[lambdaphage]

Paleolithic culture is a genuinely mixed bag. Not as bad as almost everyone thinks, but worse than the rest think. I would put 1850 as my over-under for the year that neolithic culture provided an improvement in average quality of life. The problem with being a foraging people is that farming peoples can push you off the nicer land, as the article corroborates. Over millenia, foraging probably got to be a worse deal.

It is far from clear, though, that living as a hunter gatherer isn't fun. Reports from the 18th and 19th centuries mention the scandal that when white farmers were captured by indigenous tribes, they hardly ever wanted to go back. Foraging beat farming in terms of qalys, it seemed.

[beloch]

Studies of the ǃKung San, who were recently hunter-gatherers living in a rather marginal environment, showed that they could get by doing far less work than farmers. The work they did do was strenuous. For example, they practiced persistence hunting. However, on average they had a lot more leisure time. Being a hunter-gatherer was probably an even sweeter deal before farmers and ranchers gobbled up all the prime real estate.

Interestingly enough, the recent history of the !Kung shows that settling down and joining the rest of civilization does not always benefit the fairer sex. !Kung society was much less sexist before contact than it is now, as the surrounding peoples they are now in contact with are not exactly the most egalitarian. Most archaeologists consider egalitarian social structure to be typical of hunter-gatherer societies, with rigid hierarchical structure being an innovation resulting from settlement. Consider the concept of being "rich" for example. In a nomadic pastoral culture, wealth might be owning a big herd. In a sedentary culture, wealth might take the form of housing or accumulated items. A hunter-gatherer does not own animals and has to carry everything he/she owns around. A hunter-gather's abilities are his/her wealth.

There are plenty of "civilized" places on Earth today where being poor is basically hell. There's ceaseless toil, no power or freedom, pollution, violence, poor nutrition, and no real access to the wonders of modern medicine that most of us are aghast at the thought of doing without. I'd far rather be among today's last few hunter-gatherer tribes than an immigrant worker in UAE or Qatar.

[pjc50]

This basically tells us that land ownership and control is the critical ingredient against egalitarianism. The structure of the society is built around preserving land ownership; suddenly because family membership and inheritance grants you access to land it becomes a point of contention, and control is imposed on women to maintain that boundary.