralized. It controlled the 1st to 4th Cataracts, which meant its domain was as extensive as ancient Egypt."

That's grand, but that's kind of beside the point I was making. Agriculture travelled down the Nile Valley, at a time when the climate south of egypt was a bit different. But the climate changed pushing it back north a bit. It's got nothing to do with the people involved, and everything to do with climate changing a lot more as you go north and south, than as you go east and west. It made it awkward for it to spread south.

I know you were joking with the Fox news comment however there are reliefs of Domesticated animals in Ancient Egypt as well rock art scattered around the Sahara. I am happy to send you links if you like

again that wasn't quite the point I was making. There's animal herding in africa from relatively early. but the point was that those animals had to be brought to africa, usually from slightly east of the fertile crescent. But that's largely true of everywhere that isn't Iran and iraq. Actually the Donkey was domesticated in Egypt, and it's a really good example of the random nature of how this works. The Wild Ass was fairly widespread across the fertile crescent and north africa, but only the type found in Egypt could be domesticated. The very slightly different kind that was found in the tigris and euphrates valleys is called the Onager, and it is a viciously aggressive animal, and only the zebra is a bigger menace to zoo keepers.

the thing is that people have been trying to domesticate the mammals of Africa from a very early point in time. It's just that very few of them are suitable for domestication. There are five or six boxes that an animal has to tick to be domesticable. (For instance, people have kept cheetahs as pets for thousands of years, but until 1960 they couldn't get one to breed, because in order to get the female to ovulate, you have to chase her for about 60 miles. This makes them difficult to domesticate) There are apparently 148 large mammals throughout the world that were candidates for domestication, but only 14 were suitable. and some of them were limited to certain places. There was eight types of wild horses. They can all breed with each other, though sometimes the offspring are sterile. The Type of horse in the Ukraine could be domesticated, and the egyptian wild ass could be domesticated, the other six which include the onager, and the four types of zebra can't. So the only way that farmers in Africa could get a horses spread from the Ukraine, and donkeys spread from Egypt. In order to get a domesticated horse to say south Africa, it would need to gradually spread from Egypt south, and be able to survive in all of the different climate zones that you would encounter as you went south, and you couldn't get them to america at all unless they swam.

There have been cattle in africa for a very long time, and most modern African cattle are descended from an african wild cow, and they look very different from the cattle you see in Europe, particularly since they are more likely to be cross bred with the Indian Zebu cattle, but it's unclear if this was the original type of cow that was used by the first farmers, simply because domesticating animals takes an awful long time and is really fucking dangerous, and it's a lot easier to get them off a neighbouring group of people. The Original Aurochs that modern cattle (The ones from turkey are the ones that we think of as cattle in europe and america, the ones from pakistan became the humped cattle you can see in india) are descended from, made Knickers the Steer look kind of puny, and they had enormous horns. Also most of them couldn't be domesticated. The other thing is that domesticated cattle are still pretty dangerous. A friend of mine has twice been left unconscious in the road by one, and I made the mistake of going into a small yard with a cow and her calf, and she tried to crush me against a wall. So the first wannabe herder who went up to a wild Aurochs and tried to make friends, must have been an insanely brave man/woman indeed.

One thing that certainly happened at some point though is that some cattle herder tried to domesticate the African buffalo. It is perfectly suited to its habitat, is disease and drought resistant, is very fast growing, and very efficient at turning grass into meat. It breeds easily, it lives in big herds and it is slow to run away (like a deer) preferring instead to form that big cow circle with the little ones in the middle. the problem is it's super aggressive. Similarly there have been a lot of attempts to domesticate the African Bush pig, but no-one has quite fully managed it. There is evidence though that people introduced them to islands in order to be able to hunt them.

Once the ability to travel long distances at sea quickly, a lot of things started to happen. The Portuguese brought maize to south Africa in the late seventeenth century, and there was a population explosion that lead to the rise of the zulus, and a number of other kingdoms, who set about slaughtering each other in the time worn manner of every society that finds itself with a lot more young men knocking around than they used to have. This ultimately lead to an awful lot of displacement, with the ndebele's moving from the southern coast, to bulawayo, and ethnically cleansing what would become the orange free state and the transvaal in the "tcheme". When the Boers made their great trek in an effort to flee turn back the clock about 300 years, they found that the place was almost entirely depopulated. (This is in principle no different to the first world war)

Not sure I agree here, from my knowledge these farmers would spend their spare time fighting in the numerous never-ending petty civil wars that have ravaged Britain from 1066 to 1996.
And when they were not fighting each other, they were fighting the French and Spanish.

I think the UK is a particularly bad example in this case. The UK generally only went in for a serious bloodletting once a century, but otherwise was very stable. Sometimes it was twice a century depending on where you lived, but there were a lot of people who would live their entire life without getting caught up in one of these wars. When I went on holiday to france a couple of years ago, I was reading the history of the town I was staying in, and the thing that became abundantly clear was that very little happened, but once a century Death would come marching up the valley sharpening his scythe. Also it's possible to overestimate the number of people that were caught up in these wars with foreign countries. Now a small german statelet on the other hand or italian city state.....

I believe humans developed agriculture out of Necessity more than choice. North Africa and the middle East experienced massive climate change where the land rapidly dried out and became desert. Many of the populations migrated to more amenable pastures, those that didn't coalesced around the Tigris, Euphrates and the Nile and were forced to innovate as food was very scarce.

The rise of agriculture in the fertile crescent and in adjoining areas seems to coincide quite closely with a mini ice age which would have displaced an awful lot of people, and as you point out changed the climate everywhere in eurasia, and north africa, But Agriculture also arose independently in China, and meso america, and in india. It's not clear what prompted those changes. One thing that needs to be borne in mind is that while the introduction of agriculture did lead to reduced average heights, not all of that is down to worse diets, but also because Agriculture breaks the link between size and survival. being big and strong and super fit isn't really and advantage to a farmer. Most of it is traditionally done by women and children after all. basically agriculture meant that the less than perfect specimens were able to survive and thrive for the first time.