> When I said "anthills", I didn't mean any particular city design, but the overall population density. Those example that you gave are still incredibly dense by monkey brain standards, even with all the interspersed farms etc.
Well, I misunderstood your metaphor, but I think we agree on this — at least, mostly. I'd still say that the bucolic countryside in the google street view link I gave you is not dense, even to our monkey brains.
And on further reflection, I'm not sure if that "monkey" part of our mind responds to people directly, or to places we think people might be lurking (houses as caves and windows as their entrances, because what is seen by the part of our mind pre-trained by genetics is not necessarily the same as what we learn from experience).
> Thus our economy - which is what makes that many people sustainable in the first place - requires density.
Bit yes, bit no. It benefits from density, but it's also globally distributed. I'm not sure what we would choose, cities or countryside, in some hypothetical world where most humans could predict and follow their own long-term preferences over their entire lives. Cities have always been attractive, even in ancient times, because cities hold so many wonders for our monkey brains; and yet, many were (and others still are) just plain bad places to be, for various different reasons in different cases.
I looked up the specific numbers and found this quote:
“Based on the preceding calculations, a family of five would require an estimated 200 ha of habitat from which to gather animal and plant food. This estimate is based on an ideal ecosystem, one containing those wild plants and animals that are most suitable for human consumption. Researchers report that, in fact, modern-day hunter-gatherers need much more than 40 ha per person. For instance, Clark and Haswell (1970) estimate that at least 150 ha of favorable habitat per person is needed to secure an adequate food supply. In a moderately favorable habitat, these scientists estimate that 250 ha per person would be required. These estimates are four to six times greater than those in the model presented earlier. In marginal environments, such as the cold northwestern Canadian region, each person needs about 14,000 ha to harvest about 912,500 kcal of food energy per year (Clark and Haswell, 1970).” [David Pimentel and Marcia H. Pimentel, ‘Food, Energy, and Society’, third edition, (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), p. 45-46.]
Just based on that alone I'd say that even the place you linked to is still too crowded from the "monkey brain" perspective. In hunter-gatherer societies, the only places that matched the density of our rural environments are extremely productive areas such as Pacific Northwest (temperate rainforest + elk + salmon). But even then the entire population of Coast Salish prior to European arrival is currently estimated to be under 15,000 people, living in several dozen longhouse villages spread across what's basically most of Western Washington and much of British Columbia today.
> When I said "anthills", I didn't mean any particular city design, but the overall population density. Those example that you gave are still incredibly dense by monkey brain standards, even with all the interspersed farms etc.
Well, I misunderstood your metaphor, but I think we agree on this — at least, mostly. I'd still say that the bucolic countryside in the google street view link I gave you is not dense, even to our monkey brains.
And on further reflection, I'm not sure if that "monkey" part of our mind responds to people directly, or to places we think people might be lurking (houses as caves and windows as their entrances, because what is seen by the part of our mind pre-trained by genetics is not necessarily the same as what we learn from experience).
> Thus our economy - which is what makes that many people sustainable in the first place - requires density.
Bit yes, bit no. It benefits from density, but it's also globally distributed. I'm not sure what we would choose, cities or countryside, in some hypothetical world where most humans could predict and follow their own long-term preferences over their entire lives. Cities have always been attractive, even in ancient times, because cities hold so many wonders for our monkey brains; and yet, many were (and others still are) just plain bad places to be, for various different reasons in different cases.
Monkey brains, as you say.