Stone Age hunter-gatherers lived beside farmers, didn't interbreed(cbc.ca)

37 pointsby rfugger13 tahun yang lalu21 comments

Stone Age hunter-gatherers lived beside farmers, didn't interbreed

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/stone-age-hunter-gatherers-lived-beside-farmers-didn-t-interbreed-1.1991430

21 comments

crazygringo13 tahun yang lalu

If it's anything like Africa has been over the past 100 years, agricultural tribes and hunter-gatherer tribes simply don't mix.

Agricultural tribes find the hunter-gatherer tribes to be dirty, lazy, uncivilized -- not a lot of sexual attraction going on. And the hunter-gatherer tribes think the agricultural people work way too hard for nothing, with their priorities all wrong, and don't want anything to do with the lifestyle.

At least that's how it was all explained to me during time I spent in Kenya and Tanzania, where I spent a couple weeks with a hunter-gatherer tribe.

Sharlin13 tahun yang lalu

I'm also reminded of the dynamic between the Native Americans and the European colonist-settlers, in particular Scott's review [1] of the book Empire of the Summer Moon [2].

    And throughout the book's description of these events, 
    there was one constant:

    All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it
    and refused to go back to  white civilization. All the 
    Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did 
    everything they could to go back to their previous tribal 
    lives.

[1] http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Summer-Moon-Comanches-Powerful/...

VLM13 tahun yang lalu

"And the hunter-gatherer tribes think the agricultural people"

The teeth, the teeth! Look at meat eater teeth compared to stone ground grain eaters teeth. Also this is a very old story which makes it unusual that they carefully avoided relative health issues such that grain eaters shrink in height and strength compared to the H-G eaters. So you've got Ms Hunter looking at a short little troll of a grain eater with rotting teeth vs studly McMeat eater... And in the other direction the ladies have little patience with the HGs because their diet gets a little sparse in the winter and they don't want to watch (more of) their kids starve.

HGs: Less of them per sq mile, taller, stronger, healthier, other than in winter when the die off, great teeth.

Farmers: More of them per sq mile, shorter, weaker, less healthy, starve less often, awful rotting teeth.

It must have been an interesting dating/social dynamic.

ExpiredLink13 tahun yang lalu

Farmers were chronically underfed to modern times. They never had enough to eat for thousands of years.

Sharlin13 tahun yang lalu

Yes; it's indeed important to note that the shift to agriculture was a quantity/quality tradeoff. Farming could sustain more people than hunting and gathering, so by pure math, it won over in the end, but the average quality of life decreased for thousands of years, until the industrial revolution.

jchrisa13 tahun yang lalu

There's a lot of interesting history around this topic. Anyone have recommendations?

evincarofautumn13 tahun yang lalu

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a good soft introduction to the topic, told in parable form. You probably want a proper history book covering the Neolithic Revolution.

InclinedPlane13 tahun yang lalu

So was everyone though.

The big difference demographically between hunter-gatherers and farmers is that farmers could store enough of their food to eke out a harsh winter or even a lean harvest in a following year. It would be tough but it would let more of them and especially their children survive. Hunter-gatherers had a higher quality of living on average but during the winter their kids died more often.

rubymtnman13 tahun yang lalu

This makes a lot of sense. None of us can comprehend radically different lifestyles. Regardless of race, a very different lifestyle is almost like a different culture.

ExpiredLink13 tahun yang lalu

Nowadays Muslims and Christians don't 'interbreed' - and they have much more in common than stone age hunters and farmers.

throwaway197713 tahun yang lalu

My Catholic wife and I are planning on being a counterexample to that argument :)

Mikeb8513 tahun yang lalu

Nonsense. My wife and I are an example...

bsullivan0113 tahun yang lalu

If it's anything like Africa has been over the past 100 years, agricultural tribes and hunter-gatherer tribes simply don't mix.

You are missing the point IMO. Back then, it wasn't like today, where you check their LinkedIn profile, FB pictures, date them a few dozen times and then decide.

Food, shelter and protection were even more important than now. And 2000 years is a long time not to mix, imagine what the world goes through in 2 millennia.

tjaerv13 tahun yang lalu

Obligatory link to Jared Diamond's classic essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race":

http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

qwerta13 tahun yang lalu

There are several holes in this article.

>The tribe in Central Europe ate almost exclusively freshwater fish until around 3000 B.C

3000 BC was still stone (copper) age in Central Europe. Agriculture is very hard with stone tools. Also climate could be much cooler for long period. At that time I would choose fish anytime.

> Typically, he said, the arrival of farming led to widespread deforestation and the disappearance of wildlife

Several places in Central Europe were deforested as late as 12th century. Early European agriculture relied on burning part of forest, using it until ground was fertile and than moving to other place. Intensive agriculture (which leads to widespread deforestation) was not used until middle-ages.

> Despite the fact that they were neighbours, there was little, if any, interbreeding between the two cultural groups, according to the results of a DNA analysis

> Nehlich acknowledged that lack of interbreeding may have been due to cultural reasons, but said that is pure speculation in the absence of evidence.

They probably lived in different periods, possibly separated by hundreds of years. Culture has nothing to do with it, even neanderthals were interbreeding with early modern humans. It was common to kidnap and marry woman from different tribes.

ealloc13 tahun yang lalu

This result is right in line with the observations of people studying the evolution of lactose tolerance [1].

Lactose-tolerant middle-easterners (who had long been eating lactose-free fermented milk, until they developed lactose tolerance) moved in to Europe and took over, and rarely mixed with the native hunter gatherers. Instead, they simply outcompeted them and largely wiped them out. It is estimated that lactose tolerance gave them "up to 19% more fertile offspring" than the indigenous hunter-gatherers.

That makes me muse: Maybe the two groups didn't mix because the hunter-gatherers couldn't survive on the high-milk (and high starch?) diet of the agricultural people. Lactose intolerance can be quite violent!

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1...

armenarmen13 tahun yang lalu

I wonder it comparing the bones side by side can give us any insights into the legitimacy of the claims that the paleo diet crew likes to make?

Sharlin13 tahun yang lalu

The diet of a hunter-gatherer is certainly almost always healthier than that of a subsistence farmer, but people in modern industrialized societies are hardly subsistence farmers.

VLM13 tahun yang lalu

Its kinda the other way around, where extensive research led to certain conclusions... As a field this is old stuff.

One of the profs in the article, Richards, is an expert in isotopic analysis and has sixty something published papers on the topic, more or less on the topic of bone analysis at various digs implying various things about diet. He shows up in the CJ Hunt movie 'perfect human diet' or whatever its called.

karlkatzke13 tahun yang lalu

Huh. An ancient tribe of Crossfit-ers. Who woulda thunk?

rhizome13 tahun yang lalu

There's a reality TV series here somewhere.