Re: evolutionary success of humans

Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
> "John Wilkins" <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dmgj6k$2dgq$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>>Skeletal evidence suggests that agrarian societies tend to grow shorter,
>>live shorter, and have more diet-related illnesses. On the other hand,
>>the energy budget for these societies is much higher than HG societies,
>>and so the population density is much higher. ...
>
>
>>Farmers work 16 hours days in
>>backbreaking labour, and tend to be socially isolated.
>
>
> The high population densities of early agricultural societies tends
> to contradict the conventional wisdom that farmers are socially
> isolated.
>
> I suspect that urban Americans and Australians tend to have a somewhat
> distainful opinion regarding the social opportunities available to
> farmers due to the fact that agriculture in those societies tends
> to be low density and has a pioneering history.
>
> I suspect that most of the world's agriculturalists have always had
> sufficient opportunity for the core social activities of exchanging
> gossip, folklore, and news with neighbors, and some limited contact
> with a metropolitan urban population. Most agriculture in primitive
> times involved garden plots of just a few acres and was conducted by
> villages rather than by isolated plainsmen.

That's possibly true, but it's not what I meant. If you work "all the hours
that the [insert deity here] sends", you don't spend so much time in social
grooming behaviours. Foraging societies spend *way* more time in these
behaviours. I wasn't meaning they live din low density populations; indeed the
paragraph you quoted first indicates otherwise.

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
Nihil tam absurdum quod non quidam Philosophi dixerit - adapted from Cicero

.

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