The past was not that cute

"and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds"

Earlier. Picking berries, seeds or ears of grain is something very small hands can do.

"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."

But no. You are talking about a primitive (poor) agrarian society. That only started a couple of thousands years ago, while our species used fire since over a million years in a semi nomadic live style. And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around. (Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well, but that also started rather recent)

> And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around

The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures independently decided to not only spend several hours a day picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to.

Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting.

This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do.

They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.

Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.

"Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to."

You mean nobody would choose the half nomadic hunters life?

Hm, some indigenous cultures I spoke to disagree, but the choice is not there anymore, as the bison herds they sustained on got slaughtered. The conflict of the nomads vs sedentary is an old one and the establishment of the latter, made the old ways of life simply impossible.

Some hunters have elders rather than dedicated full time priests, and they can veer more rabbinical; they've got the stories and pass down the classics as food for thought and discussion.

On a superstition v superstition basis it's hard to get a photo finish between them and a Bishop.

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We hear this refrain, that hunter-gatherers lived lives of relative ease while early agrarians lived lives of backbreaking labour, but honestly it's never made any sense to me. Outside of a few garden-of-Eden scenarios, life as a nomad seems far more precarious than life in an established village. Maybe the good days were better but the bad days were inevitable, and far more terrifying.

Exactly. It reminds me of all of the maundering about being "forced to work" (ie. having to earn some income in order to purchase some of the bounty with which we're surrounded) which usually comes along with the "hunter-gathering was a life of luxury" mindset. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from walking off into the forest and living off berries and grubs, except that (a) they don't have the required knowledge to live off the land, and (b) they're not willing to do so, because (c) it's a miserable existence compared with living in a house with hot and cold running potable water, strong walls and a lockable door, electric amenities, and a comfy bed and sofas. Nobody's forced to work, we choose to because all of the above are nice things that are worth some effort to maintain.

The agricultural people were able to produce, collect and store a surplus, which allowed them to raise armies. After that, it was all downhill for the hunter gatherers. They no so much chose the settled life, but were co-opted to it.

> Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well

I'm sorry but this strikes me as incredibly wrong and misleading. Herding cattle is anything but "a very chilled job" unless your frame of reference is "hunting Mammoths" and "facing Sable-tooth tigers". Sure, at moments it can be pretty straightforward, but as most jobs, the hassle comes from the situations that aren't straightforward, and they can get back-braking, hairy, dirty and outright taxing on you.

Living in the forest is illegal.

I would have thought herding or keeping large animals was quite dangerous, especially without modern technology. One of my wife's not-so-distant relatives was killed by a domestic pig.

Dangerous at times yes(like most of premodern life was) And cows, or rather bulls are for sure more dangerous than herding sheep. But most of the times it just meant sitting and watching.

Yes, frame of reference. But I actually meant dangerous at times, yes, but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things. So when herding there were times of danger and stress (young bulls, wolves, other tribes coming to steal the animals), but most of the time it was sitting and watching.

You're completely missing my point. Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads. Yes, this includes the ancestors of the bison hunting plains tribes. It was only with the population collapse due to smallpox and introduction of horses where the nomadic way of life became dominant again.

Until the invention of firearms, nomads had equal footing with settled people, if not an advantage (e.g. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan). The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size.

> but also chilled in comparison to the modern stressful average job, where you constantly have to do things

I don't know if you mean "office work" as "modern stressful average job" or "food delivery as a freelancer and barely getting paid", but almost any physical job would be more taxing both mentally and physically than sitting in an office all day. Maybe my experience of only becoming a office worker after ~50% of my working life and before that doing other things, but I think most people (especially here on HN) don't realize how taxing physical labor is, even for the brain and the head.

"The main advantage that agricultural civilizations had was population size."

Metallurgy?

Not just firearms.

Stone axe vs bronze sword?

Bronze sword vs iron sword?

Iron sword vs steel?

Nomadic people got their advanced weapons usually through trade from settled ones. The nomadic horse archers dominance was rather an exception, also their kingdom included cities where the weapons they used were made.

"Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads"

And there always was external pressure. Also .. our knowledge of that time is just fragmentary. We don't even know the real names of those cultures.

So yes, clearly there were benefits to settling and planting corn, otherwise humans would not have done it. But to my knowledge, it is not correct to call it a voluntarily process in general. Once there are fences, the nomadic lifestyle does not work anymore. Adopt or die out was (and is) the choice.

All technological advancement is downstream of population size and in particular density.

You can't divide work if you aren't near enough other people.

Well, I worked all kinds of things, but office jobs I actually found more stressful than physical labour to be honest. What I meant is the expectation, that in modern jobs you have to be activly doing things all the time. (Or pretending to). While hearding your main activity was watching (and be ready for the need of action).

The big difference between agrarian and nomadic populations is that the latter is decentralized. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is generally very leisurely, but it's strictly limited in population viability. A tribe of some tens of people? Sure, no problem. A city of 5,000 people? It just doesn't work, because you'd end up wiping out the resources in your region faster than nature could replenish them.

So you're never going to see a massive hunter-gatherer population, essentially by definition. It doesn't say anything at all about their standards of life, which by most accounts were (and are) exceptionally high. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

You can camp indefinitely on BLM forest land as long as you’re willing to move your camp site every two weeks

Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed, much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG “sky father” [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral lifestyle.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us

Not in the US. There is a lot of BLM land if you want to live a nomadic lifestyle in the middle of nowhere.

For hunting in a way you want? Not having to pay taxes? Raise your children in the nomadic hunter livestyle? I think schooling (and lots of other things) is mandatory in the US as well. And child protection service etc. exist. So it might be easier in the US to cosplay as a forest nomad for some time (and I know some people did it as eremits for a bit longer) but a real nomadic livestyle means living with other people together in a tribe. That does not work (just the rule to move camp after 2 weeks prevents that).

"Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads."

Portraying it as an individual choice is inaccurate. The process of populations becoming sedentary(and agrarian) spans over multiple generations and wasn't really reversible. The early settlements likely only worked because they had some method to force people from leaving and the later settlements had to be sedentary because their neighbours were sedentary, it had a cascade effect. Oversimplified but that's the gist.

Read into it; it happens, and CPS isn’t usually involved until it’s well into horror-show territory.

It’s usually around a cult or similar; we don’t have much in the way of hereditary nomadic but even those do exist.

Most nomadic cultures did not move this fast. You have to be spending a lot of time moving if you do this.

I think I did read about it and met folks who are into that. I have never been in the US, though, but the main complaint I got is pretty much, state laws make it impossible. But I am open for reading suggestions.

You're not going to grow any food or hunt anything that way, though. It's not the same.

> Literally nothing is stopping anyone

Nothing but the power of the state, which has claimed sovereignty over all the land, regulates what you can and cannot do with it, and will use deadly force against you if you fail to comply.

I once added up the total calorie content of all the yearly hunting it is legal to do where I live, if a hunter were maximally successful, and it would get one person through May.

All the land one could reasonably sustain a living on has long since been claimed, those claims being backed up by (you guessed it) the power of the state. The only land left that one can just walk off into is the land nobody wanted during the settlement period, because they could not find any way to live on it.

I have herded cattle - cows and goats when I was a child on my grandfather's farm. It was indeed a "chill job". But I had my grandfather's dog to accompany me and he did most of the work. I just lazed around.

A state small game hunting license is very cheap

And very limited.

The Agricultural Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.

Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the predators, and the predator population soars. Then they overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator population crashes.

It's not stable.

Pigs are extremely dangerous for kids, but herding cows and goats is 100% something kids did. Source: I did it.

The village kids would get up, take the cows out to the road where the other cows also came, then together, a big group of kids and cows would head to a pasture and spend most of their day watching cows, playing games and messing about.

It was great.

Realistically the cows and goats took more care of the kids than the other way around.

The first labor-saving invention was theft.

TV tells me that hunting wabbits is not very productive.

As a teen, I had a physical job. It was very motivating for me to get an education so I could do a desk job.

I'd sure hate to be a nomad in winter.

Well, that is why most modern nomads I know go to the south in winter.

(but sure, native tribes also did this a bit, but were much more limited in range. So winter time in general did meant being cold and hungry often and the weak ones died. Might be the reason, why humanity started in africa and not scandinavia)

A quick Google shows that ~20 people per year are killed by cows per year in the US. So not very dangerous, but not super safe either (cows kill more people than sharks - although that mostly shows how few people sharks kill).

It isn't common but it definitely happens in some parts of the US.

There are no taxes to pay if you aren't earning anything. It is legal, if inadvisable, to raise children this way in much of the US. There is a "live and let live" ethos around it, especially in the western US. The true nomads are probably most common in the mountain West of the US in my experience. While the rule is two weeks in one location, in many remote areas there is no enforcement and no one really cares. They sometimes have mutually beneficial arrangements with ranchers in the area. These groups tend to be relatively small.

Alaska is famously popular for groups of families disappearing into the remote wilderness to create villages far from modern civilization. It is broadly tolerated there. Often many years will pass between sightings of people that disappeared into the wilderness.

I always wondered what a high-resolution satellite survey of the Inside Passage of Alaska and the north coast of British Columbia would find in that vast and impenetrable wilderness. Anecdotally there should be dozens of villages hidden in there that have been operating for decades.

"The early settlements likely only worked because they had some method to force people from leaving"

That mechanism might have simply been, offering a warm and dry place and stored food, while it was freezing outside.

As of my knowledge, the transition process in general is pretty much a open research question.

There’s what is explicitly legal, there is what you can get away with, and there is moving between jurisdictions before they even know you’re there.

The US is large and if you keep your head down and homeschool to some level of competence I bet you could go many generations- especially if you were willing to blend in as necessary.

1 v 1, the average nomad could kill the average conscripted peasant who was physically weaker and less experienced. An iron vs a flint spear isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference. Superior numbers for the creation of a professional class of fighters that conquered the weaker nomads, but the steppe nomads remained superior in combat. The Roman, Chinese, Persian, and Muslim empires were only able to keep them at bay by turning them against each other. When they united, they were completely unstoppable.

Cows are very safe for their herders, assuming there are no bulls (and there never are, those require containment). They can get defensive or spooked and then they're very numerous very large animals with hooves and horns, but their herders won't be the target of their aggression even if the herders are very mean. At least not intentionally.

Pigs are extremely dangerous to children in all cases (they will eat body parts with no hesitation and no effort, like carrots).

Goats are incredibly awesome and accept you as part of their pack and defend you from predators. They can also be assholes but playfully. As with cows, female only herds, as males are dangerous.

I've never herded sharks so I'll go with your opinion on those.

With the Romans, the situation was the opposite. Their success was mostly based on the idea that conscripted peasants will eventually beat elite warriors. You just had to equip and train the conscripts instead of wasting the resources on the elites.

Because every man was expected to fight, the Romans had an effectively endless supply of experienced and well equipped soldiers. A society depending on a warrior class might win once or twice. But the Romans would still inflict some casualties. They would learn and adapt, and come back with another army next year. Sooner or later, the warrior class would be depleted, and Rome would prevail.

Eventually the Roman Republic grew large enough and successful enough to switch to a professional army. Not because it was better, but because the population was too large. There were not enough enemies to fight to make conscription useful.

Steppe nomads were far from unstoppable. They had occasional success in conquest, but their societies were set up to fail. The legitimacy of their leaders was based on personal relationships between the elites. When the leader of a large empire died, it was always unlikely that all leaders of note would support the successor. Most of the time, the empire would fracture into effectively independent polities. Sometimes there would be a figurehead leader on the top, but he would rarely have any real power over other leaders.

Especially the wascally ones.

There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.

I tried to hang out with white tip reef sharks while snorkelling in Fiji at the start of the year. But they aren't very sociable.

I was able to hang out with a group of cuttlefish though. Cuttlefish are weird and cool.

I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society.

Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle?

It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves.

With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape.

In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ...

Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture.

It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery!

For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!

20 people out of 350MM is pretty damn safe, even factoring for the relatively low numbers of people who actually interact with cattle. We as modern humans no longer have any sense of proportion when it comes to safety.

I've read book written by captain Kocebu, that was on duty to protect Russian holdings in Alaska. They visited San Francisco in 1805 and 1815, and several chapters described life of native people in the mission. He described harsh conditions, hard work, no freedom at all, and very high death rates. Shocking even for a early XIX century naval officer. Once a year, those people allowed to visit their tribes and relatives. And they always came back! So, the real hunter gathers, who had first hand comparison for both nomadic and agrarian life, prefer near slavery in mission to life in the wild.

it was in the news recently, an Israeli guy was hanging out with dusky sharks, a somewhat common past-time as they've always been considered to be safe for humans, but they ate him and dusky sharks are no longer considered safe.

From:

"A report by two shark experts has concluded that regular feeding of the large assembly of sharks at the site had encouraged the animals to adopt “begging behaviour” that led to the fatal incident. "

It won't stop me hanging out with sharks when I get a chance (but only some species - not Tiger sharks or White sharks!).