On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 19:27:58 GMT, Frogleg > wrote:

>On 16 Feb 2004 14:58:30 GMT, Michel Boucher >
>wrote:
>
>>Anthropological comparison of household labour between French nuclear
>>families and Amazon tribes shows that "primitives" perform only as
>>much labour as is necessary, usually about 2 hours a day for
>>gathering and cleaning. Hunting takes a bit more time but it removes
>>the men from the female controlled environment, which is part of its
>>purpose.
>
>I, too, have read that the change from hunter/gatherer culture to
>purposful agriculture and animal husbandry *increased* the difficulty
>of daily life. The idea of lying in a hammock and plucking fruit from
>surrounding trees, supplemented by trapping a few fish or shellfish
>sure sounds good. Not many opportunities for same in, say, northern
>Europe.
>
>In fact, I have a hard time understanding why human emigration
>apparently followed a path from Asia north to some problematical
>crossing to Alaska and then down through North and South America.
>Following herds of animals? It surely couldn't have been "whoopee --
>we've found the perfect natural freezer!"

The climate back then was different. A hunter/gatherer ecosystem
requires a pyramidal food chain. Man, at the top of the pyramid, can
only sparsely populate an area. Thus, as the human population increased
in an area it had to expand or die.

The extinction of many large herbivore species (and competing carnivore
species) of animals in North America coincides rather remarkably with
man's migration into the area.

The domestication of food animals and cultivation of food crops provided
more efficient and predictable use of the land and permitted a larger
population in an area.