Thread by @BretDevereaux

I like these neat videos @Kurz_Gesagt makes, but this one, () focused essentially on the agricultural revolution, errs by presenting the process as a 'peaceful transition' and ignoring the role of violence.

That's not what the evidence indicates. 1/6

The short video focused on the role of community and information exchange in the spread of farming, using it as an analogy for "another peaceful transition" (8:50) to a non-earth-bound civilization we may make in the future.

But that's not what happened! 2/6

But we have quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that it wasn't that the idea of farming spread, but that *farmers* spread, likely using their much higher population density to displace smaller numbers of non-farmers from resource-rich zones.

3/6

That process would obviously have been violent. I am quite sure that people do not voluntarily leave resource rich zones to go starve and struggle in the hill country or semi-arid zones without at least trying to resist.

But they'd lose because the farmers had numbers. 4/6

Something which in turn answers a question the video poses but talks about (because it can't answer it): why shift to farming, when it is less healthy overall? The answer is "you shift to farming to get big enough group-size to defend your territory and resources." 5/6

Warfare provides the pressure that forced otherwise maladaptive strategies. This is something we actually have growing evidence for:
researchgate.net/publication/22…
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…
Good quick summary of what we know in Lee, Waging War, ch1, too. end/6