Reddit reviews Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures

Here is a relevant TED Talk by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization that focuses on energy efficiency and sustainability.

I particularly like his parable: The booming whale oil market of the mid-19th century disappeared virtually overnight as coal energy began to compete in the market. That's why we still have whales today. The story could be analogous in many familiar ways.
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Another relevant bit comes from anthropologist Marvin Harris, in his 1977 book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Culture (pp. 266-271):

> Capitalism, then, is a system that is committed to an unbounded increase in the production in the name of an unbounded increase in profits. Production, however, cannot be increased in an unbounded way. Freed from the restraints of despots and paupers, capitalist entrepreneurs still have to confront the restraints of nature. The profitability of production cannot expand indefinitely. Any increase in the quantity of soil, water, minerals, or plants put into a particular production process per unit of time constitutes intensification. It has been the burden of this book to show that intensification inevitably leads to declining efficiencies. That declining efficiencies have adverse effects upon the average standard of living cannot be doubted.

> What must be made clear is that environmental depletions also lead to declining profits. The relationship is not easily understood because, according to the laws of supply and demand, scarcities lead to higher prices. Higher prices, however, tend to lower consumption per capita (the market symptom of declining living standards). Profits can be sustained temporarily if the drop in per capita consumption is compensated for by an expansion in total sales based on population growth or the conquest of international markets. But sooner or later the curve of rising prices caused by environmental depletions will begin to rise faster than the curve of rising consumption and the rate of profit must begin to fall.

> The classic entrepreneurial response to a fall in the rate of profit is exactly the same as under any mode of production that has been overintensified. To compensate for environmental depletions and declining efficiencies (which manifest themselves as falling rates of profit), the entrepreneur seeks to lower the cost of production by introducing labor-saving machines. Although these machines require more capital and hence usually have higher start-up costs, they result in lowering the unit cost of production.

> Thus a system that is committed to perpetual intensification can survive only if it is equally committed to perpetual technological change. Its ability to maintain living standards depends on the outcome of a race between technological advance and the relentless deterioration of the conditions of production. Under the present circumstances, technology is about to lose that race.

Chapter 15: The Industrial Bubble

> All rapidly intensifying systems of production, whether they be socialist, capitalist, hydraulic, neolithic, or paleolithic, face a common dilemma. The increment in energy invested per unit time in production will inevitably overburden the self-renewing, self-cleansing, self-generating capacities of the ecosystem. Regardless of which mode of production is involved, there is only one means of avoiding the catastrophic consequences of declining efficiencies: to shift to more efficient technologies. For the past 500 years Western scientific technology has been competing against the most rapidly and relentlessly intensifying system of production in the history of our species.

> Thanks to science and engineering, the average standard of living in the industrial nations is higher than at any time in the past. This fact, more than any other, bolsters our faith that progress is inevitable—a faith, incidentally, shared as much by the Comintern as by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. What I want to emphasize here is that the rise in living standards began only 150 years ago, while the race between rapid technological change and intensification has been going on for 500 years. During most of the post-feudal epoch, living standards hovered close to pauperdom and frequently fell to unprecedented depths despite the introduction of an unbroken series of ingenious labor-saving machines.

Potato does a great job of exploring the socioeconomic effects of the potato on various populations in the world.

Cannibals and Kings is more on the anthropology side, but there is a least one really good chapter that discusses reasons why certain cultures developed religious dietary restrictions.

A History of White Castle is an interesting read about the conditions that brought about the rise of the fast food industry in the US.

For starters: Wikipedia - Paleolithic Diet

I was really into anthropology a few years ago. Among other things I recall reading was that when humans first started eating grains 10,000 years ago, the average human lost a foot in height due to the lack of nutrients in neolitihic (grain-based) diets as compared to the paleolithic diet which their bodies had evolved to eat. This unhealthy diet, combined with sedentary living conditions (animal and human domestication) also led to either the introduction of - or massive increases of - almost every form of disease, including influenza, cancer, asthma, allergies, and heart disease, which continue to rise to this day.

Books I would recommend on the topic:

The Forest People by Colin Turnbull (study of a hunter-gatherer pygmy tribe, almost utopian)

The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull (study of an african tribe recently forced to adopt agriculture, truly horrific to read)

Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures by Marvin Harris

Twilight of the Machines by John Zerzan

My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning

I have actual books for those claims, not links, though there is something on Google books about studies of pre-agriculture people on Cyprus that had some good information.

As for data, according to one book I just grabbed off my shelf, 30,000 years ago average male height was 177 centimeters, average male life expectancy was 33.3 years. Jump forward to 1900 and average male height was only just reaching 175 centimeters, after being much lower for thousands of years, and average male life expectancy was 32.5 years.

Unfortunately the numbers for male height in recent times are from 1960 and the life expectancy is from 1900. The modern life expectancy number comes from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company while the older figures come from studies done by J. Lawrence Angel. Studies of modern hunter-gather societies by Nancy Howell seem to bear out those figures.

Those figures were quoted on pages 19 and 20 of Cannibals and Kings.

Page 22 mentions that infanticide could have accounted for 50% of infant mortality both in pre-agriculture people and modern hunter-gatherers. The common methods for infanticide are strangulation, drowning, bashing them against a rock (probably pretty common if you can find enough evidence for it in the fossil record), exposure, and neglect. Neglect was most common and there the infant generally died from malnutrition and sickness after it had been weakened.

What have you read that is inconsistent? The book I quoted there was just the one I happened to have at hand, I've read a number of others, and probably have quite a few on my shelf, that come to the same conclusions.

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The actual papers cited are "Paleoecology, Paleodemographgy and Health" by Angel, "The population of the Dobe Area !Kung" by Howell, and "Some Predictions for the Pleistocene Based on Equilibrium Systems Among Recent Hunter-Gatherers" by Birdsell. I don't see a cite for the modern numbers unfortunately.

Someone send the author of this very poor article a copy of Cannibals and Kings. No one has ever switched to farming so they would have more free time. Humans switched from hunting & gathering to farming because of population pressure: they ran out of land and didn't want to starve. H&G societies seem to have more free time than any other form of economic organization.

Acknowledged. This is an interesting book.

http://www.amazon.com/Cannibals-Kings-Cultures-Marvin-Harris/dp/067972849X