Today we will go over Chapter 6; we are reading one chapter a week.
I encourage this to be slow blogging - the very opposite of "breaking". I will leave this on my hot list for a week, so comment any time during the week.
When we get near the end of GGS, I'll start a poll for the next book; I am strongly leaning towards the book Ideas: A history of thought from fire to Freud.
Ground rules: I expect vigorous discussion. But I expect civil discussion. A sign I saw in a restaurant said
Be nice or leave
If you want to have a flame war, go elsewhere, please.
UPDATE One note: Next week, I will not be around. If someone wants to post about a chapter that week, let me know in the comments; otherwise, we can skip a week.
Chapter 6 asks (and tries to answer) the question "Why would people become farmers/herders rather than hunter/gatherers?
As Diamond notes, this question first appears (at least to some) to be silly. Farming's just better, right? It's an easier life, with less time spent working, less danger of starvation, etc., right?
Turns out not to be right at all - most hunter gatherers work relatively few hours getting food (compared to farmers), and farmers have (for most of history, and still in a lot of places) a danger of starvation. So, why switch?
He then clears up several misconceptions. First, people didn't wake up one day and say "Hey! Let's stop hunting and start farming!" the switch was gradual; not all peoples made the switch, some switched back to hunting after becoming farmers.
Second, it wasn't an all or nothing switch - farmers and herders still hunt, even today. Historically, in many places, hunting and gathering supplemented farming.
Third, not all farmer herders are stationary, and not all hunter gatherers are nomadic.
Still, even given that, why switch?
Although the reason is subject to debate, Diamond poses a few reasons:
- Wild game became less available. As noted in a previous chapter, there's a tendency for large animals to become extinct shortly after humans appear in a place
- In some places, climate change made crops more available.
- New technologies such as sickles made the switch easier
and
- Although farming/herding doesn't necessarily make life easier, it does enable a given area of land to support more people.
So, there are good reasons for switching, they just aren't the ones that we may have thought they were.