Which made me wonder... Did humans faced an overpopulation crisis ten thousand years ago?
The Agricultural Revolution occurred in several different places at several different times. This argues against a global crisis such as climate change as the cause.
It's very difficult to create an overpopulation problem in a society of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Women have to take their children everywhere they go, which means they can only have one very young child requiring intensive supervision at a time. Add to that an infant mortality rate of around 80%, and you'll see that it's more likely for a tribe to simply vanish by attrition than to overwhelm its food supply.
What's more likely is that a temporary, local food crisis caused hard times for a single population, and the best thinkers of the clan put their heads together. They probably noticed the seedlings sprouting from their middens (trash heaps) and saw the possiblity of cultivating plants. (This is my own hypothesis, I've never seen it suggested by anthropologists.) Surely a few soft-hearted clan members had already tried raising an orphaned animal for fun, so the concept of domesticating and herding them wasn't much of a leap of logic. (This hypothesis is more widespread, despite the fact that farming was invented before animal husbandry.)
Are we facing another similar crisis nowadays?
Absolutely not. The relatively underpopulated Western Hemisphere can easily provide food for the entire world population. Even the United States is a net food exporter: most of the land in "crowded, urban" California is farm, forest or easily-irrigated desert. As I have noted on this forum so often that by now I'd expect most of you to have gotten the news, the second derivative of population went negative in 1980 and the population is now universally expected to peak sometime around the end of this century, just barely into ten digits. At that point it will start to decline for the first time in tens of thousands of years, and the newspaper headlines will be monopolized by the realization that every economic model since Adam Smith depends for its engine of prosperity on a steadily increasing supply of producers and consumers.
The proliferation of GMO-based farming, which is basically another trade of quality for quantity. . . .
That opinion by no means represents a consensus, so you are hereby challenged to present your evidence. Many people regard hardiness and resistance to blight as an increase in quality.
. . . . seems to be fueled by such a trend (too many mouths to feed).
There are only "too many mouths to feed" in countries whose despotic governments prevent them from obtaining food. American churches and other charities ship a mountain of food, medicine and other necessities to the Third World every year. Government agents intercept it and sell it on the black market, using the proceeds to buy weapons or simply indulge their own tastes for champagne, hookers and Jaguars. I repeat:
There is no global food crisis!
If so, then maybe in a few thousand years from now, provided Homo sapiens has not become extinct by then, our generations might make it to the history books as the ones that made yet another monumental mistake... ?
On the contrary. Our generation is steadily exporting democracy. Every decade sees a larger number of countries throwing off their despotic dictators and making the first experimental steps into representative government. Of course the first few attempts fail but they eventually get it right. Every decade a smaller percentage of the human race lives in poverty. China and India, which between them contain about a third of the human race, passed that mark in the last century. For the first time since anyone's been keeping track, less than half the population of Africa now lives below the poverty line.
Of course as decent human beings we must weep for the people who still live in unspeakable conditions, but that doesn't mean we can't be proud of the fact that their grandchildren will, in almost total certainty, be much better off.
I based that affirmation on my perception that a lot of people are genuinely concerned with the proliferation of GMO-based crops.
"A lot of people" are often wrong.
Why is distribution such a huge problem?
As I mentioned, if you look carefully at the countries where hunger and squalor are the norm, you will invariably find an uncaring government. Even if we decided to simply overthrow them in the name of charity and install a new, kinder government, we've already tried that and we know it doesn't work. People have to implement their own solutions.
The key to this is, fortunately, the Electronic Revolution which began almost two centuries ago with the first telegraph. The internet and wireless communication have suddenly allowed people in the most remote places to communicate not only with each other but with foreigners. They know that the life they live is not inevitable, and they have access to petabytes of news, historical information, and uncategorizable websites such as SciForums, giving them suggestions for how to change it.
And, in your opinion, at what point the food availability becomes an issue in population growth? Do you see any other, more critical resource (water? something else?) that has or may become a showstopper in this regards?
My wife insists that it will be water.
On the other hand, a warming climate frees up water trapped in glaciers and ice sheets and lets it evaporate into the atmosphere. This results in more precipitation. Obviously much of it lands on the oceans whose level will eventually rise to their historical high of about half a kilometer above the streets of Amsterdam, Florida and Bangladesh. But a large percentage comes down on the land and irrigates the forests, grasslands... and our crops. Historically there have usually been famines during ice ages and bounties during the warm spells. The reason humans first migrated out of Africa 60KYA was that the entire continent was in the throes of an ice-age drought and they had to find a place with more food.
In a hunter-gather society, pretty much everyone is involved with food production. Where as in an agricultural society, more food can be produced with fewer people, freeing up some people to do other tasks, like blacksmithing or other more advanced trades....allowing some societies to progress technologically, while others were left behind.
Indeed. Even in the Iron Age, which ended in the 18th century with the Industrial Revolution, more than 99% of the human race was doomed to "careers" in the food production and distribution industry. Today only 3% of us in the developed world have those jobs.
Technological progress was of course nice, but the cultural progress that came with it is what we should get down on our knees and thank our hard-working ancestors for. Imagine this life:
- You never travel more than ten miles from your birthplace.
- There's no point in learning to read because there's not much to read.
- You work 80-100 hour weeks producing food most of the year. You spend winter fixing your fences and tools. There's a little more down time but with only candles for light there's not much you can do with it. Especially since there's no such thing as "discretionary income" or "leisure activities" and travel is not only prohibitively expensive but impractical.
- You're lucky if a halfway decent traveling band or theater company passes through your village two or three times a year. The rest of the time your only music or other entertainment is the mediocre pianist in the bar downtown, or the amateur choir in the church, if you're close enough to town to go there.
- If you get sick there's nobody to help and even if there were they don't have any modern medicines, vaccines or surgical techniques.
- Most of your children die before adolescence and a couple more die before adulthood.
- About the only positive thing you can say about this life is that there's plenty of food.
yes actually an ancient american city had that, i think it's inca, or mexican
There are ruins of several "cities" (this may be an exaggeration since some of them were not supported by agriculture) in North America. The first steps toward any technological paradigm shift are fraught with human error or sheer bad luck. There are ruined cities in the Old World too.
the city have been growing and growing and growing the food needs have been growing too, intill they couldnt feed everyone, then economic collapse started, deseases spreaded, as the city became over populated so alot of trash and stuff the city finally died, after being a big capital city, it became an abandonned dead city
This is somewhat of a fanciful exaggeration. Again, since may of these cities were not supported by agriculture, they were more centers of trade and ceremony than actual "capitals." A "capital" implies a stable, sedentary population to be administered, and people without agriculture are not stable and sedentary.
The Agricultural Revolution actually did take place in what is now the eastern USA, and villages had linked into trading networks. A few tribes established what we would recognize as governments--and interestingly enough at least one of them was strongly matriarchal. It's a damn shame that the Christian armies arrived and obliterated these incipient civilizations before they had a chance to contribute their motifs to mankind.
i watched it in a documentary once, forgot what was the city exactly
You may be thinking of
Cahokia, Illinois.
Those early hunter - gatherers busted a lot of flippers hunting that big game and a lot of them died a slow, miserable death from those wounds.
