farming vs hunter-gatherer

How are we overpopulated?

>>1040261

If you have to ask this question, please, Kill yourself

>>1040257
Hunter-gatherers didn't invent the airplane.
Does that answer your question?

We should never have come down from the trees

>>1040262
Can you provide peer reviewed studies that show that Earth is overpopulated by humans? Is the planet mismanaged, sure, but overpopulated? No. Get lost.

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>>1040285
Not the same anon but here is my yarsdstick.
If we had a solar flare tomorrow or other calamity that knocked out all tech on this planet, could most of us survive living as cavemen?
If the answer is no, not enough resources, then in my opinion, we are over populated.

>>1040289
More people would die due to a lack of knowledge than due to a pure lack of natural resources.

>>1040293
With no farming?
I dont think billions could live on this planet as hunter gatherers

>>1040304
My point was that most people could be in resource rich areas but not have the knowledge necessary to utilize those resources. The majority would die before they over-consumed what was available to them.

>>1040257

Biologically speaking we aren't really built to consume the ratio of grains to produce that we seem to prefer. It is adequately filling but not necessarily efficient which is what leads to great lack of focus, fatigue, obesity etc.

Societally speaking I'd say it's double edged. Without agriculture we wouldn't have the population size that benefits technological development.
On the other end it's easier to create castes and poor power structures that favor inheritance over merit in an agricultural society, so a lot of great talent goes to waste.

>>1040283
That slightly rotted fruit gets me kinda buzzed tho.

>>1040289
Cool, when are you leaving?

>>1040368
I will be right behind you

>>1040310
HahahahahahahahHahahhaahhaah

BULLSHIT.

>>1040310
ehhhh

even resource rich areas that were appropriately used in a hunter-gatherer fashion could not support the current population.
I mean, just imagine taking the current population of the middle east and cramming it all into the river valleys. People are already stacked on top of each other in those places. And if you take away agriculture, you're forced to take away domesticated animals as well so there goes all of the dairy and meat.

it provided the whole modern world.

if we hadn't found easy mode with farming. raising cattle.

>>1040257
it lowers our dependence on the quirks of nature and the foibles of our environment
you can get philosophical and romantic about it, I think you're well within your right to even, but it means a much more secure existence, and a more spread out and populous existence
that existence means that we can ask these questions, and the next generation can ask these questions and more questions, and the generation after that can ask questions and find their own meaning to life, and the generation after that can do the same and so on
even if we were to go back to subsistence lifestyle, I would want there to be a few groups living in a more stationary way to detect major threats and provide protection, warning, or at the very least aid in recovery
I would also really want us to be somewhere else in addition to Earth for that, but that's edging on another conversation

>>1040257
There are pros and cons with everything but I can say I'd much rather live in an agriculturalists society and choose to live as a horticulturalist.

The notion of hunter gatherer and farmer is more illusion than reality, we let social darwinist old fools dictate the definitions for far too long. Luckily it's being revised now.

>>1040304
our current population can't be sustained with organic farming either

>>1040496
>t. Monsanto shill

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farming vs a jewish invention to make the man weaker

>>1040531
was a*

>>1040257

There is not really a straight up answer to this, as it depends on what you personally see as an improvement.

Agriculture allowed humans to stay in one place, rather than have to move around for food. This is how towns were formed, because people stayed put to tend to their crop.

Agriculture also increased the amount of food humans were able to produce in a given area, which did lead to an increase in population.

The one thing that hunter gatherer lifestyle kind of wins at is lifestyle. Hunter gatherers only really 'worked' 4 or so hours a day. The rest of the time they spent doing minor chores around their temporary camp and interacting with their families.

So I guess you could say that agriculture was one of the key foundations for today's human societies. Whether that is a good thing or not is subjective. Hunter gatherers had a more relaxed lifestyle to the majority of people even today, but they didn't have iPhones.

>>1040587
>There is not really a straight up answer to this, as it depends on what you personally see as an improvement.

This.

The question is as old as the book of genesis. People never say this but the phrase 'fall of man' is not in the bible. The story is presented as a negative, but you could read it as a positive. It depends on perspective. Is it a fall to learn empathy, to establish agriculture and then civilization? It's both good and bad. This question is definitely not new, it is one of the oldest.

>>1040587
>>1040667
This is a very romanticized view of life before humanity. Sure, they may have worked less but they also had to deal with the threat of death during childbirth, awful infant mortality rates, fear of violence over land disputes and many other things that we have eliminated or significantly reduced through technological progress.

Although work may be a major cause of stress in today's life, I don't think that hunter/gathers had less stressful or "more relaxed" lifestyles by any stretch of the imagination.

Personally, I think farming was a good thing. It has allowed humanity to progress scientifically, increase in individual freedom and we can continue to improve society as we continue to understand more. Hunter gathers as a whole were ironically more stagnant than today's society which is constantly changing.

>>1040522
You try feeding yourself without pesticides, herbicides or artificial fertilizers.
Look at the area you need and multiply that by 7 biillion

>>1040289
Natural events killed bunches of hunter-gatherers all the time. A volcano or meteor, a bunch of winters, mass deaths all around. Might be our society now is more vulnerable in some respects (the solar flare thing btw. would be pretty easy to prepare against if we just took it serious). But what's the worst case, population levels dropping to preindustrial or even hunter-gatherer levels? I guess all the people agriculture allowed to live in the meantime are quite okay with that risk.

Either way, it's not like we ever had a choice. Some people, at some point, did decide not to become agricultural, but rather stay hunter gatherers. They found themselves assimilated by faster reproducing agricultural people sooner or later, peacefully or not.

The most efficient was women/children tending to the crops and other chores while the men were out hunting and getting other advantages for their community.

this thread is fucking retarded

>>1040257
Humanity is destined for greater things than mere survival. Do you really want to live a life where your only purpose in life is to find the next food source?

To me that's the opposite of freedom. We got good at covering our basic survival needs so that we could focus on more enlightened paths.

>>1040285
Several actually, for each different scientifically-accepted definition of overpopulated.

It's commonly accepted across the scientific community that the Earth has an indefinite sustainment capacity of around 6 billion people, and a 100-year-sustainment capacity of 7.5 billion people. At 8 billion we're estimated to have enough natural resources for 25 years.

We hit 7.4 billion in 2015 and it's estimated we're over 7.6 billion now.

Is it possible for a modern western man to revert to being a hunter gatherer? Has it been done?

>>1040842
Your biggest concern in that context is finding a place to do it.

Can it be done? Sure, as long as there is a local freshwater source, there will guaranteed be food you can survive off of.
What gets you is finding the space and seclusion. Short of moving to Alaska, I can't think of any places where you can set up camp, fish, hunt and gather without being harassed by NPS, Fish and Game, or other local officials. And if you move to AK you face other challenges.

>>1040261
Being this fucking thick.

>>1040845
>And if you move to AK you face other challenges.

What other challenges? Do people in Alaska do this?

>>1040962

Well it's less the people and more the sub freezing temperatures, 2 hours of daylight in the winter depending on the region, navigating snowfall taller than a grown man.

Even Dick Proenekke relied on flown-in resources and bulk storage of grains. The natives only survived really thanks to population numbers and thrived due to the advent of agriculture. Hunter Gatherer societies relied on just that - society. I'd say its almost impossible for one man to convert to hunting and gathering alone

>>1040262
U dumb nigga

>>1040684

What you just described has nothing to do with hunter gatherer society, and has everything to do with when the hunter gatherer lifestyle was prevalent.

Babies didn't die because their parents hunted and gathered, they died because there was inadequate medicine and technology.

As I stated, agriculture is one of the things that lead to these technological advancements that make today's society what it is. But that doesn't make a link between all the things you mentioned and hunter gatherers.

The people who built the first sprawling cities of a million still had shit infant mortality and plenty of violence. The coming together of people caused lots of problems like disease, logistics nightmares and the birth of monarchies and modern religion (thanks Obama). It was a long, slow road to get to where we are today.

So another angle to view this question from is WHO was agriculture good for? For us it was great, because we live in the best period of history that has existed. For the first farmers, personally I would have preferred the H+G.

>>1040995
It has everything to do with hunter gatherer society.

I never said that life as a farmer was always better, but that it has led to much better lives and was a huge step forward for humanity. Automobiles sucked too compared to a horse when they were first invented. Was the ICE a bad invention just because the very first cars that used them were awful? No, because we improve the design, make some modifications and now there is hardly a horse to be seen because they are slow and expensive in comparison.

Like I said, hunter gatherers had problems and plenty of shit to deal with but without agriculture humanity would still have those exact same problems and be nowhere closer to eliminating them. Agriculture creates new problems and also allows us to solve them.

>>1040692
About half of the world's food supply is still provided by small scale farms, despite using much less land, energy and resources.

Industrial agriculture destroys soil and biodiversity (both cultured and wild species), furthers desertification, poisons and depletes water, is dependent on massive amounts of oil and globalized industry and logistic systems that are all vulnerable to scarcity and disruption.
It is also only profitable because of massive subventions.
Monopolizing food production with few multinational cooperations is dangerous to food security.

Regenerative methods of agriculture using tree crops, holistic grazing, water harvesting, soil building and no till are proven concepts for establishing sustainable and stable food production systems that outproduce monocrop industrial farms.

No go and drink a glass of round up

>>1040995
>Babies didn't die because their parents hunted and gathered, they died because there was inadequate medicine and technology.

No they also died from malnutrition .
Many many simply could not get enough calories.
Farming helped with this

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>>1040823
>born just in time to watch the world burn

How the fuck are we overpopulated? I go to the same store 3-4 days a week for hotpockets and the shelves are always fully stocked. Its NEVER out. Pick another bullshit opinion to represent next time

>>1041197
Odds are quite good that when we start running out of natural resources there will be regional die-offs in the most overpopulated places (coastal China, southern India, sub-Saharan Africa), which also generally happen to be poor (since we're a self-destructive species, the destitute have the most kids and thus consume the most resources) and the most densely populated.

Which will return us to at least close to the carry capacity of the planet and thus the status quo, assuming the chinks don't start a global thermonuclear war or the EU imports them by the tens of millions and prolongs the overpopulation instead of just letting them die.

>>1041067
>half the world's food supply is still provided by small scale farms
1. That's no longer true, large-scale agriculture represents close to 65% of all food production
2. large-scale agriculture represents less than 25% of all cultivated land
>the rest of that that's straight out of treehugging 101
It's 30-50 years out of date. Shit's changed.

>>1041310
looked up some numbers, seems to be even more extreme than I suggested:

"More than 90 percent of farms are run by an
individual or a family and rely primarily on family
labour. According to these criteria, family farms are by far the most prevalent form of agriculture in the world. Estimates suggest that they occupy around 70 – 80 percent of farm land and produce more than 80 percent of the world’s food in value terms."

http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4036e.pdf

>Shit's changed.
Yeah, no it's not just stoner hippies developing regenerative agriculture, but professionals NGOs and universities. The methods have become much more sophisticated, practical and productive.

Comparison of conventional and organic management:
http://rodaleinstitute.org/assets/FST-Brochure-2015.pdf

Large scale restoration project in china:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQBeYffZ_SI

read Ted Kaczynski's manifesto but replace every reference of the Industrial Revolution with the Neolithic Revolution and you will know the truth

>>1040531
This isn't the first time I've heard of jaw differences among farmers and Hunter gatherers.

>>1041267
Haha, what? Maybe because they're stocked every night. You're probably being sarcastic though

>>1041309
The thing that is most realistic unfortunately is the EU bringing in more non white parasites. I hope we get to send all of the ones currently here back to their countries so they can join their fellow people at dying off.