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secretcafe: “Until agriculture, human beings evolved in societies organized around an insistence on sharing just about everything. But all this sharing doesn’t make anyone a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies were no nobler than you are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums. Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly social species to minimize risk. Sharing and self-interest, as we shall see, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many anthropologists call fierce egalitarianism was the predominant pattern of social organization around the world for many millennia before the advent of agriculture. But human societies changed in radical ways once they started farming and raising domesticated animals. They organized themselves around hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” - Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá
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secretcafe:

“Until agriculture, human beings evolved in societies organized around an insistence on sharing just about everything. But all this sharing doesn’t make anyone a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies were no nobler than you are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums. Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly social species to minimize risk. Sharing and self-interest, as we shall see, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many anthropologists call fierce egalitarianism was the predominant pattern of social organization around the world for many millennia before the advent of agriculture.

But human societies changed in radical ways once they started farming and raising domesticated animals. They organized themselves around hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

- Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá

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  12. captain-communism reblogged this from powerdadgendoikari and added:
    First of all, how could you go to war during a famine and why would you? That makes no strategic or tactical sense...
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  14. powerdadgendoikari reblogged this from shesgothighmorale and added:
    Couldn’t tell you, but it reeks of “hey let’s go back 10000 years when we died at 24” so I’m not a fan at the outset.
  15. shesgothighmorale reblogged this from powerdadgendoikari and added:
    Does this diagram even have anything to do with Sex At Dawn? Because this seems completely off from the objective of the...
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    The theory of the rise of agricultural societies directly causing the decrease of women’s roles in society is...
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