I'd just like to add, that agriculture and the development of
cities are not European phenomena, in fact they were
pretty late compared with agricultural civilisations in
China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, The Americas, India etc.
It seems part of the progress - yes, progress, as the
number of human beings multiplied and cultures/
languages/communication
became complex - of human saps to end up in feudal states
where the physical environment provided the right
conditions. It also seems that feudalism has a tendency
to become a barrier to further development after
a while, it becomes a decadent, inefficient weight, such
as all outmoded structures at some point of historical
dynamics.
Eva
> > OK, I haven't the concrete sources, but the
> > claim, that hunter-gatherers had a healthy,
> > starvation free existence sounds
> > extraordinary.
>
> My source is Jared Diamond's book "The Third chimpanzee".
> He writes that the average new born child would live until it was about
> 60 years old before agriculture was developed, and that is quite a lot
> without the help of scince and medicine. In Norway that average age was
> reached between 1920 and 1930.
>
>...
Tor Forde
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
