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430 points mhb | 7 comments | | HN request time: 1.021s | source | bottom
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PeterHolzwarth ◴[] No.46179223[source]
"A woman's work is never done."

In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.

Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).

Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.

We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.

There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.

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danny_codes ◴[] No.46179343[source]
You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a relatively brief period of our collective history.
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margalabargala ◴[] No.46179540[source]
People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
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1. UltraSane ◴[] No.46179660[source]
Initially but the excess food allowed population to increase and the only way to feed them was to keep farming. So in a way humans trapped themselves.
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2. LanceH ◴[] No.46179765[source]
The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.
3. rhubarbtree ◴[] No.46180357[source]
“Trapped” in a life that meant women didn’t have to regularly murder their children.

Such nonsense the idea that farming was a trap. I think it was Sapiens that propagated this myth in recent times.

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4. strudey ◴[] No.46180554[source]
I think there’s a version of the Malthusian trap that has explanatory merit - the idea that as population increased, you got diminishing returns from more people farming the same land. Population would therefore increase until famine, after which there would be good times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by the industrial revolution.
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5. andsoitis ◴[] No.46180904[source]
> So in a way humans trapped themselves.

It is actually the plants (barley, grain, grapes, millet, potatoes, taro, maize, rice, sorghum, manioc) that tricked the humans into cultivating (reproduce) them/

6. kzrdude ◴[] No.46181297{3}[source]
Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the niche until there are no more resources: any successful species is trapped against some kind of resource or environmental ceiling, unfortunately.

Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era? Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that question.

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7. UltraSane ◴[] No.46187106{4}[source]
Humans should be able to act smarter than bacteria.