I understand that it took quite a few million years for humans to accommodate to their environment, but why did apes for example stay the same approximately while we had all the advancement. For example why are we into philosophy, writing manifestos, infrastructure, complex design, technology etc while apes aren’t exactly.
Why did it take us 6 million years of hunting to think about farming?
In: 178
Because the transition from hunting to hunter/gatherer to proto-farming to farming is hard.
i’ll give you a very abbreviated idea of what is considered a reasonably timeline of what happened over the course of many many many years, decades, centuries.
hunting and huntergatherer is pretty straight forward is pretty straight forward, I’m going to skip it.
proto-farming though – that’s the trick. The working theory (I am not a historian or archeologist, I’m skimmed some of their work) I’ve seen is this:
Hunter gatherers lived in ranges of many miles, wandering around their range looking for food, or migrating (and looking for food) but not staying in one place. The hunter gatherers collected berries, wheat, and other edible plant materials on their hunter gatherer rounds. And the left overs where thrown away or the seeds that made it through the digestive track were then planted on the ground. And this way the crops that the hunter gathers ate would be spread along the range that they lived in. So every year they may find another berry plant or wheat plants where they would roam, and that would encourage them to return there again next year, which would spread more of those seeds. And that in turn would widen the area where there is food the hunter gathers could eat.
but this kind of spreading of seed like this is slow because our hunter gatherers don’t know that they are spreading the seeds.
eventually you get to an area that the hunter gstherers have past through enough and is fertile enough that the hunter gatherers can stay there more than a day or two. Maybe a week before moving on. That in turn spreads those seeds more in that area. And then after a couple more years, those hunter gatherers can stay for several weeks in that area instead of one week.
at some point in here someone gets the idea to intentionally *plant those seeds* instead of just letting them randomly fall where they may. So when they come back the year after that there are more plants they can harvest. And then there is more intentional planting. So the year after that when they return there are even more plants to work with.
and Slowly but surely the entire range is populated with plants that bear fruit. This makes it easier to gather food over the entire range.
eventually a couple people from a tribe of hunter gatherers says: “there is enough here, I’m staying right here.“ and they make a go of it while the rest of the tribe continues along the range. And eventually one of those people who stays manages to survive on the available plants and begins to figure out how to grow more of those plants.
And I’ve just compressed about 150,000 years into the text above. from there Stone Age agriculture is on the horizon.
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