I have long entertained the hypothesis that humans first abandoned hunting-gathering for sedentaryism because of property. Simply put, if you wander about, even in a punctuated fashion with a period of a month or so, you can’t accumulate lots of gear (as Burns would call it.) And a lot of what you do have to carry about is food and food processing stuff.
The situation was that the technology was steadily improving and diversifying. The rate of this was not as fast as today, but it was fast enough, I suspect, to cause a certain degree of tension between the stuff that the technology would permit be made and what could be carried about. And no, I’m not talking about large appliances, just the number of things. If everything is made or stone or wood or other vegetation, then there are strong limits of human strength and carrying capacity.
So the hypothesis is that as the technology improved, so did the capacity to gather and hunt foods and at some point this, probably in combination with gratuitous geography and climate, made it possible for humans to become sedentary and amass property.
There is a growing body of data that may support this hypothesis and a datum was added recently according to this article. [Link] Seems that some U California researchers have uncovered a semi-permanent settlement dating back 20 KY in contemporary Jordan. They offer that this settlement was occupied for about half of the year over a period of about a KY. That’s longer than we have been in any city in Nawth Alerika, including St. Augustine or Mesilla.
More evidence that consumerism is part of the human programming. Why? Does it go with intelligence and tool making? Why make tools if you have to leave them behind? Makes for nice cogitation on the nature or evolution and/or creation.
