dlawbailey (dlawbailey at netzero.net) wrote:
> The fossil record from hunter-gatherer societies show people who were
>riddled with disease, injury, and infant mortality. Primitive subsistence
>agriculture is not much better but it has significant advantages. One that
>is almost always overlooked by modern people is clean, fresh water.
>Consider how many towns were formed around reliable springs. Wonder why?
>Parasites and water-borne diseases plague and kill healthy adults and are
>absolutely murderous on children. Diarrhea due to water-borne illnesses is
>one of the biggest killers in the third world even today. Only societies
>that *can* stay put will benefit from having a spring nearby. Societies on
>the move have to catch as catch can. We in the modern world have forgotten
>that one of the most important and enormously broad-spectrum "vaccines" is
>one we all consume every day: chlorine.
I think there are several points to be made regarding this. Most people when they think of hunter-gatherers think of people living in marginal environments, where water is scarce. Even in those areas, such as the central desert here in Australia, or in the Kalahari, the locals were not exactly dying of thirst all over the place. But in a place like western Europe, with abundant and reliable rivers, there is no reason to believe that hg's went wanting for clean water; specially since the population was a lot lower and pollution problems thus minimal.
To put it bluntly, shitting in your water source is a bad, bad idea. You are much less likely to do this if you circulate around the environment and if there aren't great concentrations of people next to (formerly) clean and reliable springs. It is very odd to bring up water-borne illness as an argument for the advantages of settled agriculture.
Another misconception is that hg's are constantly on the move, or worse, that they just wonder around aimlessly. In fact, all hg societies that have been studies by anthropologists had nomadic schedules to follow resources, but the bands might spend quite a bit of time in each area - except in very marginal areas. They could clearly take up the advantages of being near a spring, since they would be nuts to camp away from one. It is not true that nomadic societies had to "catch as catch can" - such societies had very well developed kinship-linked geographies, often stated in myths, which meant that they knew very well what was going on and what was coming up. This has all been very well documented in anthropological studies, and even allowing for effects due to incorporation into the world-economy, it is hard to see how the entire system of nomadic schedules, mythic geographies, etc... would have been produced in a couple of decades following contact.
What goes for water also goes for other resources as well - whereas you might say that settled agricultural societies had advantages like storing grain, hg's could follow the seasons around the landscape.
I am not saying we should demolish our houses and go live in humpies in the outback, but it is important to be careful about this stuff: hg isn't a worst-case-scenario mode of production, it is more or less the form of life which we have evolved into. We are well adapted for it, but it isn't "simple."
Also, there is no clear boundary between a "hunter gatherer" society and a "settled agricultural" one. Nomadic hg's often engaged in 'environmental management', ranging from things like setting fires according to schedules to dispersing seeds. In Australia there is evidence of aquacultural management. Further along the spectrum you have slash-and-burn cultivators, with temporary villages and sometimes seasonal migration. The examples I am familiar with, in Melanesia, such cultivation was supplemented by game and collection of nuts and so on.
Thiago Oppermann