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by watwut
2022 days ago
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Most likely we would not. There are whole classes of sicknesses that dissappeared last 200 years which were caused by lack of various nutricients. Both difficulty to get them and lack of knowledge played role. Add to it easy to cure sicknesses, injuries that are nothing more and would kill you back then, their higher chance to contact said injuries and it is unlikely they would be so much healthier. Also, there is reason why agrarian societies pushed away hunter gatherers - it is just easier to stay alive and healthy. Getting all the food a hunter gatherer in all seasons is hard. In addition, childbirth in their society would both kill or forever damaged more women. They would also have harder time to leave physicly abusive situation, meaning likely more of it, meaning yet another negative impact on their health. |
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No.
Agriculture exists because it supports more people per unit of land than what the traditional way of life did (on average). This is as hard of a fact about history as you're going to get.
Now, you need to be savvy about what the statement is not saying. It is not providing a reason for an individual, or group of people, to make the switch from hunter-gather to agriculture. History did not lay that choice upon the discretion of people. It plays out in a much more complicated way.
Since the relatively natural land will only support so-many humans per acre, what happens when there are too many children? They move. Okay, what happens when that next region has too many children? Do they start making farms based on their ledgers of expected food production to population ratio - NO. The people who have political decision power are not the same people who starve or get their heads lobbed off as a result of their decision. If anything, a leader would prefer the neighboring tribe lose a few heads to adjust for the starvation problem. Do people start "switching" to farms anywhere in this? No. Only over a vast period of time, many climates, lots of movement, tribal reorganization, do people start... semi-nomadic animal husbandry. One day this will lead to agriculture.
All of this is vastly more complicated than it is on the surface, and the newly-established farmer occupation, when it comes around, could possibly be seen as the sucker at the table. There was constant tensions between "civilized" societies and their tribal neighbors, and only over the super long term does the higher calorie density of civilization win out. Even if their soldiers are shorter and stupider, there are more of them. We don't read about this, because recorded history picks up at a time when superior organizational capabilities of civilization is starting to give them a quality advantage as well (and as a side-effect, writing).