Agriculture, Cults, and Knowledge

From here

A habit of the founders of "modernity" was to do thought experiments about primitive man to provide a basis of understanding the circumstances of life today. One recent dime-store version of this thinking is the "paleo" diet whose advocates claim is the oldest, hence "natural", i.e. true diet of human beings.

This approach was an antidote to religious and cultural authority, which was a much bigger deal in the 16th and 17th century than it is today. (You can find examples of this in older books too, like Plato's works.)

I'm indulging in some of this today to imagine how social intelligence (see the previous few posts) could sound, like a lot of people, to the voice of god. It's a sort of disembodied intelligence because it seems to function between individuals almost like they're connected through an invisible network.

Imagine a pre-city era where a certain population density of people lived in the same region and some people began experimenting with agriculture. The initial farmers would learn through observation of nature and hands on trial and error. Their rate of success could be multiplied by a number of people doing trial and error experiments and providing feedback to eachother. The feedback could be through speech or through social intelligence and monkey-see-monkey-doo-ism.

That type of "knowledge" seems to seep out of the ground or arrive ex nihilo. Is it even really knowledge?