Hi Patrick, this is my first time visiting your substack site, but I have been a listener to your podcast since the Rome days. I enjoyed Roman and Early Modern series. I was a very wary of your announcement to move the current Neolithic time frame. However your manner of communication have warmed me up to the topic over the last few months and introduced me to a whole new world. Keep up the good work.
I notice you write (essentially) "Even though agriculture involved poorer nutrition etc., people were able to have more children more rapidly." That implies a difference in fertility rates specifically. A) am I understanding that right, and b) is there any speculation or evidence that agricultural packages supported higher fertility? Like maybe the nutrition, even if it was bad in some ways, was good at supporting more frequent pregnancies. Maybe the type of work allowed more frequent pregnancies, or new cultural practices forced it. Maybe it's that more children survived to adulthood for some reason, even if that adulthood was stressful and precarious.
I am LOVING the prehistory series. It's all just totally new to me. I'm glad you're talking about social structures and state or pre-state structures whenever you're able, because I'm trying to get through Fukuyama's "The Origin of Political Order" and so far it's really light on history ... I deeply want some facts to either buttress or challenge what I'm reading. I also want him to define his terms better. The practice you've had structuring narrative makes your work much more accessible and credible.
Modern historians frequently say that hunter gatherers were healthier (and happier) than farmers, but rarely explain why the farmers were able to breed more and take over the world.
In “Tribe”, Junger claims that nomadic hunter gatherer mother’s often can’t support a newborn while on the move, and often lose pregnancies and infants, keeping birth rates down despite nutritional health. But not all hunter gatherers are super mobile, right?
Maybe the disconnect is because we’re looking at how populations look at equilibrium? Perhaps farming is ridiculously advantageous when populations are low and good land is plentiful. Once a culture fills up an area with people, then they start to look unhealthy.
These are really good questions, and I'm happy to answer them!
So there are two separate things happening with agriculture and birth rates. The first has to do with mobility: It's really hard for a mother to carry multiple infants in the midst of moves from place to place, and yes, that also results in more miscarriages. But as you point out, there are foragers who don't move around very much. The ones who can maintain that lifestyle of intensive resource exploitation in a more limited area - around river rapids or highly productive wetlands, for example - tend to have much higher population densities than those groups with more extensive subsistence strategies and a wider range. Part of the equation, then, is sedentism: farmers are more likely to be sedentary, hence higher birth rates and population densities.
The second piece has to do with the kinds of food products agriculture creates, especially soft, mushy cereal grains and animal milk. You can wean an infant much sooner if you can feed it mush and cow's milk or yogurt than if you're relying on breastfeeding and the kinds of food resources foragers tend to have access to. Pottery helps, too, since you can make soups and other easy-to-eat like that. A lower age at weaning means a shorter interval between births, which means a woman could have more children during her years of potential fertility.
On an individual basis, we're maybe looking at an average of five or six births per woman in a farming community and four in a foraging community: not huge, but in the aggregate, over hundreds or thousands of years and dozens of generations, that's a substantial advantage. Even if more children die, even if people are less healthy and die younger, even if more women die in childbirth, the long-term edge in fertility goes to the farmers.
I just stumbled on your podcast - and it's fantastic. I esp. enjoyed the mailbag episode. In that vein I have question for you. On a previous episode you made a passing comment about Egypt related to its approximation to the Fertile Crescent. So then, did the neolithic toolkit migrate to the Nile River valley, the way it did through Turkey, Greece and into Europe? Or did the Mesolithic people of the Nile pick up Neolithic ways of life simply by living next door?
One of the things I’ve learned from this series (and I’ve learned a lot about prehistory!) is just how close, chronologically, were the development of agriculture and settlement of Americas. Beringia and Göbekli Teke were closer to each other in time than we are to Rome?!
Patrick, did settled populations have higher rates of infectious disease than their nomadic counterparts? I'd imagine that would be the case, but I don't want to assume anything.
Also, while I'm thinking of it, how well are we able to piece together a somewhat accurate epidemiological record of prehistoric societies?
Hi Patrick, I've been wondering something while listening to this episode. Sometimes, when archaeologists don't see any evidences of, say, the presence of culture X on site Y, they will infer from this that culture X was never on site Y. However, isn't it possible that they were in fact there, but they didn't leave any traces, or the evidences were destroyed? How can they differentiate between an evidence not being there in the first place or them getting destroyed? I guess it has something to do with soil layers or something like that. I'm sure this is a lot more complicated than I'm thinking and I'm sure they know what they're doing, I was just curious. Thank you!
Do you know if there has been any work on why, after modern humans had existed for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, farming suddenly took off all over the world in multiple places almost at the same time.
I've always thought that foragers transitioned to sedentary lifestyles - not because it was healthier or offered a greater quality of life - but because it reduced uncertainty. Anything which created some semblance of predictability was sought after - even if it wasn't "better". This comes from my fundamental assumption that people seek to reduce ambiguity whenever possible. However, I really don't know if this has any historical basis. Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
That's often been the assumption, but it's an assumption without a lot of strong evidence to support it. Foragers tended to operate in seasonal patterns with minute knowledge of the food resources available to them, and they were no more or less vulnerable to the disruption of those resources than farmers were.
Great show! Was the decline of LBK specific to them during this time? ie, was it a cultural rather than environmental event? The LBK kind of remind me of Hutterites or Apostolics.
Is there any evidence that pauses followed by spread of agriculture coincided with declines in local hunter gatherer populations? Any compelling theories on pauses?
Hi Patrick, this is my first time visiting your substack site, but I have been a listener to your podcast since the Rome days. I enjoyed Roman and Early Modern series. I was a very wary of your announcement to move the current Neolithic time frame. However your manner of communication have warmed me up to the topic over the last few months and introduced me to a whole new world. Keep up the good work.
Thank you!
I notice you write (essentially) "Even though agriculture involved poorer nutrition etc., people were able to have more children more rapidly." That implies a difference in fertility rates specifically. A) am I understanding that right, and b) is there any speculation or evidence that agricultural packages supported higher fertility? Like maybe the nutrition, even if it was bad in some ways, was good at supporting more frequent pregnancies. Maybe the type of work allowed more frequent pregnancies, or new cultural practices forced it. Maybe it's that more children survived to adulthood for some reason, even if that adulthood was stressful and precarious.
I am LOVING the prehistory series. It's all just totally new to me. I'm glad you're talking about social structures and state or pre-state structures whenever you're able, because I'm trying to get through Fukuyama's "The Origin of Political Order" and so far it's really light on history ... I deeply want some facts to either buttress or challenge what I'm reading. I also want him to define his terms better. The practice you've had structuring narrative makes your work much more accessible and credible.
I have this question too.
Modern historians frequently say that hunter gatherers were healthier (and happier) than farmers, but rarely explain why the farmers were able to breed more and take over the world.
In “Tribe”, Junger claims that nomadic hunter gatherer mother’s often can’t support a newborn while on the move, and often lose pregnancies and infants, keeping birth rates down despite nutritional health. But not all hunter gatherers are super mobile, right?
Maybe the disconnect is because we’re looking at how populations look at equilibrium? Perhaps farming is ridiculously advantageous when populations are low and good land is plentiful. Once a culture fills up an area with people, then they start to look unhealthy.
These are really good questions, and I'm happy to answer them!
So there are two separate things happening with agriculture and birth rates. The first has to do with mobility: It's really hard for a mother to carry multiple infants in the midst of moves from place to place, and yes, that also results in more miscarriages. But as you point out, there are foragers who don't move around very much. The ones who can maintain that lifestyle of intensive resource exploitation in a more limited area - around river rapids or highly productive wetlands, for example - tend to have much higher population densities than those groups with more extensive subsistence strategies and a wider range. Part of the equation, then, is sedentism: farmers are more likely to be sedentary, hence higher birth rates and population densities.
The second piece has to do with the kinds of food products agriculture creates, especially soft, mushy cereal grains and animal milk. You can wean an infant much sooner if you can feed it mush and cow's milk or yogurt than if you're relying on breastfeeding and the kinds of food resources foragers tend to have access to. Pottery helps, too, since you can make soups and other easy-to-eat like that. A lower age at weaning means a shorter interval between births, which means a woman could have more children during her years of potential fertility.
On an individual basis, we're maybe looking at an average of five or six births per woman in a farming community and four in a foraging community: not huge, but in the aggregate, over hundreds or thousands of years and dozens of generations, that's a substantial advantage. Even if more children die, even if people are less healthy and die younger, even if more women die in childbirth, the long-term edge in fertility goes to the farmers.
See below!
I just stumbled on your podcast - and it's fantastic. I esp. enjoyed the mailbag episode. In that vein I have question for you. On a previous episode you made a passing comment about Egypt related to its approximation to the Fertile Crescent. So then, did the neolithic toolkit migrate to the Nile River valley, the way it did through Turkey, Greece and into Europe? Or did the Mesolithic people of the Nile pick up Neolithic ways of life simply by living next door?
One of the things I’ve learned from this series (and I’ve learned a lot about prehistory!) is just how close, chronologically, were the development of agriculture and settlement of Americas. Beringia and Göbekli Teke were closer to each other in time than we are to Rome?!
Patrick, did settled populations have higher rates of infectious disease than their nomadic counterparts? I'd imagine that would be the case, but I don't want to assume anything.
Also, while I'm thinking of it, how well are we able to piece together a somewhat accurate epidemiological record of prehistoric societies?
Hi Patrick, I've been wondering something while listening to this episode. Sometimes, when archaeologists don't see any evidences of, say, the presence of culture X on site Y, they will infer from this that culture X was never on site Y. However, isn't it possible that they were in fact there, but they didn't leave any traces, or the evidences were destroyed? How can they differentiate between an evidence not being there in the first place or them getting destroyed? I guess it has something to do with soil layers or something like that. I'm sure this is a lot more complicated than I'm thinking and I'm sure they know what they're doing, I was just curious. Thank you!
Do you know if there has been any work on why, after modern humans had existed for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, farming suddenly took off all over the world in multiple places almost at the same time.
Most arguments about it point to the more favorable global climatic conditions of the Early Holocene as a factor.
I've always thought that foragers transitioned to sedentary lifestyles - not because it was healthier or offered a greater quality of life - but because it reduced uncertainty. Anything which created some semblance of predictability was sought after - even if it wasn't "better". This comes from my fundamental assumption that people seek to reduce ambiguity whenever possible. However, I really don't know if this has any historical basis. Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
That's often been the assumption, but it's an assumption without a lot of strong evidence to support it. Foragers tended to operate in seasonal patterns with minute knowledge of the food resources available to them, and they were no more or less vulnerable to the disruption of those resources than farmers were.
Great, thank you. Good to update my assumption here.
Great show! Was the decline of LBK specific to them during this time? ie, was it a cultural rather than environmental event? The LBK kind of remind me of Hutterites or Apostolics.
Is there any evidence that pauses followed by spread of agriculture coincided with declines in local hunter gatherer populations? Any compelling theories on pauses?