• nuko147@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    15 hours ago

    Well, we roamed earth freely and doing only 4 hours of daily work to survive. And then came agriculture…

      • nuko147@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        3 hours ago

        It was easier than what came after, but riskier too (Farming required 12+ hour days). Also if you remove the workers rights that exist today, the modern human can not comprehend how hard survival was even 100 years ago.

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Eh… it’s hard now because we don’t have the patterns or training or tools anymore. Previous people were well prepared.

        Now, it was RISKY. People died all the time. But that doesn’t mean they worked 20 hour days.

          • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            33 minutes ago

            Yeah, we don’t have the tools for day to day survivalist life en masse. That’s why it feels hard.

            We also don’t have the tools to cut marble by hand using copper. Because why would we? They aren’t needed so no one is making them.

            Knowledge gets lost when it’s no longer relevant. This isn’t news.

    • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      14 hours ago

      Is this why I feel best when I only work 4 hours a day and have a nice afternoon nap?

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      1 day ago

      Here’s another thought.

      Humans who took in wolves were at an advantage over their neighbors. Wolves made great watchdogs, so the humans could sleep better, and helped in hunting so everyone ate better. People who refused to let wolves live with them would have been less likely to reproduce.

      Domesticating dogs changed the humans.

      • mriswith@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        Cats as well.

        If you store grain you get mice/rats, that’s true even today(don’t eat raw flour), which leads to cats.

        Humans realized that fewer mice means more grain and left cats alone. But one theory is that families who let the cats hang around their home more had fewer instances of diseases carried by rodents, which further led humans to want cats to be around.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          1 day ago

          We were pretty well domesticated by the time they bothered showing up. Cats wouldn’t put up with our barbaric and unmannered ways before we invented towns.

          • mriswith@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            1 day ago

            Yeah, I was more referencing how cats basically showed up and were all “become more domestic, and we’ll move in and keep you safer”.

        • Klear@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 day ago

          It’s telling that we find lions and tigers as cute as we do small cats. Means cat cuteness isn’t a trait that was selected for in them so we’d let them stick around but it could have easily been the other way.

      • Carrolade@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        28
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        There’s degrees of difference. Wheat goes through a new generation every year. Faster if you have a greenhouse. People go through a new generation every few decades. Wheat can thus change 20-30 times faster than people.

        A century is, at minimum, 100 different “iterations” of the wheat genome. A century is ~3 “iterations” of humans.

        • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          17 hours ago

          Human selection of wheat would probably converge, as in humans would keep selecting the best wheat until it reaches some kind of optimal, steady state, then it would change slower as the selection process would be more about preserving the state.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 day ago

      It’s been selected for some 5k years, give or take. One study found out that, starting from wild wheat, it’d take roughly 30 years to fully domesticate the crop. Bananas, maize, soy, almond and others that we eat are also very different from their wild variants

    • Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      I was just about to bring that book up! I’m reading it now and it’s fascinating.

      The Dawn of Everything for people who are interested.

      Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 day ago

      I really like how the first farmers were just “let’s seed these banks that are flooded every season and wait, because we sure as fuck are NOT going to till the soil, fill it with manure and keep the weeds away, especially when I can just walk around for 5 minutes and get some stuff to eat”