Pre-historic human societies

[Brad DeLong]

>Hi Kelley,
>
>I thought Doug's comment was pretty harsh, and the same goes for
>Christopher.  Brad was addressing something else, so maybe I should cut him
>some slack.  But I've also taken some heat from the list before for
>expressing some of these ideas, so that had something to do with it as
>well.

There are deep (and unresolved) questions about whether the neolithic 
revolution was a disaster for human happiness: once you have farms 
and crops, you can't run away from the thugs with spears... Hence the 
glories of the state and the church: it really does look like your 
average human lost a lot of autonomy and perhaps two inches of adult 
height once you switched from hunting-and-gathering to 
farming-and-herding.

But I don't know enough to evaluate or even have an informed guess on 
these issues...

Brad DeLong