h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I like this article a lot. Well done.

One of the things you only touch on is the necessity to defend your own work. If a hunter gatherer makes a kill too big to be carried by a single man it is generally with the help of the hunting party who each take a share of the meat and can protect it from other scavengers.

With a farm there is a huge commitment to work the land for an extended period of time. The land was not there ready to be farmed. Cutting down forest trees with a stone axe was massviely time consuming and hard work. The land won this way would support crops and grazing for animals but they needed to know that this huge effort would not be given up easily to outsiders who might seek the opportunity of a free meal.

With farming came the need to have land ownership to make the commitment worthwhile.

Hi Vestboy,

That's an excellent point - hunter gatherer communities seem to have a lot less interest in fencing off land and declaring ownership of land than settled folk. To them the idea is a crazy one.

Thanks,

Woodpigeon

Glad to be of help.
Did you know that accounting pre existed money?

No, I didn't - although it makes sense: money is really just an improvement on the barter system. (It conjures an image in my mind of a prehistoric accountant doing a credit from the "sheep" ledger and debiting the "pretty seashell" ledger , but there you go.)

Accounting helped with taxing people. If you had to contribute to the state they needed to know what was available for them to tax. Grain, animals and so on.

Apparently the ancient Egyptians issued wooden credits for all grain stored in the Pharaoh's grain store and everyone had to use the store for all their grain - one way of ensuring how much there was to tax from. However the wooden receipts were much easier to carry around than the grain so they used them in the market with only the people who actually needed grain cashing them in.