What an interesting thread!! 8)
I’d like to formalise a little bit on a thought experiment i’m having sometime when i have a few minutes.
1/ we all know agriculture was “invented” in middle-east, and then spread across the globe over a number of millenia. Therefore agriculture is not necessarily a logical consequence of a climatic catastrophe, it’s more the spread of a paradigm from a small seed (pun :P)
2/ very quickly, an agricultural group/society would have gotten a sense of property/land ownership. It is near impossible to cultivate any parcel of land with the knowledge that somebody will come and reap the fruit of your labour.
3/ this would have put agriculturalist in stark opposition to nomadic hunter-gatherer, whose hunting ground would have been reduced by societies ready to fight for “their” land. The nomads will choose the simplest solution, which is to nomad somewhere else.
4/ In ecological terms, hunter-gatherers would have had their “habitat” reduced by competition from agriculturalists.
5/ to compound the process, agriculturalist societies would need to invent laws (property rights?), therefore some sort of hierarchy (those in charge of the law being de facto above the peasants). The one on top of the society will very quickly realise that conquest war and larger fields will give him a hedge on the chieftain of the agriculturalist city/nation next to him.
6/ then come the imperial wars of the antiquity as a consequence of the above, and spread of the agricultural model through land grabs and conquests.
7/ no hunter-gatherer clan could possibly assemble enough men and “industry” to face the imperials in a straight battle. Therefore their territory was doomed to shrink into nothingness…
Hello Mona Rose! Peace to you
My heart bleeds when i hear something like this. I am Christian (Catholic). In our christian denomination, we have diametrically opposed view to that of your acquaintance. We believe each and every human, however wounded, is child of God, and therefore son and daughter of love, and called to love eternally.
Hi Peter. Yes i’ve heard that one before. It is very interesting to put the curse of eating that fruit in perspective with the civilisation change that happened
=> “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life”
here i’m reading men became farmers
=> “It will produce thorns and thistles for you”
Constant battle against the weeds. Another consequence of being a farmer.
=> “with painful labor you will give birth to children.”
archeological records apparently show a shrinking of the pelvis in agriculturalist societies. Pain when giving birth would another consequence of eating the forbidden fruit?
=> " Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked"
all primitive hunter-gatherers were a lot less covered than we presently are