Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Secrets of the Stone Age (1/2) | DW Documentary" video.

  1. These people are making a mystery using the malleable material ignorance. How did hunter-gatherers "suddenly" turn into farmers? And more suddenly than industrialization, even... Well duh. I dunno. Ignorance makes it all a profound mystery. The facts? Hunters and gatherers were different people. Men and women mainly. What did they do with the stuff they'd hunted and gathered? Some of it they ate and used. The rest they exchanged with other people. Trade, steadily, the whole time, from the beginning of the hunting and gathering right up to today, is the link between hunting, gathering, farming, and then today's frantic making and selling. Farming is what happens when the stuff you've gathered sprouts, or the tamer of the animals you've hunted give birth and you keep the tamer ones alive longer. (Hummock farming, a real industry right up to today in parts of Africa, is the kitchen-gardening of the gatherer. Hunters walking by can see what grows in your hammock and make an offer for some of it. Trade.) This brings up an oddity, the information revolution. "Information" is when you think about what you can get for your spare sabre-toothed tiger meat that you want to exchange. Information has been around for a long time. It didn't happen yesterday just because Shannon didn't publish his Information Theory until 1948 or so.
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  2. Hunters exchange with other hunters Gatherers exchange with other gatherers. Where they meet, you've got a meeting place. That's sedentary. Sedentary and hunter-gather are co-existent and mutually dependent. Jane Jacobs would have won her Nobel in Economics if only she'd lived a couple of years more.
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