Kyle Harper: evaluation

Transcript context

…James Scott has an interesting theory in Against the Grain. I don't know if it originates with him, but he argues that one of the reasons that the early agriculturalists were so successful... And David Reich, if you've seen his stuff about The Yamnaya 4,500 years ago conquering all of Eurasia, but before them, the Anatolian... the initial farmers are the ones who displaced the initial hunter-gatherers across Europe and Asia. He argues that initial wave was so successful because of these first diseases that the farmers had created the conditions to engender. Basically, the relationship these farmers had with respect to the foragers they were taking over from was similar to the relationship the Europeans had to the Native Americans, where inadvertently, the disease is just a significant player in why you were able to dominate them. I don't know how plausible you find that. I mean, first thing, it's important, I think you were starting to get at this, that there's never a generation of humans that has the opportunity to make this choice once and for all, like, should we stay hunting mammoths or should we become sedentary farmers with basically torturous dentistry and die by diarrhea? This happens over thousands of years through an evolutionary process where nobody can... It's a story of unintended consequences. The mammoth are gone partly because we killed them all. People start... the first livestock that are domesticated are goats. Nobody says, "Hey, let's become goat farmers." The goats are wild. They're ibexes. People are hungry, and so they start managing them to only kill the males to make sure that they can reproduce, and they start penning them and they start killing the wolves who are trying to attack them. Over very long periods of time, this becomes this tight mutualistic relationship where all of a sudden we're goat farmers. But no generation makes that whole decision for anybody. That's part of it, is that it's unintended consequences that are made in very incremental steps. Two is, I definitely agree that there's some kind of cultural selection here where the farming groups are simply so much more adapted to extract energy efficiently from the environment. It's all about energy. You want to multiply, you want to grow, you want to survive, it's all about energy. Foragers require huge landscapes to extract enough energy to feed themselves and grow and reproduce, whereas farmers per unit of land can extract such higher rates of energy that then can be, through photosynthesis, turned into edible sugars that we can metabolize. Those populations are just growing faster, that they quote unquote out-compete the hunter-gatherer population say of Europe that are largely but not completely displaced. Now, on top of that, just the energy story alone is a big piece of it, but then on top of that, you probably do have some kind of population difference in the exposure and possibly even immunity to infectious diseases. I definitely think that early farmers, the first farming societies that are starting to live sedentary lifestyles where you have aggregations—these are not cities, these are villages—but still, that's more than a hunter-gatherer band. Your childhood is then going to be constant exposure to a series of pathogens. Those kinds of populations, when they're then migrating into Europe, are probably carrying these pathogens with them that may have had a kind of further effect that on top of just being able to extract more energy and multiply faster, drives up the mortality of the existing populations. Yeah. The point you made about fertility is interesting. I vaguely remember reading that it's not just the fact that the energy density is lower, it's that you're also moving around a lot. Because of that, you're spacing out kids much more so than if you were just in the same place. I think the actual fertility for foragers is sort of like reasonable—I don’t know if sustainable is the right word because I don’t mean in an ecological sense but more so—it keeps your population constant.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.