Antarctica, Greenland ice definitely melting into sea, and speeding up, experts warn

[caseymoz]

31. Current conditions say nothing about the past.

The remains that archeologists find dating to the time human beings first switched to agriculture show that it definitely didn't create a surplus. The skeletons show tell-tale evidence of nutritional diseases and loss of size that weren't evident in human remains before. This went on for generations. Perhaps for several thousand years.

Meanwhile, agriculture involved backbreaking labor. Nobody puts themselves through that kind of starvation, deprivation and drudgery unless they have to.

Human beings at the start of agriculture didn't, and couldn't, calculate that scratching the earth would lead to what you would call an "overshoot." How could they imagine that? Try it today with the tools they had available. Assume you don't have domesticated animals to help you. Try it on uncultivated land that you have to clear, with unpredictable rain. See if you can create a surplus.

The reason they switched didn't involve the great 5,000-Year Plan to create leisure time. It was more immediate. They were hunting game into scarcity, increasing their population doing it, and they couldn't move to other land because they were surrounded by other tribes that did the same. Therefore, they either had to go to war lose half or more of their people to gain more land that was also denuded of its game, or they had to try agriculture. Some probably chose war. Look at the extinction of the larger species in North America after the Clovis people arrived. That's what happened in Europe and Asia.

Need I point out that any animal that can use spears, arrows, clubs and rocks and that coordinate in packs is a supreme hunter? When their prey had teeth, claws, horns, and maybe speed? Human beings could hunt species to extinction with that weaponry alone, and likely did.

The overshoot you describe has been going on for 10,000 years at the most, sporadically, which is such a short time an evolutionary sense, that it isn't even happening yet. Yes, what you see now is the overshoot, the surplus. However, human beings weren't always that good, and they definitely had no reason to stop hunting game and to risk starvation by cultivating unless it was absolutely necessary, due to game had become scarce. They definitely wouldn't do it with the idea of creating leisue time.

Hunter gatherers limit their population now? Unbelievable. What's this birth control that they use? I suggest you check your assumption more closely and see what the actual birthrate and causes of death are with hunter gatherers, rather than spread falsehoods.

I'll put it like this: it's impossible. It's practically a cornerstone fact of biology: no species limits its own reproductive success. Period. The environment limits it. For example, given a food source, bacteria will double its population every 20 minutes until it covers the planet, except the environment limits it. It's the same with any species.

Also, check on that claim that 200 species are going extinct every day. No way. Now the information I find is that "up to 200 species go extinct evey day," meaning worst case scenario, but I can't find any credible source for this information. In other words, it's a guess. What's the real number? Nobody knows.

Moreover it's a very poor guess. Here's why. That's 73,000 species a year. There's only 1.9 million known species (I Googled it). This means in ten years, 730,000 or about 40 percent of all species would be dead. In twenty five years, the entire earth's surface would be as barren as the moon. And how long has this been going on? If this was near correct, the earth would have looked like the moon by 1980 and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Don't believe every number you read just because it confirms your misanthropy. I think you're informed more by your bad mood and your emotional disgust than by facts.

And you're wrong about leisure time itself. In the wild, animals play. Generally younger animals under care, but adult lions will play with their prey, much the way a cat does.