#RepealThe19th

[Eric the Green]

(10-15-2016, 11:13 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-15-2016, 03:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: You do know that the onset of agriculture resulting in a decline in stature (and indicator of health).  This is strong evidence that the adoption of agriculture led to a large reduction in the well-being of humans.  It has been suggested that the Garden of Eden story is a folk memory of this transition from an idealized hunter-gatherer existence to agriculture around four millennia before Abraham.

All possible. But agriculture became necessary for human survival in many places when desiccation turned many places into milieus unsuited for hunter-gatherers. The cultivation of grain coincided with a time of great hunger.

Yes; you can always say that older times were simpler and better. But evolution and history push us into new and more complicated arrangements, new solutions, and ever larger social relationships. Civilization resulted from agriculture, some millennia after it began. But it's a mixed blessing; more division of labor and oppression by authority, but more possibilities for the arts and science and inventions.

Civilization has proceeded from agricultural towns and villages, to stone age civilizations, to the bronze and iron age of war and empire and society as conquered territory (civic hero's favorite age), to the age of faith, to the secularized age of kingdoms and early humanism and science, to the age of revolution, individual liberty movements, electricity and entreprenuers, to the socialist age of collectivism, mass industrialism, nationalism, and racial and class war, to our current age of the greening of culture and society, globalism, political correctness, diversity and post-modernism, and beyond-- to increasing integral culture and society.