Sounds like a parallel to Tasmania: the tech level kept ratcheting down, as they lost tech like crops and had no way to regain them, so every loss was permanent. Slowly, by simple drift in small populations, and occasionally abruptly, in environmental or social shocks. (The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently.)
They arrived by walking across the Bassian Plain (now the Bass Strait) to a land with highlands locked by ice.
There are many sources that discuss their gathering of plants, sea foods, hunting, etc.
Which sources talk about their agrarian crop planting? More to the point which sources discuss the loss of crop planting?
The big issue in pre colonial studies these recent years appears to be a lack of past recognition of any non "hunter gather" practices - the early settlers destroyed semi permanent infrastructures such as rock pool fish traps (some quite extensive that were blown up to allow river boats through), they didn't recognise non European land and plant tending practices, etc.
There's a lack of solid study on what practices were actually taking place in different parts of Australia, and a lot of "imagined" commentary.
Small scale agriculture and aquaculture has been long understood.
The tipping point where the use of labour and soil to create surlus labour, which is then used to conquer more soil is why agriculture led to a "culture" or "civilisation"(according to 19th century hisorians IIRC).
19th century hisorians argued (I think) that superior societies had superior technology, which made them even more superior. If anything, I think modern academics are too concerned about refuting the premise that Western civilisation ended up with superior technology, rather than simply accepting that they did (in most ways) but that this didn't always make them morally superior.
I freely admit to knowing very little about "19th century hisorians" and their ideas about "surlus labour" ..
I also am unaware how this relates to the above theory about how pre colonial Tasmanians had and then lost "tech like crops".
I do have a notion that metrics such as "superior" tend to be value judgements based on particular axioms .. some people feel that storing their nuts for winter, creating an industrial revolution, eliminating other life forms on the planet through expansion, and altering the atmosphere to be a superior approach.
Others seemingly enjoyed a particular quality of life for several tens of thousands of years by spending some time gathering food and most of the time telling stories.
Hint: that was the case in "civilized" places with access to an abundance of introduced diseases, and poor diet dominated by cereal crops. Hunter-gatherer societies were typically healthier, judging by size of skeletons we find.
Of course the Canary Islands were settled by "civilized" people.
Telling stories and picking berries is very nice but you chose to ignore the fact that majority of your children would die, including a few of your partners from labor, any broken bone would be excruciating pain for life.
No amount of "colonizers bad" is gonna get away from those. Health care has improved tremendously due to technological advances and if you like preventing misery, singing songs and picking berries isn't the way.
Any resources to learn more here? My understanding is the adult sized hunter gatherer remains appear healthy, I’m not sure that is an indicator that more babies made it to that stage
Can we really put that down to value systems? You’re implying that the latter group made a choice, but for that to be true they would have to have developed the new technologies and chose not to use them.
Judging one lifestyle to be a superior society seems to be a value judgement.
It's hardly a nuetral unbiased assessment when it's literally Europeans saying "who has two thumbs and superior culture" as they photograph themselves amongst a pile of dead indigenous people and ship a bunch of heads home to pickle for the phrenologists.
you don't invent guns and grain silos because you're having a great time, you do it because resources are scarce and contested. Necessity is the mother of invention they say. Personally I don't subscribe much to notions of choice, but in that framework, I would say the pre-agrarians made the choice not to develop agriculture and all the rest.
There are many places across the globe (equatorial regions) that don't have the severe winter "nothing grows at all" problem that some would argue drove European cultures to advance food storage and intensive agriculture techniques.
There's always some kind of scarcity everywhere, sure, but the key notion here is regular predictable extreme scarcity that can be planned for and hedged against with a considered amount of energy and advance preparation.
Advanced food storage and agriculture tech originated not in Europe, though, but in the great flood plains - Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Amazonia.
On that note, it is by the way theorized that the necessity to coordinate farming with the floods and other farmers is what kicked off civilisatory development.
Fair point - I thought of that after I made the above comment (which obviously started with winter scarcity) but river delta flooding is another good example of literal flood | famine food availabilty.
And, as you note, an original challenge that predates human advance into the northern environments as glaciers retreated.
The great OG mathematical challenge for humans was the "fair" recurrent remarking of land plots following a flood - how to survey land area, and how to plan for and account for food surplus to last over food scarcity.
I don't see pests listed in the above discussion, although I could have missed it.
However this is as big as drought, if not larger. Not just insects, rodents, bird cyclictic overpopulation wiping out crops, but also fungus, bacteria, etc.
The world has starved more than once from such things, and the Egyptians had reverence for cats for a reason.
The degree to which resources are scarce and contested varies geographically yes.
Around me there is not a constraint on the deer population, resources are plentiful for them and outside of hunting season there is little contesting the deer. Eventually the deer population grows enough that the lifeforms they share space with decide to, mm, contest their expansion, but there are places and periods in which populations can grow unconstrained for a while. I suppose I was making the point that humans maintaining a certain way of life for tens of thousands of years may have lived in a way where resources and rival tribes were not an issue, and hence, had little motivation to develop defensive weaponry / collect starvation rations for rainy days.
They were not only gathering food and telling stories.
The men also took weapons and went to the tribes nearby and killed the men there, and ...
This has always been a violent species. (Not saying the other great apes are (were) any better.)
Previously the historians thought the stone age was peaceful, singing songs telling stories etc. And oh so much spare time. They know better nowadays.
Check out the Yanomami, or read about viking raids or Shaka Zulu. Humans don't just sit around and tell stories. They reproduce, become more and more, and ...
Aboriginal Tasmanians arrived there 40000 years ago when it was still a peninsula, and got cut off of Australia 8000 years ago, around the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry.
Afaik agriculture never made it to Australia (at least not in any sort of large scale) before the western invasion, let alone to Tasmania.
> When did the Tasmanian pre colonial people have crops?
My 'they' in "they lost tech like crops" referred to the Canary Islanders, as discussed by OP where the botanical evidence shows crops disappearing gradually over time.
If that was the case then to what parallel technology in Tasmania were you alluding to as "ratcheting downwards" ?
Also, population growth in the early stages of human history was important to establish enough labour to create an "idle" (as in "people|time not spent scrabbling for food|clothing|shelter") class able to advance technology for progress.
That's been increasingly non essential since post WWII with the rise of semi and fully autonomous mining | processing | production.
Smaller and smaller numbers are people are required to extract resources and meet demand for what is a population excess wrt strain put on the planets environment an atmosphere by current and growing consumption demands.
Jared Diamond's Collapse tells the story of how this happened in the far reaches of the Pacific, as Polynesian settlers landed on increasingly distant islands with poor resources, and then their societies collapsed in slow motion when trading stopped and essential imported goods like metal became unavailable.
Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.
This doesn't mean it is a "success" in the context above. The population living there might have lost most of its previous technological abilities and stabilized in a permanent "collapsed" state. There is no reason that humans have to go extinct when they lose their cultural achievements, after all, other animals survive without having those in the first place.
Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.
This is a central theme in Vernor Vinge’s Deepness books. Space travel is slow (100s-1000s of years), so travellers are forced to calculate the likelihood that their destination will have experienced societal collapse by the time they arrive. The idea of a perpetually-sustained civilization is a failed dream. Technology helps societies bet larger and last longer, but also more dependent on the technology to sustain their growth.
But the population size theory says this is increasingly unlikely the larger the population gets. Even Gran Canaria was large enough to avoid the loss of crops for a thousand years, unlike the populations on the smaller islands.
Well, I mean, technically, but it would absolutely be better if the NSI people could warn them off using similar mathematical and diagram-based signaling techniques as would be used for space aliens.
> Learning this makes North Sentinel island seem like a wild success story. It’s been continuously supporting a population with no outside help for at least a millennium.
IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.
Well, they did get a big supply of metal in 1981, and there might have been trading with other islands up to 150 years ago:
> Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory.
> It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981.
> [...]
> Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time.
> It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island.
> Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880.
> We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage.
It’s because they aren’t cutting down all the trees there. They’ve found a way to just actually live off the land without destroying. Way more than a millennium, they’ve been doing it for 50,000 years. It’s no joke.
Your article says: "It’s therefore possible that it was the newcomers from Europe who contributed to the island’s societal collapse in the years to come."
Right, as usual, the evil Europeans were the cause of the collapse, and the fact that there were no trees left on the island for hundreds of years prior, and therefore no wood for building things, had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse. This modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities is incredible in a society that preaches to value reason and science rather than wishful thinking.
Like it or not, it's what current research - the science you appeal to -- appears to show. As stated here:
"...the researchers determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. After that date, two models show a possible population plateau, while another two models show possible decline."
and
"Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps." [1]
"Evil Europeans" is your term in an attempt to make it seem as if the European culture is being attacked. There is no "modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities", it's rewriting of history taking into account new knowledge that Pacific peoples weren't stupid, had spread across the Pacific using navigation methods unknown to Europeans for thousands of years and recognising the effects of the introduction of outside cultures - disease, slavery and theft.
Diamond argued for a environment caused degradation + diverse factors of their society and thus indirectly attacked the west-"centric-diabolist meat pots.
These papers are a attempt to reconquer lost funding by the very same academics who happily ignore other cultures atrocities, be they in the past:
Because they are incapable of producing any economic surplus and thus have no population growth whatsoever. The whole noble savages trope you seem to be be leaning to might sound quite romantic but they didn’t really make a conscious choice to live how they do.
> It’s no joke.
So is high infant mortality, low life expectancy due to a very high likelihood of dying from a trivially treatable diseases, living in abject poverty etc etc.
In much of the world, hunter-gatherers have needed to spend no more than two hours per day on practical activities, year-round. Temperate climates have been more demanding.
In the highlands of India, remaining time is often spent brewing and drinking alcohol, with the biggest problem being elephants finding and raiding the brew pots.
Implying that that the majority of the people living there somehow made a conscious and at least a marginally informed choice to live how they do is more than bizarre.
That's certainly true of both the UK and Germany (and many other countries) where the majority of the population found themselves Born, Never Asked [1].
Is there a reason you'd make such a banal generic point specific to the Torres Strait Island or Tiwi Islands?
Implying that because they live in worse material conditions they have worse mental health or lower levels of happiness is even more bizarre. Makes you think what aspects of life you’d want to optimize for.
No it doesn’t. If fully informed basically nobody living in modern society would chose to adopt that lifestyle (even if they somehow magically acquired all the skills required to succeed there etc.). The opposite is certainly not true
Hunter gatherers are like you. They are bound to their identity and are incapable of imagining things any other way unless it is forced upon them. They prefer to stick with what they know.
I'm not telling that to a paleolithic or neolithic islander, I'm telling that to you, a Western dude used to cars and planes, (public) medicine that mostly works, a heated and cooled house, kitchen appliances, TimTams, lattes, running water and sanitation. And I stand by my words.
No, but it’s probably a pretty good life if that’s the only thing you know. They have a lot of sex on the beach (actually) and don’t look malnourished.
Ok, but what’s the child mortality rate? Maternal mortality rate? Average life span? Rate of death from infected wounds? Random diseases caused by inbreeding? We may not have direct data on many basic quality of life indicators but we can make educated guesses from lots of historical analogues.
I actually don’t think that’s too relevant of a question. If there’s a high amount of suffering and cruelty, along with a mental philosophy that allows for happiness in spite of that (for the survivors), that still doesn’t make the suffering ok. To say otherwise is to take a step toward justifying slavery if the slaves are conditioned to be happy…
It’s easy for a society to be “happy” (whatever that mean and however you measure that) when only fully healthy people get a chance to live and everyone else is dead.
Are more people individually less happy better than fewer people individually more happy? Do you just multiply the two together to decide which is morally better?
More importantly, do you factor in people died from otherwise treatable diseases as negative happiness, or neutral (as they no more have a brain to secrete serotonin)? Is death unhappiness? For the subject and his relatives? When death is commonplace is it still a source of unhappiness or accepted as a part of natural flow, with human life being regarded as less permanent and more ephemeral, with greater emphasis on the present moment and less on future plans and ambitions?
Probably pretty bad. But they don’t know a “better” paradigm exists. They’ve probably found ways to deal with those things as a society and accept it as the natural course of things/god based destiny etc. The real question is how happy and content are they on a day to day basis.
These people have survived for 50,000 years (!) on a resource limited island and have managed to continue to have a martial arm and frivolous beach orgies. I would have to assume they’re pretty happy on a day to day basis.
There were never crops in the first place in the modern or even ancient sense.
Some tribes figured out that some tuberous plants can be replanted and will regrow after the tuber has been harvested and that's it.
Some may have understood how seeds work (that's debated) but at no point did Aborigines clear a plot of land to plant a particular species with seeds harvested last season.
This was a reason of total misunderstanding with the arriving Europeans, there was no way to lure them to help farm and get their share of the crops, it just wasn't on their map.
In contrast, Maoris just across the ditch understood both growing plants and raising livestock, and a mere decade after wheat and pork were brought from Europe they were widely growing both.
You honestly don't think they "knew how seeds work"? It's not like you can't turn over leaves and see a literal plant growing out of a seed.
Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.
There’s more to knowing how to manage seeds effectively than knowing plants grow from them.
>why…when you get enough..
That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk.
>ultimately end up destroying…
You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.
Hunter gatherers range over vast expanses of territory, they have to. A few fields is insignificant in comparison. Of course that grows with the population, but that’s the far future for anyone trying to survive right now at the point agriculture becomes an option.
There's a lot to indicate at least the vast majority of the tribes didn't understand seeds (or sex-childbirth link for that matter).
>Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on?
So that you don't have to walk many miles a day foraging and kill all but one of your babies at a time, cause you can't carry any more. Basically, same reason as anyone else who went from hunting/gathering to farming.
Also Aborigines had no trouble burning forests to make grounds more attractive to animals they hunted, eventually converting varied biomes to eucalyptus forests, so the purported do-no-harm attitude is proven bullshit.
> Here's this one example, so therefore this is proven bullshit
Nice logic.
What is "a lot" that indicates the majority of tribes didn't understand that babies happen when sex happens? Have you ever heard folk stories or native stories about birth and death?
If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster. This much is on obvious. The goal of living isn't to create as many more humans as possible.
It's like you're offended that humans would follow the same natural path as animals where access to resources is finite. Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
It's not one example, there's plenty. If you want another, Aborigines hunted down everything larger than a kangaroo to extinction.
Aboriginal stories largely say that it's Rainbow Serpent that brings in babies. This more or less matches the pattern of constant hunger that made women infertile outside of a small window around the rain season. It's understood that the rest of the world figured out the link from observing domestic animals, something absent in Australia of the time.
There are multiple papers trying to tackle this non-understanding, including ridiculous propositions that they all kinda know, but "repress" the knowledge.
>If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster.
Having to kill your own children is disaster.
>Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
Yes, it's very much desirable that nobody is hungry, sick, or murdered. Yes, learning to get more resources from what you have is also very much desirable. And yes, it's bad and evil if instead people kill babies and murder each other over food like animals.
Before you ask, yes there are plenty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories depicting someone stealing food and getting killed.
And there's no counterpart to the Genesis myth that would say that X shagged B and they had a child.
So the ideal is no one ever dies (most good!) while everyone makes more people (more good!). I guess eventually we'll figure out how to eat rocks. It's not sustainable. Earth is an island that has finite resources. We're covering it in crops to feed humanity, but in the process of doing so are making the planet less hospitable. Should we act now to prevent what we know will happen if we continue pretending like expansion is the only way?
There might be no ideal, but it's very much preferable that everyone has a good run and nobody has to kill their kids or die of pneumonia at 20 or some such.
How much to breed is a separate question, but equilibrium with the environment doesn't have to be at the point of paleolithic misery.
I think I can agree there's a happy middle ground somewhere between "paleolithic misery" and "late stage capitalism climate change induced neolithic misery". Both are extremes of misery of a sort. There's still plenty of suffering now... More if you consider the difference in population between the paleolithic and now.
A global society which works collaboratively to maintain both our modern technosphere _and_ a livable, habitable biosphere. Progress doesn't have to come with all of its current negative externalities -- most of them are driven by short-term profit driven thinking that doesn't take our collective biosphere into account.
More people = more technological advancement is a really cool observation. And, more technological advancement creates the environment for more people to survive and thrive. Exponential growth, baby!
The technology loss side of this is a little scary. Imagine a large war or disease that takes out a large portion of population and productivity. With so much interdependence between industries, like agriculture's dependence on computerized equipment, chemical fertilizers, and so on, a collapse of one industry could lead to further collapse.
When building cloud infrastructure a practice I've seen used is to avoid creating dependency cycles between systems. Otherwise an outage of one can result in an unrecoverable situation for many systems. We don't avoid cyclic dependencies in our economy; I think we reward it.
For anyone who thought this comment was interesting or scary, I highly recommend A Canticle For Lebowitz. It’s about nuclear war and its impact on technology, and I recommend you go into it knowing little more than that
Yes, that is a great observation! I’ll have to think about that one… I see the core distinction between CFL and Foundation as pragmatic focused narrative vs idealistic grand narrative, but there’s also a very very interesting element of magical realism and religiosity in the former that I find far more interesting than the more empirical themes of Foundation dealing with institutional structures and their reciprocal relationship to historical developments.
But I’ve only read the first book of Foundation, so might be wildly off. Tried to read the second, but accidentally bought the third and never got the time to fix the mistake! Who names their third book “second foundation”??
> The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently.
Yes, but is strange that this theory wasn't mentioned at all in the article, despite containing clear evidence for its truth: For example, there is the fact that they gradually lost the ability to build boats to trade between islands, and that smaller islands lost some or all crops over time.
Yes, there's an argument that our "increasing returns" are related to population size, not technology itself. So the coming population plateau may be interesting. Perhaps AI's will compensate for this.
> The relationship of absolute population size to progress may be one of the most important facts about human history and why we only developed shockingly recently.
Dr. Robert Zubrin said this in Merchants of Despair, which is the most important book published this century. Just read the first chapter. There are 2 graphs that changed my thinking.
It is illogical to ask for green tech to clean up the environment while also asking for population reduction because a smaller population means fewer inventions.
While technically and economically true, global fertility rates except in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are cratering. Income, community cohesiveness, and leisure time of the non-ultrarich need to substantially improve to encourage larger families.
This is not a contradiction as these are multiple variables. The most important variable is the size of population able to participate in knowledge production.
Naturally higher the population size, higher the size of population able to participate in knowledge production. This creates a positive feedback loop on the population growth.
Downside of this is that every gain that would allow better living is eaten up by the population growth (there is actually name for this - Malthusian trap). Downside of this is that the size of knowledge producing population stays relatively constant in relation to the total population size.
There is another feedback loop, three actually. If households restrain the number of offspring in return of better education of the offspring then three things happen. First the size of knowledge producing population starts to grow independent of total population growth, total population growth will stagnate or decrease and amount of personal wealth will increase (surplus of resource growth is divided among fewer people).
This is also why Western world is rich, large parts of Asia is getting rich and Africa and India are staying poor.
Naturally there is a huge downside in the negative feedback loop on the population growth as eventually it will start hurting the total amount of knowledge production. It would be better if these two feedback loops would balance each other out.
It's not necessarily an either-or situation. Increased population can enable increased technological sophistication and increased technological sophistication can in turn enable an even larger population. This can be a self-reinforcing process. Anyway, I think your referencing the rgeen revolution which happened in the last hundred years while the GP is referencing the rise of agriculture.
There's also the (English) agricultural revolution.
And the rise of logistics and world trade in general. Bigger markets mean more productivity from specialisation, even if the underlying technology doesn't change. See eg the ancient Roman economy. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... is a good introduction.
> and occasionally abruptly, in environmental or social shocks
Reminds me of the history of what happened to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) after all the trees had been cut down and the ecosystem significantly modified by human presence. The whole island was originally forested.
As far as I'm aware, this has been thoroughly debunked, especially by Hunt and Lipo [1], who have argued against the "ecocide" theory, pointing out that the deforestation appeared to have had a positive effective on the islander's agriculture, and that contrary to Diamond's claims, the population was increasing, not falling, at the time of European contact.
The deforestation was almost certainly caused by the Polynesian rat, as archeological research has shown that the same type of deforestation happened on other islands where rats where accidentally introduced, but not on settled islands where there were no signs of rats having been introduced. I believe Diamond (or maybe it was Heyerdahl) claims the settlers chopped down the forest in order to make rolling logs for transporting statues, but we now know that statues were transported by "walking" them using ropes [2].
As a pop-sci counterpart to "Collapse", I recommend the podcast The Fall of Civilization's episode on Easter Island [3], which includes this newer research. The podcast is wonderful in general, and that episode is one of the best in the series.
As far I'm concerned, Diamond has a lot to answer for in perpetuating these modern myths that get repeated long after they've been debunked. His narratives catch people's interest because they are simple explanations that "make sense", and come with a kind of moral component, one of dramatic irony (the settlers were so stupid to chop down their trees, just to make these useless statues!). Diamond also wrote about Greenland and argued for the same kind of story there, despite evidence to the contrary.
There is an entire academic book [4] devoted to debunking Diamond's claims, which should tell you how annoyed real archeologists, anthropologists, and historians are with his books.
This was shown to be kind of likely to have been rats that arrived with the settlers destroyed the defenseless palm trees in a matter of years. Since palm is a softwood and not suitable for building boats for deep sea fishing, the islanders switched to agriculture, growing taro and other plants in volcanic soil. They recognized the island had a maximum population capacity and socialized themselves to build statues from the quarry, instead of making babies. Very interesting.
