[scarmig]

1) I think you're understating the amount of free time people had in the past, especially with respect to hunter gatherer societies.

2) Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist. The paraphrased "it's your choice, if you hate the 40 hour a week routine so much, just become a hunter gatherer in the Rockies" line doesn't cut it.

Even when hunter gatherer societies did coexist with more sedentary civilizations, states had to constantly fight to control the bodies and labor of the people it ruled, because they constantly were calling it quits to join the hunter gatherer societies.

The transition to agricultural, state dominated societies was a slow, contested, emergent property of collective violence, not something most individuals wanted.

[jerf]

"Joining an autonomous hunter gatherer society obviously isn't possible now, because they doesn't exist."

Yes, they do, even now. Of course, they're so inconsequential on the world stage that you don't hear about them much, but yes, they exist.

Now, you have the problem that they probably won't accept you, and will probably eventually try to kill you if you seriously set up next to them and start truly doing the hunt-gather routine.

But then, that's the authentic hunter-gatherer experience too.

(I don't believe the garbage about how peaceful they supposedly were. It is logistically ludicrous.)

[scarmig]

No one is claiming that hunter gatherers were peaceful. It weakens your argument to try to put words into people's mouths. I might as well say, "well, why are you claiming that there's no crime or inequality in modern society? There obviously is!!!1!"

And no, they don't. Sure, you can find a random tribe in the barren wastelands of the Kalahari that's ostensibly "hunter gatherer," but they are much more integrated into the economy of South Africa than any hunter gatherer society would have been two thousand years ago. Most people born into those hunter gatherer-lite societies spend at least some time working in the capitalist economy.

Compare that to millenia ago, where hunter gatherers occupied some of the most economically productive regions of the world. It's an apples and oranges comparison.

[nindalf]

That is an extraordinary claim you're making, that people had to be forced to remain within agricultural societies. Of the scholarship in this area that I'm familiar with, nothing supports this. If you're aware of research that suggests otherwise, please share it.

I often see this nostalgia about how much better things used to be, compared to how bad it is now, whether that time period is 5, 25, 100 or in your case, 10000 years ago. This usually glosses over the very real downsides of living in any of those time periods. In the case of hunter gatherer societies here are some problems that we no longer have to deal with once we moved to agricultural societies with central authority. In no particular order

1. Vagaries of food. You had to constantly find food, because storage wasn't easy. You could have a few months where you had plenty of food but a difficult week could see some friends and family die of starvation. This was a very real danger. Compare that with what a difficult week looks like today. This led to

2. Constantly moving. You could never stay in one place too long. You really like the area you're currently at? Too bad, move on before food sources dry up here. What if the new place is not as good and food is difficult to find? Too bad, keep moving. This led to

3. Leaving behind people. If a person could not walk at the pace of the group, they would be left behind to die. There was no quiet corner they could retire to, they had to walk or die. Not just old people. If a person broke their leg, and couldn't walk for a couple of months, they would be left behind to die.

4. Safety. If you lived in a large group with strong fighters this wasn't a problem. But if you didn't, or encountered a larger or more skilled group of fighters, you could see everyone in your group killed except for younger women. That's less of a problem in societies where a central entity has a monopoly on violence.

There is absolutely no doubt that all of these factors led to a high mortality rate. Once people moved to agricultural societies that were relatively safer and had relatively stable sources of food, the population exploded. The choice that people made was not forced upon them. Indeed it would have been difficult to do at a time when society had just started to change and central authority was still weak. Rather it was just people choosing the safe, stable option rather than the interesting one.

The interestingness of being a hunter gatherer is what modern societies find attractive - eating different things everyday, moving to a new place every couple of weeks, almost like a constant vacation. But it ignores the constant spectre of death that hangs over every such society.

My understanding of this topic is based on Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I highly recommend it.

[scarmig]

Off the top of my head, there's Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" [1] (popular writing, so grain of salt) and James Scott's more academic "The Art of Not Being Governed" [2]. From the first reference, "One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5'3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors."

So a few points. First of all, you elide between comparing hunter gatherer societies to early sedentary societies and contemporary industrialized societies. They are very much not the same, and I prefer contemporary industrial societies over both. This was purely a statement of leisure time, which was higher in HG societies than contemporary ones.

The comparison between early sedentary and hunter gatherer societies is where hunter gatherer societies have a pretty attractive value proposition. Some points: the threat models between agricultural and hunter gatherer societies are different, and you can sustain a higher population per acre with agriculture, obviously. But people never wholeheartedly embraced sedentary, centralized societies. They germinated in particularly fertile areas where states could most effectively maintain themselves and extract excess value from highly productive land and labor.

But if being agricultural and sedentary were an obvious, natural course of events that everyone would choose, you'd see agriculture and sedentary states rapidly spreading to the boundaries of the geography that can support people via agriculture. That's not what you see: you see constantly fluctuating exteriors in a contested relation with borderlands. The people living in those areas constantly switched sides depending on convenience and what was best for them at a given time. For instance, sometimes, Han China would offer incentives for people to take up sedentary agriculture (no taxes!), and they did. But this wasn't stable, and people would be more than happy to switch back to other lifestyles depending on the state of the economy and the incentives they faced.

Over time, the total area of those borderlands shrunk as a result of technological progress and more capable states. But this took literally millenia.

[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed