Thought experiment: Guide humanity to the top of the pecking order

[Thoughtbot360]

There's one problem I can see early agricultural society society in the D&D-verse having that wouldn't apply to the real world.

The fact is that until agriculture became highly developed, hunter-gatherers were both stronger and better fed than farmers. The advantage of agriculture is that it requires far less space. IRL, it doesn't really matter how tough or strong you are if you're outnumbered ten-to-one, and a society that understands farming could easily manage that (I think the population density for hunter-gatherer societies is something around 1 person per square mile.) However, in D&D, it's possible for a sufficiently strong person to hack through ridiculous numbers of weak opponents.

Sigh... Hunter gatherers could not possibly have been better fed than the farmers. True, barter-society farmers *did* have to pay tributes to the local authority in the form of their surplus grain, while hunter gatherer tribes were relatively democratic in comparison. However, the hunter gatherers (once they have fed their families) didn't have any surplus worth mentioning. They also burned all their calories searching for (and taking down) their food.

Hunter gatherers, like the wild animals of the world, look for food, and pray that they actually find some. Agrarian societies produce their own food. The benefits are obvious.

Now, Hunter gatherers might indeed be stronger, at least in terms of military readiness. With no farmers, every adult in the tribe is a hunter, and capable of fighting. However, for permanent settlements, farmers have surplus food, and that surplus food helps to feed nonfarmers-the most immediately important nonfarmer being a soldier. But there can be even a single non farmers as there are enough farmers to support that nonfarmer. And those trained soldiers might actually be too valuable to spread too thin over the nation, therefore militia might have to be raised (and trained in boot camp) in time of war (with professional soldiers positioned in strategically vulnerable spots, but not protecting every village).

However, the fact that alerting a single village made up of warriors about an incoming enemy army is much easier than preparing a nation of noncombatants for the same thing doesn't necessarily spell out stronger. In fact, the agrarian empire is likely to have better weapons technology and advanced tactics for use versus human beings rather than hunting game makes the army that they do have capable of putting down anything the HG's can throw at them. Even recruiting entire tribes for their army in exchange for the things civilization can offer them.

[#Raptor]

Hunter gatherers, like the wild animals of the world, look for food, and pray that they actually find some. Agrarian societies produce their own food. The benefits are obvious.

Poor harvests, crop loss... there plenty of ways a Agrarian society may loose its produced food.
And lets not forget that hunter-gatherers knew where they would find food. You make it sound like they would just randomly walk around untill they found something. If they did not find food there, they knew some other place where they would find something. If a agrarian society had crop loss, they didn't have much choice but to pray for better harvests next year.

Also, a agrarian societies diet is very one-sided, while hunter-gather societies had a very balanced diet. So hunter-gatherers where, in fact, a whole lot better fed than farmers. But it doesn't have a thing to do with paying attributes (what gave you that idea?).

The other thing is diseases. Diseases spread quickly in agrarian societies, where people life close to each other. Now take into account the, due to the poor nutrition, weakened immune systems and you might just understand how things like cholera or the plague could spread so quickly. (Of course, a hunter-gatherer society is not safe from all diseases either. For example, look at the native americans... though that was a whole ****load of new diseases at once, not just one or two.)

Those, and probably a couple of other factors lead to humanity as a whole decreasing in body size when we switched to agriculture. It is just now that we are catching up again, picking up where we left in the stone age.
Yup, I said stone age. The average man in 800 b.c., europe, was about 180 cm. A average man in germany nowadays is about 180. Between that, through settling down and the industrial revolution we had a U-curve where average size went way way down and then slowly back up again.

Your knowledge on this whole hunter-gatherer thing is outdated... maybe start with reading this article: http://www.econhist.vwl.lmu.de/press/chronicle.pdf
And here are plenty to continue reading...: http://www.econhist.vwl.lmu.de/press/index.html
(Lets just leave the social systems & stuff debatte out of this thread - I suppose that would be viewed as a political discussion.)