>>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
Barabara Ehrenreich put together a popularization of one view on this question in a book I find very compelling: "Blood Rites".
To really oversimply this theory, the claim is that a lot of the losses
in autonomy often attributed to the transition from hunter-gatherer to neolithic famrer actually came in the transition from forager-prey to hunter-gatherer. And what we got in return for this was a move up the food chain - from cat food to predator.
Evidence seems overwhelming that intertribal battles in which dozens and sometimes hundreds died, , slavery, and patriarchy preceded the invention of agriculture -- occuring long before the neolithic period.