alt Hacker NewsBeing stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting.
This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do.
They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.
Replies
watwut • last Sunday at 11:37 AM
Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
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Ar-Curunir • last Sunday at 5:21 PM
Religion is not exclusive to agrarian societies. Indeed, much of proto-indo-European religion (ie the OG “sky father” [1]) was developed on the steppes in a pastoral lifestyle.
I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society.
Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle?
It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves.
With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape.
In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ...
Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture.
It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery!
For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!