i tend to think that agriculture was a necessity based on population density and the formation of towns/cities. too many people in one place means there needs to be a renewable source of food. hunting and gathering for hundreds would eventually result in too little to feed everyone.
perhaps i could've worded it better -- the mistake (imo) wasn't choosing agriculture, agriculture was a necessary byproduct required to facilitate living in cities.
I don't think we would have lived in cities without developing agriculture - that is, I think you're putting the carriage before the horse. Agriculture not only enables us to feed many more mouths, but it required us to settle in one place. We had no incentive to settle in one place before agriculture.
perhaps. i'd be interested to read more on the topic. but to play devil's advocate:
agriculture requires us to settle in one place for a length of time. so does building shelter. a lot of things require at least semi-permanent settling in one spot. the modern tribes mentioned in the article aren't nomadic yet they still hunt/gather. to develop agriculture far enough to be able to sustain large numbers of people, it would most likely require practice, implying they were already at least somewhat stationary.
i think its more likely that a lot of things co-developed at around the same time, but i find it more difficult to be sold on the fact that we somehow learned the skill of developing crops over lengths of time to feed many mouths BEFORE we were more permanently settling in a single location.
I think that our settlements were semi-permanent as hunter-gatherers. We could move with the seasons. In this case, agriculture would give us a reason to stay put when previously we may have moved on.
But even these are distinct from "cities." A city implies a number of people in at least a few thousand. My understanding is that hunter-gatherer tribes were in the order of several dozen. I just don't see thousands of people living in one place without agriculture.
i was just using "city" as a placeholder since it was used in the article. most of the problems mentioned in the article are perfectly capable of surfacing at a much smaller settlement size.
I don't think that's the case with disease. Diseases need to have always have some living host in order to not die out completely. I don't think groups of several dozen are large enough to support that. Further, it's possible that some of our diseases are actually from the animals we domesticated as a part of agriculture.
I think Diamond is pointing out that it may be a misconception to think of hunting/gathering as a "terrible" quality of life to indicate that population pressure might have forced us into ag. This suggests an order to the chicken/egg problem.
Basically the population grew to a large enough size where the game they were hunting and the berries they were gathering weren't enough (or went extinct) so they had to switch to a agrarian lifestyle, which needed more work and yielded less.
and i suppose what i'm trying to say is that if you have a group large enough to outgrow hunting/gathering, its likely to be large enough to generate at least some of the issues described in the article attributed to large groups of people.
