So for this lecture, I'm going high-tech, distributing a few pages.
That is typically as far as I go in my classes at the University of Nevada Las Vegas also.
I've never used anything more high-tech than this.
Again, let me make a few personal remarks.
One is, since some of you have seen the videotape of Murray Rothbard, I should mention that for
For the last 10 years of his life, I was his closest colleague.
In a way, I was his intellectual bodyguard.
I came to the United States in 1985 and worked with Murray for a year in New York City.
When he was out of town, then I taught his classes.
In 1986 he received an offer for an endowed chair at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,
which was the first big position that he ever held, and at that time there was another opening,
and he asked me to come with him, and by accident I got that job too.
was I think the only year at that university where it was possible but that both of us
could be hired from that moment on the composition of the department had changed in such a way
that we never again would have received the job and then I stayed there until he died
in 1995 and now I'm the only lonely hold out there that they can no longer get rid of.
The other remark concerns the lectures.
This is the structure of the lectures. It's supposed to be the structure of my next book project that I have.
Because of that, in a way, I put more work into it than you normally tend to do.
and on top of it, it is Lew Rockwell who by inviting me always forces me to overcome my natural laziness
and put all my energy together and then prepare myself for these occasions.
In this lecture I want to talk about the spread of humans around the world and the extension and the intensification of the division of labor.
This subject will be continued to a certain extent in the next lecture which I will give tomorrow morning.
Homo sapiens, men as we know it, who is about the cranial volume that we have, is estimated
to be about 500,000 years old and takes on the current appearance roughly about 100,000
years ago.
And as I mentioned in the previous lecture, the point when the language capability developed
is dated somehow from 150,000 to 50,000 years ago.
There is general agreement, not complete agreement, but pretty much unanimous agreement that mankind spread out from Africa.
And if you take a look at this first chart here, which
is taken from the Cavalli's Forza book,
he gives you some rough dates about this process.
So his estimation is that people began to leave Africa 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, maybe up to 100,000 years ago and that the first spreading was to Asia.
We have the oldest findings of human skeletons and so forth in China, dated at 67,000 years old.
And then from China, they traveled to Australia, which he dates roughly at 55,000 years ago.
And this travel time, I'll have more to say about that,
This travel time took about 10,000 years from Africa to Australia.
One will have to say here something about the possibilities of this traveling.
You have to keep in mind there existed a few glacial periods, actually four glacial periods in the last 900,000 years and each of those lasted about 75,000 years.
The last one of these glacial periods lasted from 25,000 years ago to about 13,000 years ago.
And during these glacial periods, of course, the level of the oceans dropped considerably
The reason for this is because snow accumulated on the mountains and less water melted, so that the gaps between Southeast Asia and Indonesia and Borneo and Australia became rather small.
They did not disappear completely, but they were small enough that they could be traversed by very small boats.
The Sahara Desert, for instance, is only 3,000 years old.
Before that, that was not exactly the most fruitful of areas, but nonetheless a region that could be used for hunting and gathering activities and also for agricultural purposes.
The next break-off of the population is then the break-off to Europe, which Cavalli's Forza dates around 40,000, 43,000 years ago.
And the latest split-off is the one to America across the Bering Street,
for which again very rough estimates only exist.
They range from 15,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago.
And the spreading of the population on the American continent is estimated to have lasted about a thousand years from the north all the way down to Patagonia, which would be something like 8 miles per year, so not a huge amount per year.
The spreading at this time is either by foot or, and that was significantly faster, by boat.
Boat travel remained the fastest way of traveling until the domestication of horses, which occurs only some 6,000 years ago.
So until that time, as I said, nothing but walking was possible, and as a matter of fact, as you probably know from your history lessons, that was pretty much the only way of transportation that existed on the American continent until the arrival of Europeans.
We always just picture these Indians on horses, but of course there existed no horses whatsoever.
And they existed actually on the American continent, not even wheels.
That is to say people transported things by schlepping some wooden planks behind them
and all the things behind them on which they had, whatever they had to transport during these early times until about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago all of these populations, all of these people
were hunters and gatherers, moving in small speeds around, mostly in small bands of 50-60 people,
But several bands usually had some sort of connection.
There exists some biological reason that minimal group sizes have to be about 500 people in order to prevent some sort of genetic degeneration.
So one can expect that even if they were in small bands, there was some sort of communication and intermarriage and so forth with people of this group size.
The density of population was, as you can imagine, of course, extremely low.
Again, the estimation is there that in hunter-gatherer societies, you can have only one person per square mile.
For a larger population, the earth did not produce enough foodstuff, so to speak, to support them.
Population growth was extremely low, partly because of birth control techniques used by people by long breastfeeding and things of that nature.
and, of course, because of high mortality rates, the estimation is that 100,000 years ago, so to speak, at the beginning of this process that I'm talking about, the population size was about 50,000 on the world.
50,000 on the entire globe, and 10,000 years ago, that is the period that I will talk about a little bit later,
the so-called Neolithic Revolution, when people begin to settle down and begin agricultural existence,
The numbers there are between 1 and 15 million and the estimation that most people accept is about 5 million.
So from 100,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, 90,000 years of time,
The population increases only from 50,000 to 5 million, and that is roughly a doubling of the population every 13-14,000 years.
Again, to give you some sort of ballpark figure, what the speed of doubling populations is now, from the 1950s on, the populations doubled every 35 years.
So you can see based on this figure what extremely small growth of population took place during this period.
The groups basically simply broke away from each other as soon as there was not enough foodstuff available
and then expanded to two different areas and further and further along, as I said, many times by boat, frequently also by foot, and they existed then for a considerable amount of times, 90,000 years or so.
So, very little communication and intermingling of these breakaway groups, which explains,
so to speak, the fact that quite different genetic stocks of people develop because very
very limited inbreeding took place. In addition, take into consideration these glacial periods
which cut off sometimes for ten thousands of years communication between groups that
were not distance-wise far apart from each other. The Alps, for instance, became essentially
is really impassable, so people who were in the north lost all the contact with people who were in the south.
The weather or the rains in Eurasia come mostly from the west and eastward,
Most of the snow accumulated in the west and the drier climates were in the east so then
people moved from the west to the east and then partially after the glacial periods were
over then returned back to more western regions.
So practically no contact between these groups, of course, particularly pronounced in cases
such as Australia and Borneo, which became then separated by large bodies of waters as
as compared to the periods when you could cross these straits.
And there exists a general law, which is easy to grasp,
that genetic distance increases in correlation
with physical distance and with the separation in time.
And I provided you with two charts
that are just supposed to give you some rough indication of this.
I have no intention to go into that in great detail.
But the first one, this tree diagram,
indicates roughly the distance in the genetic material
of the populations living in these major areas,
and reflect in a way the periods when population broke away
from each other, so indicating, for instance,
that the first split occurred between Africa and Asia.
And then the second split occurred
between Asia and Europe.
And the third one was Asia and America,
and indicating also the wide genetic distance,
So to speak, we need Africa on the one hand and the oceanic population on the other.
The other table is more detailed, as you see it has on the left side the genetic relationships,
How far or close some of the major ethnic groups are genetically and on the right side
how close or distance they are in terms of their languages.
There's obviously some sort of correlation between language groups and linguistic groups,
but by no means a perfect one, which can be of course explained mostly by, again, by invasions
of various people who then spread their own language also in regions that were genetically
originally different, or sometimes you have regions that are genetically quite close, but
they have broad languages from far away distances. An example would be, for instance, in the
European scenery, let's say, the Finns and the Hungarians and the Turks, which have somewhat
are not closely related languages, even though they are physically quite far removed from each other.
I'll come back to this type of topic about different ethnicities and related subjects in a later lecture.
For the current purpose, this is entirely sufficient just to get some sort of feeling
and how the separation and the movement of hunter-gatherers with very little contact with each other automatically brings these results about.
In addition, this separation and very limited cooperation between different groups brings also about a tendency to create a large variety of languages.
You will see later on, there exists of course also a tendency for languages to be reduced in number at the moment when the contacts between various groups becomes intensified.
That is, when division of labor is no longer restricted to these small groups, but division of labor becomes more extensive and more intensive, including ever larger regions of the population, then there is a countervailing tendency.
It's because then there exists, of course, again, a need for people to communicate with
each other and one can recognize that it is then an advantage to speak languages that
are spoken by very many people.
If you are living more or less enclosed in small groups and the division of labor is
restricted to these small groups, then there is no disadvantage in just having a different
Language for each one of these groups. Currently there exists about 5,000 to 6,000 languages.
But to give you an extreme example, 1,000 of these 5,000 to 6,000 languages are spoken
And for instance, in Guinea, and half of these thousand languages have no more than 500 speakers.
That is pretty close to the number that I gave you, what the minimum size of a group
has to be in order to avoid negative genetic effects, so to speak.
And there are only a few in Guinea that are spoken by more than 100,000 people.
Again, that also immediately indicates something about the state of development of this place,
that obviously that is not a place in which the division of labor is very extensive and
intensive.
They are still living rather isolated and have only division of labor within their little tribes without much need to learn other languages or one language taking over other languages and become the dominant one.
So division of labor at this stage of a very, very limited kind, obviously women tend to be more the gatherers, men tend to be more the hunters, there are some people who make tools and so forth, but the number of tools and instruments is also very limited.
So by and large, very small numbers of different professions, if we can talk about that at all, there are probably no one who is really specializing full-time in certain types of activities.
The division of labor even shrinks at times during this period, which leads to a situation
where people unlearn things that were already part of the accumulated knowledge of mankind.
Those things took place in particular in the cases of New Guinea and Australia and Tasmania,
that is places that for tens of thousands of years were completely isolated from anybody
else and could not even occasionally, so to speak, adopt techniques or knowledge that
had been accumulated at other parts of the world.
So for instance, the Australian aborigines still used stone tools in around 1800.
In Tasmania, which were cut off for some 10,000 years from any other place, these people must
Obviously have known at some time the technique of constructing boats, but when they were
rediscovered they were not able to make boats.
They must at some time have had the capability of using bows and arrows, but when they were
rediscovered they were not able to use arrows and bows because the population had become
too small and no influx of innovation came in so these people with a smaller population
simply became less informed, less knowledgeable than they must have been at the beginning.
The same is also true, by the way, for Eskimos and Polynesians.
The Polynesians also had partially unlearned the ability of making boats, even though they
must have had this ability at some time in the past, unless they were very good swimmers.
As a little side remark, there exists an explanation why Polynesians tend to be very fat people.
That is because fat people had, so to speak, an advantage to survive at long boat trips
where they didn't know where they would end up.
So people who had accumulated a lot of body fat or so had a higher chance to finally find
whatever Fiji Islands or whatever these places are, which is, so to speak, an explanation
why we still find massive people on these places, far more massive than you would find
them in other regions of the world.
So then we arrive at one of the great revolutions
in human development.
And that is the so-called Neolithic Revolution,
which took place about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.
And the main explanatory factor for this
was that land became gradually scarcer and scarcer
and more valuable.
And pressure, so to speak, arose to find a solution to the problem, how do we feed the people who cannot walk around and break away and find new hunting and gathering places.
We have to make it possible that people can live in larger numbers on smaller territories.
Before, land was more or less treated as a free good, and if it is treated as a free good,
There existed, of course, also no incentive to appropriate it, to make land what would
establish property in land.
In the previous lecture I explained it was, of course, perfectly natural that people consider
the bow and arrow their bow and arrow and the axe their axe and so forth.
And when they hunted down a buffalo, if I had hunted him down, then of course it was
was my buffalo, but property in land is a relatively new invention so to speak and the
explanation is land all of a sudden is perceived to be scarce and as soon as it becomes to
be perceived as scarce, there will be attempts made by people to fence pieces off from other
pieces, to mark places off from other places and claim them as mine or yours.
The places where agriculture starts are naturally those places that have by nature, so to speak, an abundance of suitable plants.
That is where you have wild corn and wild wheat and white, wild rye and so forth, people settle then there and then begin to cultivate that, breed better products.
and those happen to be the places that we describe as the Fertile Crescent that is what is Iraq and Syria and those places nowadays on the one hand and on the other hand China that is places that were located close to
to reverse and then later on of course also Egypt.
Again we might want to take a look at the next chart that I have here that deals on
on the one hand was examples of domesticated plants and animals by the date of earliest
Domestication and by region.
So again, this begins, so to speak, at about 8,000 before Christ.
The only animal that had been domesticated before was the dog, which you find on the
The opposite page. Dogs, of course, had been already of some use for hunters and gatherers.
All the other animals are typical animals that are useful only in agricultural societies
and not so much useful if you lead hunter and gatherer life existences.
Again, the thing that I would like to make you aware of here is the remarkable observation
that there existed basically no large-scale domesticated animals on the American continent
except for the llama which is not exactly comparable in its versatility to horses and
Cows and those things.
There exists some explanations that Mr. Diamond proposes, which don't sound too plausible
to me.
He is some sort of environmentalist.
He explains, for instance, the fact that there are no domesticated animals, large-scale animals
on the American continent with the fact that it points out that initially there existed
all the animals on the American continent that existed in Asia and Europe also.
But on the American continent overhunting took place.
And then you ask, of course, why did overhunting take place?
Why did they wipe out all of these animals and did not recognize in time, so to speak,
the value of some of them, the potential to be domesticated and so forth, as compared
to what people did in Eurasia.
And his explanation is that people arrived in America at a later date than in Asia and
in Europe, and at that date the weapons technology was already further developed, so the killing
potential was greater for those people active on the American continent, such that the extinction
of Animals resulted there and did not result in Eurasia.
Again, there exists, of course, also other explanations
for this to which I will come at some future lecture that
might have also something to do, of course,
was a lack of foresight, that there was more foresight among some people in Eurasia and
less foresight in America to prevent this sort of environmental catastrophe, as we might
call it, from occurring.
Now, agricultural life allows, of course, a far greater density of the population than hunter-gatherer existences.
As a matter of fact, it is estimated that 10 to 100 times as many people can live on the same piece of land
And if they engage in agriculture, then if they would engage in hunting and gathering activities.
And we also recognize that as soon as you have settled down,
build agricultural communities for the first time it becomes possible that capital can be accumulated.
Imagine hunters and gatherers who just schlep around from place to place. There is only so many
things that you can take with you. After all, you have to carry all of this and most of the stuff
Now that you settle, of course, you can establish storages, you can accumulate things for bad seasons, and you can feed not only larger numbers, you can also turn your activity from one type of farming to another.
from farming to other types of farming, from growing one type of cereal to growing other types of cereal and so forth.
Initially, the way anthropologists describe or compare the life of the hunters and gatherers with the life of the settlers, the agricultural settled people,
They point out that the life of hunters and gatherers was in a way easier, nicer.
They spent only a few hours a day just hunting away and then they were lazing around.
Whereas the agricultural people worked for long periods of time,
time, especially since this whole thing started, so to speak, in the Middle East, with comparatively
nice weather all year round.
You could work also all year around, whereas hunters and gatherers had entire seasons off.
So anthropologists report, for instance, that the hunters and gatherers frequently laughed at the stupid agricultural settlers there, that they worked so hard and they themselves had such a nice and lazy life.
What is not true, however, which you find in some books reported, that it was that these hunter-gatherer societies turned out to be militarily, so to speak, superior over agricultural societies and regularly raided them.
And if you think about it, while this is of course possible, there are compelling reasons why that should not be the case.
That is why agricultural societies should have been, even in this department, that is defending themselves superior over hunter-gatherer societies,
and other societies simply because they engage in capital accumulation, they are denser populations, they have far more men, and in conflicts, typically it was not the hunter-gatherer societies that beat the agricultural societies, but vice versa.
Because of this then, let me just say something about the population size again.
So with the Neolithic Revolution, so from 10 to 12,000 years ago, the population doubles
every 1,300 years, roughly, as compared with 13,000 years prior to that.
So that we have, for instance, again these are all ballpark figures, at some later lecture
I will also give you a table with some sort of population estimates.
So the estimation is that maybe 10,000 years ago we had 5 million people at the beginning
of the Neolithic Revolution, and in the year one, the numbers that are given go from 170
million to 400 million.
So if you take an average of these estimates, then you come up with this rough idea of 1,300
for the years per doubling of the population.
Now this superiority of agricultural societies over hunter-gathering societies is then responsible
for the gradual spreading of these societies.
This did not start at every place.
It started at a few places.
As I said, fertile crescent, then some places in China, and gradually the farmers, so to speak, take over more and more land.
The hunter-gatherers are first transformed into herders.
They don't roam around anymore, they have no deal with tamed animals,
But the tamed animals are of course now on the outskirts and even the herders gradually lose more and more land to the ever expanding farming population.
Again, if you just look at the current world, hunters and gatherers practically exist no more at all, except at the very fringes of the globe.
And even herders exist only at very small places, again, far removed, whatever, in Siberia, in places of that kind.
So the superior civilization, if we want to use this term, the agricultural civilization gradually expands outward.
The time, for instance, you can gather that from one of these tables also where, when
and various plans and so forth appear in various regions.
The time takes about 5,000 years for agriculture
to spread from the fertile crescent
to reach a place like England.
So that would be, if I remember correctly,
That would be an expansion of something like slightly more than one kilometer per year,
which is added, so to speak, to an agriculturally used territory and taken away from hunter-gatherer
territories.
The division of labor now intensifies, of course, quite a bit.
There are not just three, four different types of occupation that you can do, small villages
coming into existence, craftsmen who are specialized in these tasks evolve, far more specialization.
There is also a certain amount of interregional trade now developing, whereas between the
The hunter-gatherer societies, as I said, there was practically no trading going on whatsoever and, of course, innovations now spread in some sort of regular and permanent way.
Again, hunter-gatherer societies living, so to speak, side by side.
It happens, but it happens more or less by accident that one group picks up a new technique that has been developed by another one.
Now, in agricultural societies, people living next door to each other are being integrated to a certain extent through division of labor.
Labor. Of course, the diffusion of knowledge also takes place. It is something that is developed in one place, will eventually arrive at some other place and will be imitated there if it happens to be useful at those places.
The source of direction is always from the center of civilization, which is further crescent in the river valleys in China, to the periphery where the wild people still live.
And no longer does it take place that the division of labor breaks down as easily, that something is simply forgotten.
As long as contact remains in existence, and it does remain in existence, and the population size increases,
The specialization progresses and innovations are transported from place to place.
And what I pointed out before, now with agriculture we see also a tendency that this previous tendency of languages
Languages to break up into larger and larger numbers of different languages does come to a certain halt.
There is no more communication between them.
There is a greater advantage to speak languages that are spoken by many people
and also a tendency, so to speak, for the first time to learn the languages of neighboring regions
because you trade and associate with them to a certain extent, which you did not do during the previous phase of mankind.
Let me end this lecture by providing you with two quotes from Mises, the first one a quote, the full implication of which will only become clear in the next lecture.
I think Mises tries to explain why there is, so to speak, an inherent tendency in human development of extending the division of labor,
of having more and more people participate in division of labor and to intensify division of labor that is to specialize more and more and dedicate your entire time to specific tasks rather than do one hour this and another hour this and an hour this.
And the second quote, which again leads over to the first lecture of tomorrow morning,
a quote where he describes, so to speak, the inherent limitations that purely agricultural societies have,
which lets us expect, so to speak, that a new invention has to be made again, just as we invented agriculture to solve the problem of the increasing scarcity of land.
We have to make a new, mankind has to come up with another, has to solve another challenge that is inherent in purely agricultural societies that is to develop industrial societies with cities in order to deal with the fact that of course even in agricultural societies we will reach eventually the point again when
The land cannot support steadily growing populations and a new institution allowing us to live on far denser, far smaller territories comes into being.
The first quote, as I said, dealing with the cause, what he says, the cause of social evolution.
There he says, the simplest way to depict the evolution of society is to show the distinction between two evolutionary tendencies
which are related to each other in the same way as intention and extension.
Society develops subjectively and objectively, subjectively by enlarging its membership.
We have seen how that takes place reaching already several million people
at the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution and then shooting up from there in a more rapid rate.
So subjectively by enlarging its membership and objectively by enlarging the aims of its activities.
Far more activities become possible in an agricultural society.
We build huts, we build tools for which there was no need before, we build storage facilities
and so forth, enlarging the aims of human activities.
Originally confined to the narrowest circles of people, to immediate neighbors, the division
of Labor gradually becomes more general until eventually it includes all mankind.
This process, still far from complete and never at any point in history completed, is
finite.
We can of course imagine, so to speak, a point when this process has reached an end.
When all men on earth form a unitary system of division of labor, it will have reached its goal.
Side by side with this extension of the social bonds goes a process of intensification.
Social action embraces more and more aims and the area in which the individual provides for his own consumption
becomes constantly narrower. We need not pause at this stage to ask whether this process will eventually result in the specialization of all productive activity.
But again, the tendency is clearly in this direction.
There's an interesting quote on what I might call the limitations of purely agricultural societies.
There he says, we may depict conditions of a society of agriculturalists in which every member
Remember tilts a piece of land large enough to provide himself and his family with the
indispensable necessities of life.
We may include in such a picture the existence of a few specialists, artisans like Smiths
and professional men like doctors.
We may even go further and assume that some men do not own a farm but work as laborers
on Other People's Farms.
The employer remunerates them for their help and takes care of them when sickness or old
age disables him.
This scheme of an ideal society was at the bottom of many utopian plans.
It was by and large realized for some time in some communities.
The nearest approach to its realization was probably the commonwealth which the Jesuit
Padres established in the country which is today Paraguay.
There is, however, no need to examine the merits of such a system of social organization.
Historical evolution burst it asunder.
This frame was too narrow for the number of people who are living today on the Earth's surface.
The inherent weakness of such a society is that the increase in population must result
in progressive poverty.
If the estate of a deceased farmer is divided among its children, the holdings finally become
have become so small that they can no longer provide sufficient sustenance for a family.
Everybody is a landowner, but everybody is extremely poor.
Conditions as they prevailed in large areas of China
provide a sad illustration of the misery of the tillers of small parcels.
The alternative to this outcome is the emergence of a huge mass of landless proletarians.
Then a wide gap separates the disinherited paupers from the fortunate farmers.
They are a class of pariahs whose very existence presents society with an insoluble problem.
They search in vain for a livelihood. Society has no use for them. They are destitute.
And here then, a solution to another problem has to be developed, and that is the solution of industrial capitalism.
and Capitalism, the development of towns, money, which allows another push in the growth of mankind and in the specialization of tasks.
And I will talk about that tomorrow. Thank you.
Any questions?
Is this the lecture where you can discuss private property as the ownership of land and how much land a party should own?
I will come back to this subject at several points again, but yes, of course, but here you immediately realize that of course if we use this idea that you acquire property in things that you have brought under your own control,
The initial size of farm plots must have been very moderate.
At this time we have no means of transportation that would allow us to just plough huge amounts of land.
So the parcels that people bring under their active control are comparatively small.
You do have, however, in those societies already a certain stratification, that is, there will be wealthier farmers and less wealthy farmers.
There will be some farmers who will be able to buy up the farmland of someone else.
So you can already have significant differences in the size of land holdings in such societies, but you could not have anything like Mises describes it at some point during the Roman Empire that three or four people owned all of Africa.
That you can only have with the help of a state, but not by personally or with the help of your employees taking possession, doing something to the land, fertilizing it, cultivating it, and so forth.
Any idea I have had is unsuccessful in that, as I see the desirable properties, being in contention, jealousies, that it entails in the subjective or individual self-defense, and the aligning themselves with the community, wherein jointly they can, and to proceed it on, I end up with a war, despite our, what of our chief objective being to keep those
First of all, yes, it is true that these agricultural societies, as I pointed out, have better defense capabilities because they are closer together.
They are adjoined and they can accumulate capital. In this regard they have an advantage over these roaming hunters and gatherers.
And the second point, yes, of course there is competition for the best land.
But we have to keep in mind there also that what is the best land and the best location is something that does change.
I recall the Sahara at one point in time was a piece of land that could be agriculturally used and then became entirely useless.
Regions that could not be used at all can be used as soon as we have air conditioning.
That is, technological advances, changes in the climate can make certain things attractive that were formerly unattractive and vice versa.
And we can even go a step further, we can say, yes, there is of course also a certain amount of entrepreneurial talent involved in picking out right places.
That is, at least nowadays, in the thousands of years, it was of course far more difficult because we had no idea of what the world offered, so to speak.
But now that we know basically everything, how it looks there and how it looks here,
now of course it is all partly entrepreneurial talent to figure out,
hey, this is a promising piece of land and I should get this one.
And we can even say, goes as far as to say,
then smarter people will tend to settle at better places
The loser in the competition is encouraged to move from Africa to Australia, isn't he?
at the beginning they could roll more all over I mean that place where we have now
CUN and Monaco and beautiful places and San Diego and who knows what it was
available to everyone but we cannot imagine that hunter-gatherers would be
able to hold on to places like this under current conditions obviously yeah
I'm just curious about the idea that hunter-gatherers basically went into an agricultural region and took over a state or a ruling group. Where did that idea originate?
That's the statement. Their view is, yeah, they are better in the short run, of course, they are better in the handling of arms.
That's what they have done. They have arrows and bows and this sort of stuff.
Is there any empirical evidence?
Empirical evidence in this entire period is very sparse.
So I have heard both positions argued.
I have persuaded myself to adopt the one that I presented here based more on theoretical reasons.
After all, they will be wealthier. After all, they can engage in capital accumulation. After all, they will, after a short period of time, of course, have people who are better as specialist warriors than the hunters and gatherers are.
Without saying that that other thing cannot happen, obviously, if you do a surprise attack and loot some farming community, that can happen.
But if you think, but would that be, so to speak, over and over possible? Is that the dominant pattern?
And there I would say that all theoretical reasons speak against that.
Yeah, but I think, but the same reasoning does apply to the herders as well.
Yes, but they're agriculturists. I mean, they're not completely settled, but they do not have a possibility to accumulate capital to the same extent as settled communities have.
What? Yeah, but the livestock is not capital that is relevant when it comes to defending yourself.
It's like you cannot build fortifications and things like this. Yes, yeah, you can, right, in some movies you can just run your buffaloes through
but again you see like if you have villages you can build walls the
herders would not have walls they just so in this in this sense I think the same
type of reasoning not to the same extent as hunter-gatherers applies to them as
well so I consider that to be also the less likely scenario even even though
The fact is probably that those two types of agriculture just didn't exist separately, just cultivation and just herding, that they probably overlapped. Some cultures may have been more herding and some may have been more killing.
more and more to the fringes, you have that in the United States also, you have the fights between the farmers and the herders, and of course the herders must lose this fight, I mean there's no question about it.
So I think what we saw in the United States, the American continent being, so to speak, one of the least developed of the continents, things taking place here with the delay of a few thousand years as compared to what we more advanced Europeans had.
Carl Menner made beans, though, on their cattle drives, so, I mean, they did rely on killing, just as much as the farmers. They had some big people, too. They weren't stopped by trucks.
They bought their beans.
The herds! The herds were just for survival. I mean, they didn't raise up extra stock to go trade.
The herders have the problem that they have no clear-cut ownership in land concept yet.
It develops in them.
You can see it.
They are closer to it than the hunters and gatherers, but it is precisely that you have
fights among different herders because your sheep graze on what other people consider
You had mentioned in the book Guns, Germs and Steel that diamond had theorized that at one time various animals that were available in Europe and so forth were available again in America.
That they had, the existing populations had exterminated them?
Yes, that's what he claims.
The logic I keep thinking of is while they were exterminating the last few pigs and cows and whatever, did they fail to notice the tens of millions of buffaloes running by them?
No, the buffaloes didn't exist. The buffaloes were also, they also came back afterwards, I guess.
I assume the buffalos can be domesticated, but we have water buffalos and that sort of stuff, right?
The American bison is bison, and they're harder to domesticate. And that was an animal species that a lot of the American animals were just temperamental.
I'm not sure I buy that either, but even now when people keep bison in enclosures, they have to use different kinds of fencing, you know, they're just not...
They're just big.
Now whether or not they are domesticable is...
that he does claim. Another explanation that doesn't work in his case is he points out, for instance, you see that on that table too, that there are very few domesticated plants in Africa and also very few domesticated animals in Africa.
and he has a list of domesticatable plants and domesticatable animals and
then shows that it doesn't happen in Africa but his general explanation is
always to say there are some regions there are less domesticatable plants and
animals and because of that they lack development but in the African case it
But it would not work at all, because they have just as many as they had on other continents, and the development is basically zero.
But in any case, it does not support at all his environmentalist explanation.
There are obviously easy explanations to come up with that would be able to explain this, but he doesn't touch those explanations.
Just as I should point out, also this book by Cavalli-Sforza, he of course also rejects any type of, yeah, how can I say, ethnic IQ explanations or something like this in his preface, in the postscript to the book.
There is no difference. They are all the same. But the entire book is a book that explains how different they actually are.
So I think that Cavalli-Sforza wrote the preface and the postscript after he was hired at Stanford.
And then he realized at Stanford certain things you could not say.
So in order to pacify his colleagues, he wrote this politically correct preface and postscript, hoping that, like most academics, nobody would read the middle, and they would be all happy this way.
I didn't read the diamond book or the word, but it seems to me that this thesis was more that there was a different density of domesticable species in the thorough presence of the Narwhal, so that in the entirety of Africa there may have been 15 domesticable species, and in the small thorough presence area there were 15 domesticable species.
and so that the idea of domestication couldn't easily develop unless you had a certain concentration of several domesticable species.
One was looking at the continent and one was looking at a small area and I thought that that was his major point,
that you had all these species concentrated in a small area whereas in other areas you had a similar number of species
No, he has broad categories also. He says simply Eurasia, which is obviously also a very broad category.
Right, but I, you know, more in the text than just the table, it seems like he was talking a lot from what I understood was that there, he felt like there was a different density of mathematical species in that one area and that's what gave it the advantage.
You know, we don't have to decide this question now.
I also would not feel competent enough to decide questions such as this.
I just want to make you aware of the fact that Mr. Diamond has a clear-cut agenda in his book
book, an agenda that is contradicted at many places in his own book, which he does not
seem to be aware of.
That doesn't make the book any less enjoyable.
I thought that it's a very interesting book, just as I think that Cavalli's Forza book
is a very enjoyable book.
I don't agree with everything that he says.
In those areas where I feel competent to make judgment myself, I think they make clear mistakes.
In other areas, I feel completely incompetent when it comes to genetic differences and that
sort of stuff.
That's their specialty and what I do here is just use these things as some sort of illustration.
My purpose is an entirely different purpose as that from Cavalli-Sforza or Jared Diamond.
I, in many ways, I have far more ambitious goals than these people do.
No, yeah, of course you will see that.
Okay, I think let's let that be enough for today.