stone tool production was an activity most commonly practiced, work also involved creating specialized tools like fishing nets and hooks and bone harpoons ,another activity that aided in intelligence was long-distance running as in persistence hunting, a method still practiced by some hunter-gatherer groups in modern times, was likely the driving evolutionary force leading to the evolution of certain human characteristics here is a link to the theory.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_running_man_revisited/
Collecting seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits, sounds easy but is an activity that requires much knowledge of your environment, an example is the Cree who scavenged the Seneca root. All of which would have to be revised if there is a shift in climate or culture, requiring a new way of thinking. And of course hunting, a task that requires forethought, reasoning and constant creativity in order to keep catching prey.
Good points, I was thinking about hunter-gatherer society in terms of last thousands of years before farming, the time of transition. As you pointed, they have undeniably invented many things and new concepts like: man made fire, living in caves, tools made of stone, bones and wood (or their combination, stone on a stick like a hammer or a spear), religion, skin made cloths, tents, cooked food, musical instruments.
I was hoping though, that you are going to notice the scale of time, the monumental paradigm shift, the acceleration of invention of new concepts the farming brought. You see, it took H-Gatherers a million years or so to come up with their inventions. It took only 5k years for Farmers (we can even disregard last 5k years) to invent much more extensive list of new concepts, a long list of completely new ideas. To emphasizes my point even more, I should add to my previous list other novel ideas of farmers like wheel, use of clay for pots and bricks, use of metal, irrigation of fields, writing, not mentioning many new technics in new occupations they've created.
For simplicity of argument let's assume that both groups invented same number of new concepts. It still would leave us with the huge difference in time scale, 5k years versus a million. It means that Farmers came up with their inventions 200 times faster than H-Gatherers! This is really
huge shift.
How can you explain this explosion of new inventions, when you assumed that smaller brains of modern humans meant less intelligence?
,another activity that aided in intelligence was long-distance running as in persistence hunting
How does running add to intelligence, except more oxygen flow? Besides it is hardly a new idea, a new concept. We had ran before, only later we started to run a lot and long distances. It is only a change within existing concept.
Perhaps the novel idea was that there is food at the end of a long run. But not running itself.
To know who we were in the past, it is enough to observe little boys playing. Mostly they run around in little groups and play wars. Also our most popular sports are group sports. Football is nothing more than two groups of men (hunters), running a lot, to achieve common goal, to win against other group of men. This is how we do civilized wars against other cities or countries.
We can't escape our past. We are the product of our ancestors life style and environment.
I referenced that these early farmers had a tough existence in my last post, but nothing compared to a hunter gatherer, examples being that the homicide rate among tribes was 30%, and hunting big game was extremely dangerous not to mention physically strenuous, i cant imagine any farm work coming close to hunting a herd of buffalo or taking down a mammoth.Actually most tribes in the amazon are semi agricultural, in that they cannot practice a full fledged farming system because most of the land isn't suitable for it, most of their subsistence comes form hunting and gathering.
Ok thanks for the lesson, ill elaborate on my last post. Today if an ice age were to come we would be able to fair through it reasonably well, and most of this is because of tech advents all stemming from the agricultural revolution, where as a hunter gatherer would not be able to coast through such an event and only the fittest and smartest would survive. While less would live through it future generations would benefit because these great genes would pass on, where as today the lesser specimens among us can survive with relative ease and continue to pass on our less than adequate genes.
I've never questioned how dangerous hunter-gatherers' life was. I'm talking about very different lifestyles and consequences of adaptation to them. It has to be a reason why farmers didn't want to switch to Native's life style, and also it has to be a reason why Natives in general don't want to accept farming way of life.
Obviously farming was beneficial in increased food access therefore survival of early adopters. Whenever conditions were suitable for farming population grew 10 or 100 fold compared to H_Gatherers. My point from post one, was about tremendous shift in lifestyle of folks adapting to farming. According to natural selection this obviously had to effect gene selection to fit farming lifestyle even better with time. Do you deny it?
One of best farming lands are in east Asia. This is no coinsurance that China was always stronger and most influential in this region even if only by sheer number of inhabitants their land supported From all ancient records, and archaeology, we know that this part of our planet was always most populated of all. It makes sense, because south China can have 2 growing seasons a year, where in Europe we could have only one. From this two top agricultural regions, I would pick east China as the most genetically adapted to farming. Farming demands a lot of work, the daily grind. Getting up early in the morning and feeding animals. Seeding fields takes weeks, long repetitive motions hours after hours. So is taking care of it, watering, plowing, harvesting thrashing, milling, and food making of animals, cooking for big families from scratch few times a day, taking care of buildings and fences. Hauling surplus to the market, and paying taxes to the landlords and churches. Unfortunately for today's city dwellers it is so hard to imagine how labour intensive life is on simple farms.
Now be a judge and observe for yourself how different peoples work, which is not difficult in Canada, and you should be able to guess their heritage. Keep in mind that these are general observation of populations and not characteristics of individuals. Observing one person and generalizing one observation over whole population gives misleading results.