[ttt11199907]

You honestly don't think they "knew how seeds work"? It's not like you can't turn over leaves and see a literal plant growing out of a seed.

Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.

[simonh]

There’s more to knowing how to manage seeds effectively than knowing plants grow from them.

>why…when you get enough..

That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk.

>ultimately end up destroying…

You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.

[abdullahkhalids]

What statistics do we have of how many people pre-farming (before~7-10k BC) died early due to starvation or malnutrition?

[jojobas]

We know they voluntarily killed ~30% of all newborn, so there's that. Perhaps another 30-50% died before age 18.

These numbers are not unique to Australia, it's considered to be commonplace in hunter-gatherer societies.

[fmbb]

> You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.

Crops destroying native life is immediate, not years in the future. It’s not like there was nothing before on that acre you cleared for planting.

[simonh]

Hunter gatherers range over vast expanses of territory, they have to. A few fields is insignificant in comparison. Of course that grows with the population, but that’s the far future for anyone trying to survive right now at the point agriculture becomes an option.

[jojobas]

There's a lot to indicate at least the vast majority of the tribes didn't understand seeds (or sex-childbirth link for that matter).

>Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on?

So that you don't have to walk many miles a day foraging and kill all but one of your babies at a time, cause you can't carry any more. Basically, same reason as anyone else who went from hunting/gathering to farming.

Also Aborigines had no trouble burning forests to make grounds more attractive to animals they hunted, eventually converting varied biomes to eucalyptus forests, so the purported do-no-harm attitude is proven bullshit.

[ttt11199907]

> Here's this one example, so therefore this is proven bullshit

Nice logic.

What is "a lot" that indicates the majority of tribes didn't understand that babies happen when sex happens? Have you ever heard folk stories or native stories about birth and death?

If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster. This much is on obvious. The goal of living isn't to create as many more humans as possible.

It's like you're offended that humans would follow the same natural path as animals where access to resources is finite. Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources

[jojobas]

It's not one example, there's plenty. If you want another, Aborigines hunted down everything larger than a kangaroo to extinction.

Aboriginal stories largely say that it's Rainbow Serpent that brings in babies. This more or less matches the pattern of constant hunger that made women infertile outside of a small window around the rain season. It's understood that the rest of the world figured out the link from observing domestic animals, something absent in Australia of the time.

There are multiple papers trying to tackle this non-understanding, including ridiculous propositions that they all kinda know, but "repress" the knowledge.

>If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster.

Having to kill your own children is disaster.

>Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources

Yes, it's very much desirable that nobody is hungry, sick, or murdered. Yes, learning to get more resources from what you have is also very much desirable. And yes, it's bad and evil if instead people kill babies and murder each other over food like animals.

Before you ask, yes there are plenty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories depicting someone stealing food and getting killed.

And there's no counterpart to the Genesis myth that would say that X shagged B and they had a child.

[ttt11199907]

So the ideal is no one ever dies (most good!) while everyone makes more people (more good!). I guess eventually we'll figure out how to eat rocks. It's not sustainable. Earth is an island that has finite resources. We're covering it in crops to feed humanity, but in the process of doing so are making the planet less hospitable. Should we act now to prevent what we know will happen if we continue pretending like expansion is the only way?

[jojobas]

There might be no ideal, but it's very much preferable that everyone has a good run and nobody has to kill their kids or die of pneumonia at 20 or some such.

How much to breed is a separate question, but equilibrium with the environment doesn't have to be at the point of paleolithic misery.

[ttt11199907]

I think I can agree there's a happy middle ground somewhere between "paleolithic misery" and "late stage capitalism climate change induced neolithic misery". Both are extremes of misery of a sort. There's still plenty of suffering now... More if you consider the difference in population between the paleolithic and now.

A global society which works collaboratively to maintain both our modern technosphere _and_ a livable, habitable biosphere. Progress doesn't have to come with all of its current negative externalities -- most of them are driven by short-term profit driven thinking that doesn't take our collective biosphere into account.