> you have to lower
> average life expectancy to 35 or 40 and yes, you do. The idea that
> hunter-gatherers are healthy people is silly.
Question: aren't average life expectancy figures affected heavily by high infant mortality rates? That is, an average life expectancy of 35 could indicate (in rough terms) that half the population dies before age five and the rest live to sixty-plus. It doesn't mean adults that survive beyond childhood get to 35 and all croak it.
As for hunter-gatherers being 'healthy', healthy is clearly a relative term here. In my own post it should have been clear I was arguing hunter-gatherers were healthy compared to peasant farmers. This assertion is far from 'silly', in fact. I recall reading about research done on Neolithic skeletons of both hunter-gatherers and farmers - the hunter-gatherers showed significant indicators of superior health, e.g. they were several inches taller (indicative of better nutrition), had much fewer cavities, and a lesser incidence of bone lesions indicative of serious disease. Such research poses a serious problem for the traditional view of agriculture as a blessed Garden-of-Eden release from a Hobbesian hunter-gatherer existence - if anything it posits the opposite view.
> First, all hunter-gatherers
> are subject to parasitic infections.
>
If this refers to my post, it's irrelevant. So what? My point was that vaccines and antibiotics are for the most part used against diseases of civilization (this is especially true for vaccines, less so for antibiotics, which can cater to opportunistic infections in wounds and so forth). You can't vaccinate against parasites (except with a smaller and less harmful parasite that is defensive of 'it's' territory, ie your body).
> Second, consider the fact that all
> predators (human or no) are subject to both high infant mortality and
> episodes of population decline due to starvation.
>
Not all predators by any means. Humans are a prime example of 'switching
predators', that is, when their usual prey starts dwindling they just go
and eat something else. The feral cat population in Australia would be
another good example. The only way this population declines is through
culling.
> Drought, for example,
> kills hunter-gatherers just as easily as it kills farmers - more easily
> since hunter-gatherers do not have the power to turn their food production
> to foodstuffs that can be saved to make it through lean times.
>
This is completely wrong.
Respective vulnerability to starvation can be demonstrated by considering that hunter-gatherers can live on lands that are utterly useless for farming, lands where farmers by definition will starve to death if they are dumb enough to try their luck. Drought? Think of the Aboriginals of central Australia. Apart from a short wet season such a place is a pretty good example of drought, given that most of the area is desert. Farmers can't last five minutes in such a place. The Aboriginals lived there for tens of thousands of years.
If you aren't impressed by that, consider what Sahlins said:
"In alleging this [ie a hunter-gathering economy] is an affluent economy, therefore, I do not deny that certain hunters have moments of difficulty. Some do find it "almost inconceivable" for a man to die of hunger, or even to fail to satisfy his hunger for more than a day or two.16 But others, especially certain very peripheral hunters spread out in small groups across an environment of extremes, are exposed periodically to the kind of inclemency that interdicts travel or access to game. They suffer although perhaps only fractionally, the shortage affecting particular immobilised families rather than the society as a whole. (10)
Still, granting this vulnerability, and allowing the most poorly situated modern hunters into comparison. it would be difficult to prove that privation is distinctly characteristic of the hunter-gatherers. Food shortage is not the indicative property of this mode of production as opposed to others; it does not mark off hunters and gatherers as a class or a general evolutionary stage. Lowie (22) asks:
"But what of the herders on a simple plane whose maintenance is periodically
jeopardised by plagues-who, like some Lapp bands of the nineteenth century were
obliged to fall back on fishing? What of the primitive peasants who clear and till
without compensation of the soil, exhaust one plot and pass on to the next, and are
threatened with famine at every drought? Are they any more in control of
misfortune caused by natural conditions than the hunter-gatherer?"
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an in. situation. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a
certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a
relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It
has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more
importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural
catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.
> That's why
> people raise grain staples in the first place.
>
Apparently not. The whole question of why agriculture exists is much more complicated.
Eric Leher