The Long Term Impacts Of Islamic Occupation In Iberia

This paper makes that case that developing a merchant class in the Middle Ages was critical to the development of literacy and self-government, and that Islamic rule discouraged this from happening for different lengths of time in different parts of Iberia (basically on a north to south gradient).

We use a unique dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities to study the long-run impact of Islam on human-capital in historical Spain. 

Reduced-form estimates show a large and robust negative relationship between length of Muslim rule and literacy. 

We argue that, contrary to local arrangements set up by Christians, Islamic institutions discouraged the rise of the merchant class, blocking local forms of self-government and thereby persistently hindering demand for education. Indeed, results show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants, whereas neither later episodes of trade nor differences in jurisdictions and different stages of the Reconquista affect our main results. Consistent with our interpretation, panel estimates show that cities under Muslim rule missed-out on the critical juncture to establish self-government institutions.

Francesco Cinnirella, Alieza Naghavi, and Giovanni Prarolo, "Islam and human capital in historical Spain" 28 Journal of Economic Growth 225-257 (January 3, 2023).

Diet Drives Height

Individual variation in height, like individual variation in IQ, is strongly influenced by genetics. But, population level variations in height (between populations or over time) is profoundly influenced by environment, rather than genetic legacies. There is a good case to be made that the same is true of IQ.

This paradox is also seen, for example, in modern Japan and South Korea where height is closely correlated with year of birth, with children born later in more economically prosperous times with less food scarcity ending up taller.

This also provides a food production counterpart to the "coal curse" by which regions with particularly great coal resources lagged in later economic development as the natural resource based economy fostered by rich coal resources prevented other forms of economic production from thriving, which mattered when coal became less economically important.

In the late nineteenth century, the North American bison was brought to the brink of extinction in just over a decade. We demonstrate that the loss of the bison had immediate, negative consequences for the Native Americans who relied on them and ultimately resulted in a permanent reversal of fortunes. Once amongst the tallest people in the world, the generations of bison-reliant people born after the slaughter lost their entire height advantage. By the early twentieth century, child mortality was 16 percentage points higher and the probability of reporting an occupation 29.7 percentage points lower in bison nations compared to nations that were never reliant on the bison. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the present, income per capita has remained 28 percent lower, on average, for bison nations. This persistent gap cannot be explained by differences in agricultural productivity, self-governance, or application of the Dawes Act. We provide evidence that this historical shock altered the dynamic path of development for formerly bison-reliant nations. We demonstrate that limited access to credit constrained the ability of bison nations to adjust through re-specialization and migration.

Donn. L. Feir, Rob Gillezeau & Maggie E.C. Jones, "The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains" NBER Working Paper 30368 (August 2022), DOI 10.3386/w30368

What Causes Patriarchy?

Alice Evans, in her blog post "3 Things I Got Wrong About Patriarchy" (June 26, 2022), concludes (convincingly) that:

(1) Patriarchy in a society with plough agriculture arises not mostly due to the importance of men's physical labor relative to women, but instead, as a result of how patrilineal inheritance is used to concentrate wealth and power in a society, to encourage clan-like organization, and to create a need to resolve conflicts between men living in close clan communities over women.

(2) Christian Europe has been surprisingly egalitarian because Christian doctrine was actually followed in the Middle Ages and because rich nobles would use church morals rules against patriarchy as a bludgeon against rivals to prevent them from concentrating power and wealth. Christianity reduced patriarchy relative to many of its immediate predecessor societies in Europe.

(3) Islam promoted patriarchy, when other economic conditions made it feasible, even when the economic and technological conditions didn't compel a patriarchy outcome that wasn't present before a conversion to Islam. But oil wealth didn't change the pre-oil discovery level of patriarchy in an Islamic society very much as many scholars had hypothesized.

She reaches these conclusions, that are not conventional wisdom in anthropology and economics, by looking at more data over longer time periods, with greater detail than other scholars doing the same kind of analysis usually do. 

She was also willing to discount her own cognitive biases, for example, that religion was less important than economics in these matters.

Grain Cultivation and Chinese History

One can do a pretty decent job of explaining the larger course of history with an economically deterministic model (which in turn, although not necessarily in the case of the paper below, has a strong climate driven component).

We propose and test empirically a theory describing the endogenous formation and persistence of mega-states, using China as an example. We suggest that the relative timing of the emergence of agricultural societies, and their distance from each other, set off a race between their autochthonous state-building projects, which determines their extent and persistence. 

Using a novel dataset describing the historical presence of Chinese states, prehistoric development, the diffusion of agriculture, and migratory distance across 1° × 1° grid cells in eastern Asia, we find that cells that adopted agriculture earlier and were close to Erlitou the earliest political center in eastern Asia remained under Chinese control for longer and continue to be a part of China today. By contrast, cells that adopted agriculture early and were located further from Erlitou developed into independent states, as agriculture provided the fertile ground for state-formation, while isolation provided time for them to develop and confront the expanding Chinese empire.

Our study sheds important light on why eastern Asia kept reproducing a mega-state in the area that became China and on the determinants of its borders with other states.

James Kai-sing Kung, et al., "Millet, Rice, and Isolation: Origins and Persistence of the World's Most Enduring Mega-State", SSRN IZA Institute of Labor Economics Discussion Paper Series IZA Discussion Paper No. 15348 (June 11, 2022).

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4134131

The Legacy Of Herding

The Legacy Of Herding

Historical food productions practices influence culture and morality long after those food production practices are long gone.

According to the widely known ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. 

We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large-scale surveys. 

The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor. First, the culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking. Second, contemporary ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today. Third, the contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior in the globally representative Global Preferences Survey. In all, the evidence supports the idea that this form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict across the globe.

Yiming Cao, et al., "Herding, Warfare, and a Culture of Honor" NBER (September 2021).

Another paper fleshes out the concept a bit more (and has a nice literature review), although its description of the southern United States as historically a herding culture is doubtful. Appalachia was indeed settled by Scotch-Irish herders and does have a culture of honor, but, the lowlands of the American South (which also has a culture of honor), where plantation farming became predominant, was settled by lesser English gentry farmers, not by descendants of herders.

A key element of cultures of honor is that men in these cultures are prepared to protect with violence the reputation for strength and toughness. Such cultures are likely to develop where (1) a man's resources can be thieved in full by other men and (2) the governing body is weak and thus cannot prevent or punish theft. 

Todd K. Shackelford, "An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on Cultures of Honor" Evolutionary Psychology (January 1, 2005) (open access). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300126

The example of the Southern United States suggests that a weak state may be as important a factor in the development of a culture of honor as a herding economy.

The Legacy Of Plough v. Hoe Farming

Parallel hypotheses from the same disciplines associate ancestral heavy plough farming with strongly patriarchal societies with strong differentiation in gender roles, and ancestral hoe farming with less patriarchal and sometimes even matrilineal societies.

The Legacy Of Clan Based Societies

It has also become common in modern political theory to associate weak government approaching anarchy with clan based societies in which women are forced into highly subordinated roles, somewhat in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes ("nasty, brutish and short") as opposed to those who idealize an Eden-like "state of nature." See, e.g., Valerie M. Hudson, et al., "Clan Governance and State Stability: The Relationship between Female Subordination and Political Order" 109(3) American Political Science Review 535-555 (August 2015).

The Legacy Of Cousin Marriage

Also along the same lines, cousin marriage (often common in clan based societies and also among feudal aristocrats) tends to be a practice the undermines democratic government:

Image from here.

How might consanguinity affect democracy? 

Cousin marriages create extended families that are much more closely related than is the case where such marriages are not practiced. To illustrate, if a man’s daughter marries his brother’s son, the latter is then not only his nephew but also his son-in-law, and any children born of that union are more genetically similar to the two grandfathers than would be the case with non-consanguineous marriages. Following the principles of kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) and genetic similarity theory (Rushton, 1989, 2005), the high level of genetic similarity creates extended families with exceptionally close bonds. Kurtz succinctly illustrates this idea in his description of Middle Eastern educational practices:

If, for example, a child shows a special aptitude in school, his siblings might willingly sacrifice their personal chances for advancement simply to support his education. Yet once that child becomes a professional, his income will help to support his siblings, while his prestige will enhance their marriage prospects. (Kurtz, 2002, p. 37).

Such kin groupings may be extremely nepotistic and distrusting of non-family members in the larger society. In this context, non-democratic regimes emerge as a consequence of individuals turning to reliable kinship groupings for support rather than to the state or the free market. It has been found, for example, that societies having high levels of familism tend to have low levels of generalized trust and civic engagement (Realo, Allik, & Greenfield, 2008), two important correlates of democracy. Moreover, to people in closely related kin groups, individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are part of the cultural idiom of democracy, are perceived as strange and counterintuitive ideological abstractions (Sailer, 2004).

From the body text of the following article whose abstract is also set forth below: 

This article examines the hypothesis that although the level of democracy in a society is a complex phenomenon involving many antecedents, consanguinity (marriage and subsequent mating between second cousins or closer relatives) is an important though often overlooked predictor of it. Measures of the two variables correlate substantially in a sample of 70 nations (r = −0.632, p < 0.001), and consanguinity remains a significant predictor of democracy in multiple regression and path analyses involving several additional independent variables. 

The data suggest that where consanguineous kinship networks are numerically predominant and have been made to share a common statehood, democracy is unlikely to develop. 

Possible explanations for these findings include the idea that restricted gene flow arising from consanguineous marriage facilitates a rigid collectivism that is inimical to individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are key elements of the democratic ethos. Furthermore, high levels of within-group genetic similarity may discourage cooperation between different large-scale kin groupings sharing the same nation, inhibiting democracy. Finally, genetic similarity stemming from consanguinity may encourage resource predation by members of socially elite kinship networks as an inclusive fitness enhancing behavior.

Michael A. Woodley, Edward Bell, "Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations" 44(2) Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (2013). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022112443855

Reflections On Greece Part I: Palimpsest Layers In The History Of Greece

So, I am back from a couple of weeks in Greece, in Athens, the Cyclades, and Crete. Naturally, this got me thinking about a lot of issues of deep history. I'll start with a historical backgrounder.

The Eastern Mediterranean (image from here).

Any assessment of genetic or archaeological or linguistic evidence from Greece and historiography require one to consider the many confounding palimpsest layers in its past that must be considered and stripped away before considering older materials.

Greece had Neanderthals and the earliest modern humans in Europe (as expected almost definitionally as it is the most Southeastern part of Europe).

A One Paragraph Overview Of Holocene Era Greek History

Wikipedia sums up its history this way:

Generally, the history of Greece is divided into the following periods:

• Neolithic Greece covering a period beginning with the establishment of agricultural societies in 7000 BC and ending in 3200/3100 BC,
• Helladic (Minoan or Bronze Age) chronology covering a period beginning with the transition to a metal-based economy in 3200/3100 BC to the rise and fall of the Mycenaean Greek palaces spanning roughly five centuries (1600–1100 BC),
• Ancient Greece covering a period from the fall of the Mycenaean civilization in 1100 BC to 146 BC spanning multiple sub-periods including the Greek Dark Ages (or Iron Age, Homeric Age), Archaic period, the Classical period and the Hellenistic period,
• Roman Greece covering a period from the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC to 324 AD,
• Byzantine Greece covering a period from the establishment of the capital city of Byzantium, Constantinople, in 324 AD until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD,
• Ottoman Greece covering a period from 1453 up until the Greek Revolution of 1821,
• Modern Greece covering a period from 1821 to the present.

Greece was near the birthplace of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic and had very early Neolithic communities. 

Bronze Age Greece

Greeks metal age civilizations including the Minoan civilization were among the earliest, if not the earliest, in Europe, and were pre-Indo-European. A parallel, somewhat less advanced metal age culture arose on the Greek mainland.

Greece has one of the best documented transitions from the non-Indo-European to Indo-European cultures in prehistory with even some written attestation in the form of the Linear A to Linear B and Eteocretan transitions in addition to rich oral legendary history documented not too long after fact, and contemporaneous Akkadian and Egyptian records.

Iron Age And Early Medieval Greece

In the Iron Age, Greece had periods of Persian invasion and rule. Briefly, in the early Iron Age, before the Romans became ascendant, they had an ancient maritime colonial civilization that stretched from the Mediterranean coast in Spain to the Black Sea. Culturally and linguistically, "Ancient" and "Classical" Greece in the early Iron Age were in direct cultural continuity with the Mycenaean Greek society that fell during Bronze Age collapse.

The Roman Empire at its greatest extent, 117 CE, the time of Trajan's death (with its vassals in pink) via Wikipedia.

Fun fact: Emperor Hadrian, who is famous for his wall in Britain at something close to the Roman Empire's peak, also built an archway in new half of the city in Athens that survives today and is now at the center of the city. I checked it out in person the day before yesterday.

They spent four and a half centuries ruled by the Romans.

But, they are one of the best examples of a people who were conquered militarily but ended up culturally integrating and subsuming their conquerors to a great extent. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire survived and morphed into the Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople, which prevailed in Greece for another eleven centuries (although this was not uniform across all parts of Greece).

Ottoman and Venetian Greece In The Late Middle Ages And Early Modern Period

The division of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade (1204-1261 CE) via Wikipedia. The purple territory is the Byzantine Empire proper and the rust colored states are Greek successor states of the Byzantine Empire. The green areas are parts of the Republic of Venice shown with the year that they joined the Republic of Venice. The Brown Sultanate is an immediate predecessor of the Ottoman Empire which would come into being a generation later. 

The Byzantine Empire greatly reduced since the 7th century, in the face of an expanding Islamic Empire, lasted for eight centuries, but it was all downhill after 1261 CE, and finally imploded in 1453 CE, after being defeated by the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922 CE).

The Republic of Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries via Wikipedia.

The Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent in Europe, under Sultan Mehmed IV via Wikipedia.

But, some of Greece resisted the Islamic expansion by becoming an integral part of the Republic of Venice for many centuries with Heraklion, the current regional capital of Crete, becoming a Venice of the East (the understanding that the term "Oriental" originally referred to what is now often referred to as the "Near East" sunk in).

Eventually the Ottoman Empire did conquer Greece, but this left a remarkably thin lasting impression. Even the "Turkish delights" made famous by C.S. Lewis are called "Greek delights" everywhere in Greece which is allergic to Turkey with whom it has a tortured history of conflict that is ongoing. A brief period of Greek absolute monarchy under Austro-Hungarian King Otto's brother-in-law (from 1832 to 1843 when he established a constitutional monarchy in which he remained king) left more of a lasting mark on the country than about four centuries of Ottoman Empire rule.

A more detailed account of the process explains that:

Most of Greece gradually became part of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. The Eastern Roman, the direct continuation to the ancient Roman Empire who ruled most of the Greek-speaking world for over 1100 years, had been fatally weakened since the sacking of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204. 

The Ottoman advance into Greece was preceded by a victory over the Serbs to its north. First, the Ottomans won at 1371 on the Maritsa River – where the Serb forces were led by the King Vukašin of Serbia, the father of Prince Marko and the co-ruler of the last emperor from the Serbian Nemanjic dynasty. This was followed by a draw in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. 

With no further threat by the Serbs and the subsequent Byzantine civil wars, the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453 and advanced southwards into Greece, capturing Athens in 1458. The Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and the Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by 1500 most of the plains and islands of Greece were in Ottoman hands. The mountains of Greece were largely untouched, and were a refuge for Greeks to flee foreign rule and engage in guerrilla warfare. 

Cyprus fell in 1571, and the Venetians retained Crete until 1670. The Ionian Islands were only briefly ruled by the Ottomans (Kefalonia from 1479 to 1481 and from 1485 to 1500), and remained primarily under the rule of Venice. 

Territorial evolution of Kingdom of Greece until 1947 CE via Wikipedia. 
The territories in yellow, acquired in 1920, were ceded back to Turkey in 1923. 

Eventually, staring with the proclamation of the Greek Revolution in October of 1821, the Greeks finally secure independence after a long hiatus (I'm not sure that Greece was ever a unified kingdom before this time, as opposed to a civilization of interacting balkanized city-states and small principalities, even in its Golden Age). This was a period of tremendous growth, urbanization and modernization, a bit like that of countries emerging from Eastern Europe and the Communist regimes in the 20th century. As explained here:

The urban population tripled from 8% in 1853 to 24% in 1907. Athens grew from a village of 6000 people in 1834, when it became the capital, to 63,000 in 1879, 111,000 in 1896, and 167,000 in 1907.

In Athens and other cities, men arriving from rural areas set up workshops and stores, creating a middle class. They joined with bankers, professional men, university students, and military officers, to demand reform and modernization of the political and economic system. Athens became the center of the merchant marine, which quadrupled from 250,000 tons in 1875 to more than 1,000,000 tons in 1915. As the cities modernized, businessmen adopted the latest styles of Western European architecture.

This was actually the second rebirth of Athens, which was also entirely abandoned in favor of a more defensible neighboring island in the 400s BCE, following a Persian invasion. Athens is now home to about 4 million people, a third of the twelve million people in modern Greece, more than half of whom live in its three largest cities (only about 12% of the population lives permanently on its islands today, and most of those people live in urban settings as well).

With more than a century of territorial adjustments, Greece eventually reached something like its current boundaries. For example, as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, most of Epirus, southern Macedonia, Crete and the northern Aegean islands were incorporated into the Kingdom of Greece. Greece was divided internally between the major sides in World War I with the prevailing allies ousting the King and becoming ascendant. Today's boundaries of Greece are the same as they were in 1919, except for the Dodecanese islands off the shore of Turkey ceded by Italy to Greece in 1947.

The 19th and 20th century brought major territorial realignments and mass migrations of people "ethnic cleansing" style with non-Greeks leaving independent Greece and Greeks with a handful of exceptions leaving Anatolia and the Black Sea region (something reminiscent of the mass migrations of Jews leading up to World War II and for those who survived the Holocaust, in its aftermath, to Israel and the United States, and also of the realignment of populations in South Asia following the partition of India and Pakistan).

Per Wikipedia, in the next key time period:

At the end of the war, the Great Powers agreed that the Ottoman city of Smyrna (Izmir) and its hinterland, both of which had large Greek populations, be handed over to Greece. 

Greek troops occupied Smyrna in 1919, and in 1920 the Treaty of Sèvres was signed by the Ottoman government; the treaty stipulated that in five years time a plebiscite would be held in Smyrna on whether the region would join Greece. However, Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, overthrew the Ottoman government and organised a military campaign against the Greek troops, resulting in the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922). A major Greek offensive ground to a halt in 1921, and by 1922 Greek troops were in retreat. The Turkish forces recaptured Smyrna on 9 September 1922, and setting the city ablaze and killing many Greeks and Armenians. 

The war was concluded by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), according to which there was to be a population exchange between Greece and Turkey on the basis of religion. Over one million Orthodox Christians left Turkey in exchange for 400,000 Muslims from Greece. The events of 1919–1922 are regarded in Greece as a particularly calamitous period of history. Between 1914 and 1923, an estimated 750,000 to 900,000 Greeks died at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, in what many scholars have termed a genocide.

World War II was not kind to Greece either, where it was a major area of active conflict, and a period of Nazi occupation left definite marks. Once restored to allied control, civil war between nationalist and communist forces broke out (1944-1949) before World War II was even over, in the first conflict of the Cold War. Subsequent U.S. led post-war Marshall Plan reconstruction efforts that flooded Athens or other major Greece cities with "International style" "brutalist" architecture that remains predominant in much of the mainland. 

Neither the monarchy nor democratic nature of the constitutional monarchy was uninterrupted:

Following the National Schism during World War I and the subsequent Asia Minor Disaster, the monarchy was deposed in March 1924 and replaced by the Second Hellenic Republic. Between 1924 and 1935 there were in Greece twenty-three changes of government, a dictatorship, and thirteen coups d'etat. In October 1935, General Georgios Kondylis, a former Venizelist, overthrew the government and arranged for a plebiscite to end the republic. On 3 November 1935, the official tally showed that 98% of the votes supported the restoration of the monarchy. The balloting was not secret, and participation was compulsory. As Time described it at the time, "As a voter, one could drop into the ballot box a blue vote for George II and please General George Kondylis, or one could cast a red ballot for the Republic and get roughed up." George II returned to the Greek throne on 25 November 1935. 

On 4 August 1936, the King endorsed the establishment of a dictatorship led by veteran army officer Ioannis Metaxas, signing decrees that dissolved the parliament, banned political parties, abolished the constitution, and purported to create the "Third Hellenic Civilization." An Index of banned books during that period included the works of Plato.

George II followed the Greek government in exile after the German invasion of Greece in 1941 and returned to the throne in 1946, after a referendum that resulted in the restoration of constitutional monarchy.

Greece got yet another military coup and military dictatorship (which abolished the constitutional monarchy once and for all) in 1967 and lasted until 1974 when it fell to another coup that also precipitated a coup in Cyprus that led to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus whose consequences remain a point of tension that has not been fully resolved.

In 1967, the Greek military seized power in a coup d'état, overthrowing the centre right government of Panagiotis Kanellopoulos. It established the Greek military junta of 1967-1974 which became known as the Régime of the Colonels. The junta government's accession to power lead to an isolation to Greece from European affairs and froze Greece's entry to the European Union. In 1973, the régime abolished the Greek monarchy and in 1974, dictator Papadopoulos denied help to the United States. After a second coup that year, Colonel Ioannides was appointed as the new head-of-state. 

Ioannides was responsible for the 1974 coup against President Makarios of Cyprus. The coup became the pretext for the first wave of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 (see Greco-Turkish relations). The Cyprus events and the outcry following a bloody suppression of Athens Polytechnic uprising in Athens led to the implosion of the military régime.

But, democracy was ended and the end of the monarchy was confirmed, later in 1974, and Greece joined the E.U.

After the end of the military régime, democracy was restored. 

The fall of the junta was followed by the metapolitefsi. Metapolitefsi was initiated when Konstantinos Karamanlis returned from self-exile in Paris at the invitation of the junta, to become interim prime minister on July 23, 1974 and later gained re-election for two further terms at the head of the conservative New Democracy Party. In August 1974, Greek forces withdrew from the integrated military structure of NATO in protest at the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus. 

In 1974, a referendum voted 69%–31% to confirm the deposition of King Constantine II. A democratic republican constitution came into force. Another previously exiled politician, Andreas Papandreou also returned and founded the socialist PASOK Party (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), which won the 1981 election and dominated Greek politics for almost two decades. 

After the restoration of democracy, Greece's stability and economic prosperity improved significantly. Greece rejoined NATO in 1980, joined the European Union (EU) in 1981 and adopted the euro as its currency in 2001.

This didn't bring happily ever after, however. 

In 2009, a sovereign debt crisis flowing from a U.S. led global financial crisis hit Greece and the country was thrust into a state of extreme economic distress until about 2015. Everywhere in Greece there are abandoned half built homes and commercial buildings, the construction of which was derailed in that crisis, which have not completed and are covered with graffiti, some serving as homeless camps, as of August of 2019. Successive elections brought tidal waves of political change and also gave far right parties considerable power, although the far right parties and more democratic socialist leaning parties were swept out earlier this year in an election that brought a center-right party into power, and as I my visit, affairs had returned to relative normalcy. 

Books About Prussia

My paternal line ancestor came from Prussia in 1847 to dodge the draft (Germany did not yet exist).  Some of my ancestors are also connected to one of the classical music composers called Bach's family. Most of the ancestors who stayed ended up just barely on the East German side of the divided Germany after World War II.

Razib notes some good books about Prussia, which a quote here for future reference:

Tim Blanning’s Frederick the Great: King of Prussia is an excellent book. So is The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815. Finally, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. One of the most interesting things about Frederick the Great: King of Prussia is how Blanning recounts the importance of personally playing and repeatedly listening to music in the life of the German monarch. He was apparently a very competent flutist.

In the greater scheme of things, Prussia is particularly notable for having an absurdly micromanaging legal code (with dictates, for example, regarding when one should do which chores in a household like laundry) and for encouraging a largely industrial employer based welfare state, not so different from the Japanese economy of the 1980s. Some interesting historical economics also flows from the previously highly balkanized state of what became Germany, comparing economic development with litmus tests like opera house construction and public clocktowers.

Genetically, my father's side makes him look like a broadly Northern European mutt, in significant part because the significant clusters and ancestral populations of Northern Europe don't align very well with the current political boundaries there, and partially because Northern Europe has had considerable population exchange in the modern era in this region.

Is Poverty Point, Louisiana Evidence Of Complex Social Organization In Hunter-Gathers?

A short partially animated video by the maker of PhD Comics makes the case that Poverty Point, Louisiana is evidence of a far more sophisticated social organization in hunter-gatherers from 1200 BCE than is commonly assumed. 

Given the surprising short timeline of construction of the largest earth mound there (60-90 days which would have taken 1000 laborers plus supporters), I'm inclined to think that, like the pre-Neolithic temples of the Fertile Crescent like Göbekli Tepe, this may have been a periodic meet-up event of an extended clan of tribes a bit like a modern Olympics or extended family reunion. And, while individual mounds may have been built in one go, the entire cluster of mounds may have been built over the course of multiple generations taking centuries. The Wikipedia account of the Anatolian site below is strikingly similar to the one in the video about Poverty Point:

While the site formally belongs to the earliest Neolithic (PPNA), up to now no traces of domesticated plants or animals have been found. The inhabitants are assumed to have been hunters and gatherers who nevertheless lived in villages for at least part of the year. So far, very little evidence for residential use has been found. Through the radiocarbon method, the end of Layer III can be fixed at about 9000 BCE (see above) but it is believed that the elevated location may have functioned as a spiritual center by 11,000 BCE or even earlier, essentially at the very end of the Pleistocene. 

The surviving structures, then, not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel, they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BCE. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies. 

Archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the heavy pillars from local quarries and move them 100–500 meters (330–1,640 ft) to the site. The pillars weigh 10–20 metric tons (10–20 long tons; 11–22 short tons), with one still in the quarry weighing 50 tons. It has been suggested that an elite class of religious leaders supervised the work and later controlled whatever ceremonies took place. If so, this would be the oldest known evidence for a priestly caste—much earlier than such social distinctions developed elsewhere in the Near East.

Another possibility, but not really consistent with the lack of evidence of settlement and short time frame of construction locally, at least, would have been a somewhat sedentary lifestyle supported by fishing and proto-farming. But, fishing and proto-farming in the Mississippi Delta era could still have given rise to a larger community population that was relatively localized which would make mobilization of a community to build this monument more feasible. Indeed, it may have even been a Chalcolithic technology civilization. According to articles in Science which I summarized in a 2012 post at this site:

A little more than a thousand years later (flourishing 1600 BCE to 1000 BCE), however, a civilization that appears to be derived from this first wave of mound builders appears at Poverty Point, which is within a day's walk of the earlier sites in Louisiana. This urban center is much larger in scale, perhaps comparable to a medium sized archaic era Greek city state, and shows clear signs of a trade network that extends as far as Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the North and the Ozarks in the West. It used copper and engaged in fine stoneworking. Its trade network may have even extended farther still. The way that its structures are aligned with solstices and equinoxes, its burial practices, its pottery, and the arrangement of structures in the complex, appear to strongly echo and to probably be antecedent to the Mesoamerican civilizations of the Olmecs (from ca. 1200 BCE) . . .

Maize (and hence agriculture) had reached the American Southwest by about 2100 BCE via a highland route from a pre-Olmec civilization in Mexico (see also here). Domesticated pumpkins and gourds were present in Kentucky ca. 3000 BCE, and were independently domesticated in Northeast Mexico and the eastern United States. Given this data, I'm skeptical that Poverty Point was really, as the investigator in the video claims, a hunter-gatherer society. But, there are authoritative investigators of the site who have reached that conclusion.

Maize only reached the Eastern United States around 200 BCE, but the Eastern Agricultural Complex had independently domesticated other plants starting around 1800 BCE. These crops included squash (Cucurbita pepo var. ozarkana), little barley (Hordeum pusillum), goosefoot or lambsquarters (Chenopodium berlandieri), erect knotweed (Polygonum erectum), maygrass (Phalaris caroliniana), sumpweed or marsh elder (Iva annua), and sunflower (Helianthus annuus).

The plants are often divided into "oily" or "starchy" categories. Sunflower and sumpweed have edible seeds rich in oil. Erect knotweed and goosefoot, a leafy vegetable, are starches, as are maygrass and little barley, both of which are grasses that yield grains that may be ground to make flour.

It is plausible to me that non-specialist archaeologists at these sites may not have recognized Eastern Agricultural Complex crops as domesticated plants rather than as wild gathered crops, since most of the EAC crops were later replaced by the maize-bean-squash triad developed in Mexico. 

Also, cooking in stone ovens seems inconsistent with a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

It is notable that the construction of the Poverty Point mound is contemporaneous with the climate event that in Europe and the Near East led to a historical phenomena known as Bronze Age collapse. Perhaps the effects of that climate event in the Mississippi Delta area at the time spurred a fresh wave of religious devotion to assuage the gods.

Another reason to have particular interest is Poverty Point is that like Göbekli Tepe, in the Fertile Crescent, this seems to have been the point of genesis of a cultural movement that may be ancestral to a wave of agricultural development and organized civilization that spanned most of one continent and a healthy part of another in both cases. (Links to posts on subsequent possibly related civilizations in North America can be found in this post.)

In the chicken and egg problem of which came first, large scale organized religion, or modern civilization, both of these sites argue in favor of a religion first hypothesis.

Papuans Continued To Forage Long After Inventing Agriculture

In most places where agriculture was adopted, it replaced hunting and foraging. But, new hard evidence based upon isotypes in small mammal bones in Papua New Guinea demonstrates that there, foraging remained an important source of subsistence until at least 300 years ago. As a Science Daily press release explains:

In tropical New Guinea, where one of the earliest human experiments with agriculture occurred, agriculture apparently never replaced foraging as a primary subsistence strategy: "Montane tropical forest environments provided a stable source of subsistence for human hunter-gatherers in New Guinea," says Patrick Roberts, primary author of the study. "We have found out that foragers were living in close proximity to emerging farming groups, from 12,000 to 300 years ago, which indicates that agriculture was not a forced event in this part of the world." 

Tropical forests have frequently been perceived as unattractive habitats for humans -- both foragers and farmers -- due to poor soils, difficulties of humidity, and issues of reliable nutrition. However, archaeological work in New Guinea, among other tropical regions, has now helped to refute this idea: "We can now affirm that humans have occupied areas in this region, covered today in rainforest, from 45,000 years ago," says..., Professor Glenn Summerhayes from the University of Otago, senior author of the study. "Some of the earliest evidence for the human development of agriculture comes precisely from the tropical forested portions of New Guinea."

This is particularly notable, because most cultures in global history that have been slow adopters of agriculture have had a predominantly fishing based economy as an alternative, but in New Guinea we have a group of terrestrial hunter-gatherers in a tropical forest instead.

The abstract and citation to the source article are as follows:

The terminal Pleistocene/Holocene boundary (approximately 12–8 thousand years ago) represented a major ecological threshold for humans, both as a significant climate transition and due to the emergence of agriculture around this time. In the highlands of New Guinea, climatic and environmental changes across this period have been highlighted as potential drivers of one of the earliest domestication processes in the world. We present a terminal Pleistocene/Holocene palaeoenvironmental record (12–0 thousand years ago ) of carbon and oxygen isotopes in small mammal tooth enamel from the site of Kiowa. The results show that tropical highland forest and open mosaics, and the human subsistence focused on these environments, remained stable throughout the period in which agriculture emerged at nearby Kuk Swamp. This suggests the persistence of tropical forest foraging among highland New Guinea groups and highlights that agriculture in the region was not adopted as a unilinear or dramatic, forced event but was locally and historically contingent.

Patrick Roberts, Dylan Gaffney, Julia Lee-Thorp, and Glenn Summerhayes. "Persistent tropical foraging in the highlands of terminal Pleistocene/Holocene New Guinea." 1 Nature Ecology & Evolution 44 (2017).

Did The Crusades Fuel The Development Of The Modern State?

Two economists make an intriguing, but not entirely convincing case that the Crusades of the Middle Ages played a pivotal role in the rise of the modern state. When did they happen?

There is general agreement among historians on the numbering of the first five crusades: the First Crusade, 1096–1102 CE; Second Crusade, 1147–49 CE; Third Crusade, 1188–92 CE; Fourth Crusade, 1202–04 CE; and Fifth Crusade, 1217–21 CE. Some have argued for the relevance of three additional numbered crusades (the Sixth Crusade, 1227–29 CE; Seventh Crusade, 1248–54 CE; and Eighth Crusade 1270–72 CE)[.]

Particularly notable is the article's revelation that the Crusades were largely financed with the personal wealth of the elite military leaders of the campaigns raised largely through the sale of their real estate.

A variety of sources suggest that the primary crusade participants were members of the European elite—including nobles, knights, and monarchs—as well as the full complement of individuals who might accompany elites on such a journey. Part of the reason that elites were crusade participants was that the costs of raising the funds necessary to participate would be difficult, even for the affluent, and virtually impossible for poor nobles who might be required to raise up to four times their annual income. This is not to say that elites were the numerical majority of travelers to the Holy Land; historians have suggested that nobles and knights in the First Crusade, for example, traveled with at least three to four times their numbers in squires, grooms, and other staff. But it was the elites who “took up the cross” and most of what is known about the crusaders is drawn from charters that document the preparations of elite participants.

The abstract and citation to the article are as follows:

Holy Land Crusades were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period. Crusader mobilization had important implications for European state formation. We find that areas with large numbers of Holy Land crusaders witnessed increased political stability and institutional development as well as greater urbanization associated with rising trade and capital accumulation, even after taking into account underlying levels of religiosity and economic development. Our findings contribute to a scholarly debate regarding when the essential elements of the modern state first began to appear. Although our causal mechanisms— which focus on the importance of war preparation and urban capital accumulation— resemble those emphasized by previous research, we date the point of critical transition to statehood centuries earlier, in line with scholars who emphasize the medieval origins of the modern state. We also point to one avenue by which the rise of Muslim military and political power may have affected European institutional development.

Lisa Blaydes and Christopher Paik, "The Impact of Holy Land Crusades on State Formation: War Mobilization, Trade Integration, and Political Development in Medieval Europe", International Organization / FirstView Article / May 2016, pp 1 - 36 (May 30, 2016).

Pre-Industrial Societies Reward High Status Men With More Children

From the hunter-gatherer era and on into societies based on herding and farming, high social status men have significantly more children than low social status men. Then, in the industrial era, that relationship was inverted. That is the conclusion of a new meta-analysis of 33 pre-industrial societies.

I've seen a study along the same lines out of a University of Michigan scholar a decade or two ago, that looked at historical and legendary history documents to show the gradually decreasing number of mates and children of ultra high status men from the Bronze Age through the present, with significant changes continuing even from the Victorian era to the 20th century. The drivers of this change aren't entirely clear.

The study and its abstract are as follows:

Social status motivates much of human behavior. However, status may have been a relatively weak target of selection for much of human evolution if ancestral foragers tended to be more egalitarian. We test the “egalitarianism hypothesis” that status has a significantly smaller effect on reproductive success (RS) in foragers compared with nonforagers. We also test between alternative male reproductive strategies, in particular whether reproductive benefits of status are due to lower offspring mortality (parental investment) or increased fertility (mating effort). We performed a phylogenetic multilevel metaanalysis of 288 statistical associations between measures of male status (physical formidability, hunting ability, material wealth, political influence) and RS (mating success, wife quality, fertility, offspring mortality, and number of surviving offspring) from 46 studies in 33 nonindustrial societies. We found a significant overall effect of status on RS (r = 0.19), though this effect was significantly lower than for nonhuman primates (r = 0.80). There was substantial variation due to marriage system and measure of RS, in particular status associated with offspring mortality only in polygynous societies (r = −0.08), and with wife quality only in monogamous societies (r = 0.15). However, the effects of status on RS did not differ significantly by status measure or subsistence type: foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture. These results suggest that traits that facilitate status acquisition were not subject to substantially greater selection with domestication of plants and animals, and are part of reproductive strategies that enhance fertility more than offspring well-being.

Christopher R. von Rueden, Adrian V. Jaeggi. "Men’s status and reproductive success in 33 nonindustrial societies: Effects of subsistence, marriage system, and reproductive strategy." 113 (39) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 10824 (2016).

Civilization As A Consequence Of War

Peter Turchin's new book, Ultrasociety, argues that modern large scale civilization is something that has emerged largely as a tool developed because it was necessary for warfare.  The book also provides fun facts like the fact that socially complex ants makes up a combined 25% of the mass of all animals on Earth, which is a pretty interesting fact and an interesting way to measure the dominance of different kinds of organisms.

This builds on model based research described in in 2013 PNAS paper which is open access that I read and discussed, either at this blog or in comments elsewhere at the time. The abstract of the paper reads as follows:

How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today, typically organized as states? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? 

Existing theories are usually formulated as verbal models and, as a result, do not yield sharply defined, quantitative predictions that could be unambiguously tested with data. 

Here we develop a cultural evolutionary model that predicts where and when the largest-scale complex societies arose in human history. The central premise of the model, which we test, is that costly institutions that enabled large human groups to function without splitting up evolved as a result of intense competition between societies—primarily warfare. Warfare intensity, in turn, depended on the spread of historically attested military technologies (e.g., chariots and cavalry) and on geographic factors (e.g., rugged landscape). 

The model was simulated within a realistic landscape of the Afroeurasian landmass and its predictions were tested against a large dataset documenting the spatiotemporal distribution of historical large-scale societies in Afroeurasia between 1,500 BCE and 1,500 CE. The model-predicted pattern of spread of large-scale societies was very similar to the observed one. Overall, the model explained 65% of variance in the data. An alternative model, omitting the effect of diffusing military technologies, explained only 16% of variance. 

Our results support theories that emphasize the role of institutions in state-building and suggest a possible explanation why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita.

I'm generally pretty skeptical of model based research of this kind, but Turchin's stochastic model is one of the best examples of the type, doing an excellent job of striking a balance between having too many and too few parameters, and of modeling them in a way that reproduces alternative histories that are similar in broad outlines to historical reality.  The fact that the model can do so strongly suggests that the parameters that the model considers are basically the right ones.

If I recall correctly, the guts of the model as applied also exploit a recurring motif in forest level views of history - conflict between "barbarian" herder societies (often in mountains or dry steppes) that tend to prevail in "bad times" and "civilized" farmer societies that tend to prevail when conditions are more optimal.

The other question, of course, is whether we as a species have outgrown this kind of dynamic, or if it continues to drive our cultural evolution on more or less the same basis that it did from the late Bronze Age through the Middle Ages.

Why Did The First Farmers Farm?

Numbers Make Smart People Stupid

An open access paper in PNAS by Samuel Bowles (of the interdisciplinary Sante Fe Institute) and Jung-Kyoo Choi (a Korean academic economist), "Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene," is a classic example of smart people doing lousy analysis with quantitative methods.  But, the focus on private property institutions in the context of the development of farming technology seems driven more by the political agenda of the investigators, than by the data.

If you read academic journal articles long enough, you will notice the trend.  Someone outside a field uses a simple mathematical model to solve problems that have confounded experts in the field for decades or centuries and publish it in a general interest journal. This provides a clear, precise answer to the problem.  This creates a huge controversy as experts in the field attempt to explain the huge conceptual or methodological errors made by the outsiders, usually with objections that are well founded.  The wider public, however, remembers the flawed study, but not the apt criticisms of it made in response to it, long after it is published.

One of the authors at the Language Log blog rants about some similar cases involving historical linguistics at Science magazine where a study with weak methodology used mathematical "entropy analysis" to argue that the Indus River Valley civilization's symbols were part of a written language.  Science wasn't interested in publishing an attempted replication using better data and methods that contradicted this famous result, concluding that the Harappan symbols, like the symbols used by the Vinca civilization of the Balkans and symbols used by the Picts were a mere proto-linguistic symbol system and not a full fledged written language.

Another PNAS computational linguistic paper by repeat offender and New Zealand academic Quentin D. Atkinson and others was also recently ripped apart by the linguistics experts at Language Log in a takedown that I discussed in a recent post.  Atkinson released another notoriously flawed computational linguistics paper on serial founder effects and phonemic diversity in 2011 which I blogged at the time.  He co-authored a flawed computational linguistics paper on the age of the Indo-European language family in Nature in 2003 and reproduced by others with improved by still flawed methods in 2011 (blogged here).

And, there was also the flawed foray into computational linguistics analyzing the case for an Altaic language family, also sponsored by the Sante Fe Institute, with retired eminent physicist Murray Gell-Mann as a co-author.  This study was actually better than some of Atkinson's efforts, but is was bad enough that Gell-Mann was ridiculed for it, and included some glaring overstatements about what had been shown.  For example, deceptively the study prominently discussed the Korean language as part of the Altaic language family in its analysis, despite the fact that the study didn't include any Korean words in the data sets that were used for the paper's computational analysis.

The Bowles and Choi Paper On The Neolithic Revolution

Bowles and Choi are trying to answer the question of why people started farming when they did (an event called the Neolithic Revolution), despite the fact that the first farmers were generally less well fed than contemporaneous foragers.  They pose the question, somewhat misleadingly, as follows (emphasis added):

[A]s a number of archaeologists have pointed out (11⇓–13), farming was probably not economically advantageous in many places where it was first introduced. Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the productivity of the first farmers (calories per hour of labor including processing and storage) was probably less than that of the foragers they eventually replaced, perhaps by a considerable amount (14) (SI Appendix). In many parts of the world, stature and health status appear to have declined with cultivation (15). Farming did raise the productivity of land and animals, and this, we will see, was critical to its success. However, why an erstwhile hunter–gatherer would adopt a new technology that increased the labor necessary to obtain a livelihood remains a puzzle.  

They are correct that calories per hour of labor including processing and storage was probably less for early farmers than for foragers, and that stature and health status declined among early adopters of farming.  My quarrel is with their use of the term "economically advantageous", when what they really mean is "nutritionally advantageous."  Their failure to distinguish these two concepts is a critical flaw in the study.

There is no good reason at all to believe that farmers were acting in anything but their best economic interests taken as a whole, even though this may have involved nutritional deficits.  The question instead, is what benefits did early adopters of farming receive that made up for the nutritional deficits that they experienced.

When People Seem Irrational, You Are Ignorant Of One Or More Key Facts 

One of the most powerful lesson of economics is that people, even ill educated people whom their betters don't give much credit for acting rationally do indeed very consistently, at least on average, respond to incentives and take actions that enhance their well being.  Almost always, when people do something that looks like it is irrational, this is because the observer isn't aware of the factors that are driving people to take the action in question.

For example, while renting rather than owning a home when interest rates are low and small down payment can be secured, making it cheaper to make mortgage payments than rent payments, may seem like an irrational choice for a working class individual, when one looks closer, it frequently isn't irrational.  If that working class individual has bad credit, the interest rates he would have to pay may be much higher than those paid by his middle class peers.  And, if that working class individual is likely to be unemployed for a few months at a time over the course of the next decade and has little savings, owning a home exposes him to a loss of a down payment in a foreclosure when he is unemployed and can no longer make his monthly payment, while his down side loss in the event of a few months of unemployment may be less (particularly if he keeps his limited assets in a liquid savings account rather than a down payment to buffer him at these times) if he rents.  A choice that looked irrational when only a simplistic analysis is conducted may make more sense when more factors are considered.

Key Factual Observations About the Neolithic Revolution

This Bowles and Choi paper is better than most at presenting some of the key historical facts from archaeology and paleoclimate studies, even though its model is too simple to capture many of these insights and adds little to what can be completed more reliably without a mathematical simulation which is really just a gimmick for presenting the foregone conclusion associated with the assumptions that go into the model. 

Paleoclimate

The key paleoclimate data are presented in the chart below.

Ignoring for the moment their simulated data in light gray bar graph form:

Estimated dates of some well-studied cases of the initial emergence of cultivation are on the horizontal axis (8, 54, 55). Climate variability (Left) is an indicator of the 100-y maximum difference in surface temperature measured by levels of δ¹⁸O from Greenland ice cores (SI Appendix). A value of 4 on the vertical axis indicates a difference in average temperature over a 100-y period equal to about 5 °C.

As the chart indicates, intermittent periods of wild temperature variation over the span of just a few generations was the norm for the entire Upper Paleolithic era (about 40,000-50,000 years ago), after which temperatures became much more stable starting at the beginning of the Holocene era about 10,000 years ago when farming first emerged in the Fertile Crescent and China and the middle latitudes of the Americas (farming arose independently at later times in the New Guinea Highlands, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern United States).

Thus, a key part of the answer to the question of why farming emerged when it did is that the climate was too unpredictable for farming to be a viable means of food production during almost the entire Upper Paleolithic era.  Farming didn't emerge before the Holocene because it couldn't in the climate conditions at the time.

It is very plausible to think that property rights were an effect driven by the fundamental economics of farming and herding, rather than an important cause of this shift, when reduced climate variability provides a much more plausible proximate cause of the Neolithic revolution.  The authors certainly don't suggest any plausible way that the Neolithic revolution could have been possible earlier if Upper Paleolithic humans had adopted different property regimes, something that ought to have been possible if property rights were as important as they suggest in this transition.  And, Coase's theorem, a jewel of modern economics, which basically says that economics will generally drive people to find a work around to secure economically efficient arrangements in the face of bad legal rules, tends to favor that direction of causation.

Prior to the Upper Paleolithic era, modern human presence was largely restricted to Africa and mainland Asia (probably excluding North Asia).  Modern humans prior to that era were absent from the Americas, Oceania, Australia, the islands east of the Wallace line, Japan, Taiwan, Tibet, the Andaman Islands, and Crete. 

There is no solid positive evidence for any modern human presence in Asia beyond South Asia until the Toba eruption ca. 75,000 years ago, although there is evidence of a modern human presence in Southwest Asia more than 100,000 years ago, some of which was part of the same archaeological culture as a contemporaneous group of modern humans in Upper Egypt and the Sudan.  Before then, modern humans were confined to Africa where they evolved in the first place as foragers.

The Archaeological Record in the Fertile Crescent Neolithic

Bowles and Choi do nicely summarize some key elements of the archaeological record describing the Neolithic transition:

Kuijt and Finlayson very plausibly write that a “transition from extramural to intramural storage system may reflect evolving systems of ownership and property … with later food storage systems becoming part of household or individual based systems” (2). . .                          

Southwestern Asia provides the best-documented cases providing evidence of the gradual adoption of food production along with evidence suggesting the emergence of private property in stores in the Levant between 14,500 and 8,700 B.P. (SI Appendix). At the beginning of this period, Natufians hunted and collected wild species and possibly practiced limited wild-species cultivation along with limited storage (41, 42). Somewhat before 11,000 B.P. there is direct evidence of storage of limited amounts of wild plants outside of dwellings, consistent with the hypothesis that access to stored goods was not limited to the members of a residential unit (2, 43). A millennium later, goats and sheep had been domesticated (constituting a substantial investment), and we find large-scale dedicated storage located inside dwellings, suggesting more restricted access (4, 44).

Over none of this period could one describe these communities as either simply foragers or farmers. Their livelihoods were mixed; in many cases, their residential patterns varied over time between sedentary and mobile, and it seems their property rights, too, varied among the types of objects concerned, with elements of both private and common property in evidence. Bogaard (4) and her coauthors found that at Catalhoyuk in central Anatolia (10,500–10,100 B.P.), “families stored their own produce of grain, fruit, nuts and condiments in special bins deep inside the house.” This restricted-access storage coexisted with the prominent display of the horns and heads of hunted wild cattle. The authors concluded that “plant storage and animal sharing” was a common juxtaposition for “the negotiation of domestic [the authors elsewhere call it “private”] storage and interhouse sharing.” The process of change was neither simple, nor monotonic, nor rapid. However, in both its institutions and its technology, Levantine people were living in a very different world in 8,700 B.P. from the world of the early Natufians almost six millennia earlier.

Thus, a second key fact is that people didn't just "adopt farming."  They became proto-farmers of wild crops at a time when hunting was good enough for them to remain at one location.

Another Economics Consideration

Yet another key consideration that doesn't really properly get posed is the fact that in economics, you need to look at the margins, and not at averages.  Those who adopted farming first, no doubt, had the most comparative advantage.  This is to say, they were best at farming relative to their success at hunting.  Perhaps they had mobility problems due to injured family members, or pregnant women in the family.  Perhaps they were in places that had been over-hunted and storage of hunted and gathered products reflected this scarcity (people hoard things that have value), but had especially fertile soils.

Anyway, the key point is that even if the first farmers were less well fed than the average hunter-gatherer, that doesn't imply that this was true for this particular subset of individuals.

Trade Offs

Why else would someone sacrifice calories to farm?

Farmers can live sedentary lives, which means that they can invest resources to build homes, rather than rebuilding camps every few days, providing better quality shelter with less of an investment in labor, that shelters them from the elements, hungry animals or unfriendly tribes of fellow humans.  This saved time may have also freed up time to make other things, like clothing, that can also protect people from the elements and thereby increase their ability to survive.  And, it can allow them to accumulate goods, like pottery, baskets and food stores, that can buffer short term shortfalls in food production.

A little more hunger may be worth fewer deaths from hypothermia, wild animals, brief periods of unsuccessful hunting and gathering, and attacks by hostile foreign tribes.  These benefits may be particularly beneficial for the survival of children, the temporarily injured, and pregnant women, whose well being enhances selective fitness, and to the elderly whose knowledge and capacity to free up the time of community members who are able to hunt and gather and farm and herd while caring for children and doing sedentary tasks like making flour, ceramics, weapons and clothing.

Proto-farmers may also have traded lower average calories in order to have a steadier food supply not so strongly subject to feast and famine cycles, that culled weaker members of the community leaving those who survived better fed, but meant that many died of hunger when the hunting and gathering wasn't as abundant, wresting control from Nature to mankind.