Agriculture and cultural ecology

This topic is a spin-off of a discussion in the Akhenaton thread. Speel-yi takes the position that agriculture makes no sense as a cultural adaptation and must have been imposed on the 'masses' by the 'elites.' Wrong. And it is a basic component of evolutionary biology that you have missed. A woman who lives to 80 has no more fertile time than a woman who lives to 40, or even 30 in most cases. That is why average lifespan is the wrong variable. Lifespan only matters up to the point where a woman can no longer become pregnant. Once a woman is infertile she could live to a thousand and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference.The relevant variable is the average birth rate per woman. The key variable for birth rate is fat. Calories make babies. Agricultural based diets are high in carbohydrates relative to foraging based diets. Thus, birth rates go up.

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No it is not, it is quite alive and many textbooks have incorrect information about human evolution and this in turn has an effect on social policy. Ever heard of the term "developing country?" What are they supposed to develop into?

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Textbooks may have incorrect information, though I am not sure how you would spot it. The term 'developing country' means 'developing a technological infrastructure.' This is not social darwinism. It is economics. Like it or not, a non-industrial country will be crushed in this world. It will be overrun.

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It doesn't take much training to do menial tasks associated with agriculture.

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It takes no more training to learn to walk around and recognize what is edible. Agriculture is no easy thing.

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The division of labor meant that you learned one task and did not learn about anything else.

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BS. That degree of labor division does not occur until you have very complicated societies such as Egypt. This is not the case with early agricultural communities. There tends to be more division of labor in these communities but it reaches nowhere near the degree you pretend.

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It does not take much training to survive in America, most people are completely ignorant of anything except what they need to know.

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You are overlooking the obvious. Kids are 16 to 20 or later before they can support themselves. The reason is school. How well do you think someone would survive with no formal education at all? No grammar school, no kindergarten, nothing? By six of seven a forager or farmer is contributing. In the US, we'd call that illegal.

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The skeletal record shows a great deal of physical stress and malnutrition. Porotic hyperostosis is very evident in many skulls from agricultural societies and it is still evident in in human skulls from India.

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No argument. Early agriculture resulted in restricted diets. I haven't said differently. And, no, this does not contradict what I said earlier about birth rates. The human body will sacrifice the mother's health for the child, as long as there are calories enough. Aggriculturists have calories. What I said is that agriculture allows more people to live on a smaller plot of land than could foragers. The term is 'intensification.' It means getting more food out of the land by putting more effort into it. It usually results in a decrease in living standards for those involved. The critical question is 'Why?' Several things could account for the switch. Population growth could deplete the environmental resources-- you see this among the Yanamamo. Settlement along a particularly fertile riverbank could break the foraging cycle. If the local resources run dry, you are forced into agriculture. Chances are agriculture began slowly as foragers started encouraging wild crops. As their efforts paid off, their populations increased. Eventually these forager/farmers would get trapped into agriculture, their populations having grown too large to be supported by the environment.------------------
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Its a hydrogen molecule. Site not installed - OVHcloud------------------
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It might make a bit of difference, but it isn't going to justify using average lifespan as an indicator of reproductive success, which is what Speel-yi appears to be doing.------------------
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I'm not sure what your objection is, or even if there is an objection. If we could investigate early agriculture thoroughly, we'd probably find all sorts of experiments.------------------
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I have no confusion about what it means.

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You did, and you still do.

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The replacement rate for people is currently 2.11 children per woman...

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Why do you think current replacements rates are relevant?

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Given this, if a woman begins reproducing at age 15, she will be 22 when her first child can survive and in a forager context, she will have another child that is 3 by then and that child will be 7 when she is 26 with yet perhaps another on the way.

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Well, you've started our girl reproducing about 4 years too early. [qs]humans grow longer and begin reproducing around age 19 in hunter-gatherer societies typical of our evolutionary past. 404 File Not Found :: New Mexico's Flagship University | The University of New Mexico You've also biased the data toward your position in other ways. Both infant and child mortality rates are higher for foragers than for agriculturalists, for example. No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/kelly5_end.htm-- there is a chart about halfway down the page.The same chart also gives an average reproduction rate of 5.5 for foragers and 6.1 for agriculturalists, so lets run some rough calculations.Our woman has 5.5 kids, 23 percent of whom die as infants. This leaves us with 4.5 ( roughly ). 43% of these children die in childhood leaving 2 children to mate and make babies. This is dead-on replacement.Our agriculturalist has 6.1 children of whom 21% die as infants leaving us with 5 kids ( again, roughly ). 38% of these die in childhood, which eliminates another 2. Thus the agriculturalists nets one extra child. This is population growth, and at a descent clip as well.The reasons are...

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How I would spot it? Hmmm, another insult.

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Yes, if you want to take it that way. You could, however, take it constructively.

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Developing counties? They are not developing an infrastructure.

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What exactly do you think factories are? Roads?

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Could you survive without all the things that you have at hand?

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It would take all of about a month to learn. That is the point.

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You are oversimplistic in your claim about foraging.

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You are overly romantic.

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Could you make a stone spearpoint?

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Spearpoints are hard, but they are also unnecessary. Chimps forage just fine without them. I can, however mangae the simple knives, axes and scrapers our ancestors used for tens of thousands of years. These are much more important and much easier.

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Where would you get the rock?

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If I had been born into a foraging culture that makes stone tools someone would have told me. That would take all of about five minutes.

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Which type is best to use?

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The best is volcanic glass, but that is pretty rare. Flint is second best, but most cherts are tolerable.

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When do the right plants come into season and which ones are poisonous?

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I've lived where I live long enough to know the plants. Foraging is not that hard. A friend of mine, born and raised in the city and kinda nuts, lived for months on stuff he found growing wild. It simply isn't that hard.

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Can you even make a fire?

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Yes, actually. That isn't terribly hard either, if someone shows you how to do it. You can teach someone in a couple of hours. And that is the whole point. The basics are easily learned. If you grew up in a foraging society, you would have been taught.

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I have a question for you John. Who will take care of you when you are 80?

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I have no idea. More red-herrings?------------------
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Again, you are confusing life expectancy with reproductive success.------------------
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Then why would a large brain evolve in the first place?

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Large brains evolved because hunting and gathering is hard and requires intelligence? Think about this. Rats, birds, whales, lizards, spiders... all hunt and/or gather. It is the de facto standard means of subsistence for the animal kingdom. If it required giant brains, wouldn't all animals have huge brains like ours? Yes, indeed-ie. But that isn't we see. There must be another reason for our brain.I am not sure if there is a consensus in the field, but the theory I favor for the initial push to big-brains involves where are ancestors lived and how they survived. Our ancestors lived in a very hot and sunny part of Africa. Animals in this environment become quite sluggish during the middle of the day. This includes the hunters-- the cats. Humans are very good at keeping cool. We have little hair and sweat a lot. Body proportions are such that heat escapes rapidly. In other words, we could function during the middle of the day when other animals, both prey and predator, are at their weakest. It was adaptation to this niche that provided the initial push for brain size. How? Our brains are huge, but we don't actually need all it to survive. There is a lot of redundancy. This is easily demonstrated by investigating modern brain trauma cases. Some people loose large parts of their brain and still function relatively normally. Heat kills brain cells. Since we were operating in a very hot niche, there was a need for redundancy, for backup brain cells-- hence, brain size increased.

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And how many offspring did he produce during this time?

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During two months? And seeing as how he had no girlfriend, how many do you think? Kind-of a dumb question, really.

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Did he make clothing as well or did he carry the things he would need with him went he started this?

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Doesn't matter. You are nit-picking. Clothing is pretty much irrelevant. In Texas, it is even a draw-back. What he ate, he found. That is the only claim I made.

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I'd also be fairly sure that he lost a lot of weight during this period and exhibited some malnutrition symptoms.

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You are wrong. I was impressed with the effort. He did quite well. He made himself sick a time or two, but nothing serious. He came out of it no more malnurished than he went into it.

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It is one thing to survive for a few months in an environment and quite another for a species to reproduce in that environment.

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If you can make it a couple of months, you can make it. Especially here. The environment doesn't change much with the seasons.I used to live in San Marcos, a college town about 30 miles from Austin. There is a thriving colony of hundreds of parrots in San Marcos. They started out as pets, apparently. A few escaped and they set up shop. The university has been tracking them for years. If these parrots, with their tiny little bird brains, can make it, why do you have such a hard time believing that a human, or humans, can manage it? It doesn't make sense.------------------
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Human foraging is efficient, not hard. Don't confuse the two. It takes training.

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You are drawing a distinction that isn't there.Sentences one and three contradict one another.

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It's also not just large, it has many specialized regions that allow certain functions to develop in a cultural context.

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"It" being the brain, I take it. What is the point?

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Those animals are able to function without training and survive quite well without it. Their behavior is instinctual.

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Yes. That is what is so foolish about your position. Everything else manages to forage but humans require what you make out to be graduate degrees to survive in the same way. It is silly.

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Humans on the other hand have to be taught.

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Primates in general are very heavy on training and low on instinct. Monkey and ape children learn most of their behaviors. They all forage just fine, and do so without inordinate amounts of higher education. Just growing up in a foraging lifestyle is adequate training. But humans, arguably the smartest kids on the block, can't pull it off?

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I'm supposing that you are assuming the old myth about humans using only 10% of their brains.

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No. I am not. And I said so in my previous post. Is this intentional misrepresentation or can you not read?

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The brain has many specialized features, the loss of any one of them may make the individual incapable of functioning normally. It is not a general purpose organ. Many people lose small portions of their brain and never function normally again.

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The traumatic loss of whole features would be a problem in the absence of modern medicine but the fact that people can suffer immense brain trauma and recover does quite dramatically prove that we don't need all of the brain we have. Luckily, however, I did not posit traumatic injury as a driving force. The driving force I propose is heat. This isn't local but effects the whole brain somewhat the way alcohol effects the brain.

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Even after hominids left the hot confines of Africa, the brain continued to increase in size with Neanderthals attaining cranial capacity in excess of 1500 cc.

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Yes, by that time the brain had been co-opted for other things.

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Then you have to consider the surface area to volume ratio in that with increased volume, the area available to cool the interior decreases in proportion to the volume. A big brain would be a liability in a hot environment.

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The brain is cooled by its blood supply, not by evaporation from its outer surface. You are complaining that the engine block cannot cool itself but you are forgetting about the radiator.The variant of the theory I posted came directly from an anthropology/primatology professor named Glassman. It is one of several theories. Others being the climatic change theory and the shellfish theory. One variant of the theory I posted, and a variant that I am starting to like, is that an adaptation to the heat-- a cranial blood vessel structure change-- allowed the increase in brain size rather than the increase itself being an adaptation to the heat.

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Your friends experience is not anything close to a conclusive or objective point about foraging.

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Sure it is. You say it can't be done. Someone did it. You are wrong. Case closed. But I can't support the claim. It is personal experience. I don't have records.How about the Texas Macaques? Japanese macaques, native to snow covered mountains, were introduced to the Texas desert in 1972. They are still getting along just fine. The monkey's weren't taught to forage, and and avoid novel predators, in the Texas desert. They made it up. Humans are not capable of this kind of innovation? I'm afraid that we are.------------------
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So since the brain is cooled by the blood supply, there should be no lost cells with adequate blood flow.

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This is completely insane. The brain is cooled by blood supply, but no system is perfect. Any mammalian brain, really, is cooled by its blood supply. It is enclosed by the skull. It can't very well evaporate or radiate its heat away directly. Human brains are better at it that most though. Still, it doesn't mean the system is perfect or that there is no need for redundancy. If this were the case you'd only have one kidney, one lung, half your liver, one testicle... Get it? Your body is full of fail-safe systems. We shouldn't need them if everything works perfectly. Things do not work perfectly all the time. High stress conditions call in the reserves and that makes the difference between a successful hunt or escape and death.Tell you what, Speel, take a trip to the equator and run around for awhile during the middle of the day. Then come back and tell me if you started to feel dizzy and confused. It won't take long for this to happen. At 114 degrees it can happen in minutes. Trust me. That effect is due to brain damage. You'll recover because your brain is very redundant. Can you honestly tell me that you'd prefer that that redundancy did not exist? And that you'd rather rely completely on the primary systems-- sweat?------------------
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I can do better than going to the equator, I can just step into a suana and get over 140 F easily and still not have my body core temp exceed 98 degrees.

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And you were in there how long? Ten? Twelve hours at over a hundred with several hours in the middle over 120? And there was a hole in the roof so that the sun could shine directly down onto your head as it would out on a savannah? Was your water supply nearby, say, within a few steps? Or did you have to walk half a mile to get to it? How much food did you collect during that stay in the sauna? Did you chase down a bunny and club it death, or did you just sit on your butt? There is a big difference between sitting on your ass in a sauna for twenty minutes and living on the damned grasslands. That you think this is a rational comparison is amazing.

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Getting dizzy is not a sign of brain cell death.

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In association with heat stress it does signal neural damage. You really need to work on relevance.

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You can achieve the same thing by hyponatremia, people do this all the time in America.

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See what I mean? Irrelevant crap is just... well, irrelevant.------------------
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people running around in hot climates do not have their brains lose brain cells.

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Yes, they do. Brain cells die all the time, for many different reasons. Smack your head against a wall moderately forcefully; you kill brain cells. Drink yourself into a stupor; you kill brain cells. Heat also kills brain cells. One rarely notices because the brain is so damned redundant. This redundancy, as per the theory I have been trying to describe, and hence brain size was initially an adaptation to heat stress. In other words, those individuals who had a few more brain cells faired better under the hot conditions wherein we all evolved. Heat, Hair, Sweat, and MarathonsYou stated to Asgara: [qs]Heat stroke is not all that common in hot climates. People survive quite well and never suffer heat exhaustion or stroke.[/b][/quote]Right. Because circa 2 mya we started developing some good adaptations to the climate.------------------
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Re: A brief primer on the brain

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LOL... Ignorance and arrogance! A winning combination! It is almost too incredible to believe.Seriously, do you research any of this stuff before you post? Or do you just make up what need?Browsing a site concerning brain injury might help. Page not found - Brain Injury Association of AmericaEspecially... Page not found - Brain Injury Association of America

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Brain cells do not die when you hit your head unless there is some bleeding in the blood vessels.

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Every wonder why football players are at risk for brain injury? Page not found - Sports Injury BulletinBoxers? BBC - 404: Not Found Soccer players? Vision Problems May Occur After a ConcussionEver wonder why one should never ever shake a baby? No webpage found at provided URL: http://newsbureau.upmc.com/medsurg1/Kochanek.htmAnswer: Physical impacts cause damage.Are you so desperate that you are willing to make idiotic statements like this? That impacts to the skull do not cause damage?I'm not sure why you are focusing on bleeding. I suspect it is so that you can pretend you have a valid objection. Not many injuries are bloodless. Practically any cell damage will cause some bleeding, even if minor.

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If neurons die, they release a toxic amount of glutamate and this in turn will cause other neurons to die.

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This is hardly news. Are you implying that neurons don't die because if they did the resulting cascade would kill ALL the nuerons in the brain? It sure looks that way. It is also a silly point. Dying cells do not start an unstoppable cascade, unless the initial trauma is past a critical threshold in the first place. Heat related trauma that is past that threshold would, out on the plains, kill the individual thus selecting against the individual's brain, removing it from the system. This is exactly the process for which I am arguing.Babies with shaken baby syndrome, by the way, have elevated glutamate levels.

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With the advent of drugs known as glutamate antagonists...

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And this is relevant to our prehistoric hunters in what way?

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The brain is comprised of 90% non-neuronal type cells, by and large these are referred to as glial cells.

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Lets take a moment to note how you are spinning what I've said. I have made no statements specific to neurons, nor to glial cells. I have very consistently refered to brain size and brain cells, yet someone reading your response would get a very different impression. Both neurons and glial cells are in the brain are they not? Damage to either the glial cells or the neurons would be damage to the brain would it not? Damage to glial cells, in fact, can cause consequent damage to nearby neurons. Neurons do fair well without them.So once again you've demonstrated your very dishonest debating tactics.

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Neurons by and large are nearly immortal they do not die and are resistant to apoptosis (Pronounced A-POE-toe-sis).

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Neurons do not die? Just above you were explaining how glutamate levels kill neurons? Something isn't adding up. Resistant to apoptosis? A big problem with head injuries is that neurons are prone to apoptosis. Page not found | Psychiatrist.comAnd lets not forget necrosis.

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The hunting technique that you are referring to is known as persistance hunting...

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Yes it is. Proposed, originally, by Grover Krantz, I believe. But I am not talking only about hunting. The ability to function during the hottest periods of the day would give you an edge in other areas as well, primarily because the other predators are at their weakest. Foraging in general would be safest while the predators are hiding from the heat.

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... it has been postulated that the need for remembering which animal was being stalked and the need to hunt with others was a driving force for the enlargement of the brain.

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Indeed, this has been proposed. Several other ideas have also been proposed. I mentioned a few in an earlier post. People like to go for the theories that stress intelligence and cognitive abilities. We like to think we are smart. Frankly, chasing an animal does not take a hell of a lot of brain power. Remembering what you are chasing does not take a hell of a lot of brain power. That memory is the key does not make sense. Some animals, with proportionally smaller brains than ours-- squirrels, or birds, for example-- have phenomenal memories for certain things. Squirrels remember where they stash their food, for example. And birds keeps tabs on stash robberies. No webpage found at provided URL: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0822_030822_tvanimalmemory.htmlCooperative hunting isn't it either. Chimps are extremely social and hunt cooperatively. They have big brains, but nowhere near the size of ours. Dogs and wolves also hunt cooperatively. We don't see a trend to big brains.

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Brain cell death is not the reason to increase brain size. It just doesn't happen.

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What doesn't happen? Brain cell death? Sorry. It does happen. And it happens under exactly the conditions I have been describing. Try again. And try harder.

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When you drink yourself into a stupor, most of the cells that die are the glial cells and since they comprise 90% of the volume of the brain, the brain will shrink in alcoholics.

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First, drinking does kill neurons. Secondly, I wonder why you specically mention alcoholism. A binge kills brain cells immediately. No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.csam-asam.org/binge_drinking_and_neuron_.htmBut here again you are trying to spin my argument. Neurons don't have to die to have their functions impaired. This latter part is the important bit.

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Long before most alcoholics die of brain damage, they die from liver failure.

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Irrelevant.

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If an alcoholic stops drinking, the glial cells can recover but in severe cases, they may take years to regain proper function.

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The brain can heal but neuronal structure is permanently altered, much like a liver will heal though its structure is permanently changed by alcoholism. Strangely, the answer given in the above article for the question "Does alcohol kill brain cells?" is "Not in the cerebellum." This is strange because the cerebellum isn't the whole brain. Alcohol does most of its damage in the frontal lobe. No webpage found at provided URL: http://home.iprimus.com.au/rboon/ALCOHOLBRAINSHRINKAGE.htmNow, to bring this back around to the topic. I brought up impacts and alcohol as examples of means other than heat that can kill brain cells. I did this because you seemed to be having such a hard time understanding that brain cells die.Brain function is effected by heat. The following isn't about cell death but it does demonstrate a link between temperature and brain function. No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.sfu.ca/mediapr/Releases/News/2000/March2000/Violence.htmlParesthesias, a neurological disorder, is associated with heat exhaustion.More info... remember, redundancy reduces the effects of the damage. A man named Falk proposed something very similar. In Falk's radiator hypothesis, brain size is a side effect of an adaptation to heat, rather than a direct adaptation. I rather like this theory as well. ------------------
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Having seen the quality of your posts and witnessed the string of dishonest debating tactics, I know that you are full of sh*t. Your lame appeal to "I took some classes" only confirms the conclusion.Those classes wouldn't have any relationship to that 'field work' you claim to have under your belt-- a claim you unceremoniously dropped when asked that it be substantiated?
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No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com[This message has been edited by John, 10-09-2003]

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At any rate, your idea and Falks are two different things.

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Actually...1) Not my idea. I got it from a primatology/anthropology professor named Glassman, at SWTSU. It wasn't his idea either, but at the time he seemed to favor it and made a good case.2) I know it is a different idea. I said so in my post. I believe I wrote something like "I also like this theory of Falk's" Can't you read? I bet you can, but choose to misread instead.

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Excuse me? You started out with an idea that is ludicrous from the beginning.

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Ummm... no. I started out with an idea which you, from the beginning, have claimed is ludicrous but have provided nothing substantial to support that claim. In other words, you just keep repeating yourself and pretending to have said something worthwhile.

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Then post a bunch of links that only counter your own claim. (i.e. showing how brain damage is actually prevented by an efficient cooling system.)

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The presence of a cooling system is does not counter any claims I have made. For this objection to make sense one would have to assume that this cooling system prevents all-- not just some, but all-- heat related damage to the brain. This just isn't the case. Overheating does cause brain damage. I've provided more than enough proof to that effect.

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What is your obsession with my credentials?

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My obsession with your credentials? You've several times brought up your 'training' or 'experience' to buttress your position. What is the problem with asking that your support these claims?

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You would do better to stay with the facts at hand.

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I have. You, on the other hand, have cited your 'field work' and your education as evidence. This is an appeal to personal authority. It is fallacious. People with nothing to say use such things to try to bully others into silence. A bit hypocritical isn't it, to throw around your personal expertise and then complain when someone asks for verification?

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I don't feel compelled to share my personal history with anyone on a public forum, nor did I realize that it was required by anyone.

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You have felt compelled to BRING UP YOUR CREDENTIALS several times now. What you object to is having your bluff called. If you had half an education in any relevant field, you could have made an argument a thousand times better than the one you've made. I say this largely because you haven't made much of an argument at all, but have rather posted a huge string of logical fallacies. If you had a case, you wouldn't need the bully debate tactics.------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com[This message has been edited by John, 10-09-2003][This message has been edited by John, 10-09-2003]

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I see that Dr. Glassman is an archeologist, you would do well to consult with him about lithic technology.

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I know, or knew, Glassman because I took a dozen of his courses.

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It's a little more involved than you have made it out to be.

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More glib BS. Maybe I should call you 'spiel.' Oldowan toolkits are not complicated. Hell, they are mostly unmodified flakes. Acheulean tools are a bit tougher, but still not that hard. Our ancestors survived for about 2 million years using first one then the other, so I guess they adequate.

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You have contradicted yourself with your posts, I have only pointed that out.

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You have been incoherent, spiel. That hardly counts as 'pointing.'

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The idea that you started out with is not supported by any of the links that you have spammed the thread with.

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More BS. Simple senseless repetition. You can't create even a bad argument to support your claims.Spam the thread? LOL... not tired of the bully tactics yet are we?------------------
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