TheOtherDave comments on Counterfactual resiliency test for non-causal models - Less Wrong
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All theories of emergence of agriculture I'm aware of pretend it happened just once, which is totally wrong.
Is these any even vaguely plausible theory explaining how different populations, in very different climates, with pretty much no contact with each other, didn't develop anything like agriculture for very long time, and then in happened multiple times nearly simultaneously?
Any explanation involving "selection effects" is wrong, since these populations were not in any kind of significant genetic contact with each other for a very long time before that happened (and such explanations for culture are pretty much always wrong as a rule - it's second coming of "scientific racism").
Backing up a step from this, actually... how confident are we of the "no contact with each other" condition?
Speaking from near-complete ignorance, I can easily imagine how a level of contact sufficiently robust to support "hey, those guys over there are doing this nifty thing where they plant their own food, maybe we could try that!" once or twice a decade would be insufficient to otherwise leave a record (e.g., no commerce, no regular communication, no shared language, etc.), but there might exist plausible arguments for eliminating that possibility.
Well, we know pretty well that even when societies were in very close contact, they rarely adopted each other's technology if it wasn't already similar to what they've been doing.
See this for example:
If in this close contact scenario agriculture didn't spread, it's a huge stretch to expect very low level contact to make it happen.
(nods) Yup, if that theory is true, then the observed multiple distinct onset points of agriculture becomes more mysterious.