Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Robin Hanson's avatar

ale, few things are a strong consensus, but those seem at least weak ones. Most of the "primitive" societies we know of are various intermediate forms between ancient nomadic foragers and modern farmers.

Mike, yes more agreeableness seems likely.

Micro, forager mating, even in pairs and for periods of a few years, is quite different from farming-style marriage, and that is quite different from modern "marriage" too. Farming wives were more property, abd divorce was strongly discouraged. Forager violence is different from farming-style war; nomadic foragers were too distance and unpredictably located for effective attacks.

Steve, nice to know.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"the key change after farming would have been an increased sensitivity to culture, so that social sanctions became better able to push behavior contrary to other inclinations."

That was the impression 19th Century white Americans, such as Mark Twain, took away from their encounters with American Indians who were primarily hunter-gatherers: They saw Indians as "wild:" like the difference between a wild and domesticated animal: suspicious, ornery, and not very sociable. In contrast, Africans, from farming cultures, were seen as sociable and cooperative. (Twain's books, for instance, are vastly more sympathetic to blacks than to Indians.)

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts