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430 points mhb | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.019s | source
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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. kzrdude ◴[] No.46181284{3}[source]
It looks more like agrarian society outcompeted hunter gatherer society because the agrarians got more surviving kids. This replacement and assimilation happened in Europe, for example, where it's visible in genetic and linguistic history.
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2. margalabargala ◴[] No.46183358[source]
Yes, because it was easier, to not have your kids die among other things.

Hunter-gathering doesn't scale. What is fine when it's one person, collapses the whole society when it gets too large.