> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paleolithic Eating Support List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of steve
> Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 12:43 PM

> You'll find that the birth rates are dropping below replacement in the
> most advanced countries.  The least advanced countries have a greater
> replacement rate and better economic progress in them will result in a
> lower birth rate. 

Yup, economic and technological progress does have the benefit of eventually
leading to birth declines after an initial spike. Let's hope that the less
developed nations also start experiencing significant birth rate declines in
the near future.

> High birth rates are left over from paleo times when
> having as many children as possible was a primary means of passing on
> genes since so many children died young. 
--Steve

Actually, birth rates went UP with the Neolithic revolution, not down. Ron
Hoggan was right in pointing out that high birth rates began in the
Neolithic--and they accelerated during the last 200 years, then finally
started slowing down again when modern forms of birth control came into use.

<<The Neolithic diet had immediate effects on man's health. The skeletons of
Neolithic farmers show the effects of poor nutrition. They died much younger
[see Cohen, Leonard A., "Diet and Cancer." Scientific American (November
1987), 42-48], were shorter, and had many more cavities, as well as fewer
teeth, than their immediate hunter-gatherer ancestors [see Harris, Marvin
and Eric B. Ross, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. New York:
Random House, 1977.] These same remains show the first evidence of obesity
in humans.

The tendency to put on weight was to have another effect on the living
conditions of Neolithic peoples. In spite of a much shorter life span,
population densities grew dramatically. As women must have a certain minimum
percentage of body fat to ovulate, the tendency of agricultural people to
become fat resulted in women becoming pregnant at an earlier age and
becoming pregnant again much sooner after giving birth. Studies of
contemporary female hunter-gatherers have shown them to reach first
menstruation several years later than agricultural women. Hunter-gatherer
women averaged four years between births versus eleven months for
agricultural women. [There is even a colloquial term for this phenomenon of
getting pregnant twice in less than twelve months: "Irish twins."] As it was
no longer 51 necessary to carry infants from place to place, the natural
constraints on family size experienced by nomadic hunter-gatherers were no
longer in effect.

Obviously, greater populations required larger crop yields for sustenance.
Methods of agricultural intensification such as the plow and irrigation were
soon invented to boost yields. As these more intensive methods accelerated
the exhaustion of the topsoil and populations continued to grow, new lands
for cultivation had to be found. The process of colonization continued until
recent history, until the civilized world became agricultural, polluted,
overpopulated, and overweight.>>

--Ray Audette, NeanderThin, p. 50

"By 25,000 years ago, about 3.5 million people lived on the earth. By 10,000
years ago--the dawn of agriculture--[the] slow rate [of population growth]
had produced a world population of between 5 and 10 million.

But then everything changed. Once people started tilling the soil and
altering ancient patterns of resource availability and abundance, life
became more sedantary, birth spacing became shorter, and annual population
growth increased almost a hundredfold, to an estimated .1 percent per year."

--S. Boyd Eaton, The Paleolithic Prescription, p. 39


> A paleo society could expect
> to have the traditional short and brutish and red in tooth and claw
> lifespans with a very high childhood mortality.  Unless of course, you
> somehow want to have your cake and eat it too.
> 
> Steve

Those quotes from Hobbes and Tennyson that you paraphrased are unfortunately
some of the most misguided in human history, with devastating consequences
for both society and the planet. Luckily, I have accumulated plenty of
information over recent years that dispels these destructive notions. No
period of existence of human beings was without problems, but the
exaggerated picture that Hobbes presented of life before civilization is not
supported by the evidence.

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear,
and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short." -Thomas Hobbes (1651)

When Hobbes claimed that life before civilization was "nasty, brutish and
short," as compared to the agrarian civilizations that were born during the
Neolithic revolution, he was engaging in pure speculation, based on what he
had been raised to believe by Taker society (civilization), without a shred
of evidence to support it. It is what I also used to believe until my eyes
were opened by NeanderThin, The Paleo Diet, Ishmael, anthropology articles &
books and other sources, as well as my experience, and the experiences of
others I have witnessed or read about, on a more ancestral diet. Until I
read these sources, evidence-based and revelatory, and experienced an
ancestral diet for myself, I could not have a full appreciation of the real
facts, because they are so radically different from what is fed into us from
birth, both literally and figuratively. Yet, once logically-minded people
encounter these facts, they quickly see the logical sense of them and they
answer thousands of questions that have puzzled moderners for generations.
We Moderners were puzzled because we had forgotten that we were once
Leavers, thousands of years ago. Quinn calls this lost connection with our
past "The Great Forgetting."

 "The archaeological record clearly shows that whenever and wherever ancient
humans sowed [cereal grain] seeds (and replaced the old animal-dominated
diets), part of the harvest included health problems. One physical
ramification of the new diet was immediately obvious: Early farmers were
markedly shorter than their ancestors. In Turkey and Greece, for example,
preagricultural men stood 5 feet 9 inches tall [on average] and women 5 feet
5 inches. By 3000 B.C., the average man had shrunk to 5 feet 3 inches and
the average woman to 5 feet. But getting shorter--not in itself a health
problem--was the least of the changes in these early farmers. Studies of
their bones and teeth have revealed that these people were basically a mess:
They had more infectious diseases than their ancestors, more childhood
mortality, and shorter life spans in general. They also had more
osteoporosis, rickets, and other bone mineral disorders, thanks to the
cereal-based diets. For the first time, humans were plagued with vitamin-
and mineral-deficiency diseases--scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, vitamin A and
zinc deficiencies, and iron-deficiency anemia. Instead of the well-formed,
strong teeth their ancestors had, there were now cavities. Their jaws, which
were formerly square and roomy, were suddenly too small for their teeth,
which overlapped each other.

What had gone wrong? How could the benign practice of
agriculture--harnessing nature's bounty--have caused so many health
problems? We now know that although the population was soaring, the quality
of life--as well as the average life span--was in a nosedive. The new
staples, cereals and starches, provided calories but not the vital nutrients
of the old diet--lean [and some naturally fatty] meats, fruits, and
vegetables. The result--ill health and disease."

--Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet, p. 43

"....recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly
our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe
from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social
and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

.... Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers?
Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive
people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way.
It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good
deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the
average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for
one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.
....

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes,
the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving
hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other
nutrients. ....

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and
brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst
real estate. ....

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial
stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose
between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose
the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and lo[n]gest-lasting life
style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess
into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve
it."

--Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"


"Who trusted God was love indeed 
And love Creation's final law 
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed"

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"In Memoriam A.H.H."

Here Tennyson repeats the typical modernist-Taker view that nature is
fundamentally hostile to God and the "civilized men" who worship this God
who is rejected by the nature he created; and that this disobedient,
ungrateful, monstrous creation must be conquered, tamed and improved,
because God apparently did not do a good job in creating nature, and
civilized humans can therefore improve untamed nature and untamed savages.
In this conception, without the hand of divinely-inspired demigod-like
humans to mold and guide it, nature has no purpose or worth of its own. In
this conception, nature is eventually seen as Satanic, and it even sprouts
evil, demonic nature-beings like a horned and hooved devil.

Here is an alternative to this grim view of nature:

From Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn:

p. 86: "There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to
enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with
the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world,
as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact
in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the
world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be
conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their
foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now." 

[The Leavers--the hunter/gatherer/horticulturalists--lived largely in
harmony with nature for about 2.5 million years, mostly abiding by the prime
law of nature, the peacekeeping law: "No one species shall make the life of
the world its own."] pp. 120 - 121: "And then about ten thousand years ago
one branch of the family of Homo sapiens sapiens said, 'Man is exempt from
this law. The gods never meant man to be bound by it." And so they built a
civilization that flouts the law at every point, and within five hundred
generations--in an eye-blink in the scale of biological time--this branch of
the family of Homo sapiens sapiens saw that they had brought the entire
world to the point of death. And their explanation for this calamity was ...
that something is fundamentally wrong with people."

p. 168: "The disaster occurred when, ten thousand years ago, the people of
your culture said, 'We're as wise as the gods and can rule the world as well
as they.' When they took into their own hands the power of life and death
over the world, their doom was assured."