Re: CG040, CG041: Recency of writing and agriculture

Mark Isaak wrote:

> Here is a substantially revised version of CG041 to tear into:
>
> ----------------------------------
> Claim CG041: Agriculture is too recent.
>
> Standard science says that humans lived as hunter-gatherers for
> 185,000 years before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years
> ago. It is improbable that the Stone Age men, who were as intelligent
> as we are, did not discover how to plant food plants for so long.
>
> Source:
>
> Humphreys, D. Russell. 2005. Evidence for a young world. _Impact_
> 384 (June): v-vi.
>
> Response:
>
> 1. Why is it implausible that humans lived for a long time without
> agriculture? Agriculture allows higher population densities, but it
> leads to an overall decrease in the quality of life over that of
> hunter-gatherers (Diamond 1987). In particular, agriculture requires
> much more work for a lower quality, less dependable diet, and it
> increases disease. There was no pressing reason to adopt agriculture
> in the first place.
>
> 2. The end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago may have
> facilitated the origin of agriculture at that time. The changed
> climate may have made agriculture possible in more areas, and/or it
> may have led to a human population increase which required agriculture
> to sustain.
>
> 3. It is possible that agriculture *has* been discovered several
> different times over the last 180,000 years. Climate change, even
> over relatively short periods of a few decades, has caused the
> collapse of agricultural societies in historical times, and the
> climate has changed dramatically over the last 180,000 years.
> Agriculture in the distant past may have been lost repeatedly.
>
> 4. The assumption that humans have not changed in intelligence over
> the past 185,000 years is unsupportable and appears to be invalid.

Still too strong, I would say. "might not be true" is as far as I would go.

A
> team of geneticists has found evidence that human brains have evolved
> adaptively recently (and may still be evolving). Two genes associated
> with brain size have genetic variants whose high frequencies indicate
> that they spread under strong positive selection. A haplotype
> (genetic variant) of the _Microcephalin_ gene arose about 37,000 years
> ago (95 percent confidence interval of 14,000 to 60,000 years) (Evans
> et al. 2005). An _ASPM_ haplotype arose only about 5800 years ago (95
> percent confidence interval of 500 to 14,000 years) (Mekel-Bobrov et
> al. 2005). It should be emphasized that the effects of these
> haplotypes is currently unknown; the evidence for strong selection
> indicates only that their effects are important, that humans have
> evolved recently in some way. It may be significant that they
> occurred around the same times as the introduction of modern humans to
> Europe and the origins of art (about 40,000 years ago) and the rise of
> agriculture and writing (about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago). It is also
> possible that these genes are not relevant to the origins of
> agriculture but others are. The larger point is that there is
> evidence that humans continue to evolve in subtle ways.

5. Regardless of whether we know the reasons why more technological
progress was not made earlier, humans do have a long history, stretching
back much, much farther than 6000 years, and we do have good indications
of levels of technology during this history. "I don't know why this
happened" is not a good reason to say "This didn't happen".

> References:
>
> 1. Diamond, Jared. 1987. The worst mistake in the history of the
> human race. _Discover_, May: 64-66.
> http://anthropology.lbcc.edu/handoutsdocs/mistake.pdf
> 2. Evans, Patrick D. et al. 2005. _Microcephalin_, a gene regulating
> brain size, continues to evolve adaptively in humans. _Science_ 309:
> 1717-1720.
> 3. Mekel-Bobrov, Nitzan et al. 2005. Ongoing adaptive evolution of
> _ASPM_, a brain size determinant in _Homo sapiens_. _Science_ 309:
> 1720-1722.
>
> Further Reading:
>
> Diamond, Jared. 1997. _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
> Societies_. New York: Norton.
>
>
> --
> Mark Isaak eciton (at) earthlink (dot) net
> "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
> the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
> being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
> exposing the country to danger." -- Hermann Goering
>

.

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