3.5: Calorie Surplus: The End of Hunting and Gathering, and the Beginning of Civilization, How to Invent Everything

3.5 CALORIE SURPLUS: THE END OF HUNTING AND GATHERING, AND THE BEGINNING OF CIVILIZATION

Hunting and gathering better ways to live your life.

Beginning with our ancestors in prehistory, and continuing even past the appearance of anatomically modern humans around 200,000 BCE, humans spent all their time fully immersed in the fabulous hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. This is, as you might suspect, a situation in which hunters hunt while gatherers gather. You live off the earth, survive by your wits, and follow food wherever it might take you, leaving areas when you’ve exhausted their local resources. There are many benefits to this lifestyle: you get to eat a wide variety of foods (a varied diet helps ensure good nutrition) and you get to visit lots of interesting places, eat whatever lives there, and get lots of exercise. But this means food doesn’t come to you: you have to go to it. And this is expensive.

This expense manifests in several ways: It costs calories to search for food. It costs you years of your life, as you’re much more likely to eat something new that happens to be toxic, or to get injured or killed by the very animals you’re trying to gobble. Plus, you’re constantly introduced to new bacteria and parasites as you chase after a food supply that’s never assured. But its greatest expense comes from constantly moving: when you never know how long you’ll be living somewhere, you’re not going to build expensive and labor-intensive infrastructure. Anything you can’t take with you can turn into wasted effort overnight. You won’t store any resources long-term, because there is no long term.

And for almost 200,000 years—the vast majority of human experience—this was all anyone did. Hunt, gather, maybe build some temporary settlements, and move on whenever the going got tough or someone saw a tasty-looking herd of animals over the next hill. It was only around 10,500 BCE⁶ that anyone thought to suggest that rather than taking the planet as it was when we come across it, we could instead change the planet to better suit our needs.

This idea represents both the invention of farming (the process of raising and caring for plants and animals in a convenient location, so that food supplies are more reliable), and with it, full domestication (the process by which these plants and animals, once kept in a convenient location, are transformed into more convenient versions of themselves).* There was no reason this idea couldn’t have occurred to us sooner, except that we either didn’t think of it or were too lazy to make it happen. Humanity wasted almost 200 millennia not having this idea. But it’s already occurred to you, because you just read it. Look at you. You’re already doing great!

Once you begin farming and domesticating animals, you have entered a new phase of humanity, one in which a single human can reliably produce much more food than they need to survive. Humans run on food energy—calories—and you have just produced a surplus. In fact, a farmed field can produce anywhere from 10 to 100 times more calories than what you’d get by hunting and gathering an equal area of unfarmed land! And when you add more farmers and more arable land, you just add to that pile of extra food. It’s on calorie surpluses—and therefore farming—that civilizations are built.

How? Well, more food obviously lets you have more people. But it also lets those people stop worrying about where their next meal is coming from, freeing them up to start worrying about different, more productive things: why stars seem to move across the sky or how come things fall down instead of up. Farming also formalizes the idea of an economy in your civilization, since now farmers can regularly trade their food with others. With an economy comes specialization: instead of each human having to do everything necessary to survive (or splitting it among a family group), now someone who’s particularly talented at farming can focus all their efforts on that. A hunter and gatherer simply does not have the time to invent integral calculus, but a professor or philosopher—someone who can both conceive of and devote themselves to such problems—does.

Specialization gives the people in your civilization the opportunity to go further in any direction of study than any other human has gone before. It unlocks doctors who can devote their entire lives to curing disease, librarians who can devote their entire lives to ensuring the accumulated knowledge of humanity remains safe and accessible, and writers who, fresh out of school, take the first job they find and devote the most productive years of their lives to writing corporate repair manuals for rental-market time machines that their bosses almost certainly don’t even read,* ironically for so little money that they can’t possibly afford to go back and fix that one horrible, horrible mistake.* Specialization goes hand-in-hand with a civilization’s development, because the greatest resource of your or any civilization is not land, power, or even technology. It’s human brains—yours and those of the humans around you—that will be the creative, inventive, brilliant engines that drive your civilization forward. And it’s specialization—supplied by a calorie surplus—that allows those human brains to reach their full potential.

Unfortunately, the advantages we’ve just outlined do come with several challenges. While we believe the benefits do outweigh the drawbacks, you should be aware of the following Extremely Garbage Features of Farming:

When wild food is abundant, farming is way more work than hunting and gathering. What farming offers, though, is the promise of a more reliable food source and, through domestication, more convenient food sources too.
Farming also requires technologies for food storage, because its whole point is to produce more food than you can eat at once. This again is more work, but thanks to Section 10.2.4: Preserved Foods, you at least have the advantage of knowing exactly what to do.
Farming creates the first income inequality, because not everyone can be farmers or share equally in the land required for it. Farmers have the most food and (initially) the most to trade, and everyone who doesn’t want to become a skeleton needs to continue eating food. You have just created rich and poor people, or at the very least the potential for them.
Farming requires infrastructure (fences, etc.), which means you are no longer mobile. Your civilization has just become a giant and stationary target. While this text does not include explicit instructions for weaponry, we’re certain that, should the need arise, you can probably adapt several of the technologies included here to that purpose.
Animals carry diseases and can transmit them to humans. Worse, some of our deadliest diseases don’t bother animals at all. Over 60 percent of all human diseases originate from close contact with animals, including such all-time champion diseases as anthrax, Ebola, plague, Salmonella, listeriosis, rabies, and ringworm. We understand if after reading that list you want to go back to hunting and gathering, but we promise civilization will eventually be worth it. Just don’t be surprised if people start getting sick, and maybe read Section 14 (Heal Some Body) before it’s critical.

In light of these downsides, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you that it is inarguable that farming leads to calorie surpluses, which leads to specialization, which leads to innovations like apple pies, time machines, and the latest mass-market portable music players. If you work hard, you will produce these. If you hunt and gather, you will not. Instead, you will eat bugs you find under a rock.

Best of luck with your decision.