Comments Elsewhere

Gene: By the way, the worsening of conditions under agriculture is a well known fact, not a oddball opinion of Clark’s. Agriculture allowed a big population increase, but at the cost of a harsher lifestyle.

Sure. Of course, that still leaves open the further, and probably more interesting, question as to why the population increases enabled by agriculture outran the capacity to produce the necessities for comfortable living. I suspect that the answer to that question has little essentially to do with agriculture, and a lot to do with some of the species of vermin that were able to break in and feed off of the surplus grain and meat. Specifically, the professionalized military and theo-political classes.

Gene: Well, Bob, if you want to work about three hours a day for your living, be relatively healthy, and live about the same lifespan (35 years for both), then you would want to be a hunter-gatherer rather than a English factory worker.

Bob: But would I have learned the Pythagorean theorem?

Probably not. But what makes you think you would have learned the Pythagorean theorem as an illiterate English factory worker ca. 1800?

Bob: And would I have to speak Swahili?

I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. Modern Swahili is a literate language which serves as a lingua franca for trade, diplomacy, and education throughout much of East Africa. It developed as a direct result of extensive trade, cultural exchange, and colonization between the Arabian peninsula and East Africa, via the Indian Ocean. It has just about as much to do with a “primitive” or hunter-gatherer lifestyle as does modern English, French, Mandarin Chinese, or Hindi.