Hi

I'm rather mixed up about posting a reply on this thread lest it should 
turn out to be off-topic. The odds are so to say in that direction, aren't 
they?

Anyway, here's what I feel like saying.

I wouldn't think in terms of laziness. I'd rather call it pragmatism 
stemming from the daily observation of the environment all around. I can't 
explain why the shift into agriculture and pastoralism happened about say 
13,000 years ago, and not before. 

There is, however, an interesting theory that I want to share. In a 
nutshell:

It seems that at the end of the Paleolithic, people in many areas began to 
turn towards more stable food supplies that were to be found in waters: 
rivers, lakes, seas, oceans. Such waterways were then teeming with aquatic 
life probably due to the rising seas brought by warmer temperatures. So 
there was no longer any need to move on and people became sedentary, first 
living in larger groups, then in villages, towns and finally cities.

It has been said that the first great civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, 
China, India) were all hydraulic ones, because of course they were centred 
upon the waters of great rivers. 

This doesn't account for everything, but it rather gives a more plausible 
picture, I believe. 

Cheers,

JC

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:15:52 -0600, Adam Sroka <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Susan Carmack wrote:
>> Hi Paleopals:
>>> Like other carnivores, paleo men were decidely lazy on non
>>> hunting days.  Hard work followed by periods of laziness.
>>
>> My husband's theory on how we started eating grains was that the
>> paleomen just decided they were too lazy to hunt...
>>
>Too lazy to move is more likely. Conditions that made it favorable to
>stay in one place for a while eventually ended, but at that point we had
>already set down roots and weren't too keen on going back to a nomadic
>lifestyle. If we can't, or don't want to, go where the food is then we
>better find a way to get the food here. We believe that man had known
>for a long time that he could cultivate plant foods. So, if moving were
>considered more of a hardship than subsisting off of what we could grow
>agriculture is a logical result.
>
>Which, initially, according to many anthropologists, meant that women
>did most of the work; since they were traditionally responsible for
>processing plant foods. In the long run, however, when division of labor
>came along, men did most of the farming and storing and women did the
>actual preparation.
>=========================================================================