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The one directional conveyer belt of lifestyles?

Though we are taking a hiatus for the summer for The Insight podcast, we have many episodes already recorded and ready to go. The current plan is to launch season 3 with a discussion between Spencer and myself on the Tocharians.

One of the things I brought up is an observation about the changing lifestyles of proto-Tocharians and post-Tocharian peoples. It seems likely that the proto-Tocharians, the descendants of the Afanasevio people, were pastoralists. At some point, they settled down in the oases around the Tarim Basin. And, they became city-dwellers. Eventually, they were conquered by the Uygurs. They too were pastoralists, and they settled down to become city dwellers. The Uygurs were eventually conquered by other Turks, who also became city dwellers.

To my knowledge, the shift from pastoralism to a sedentary lifestyle seems to be far more common than the other way. Pastoralist peoples conquer sedentary peoples…and in their turn settle down, and are conquered by later pastoralists. Meanwhile, hunter-gatherers, such as Mongolians and Australian Aboriginals, adapt to pastoralism quite well.

9 thoughts on “The one directional conveyer belt of lifestyles?

  1. OTOH, consider the end of the Bronze Age, when SFAIK, many of the surviving urban dwellers (and their descendants) turned to agriculture and some, perhaps, to pastoralism. To the extent that Genesis can be believed, Abraham grew up in an urban setting before becoming a pastoralist, something which continued for several generations, through at least Jacob/Israel and his children. So, far more common but not unheard of at least at a time of cultural and economic catastrophe.

  2. wasn’t it mostly in response to the destruction of the habitat / unsustainability of roaming pastoralism in the face of Maltusian pressures? Cattle ranchers of the US West and Voortrekkers of Africa did revert to pastoralism, but only because the lands of the High Prairie and the Highveld was already depopulated due to tribal warfare and disease.

  3. There is a saying in software engineering, “Easy-to-replace systems tend to get replaced with hard-to-replace systems”. The same is true in human societies. More sedentary peoples have denser populations. If they become hunter-gatherers, they may not be able to provide enough food once their population has grown to its new, pastoral size. Additionally if they don’t continue to grow they will be vulnerable to attack from other larger societies.

  4. Meanwhile, hunter-gatherers, such as Mongolians and Australian Aboriginals, adapt to pastoralism quite well.

    That makes sense to me. You go from following the herds and collecting various other foods along the way, to actively managing herds of animals for food and other products while collecting various foods along the way (once you have horses so you can keep up with the herds). That seems like less of a jump than going from hunting and gathering to intensive agriculture.

  5. I’ll try and think up some counterexamples:

    Late Neolithic Brit Islanders seem to have gone pastoral from an agricultural background as farming experienced various problems. I believe this is linked to a wider shift to pastoralism through Middle and Late Neolithic populations in Northern Europe?

    In a less remote time, there was an article a couple years ago now about Roman farmers switching to a pastoralist “Hunnish” lifestyle in the late Roman Empire – https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/tiller-the-hun-farmers-in-roman-empire-converted-to-hun-lifestyle-and-vice-versa

    More speculatively, we also know that some of the samples of Hungary with a Scythian material culture seem to have had a genetic makeup which was rather similar to Slavic peoples, but with much more neolithic ancestry, which suggests some fluidity. (However, this was a time of the beginnings of complex trade between pastoralist and settled people which greatly changed diets so probably that meant cultural fluidity of some kind. See the recent – “Intensification in pastoralist cereal use coincides with the expansion of trans-regional networks in the Eurasian Steppe”.)

    I also wonder about those expansions of R1b-V88 EEF/Levant N pastoralists into the Sahara, and the expansion of Levantine ancestry through East Africa and the Circum Arabian Nomadic Pastoral Complex. Did those represent peoples who began as pastoralists, or farmers who switched to pastoralism when they encountered un-favourable soil and climates?

    In the Caucasus, some recent papers I was reading indicated that neolithic groups expanding there in the late Copper Age were predominantly pastoral as well, even if more mountain bound and not the same as the pastoral people of the steppes.

    The above is pretty West Eurasian in focus – in East Eurasia you might be able to get something out of the notion of Sino-Tibetan and other language family etc expansions into the “Zomia” highlands and Tibet, and switches to much more pastoral ways of life on the way.

    I would tend to say that there could be more switching pastoral->crop producing over time, but if so this probably has more to do with growing ingenuity at raising plants over time narrowly winning out against forces pushing for new and more innovative and productive pastoral toolkits? Animals are a great complement, but plants are really productive.

  6. As I understand it, the thinking is that individual wellbeing is greater in HG cultures, but they can’t survive contact with the higher population densities of pastoralists or agriculturalists. Are there any examples of peoples having a chance to revert to hunter gatherer lifestyles and taking it? (I’m aware of European settlers in North America “going native” but that’s not quite the same thing.)

  7. According to James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale, 2018), there was a fair amount of “reverting” in the early stages. Often, people did some combination of tilling, hunting/gathering, and animal keeping.

    It’s an interesting book, well worth reading.

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