Can a civilization develop Urban Centers without Agriculture?

Question

Say I wanted to create a civilization of people who, in accordance with a vow to never harm plants, refuse to practice agriculture or animal husbandry, instead relying hunting and fishing for all of their needs. Is it conceivable that this society would ever produce a city with tens of thousands of people?

Answer 1

Historically cities have developed first in those place where the agricultural production exceed the needs of the farmers, allowing also to feed those covering "non productive" roles (non productive in the sense that do not directly produce food) like priests, guards, scribes and so on.

When relying on hunting and fishing that step has never been taken: while farming requires being stationary in a certain place, hunting and fishing has to follow the preys, and the larger group it has to sustain, the more frequent the movement has to be to prevent depletion of the locally available resources.

By the way, tens of thousands of people are also challenging for a simple state city which do not have a developed trade with neighboring communities.

And it is also very hard to build a city without harming any plants: trees and grass are not going to get out of the way just because a bunch of noisy humans are there, like most animals would do.

Answer 2

Trade and Fishing

Humans have developed high population densities in the absence of agriculture.

In the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada the Chinook, Salish, Tlingit, Haida, Makah and other indigenous peoples had large villages (up to 400 or more people) with hierarchy (kings rather than chiefs in Nootka Sound) and social stratification (including a widespread slave trade)

These nations had no agriculture prior to European contact, instead relying on the seasonal salmon runs to support their large and sedentary populations. They supplemented the salmon with berry collection, whaling and hunting.

Trade was extensive amongst these nations and included everything from obsidian extracted in the Cascade mountain range to slaves taken as far south as what is today California.

You could conceivably have much larger polities forming from alliances of villages that could make actual cities based on especially productive fisheries and hunting grounds that are also located somewhere that trade is lucrative

Edit: Short Answer is you can get decent sized sedentary communities but not in the tens of thousands. Consider altering the flora or fauna to justify even more lucrative fishing and hunting or having your cities be in the low thousands or a few fortified villages (think Celtic Oppidum) so that your hunter gatherers have settlements and an administrative core ruling over a rural populace

Answer 3

I think that it is a really nutty ethical system which permits hunting animals but forbids harming plants. But it is your story.

It is possible to use plant products without harming plants.

"Lemon tree is very pretty, and its flower is very sweet,

but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat."

And at first sight one may wonder why the lemon tree - if it had consciousness and desires - would want pieces of it to be broken off and eaten.

But if there are no nerve connections between a plant and its fruit - which is easy to achieve since plants have no nerves - the plant will feel no pain when a ripe and ready to fall off fruit is picked, or when a fallen fruit on the ground is picked up and eaten.

The function of fruit is to be an edible container for inedible seeds. Animals eat and digest the fruit, and then excreate the undigested seeds in their poop. Thus the seeds are carried far from the parent tree and are deposited in a little bit of fertilizer.

And I think that berries also function that way, from the point of view of berry bushes -if berry bushes could have a point of view.

And grapes include seeds, except for seedless varieties developed by agriculturalists, so they should function like fruits and berries, and maybe your hunter-gatherers will think that way.

What about nuts? Every nut which a human eats will never grow up to be a tree, so being eaten will not be good for that particular nut if that nut needs to become a tree. But if humans have a habit of picking up and collecting nuts to eat, they will lose a percentage of those nuts which might land in spots good for sprouting. So if a nut is not considered to be an entire plant, but a tiny part of its parent tree, and if that tree is considered to have some sort of need to reproduce, and get some sort of benefit from having growing offspring, then collecting nuts to eat and sometimes losing some of them can be considered to be good for the nut trees.

And considering a nut, a stage in the life cycle of a nut, to be not a tree and thus not a plant, might seem like thinking up a goofy loophole to blatently violate an ethical rule. But humans do that all the time. For example, humans constantly violate the rule against murder by killing embroyos and fetuses, despite them being just as obviously human as a person in any other stage of the human life cycle. And technologically challenged hunter-gatherers like the desired group would kill or abandoned to die unwanted newborn infants.

Many Neolithic groups routinely resorted to infanticide in order to control their numbers so that their lands could support them. Joseph Birdsell believed that infanticide rates in prehistoric times were between 15% and 50% of the total number of births,[7] while Laila Williamson estimated a lower rate ranging from 15% to 20%.1: 66  Both anthropologists believed that these high rates of infanticide persisted until the development of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution.[8]: 19  Comparative anthropologists have calculated that 50% of female newborn babies were killed by their parents during the Paleolithic era.[9] From the infants hominid skulls (e.g. Taung child skull) that had been traumatized, has been proposed cannibalism by Raymond A. Dart.[10] The children were not necessarily actively killed, but neglect and intentional malnourishment may also have occurred, as proposed by Vicente Lull as an explanation for an apparent surplus of men and the below average height of women in prehistoric Menorca.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Paleolithic_and_Neolithic

Thus your hunter-gatherers might think that nut are not yet plants and so it is right to eat them.

What about mushrooms? Fungi are classifed as a separate kingdom of life from plants. The visible parts of mushrooms are just the parts they use to spread their spores, and the main bodies of mushrooms are underground or inside infected tree trunks.

Would the hunter-gathers be aware that mushrooms aren't plants, or aware that the visible mushroom caps are disposable spore containers and that eating them will not harm the mushrooms if they think mushrooms are plants? I don't know.

If the hunter-gathers see mushroom caps growing out of living trees, will they think that the mushroom caps are parasites harming the trees and that picking and eating them will be helping and not harming the trees? I don't know.

And it is possible to build a city in a rather barren area with little or no plant life growing, and perhaps to build around any widely scattered plants which do grow there.

The ground floors of buildings can be made of dirt, or sod, or stones. The walls can be made of stones. The roofs (and ceilings and upper floors, if any) of low technology buildings are usually made of wood. To get wood without harming trees and thus plants, they would have to carefully trim away superflous branches as modern tree doctors sometimes do, or collect fallen branches and trees from the forest, or collect driftwood on the banks of rivers, lakes, and seas.

And it is perfectly possible to build vaulted and domed ceilings and roofs out of stone or bricks. Wooden centering is often used while building arches, vaults, and domes, but they could collect dead wood or build vaults without wooden centering, which has been done. Legends claim that some vaulted buildings were built by making giant sand or earthcastles in the desired shape, covering the sides and top with stone or bricks, and then digging out the sand or dirt from beneath. Those are just legends, but that could possibly be another real life technique to build vaults without centering.

Any bricks used would have to be inferior, but widely used, sun-dried bricks instead of fired bricks.

Or buildings could be roofed with tent roofs. If they hunt, they can make leather out of animal skins and sew a lot of leather pieces together and suspend them over the rooms in the buildings, perhaps using poles made out of dead wood they found to support the leather roosm.

Possibly the city dwellers could advance enough to become herders and domestic animals, keeping them in walled meadows to graze. Of course that would be harming the plants the animals eat. But maybe they could think up a sneaky loophole to the rule agaisnt harming plants, for example claiming that it was the livestock that hurt the plants.

Or possibly they drive herds of wild animals into a wide and fertile valley and wall up the only pass into the valley so the animals can't get out, and then enter the valley to hunt them, and build their city nearby.

Possibly they follow nomadic herds of prey animals on their regular migration routes. Possibly there are a few places where the herds stop for long periods of time each year, and the hunters build seasonal tent cities at those places and eventually replace the tents with stone buildings used during the seasons while they are there. So they would live in several different cities in different seasons of the year.

Late Medieval Ethiopia was a civilized society with agriculture and permanent villages, towns, and cities. But the king of kings, his court, and many soldiers, usually travelled constantly, forming a vast tent city with thousands of people wherever they stopped for the night. The permanent capital, Gondar, wasn't founded until about 1635.

And I guess that a travelling tent city with many thousands of persons could support itself by hunting if they followed vast herds and had riding horses to go hunting far from where ever they were camped at the moment. The Sioux sometiems formed travelling camps with thousands of men, women and children for months at a time, so you need to make hunting somewhat easier for your people than it was for the Sioux if you want them to live in vast tent cities all year round.

Answer 4

Consider the requirements of a city of tens of thousands. That requires significant movement of resources into the city just so that the people can cook and eat. In order to have that movement, thousands of people have to be motivated to be hunting / gathering firewood and carrying that into the city. You also need water brought in. You are talking about some kind of slavery or religious movement.

When we look at history prior to agriculture, there were places where thousands gathered. Places like Stonehenge were gathering places. But they were for special gatherings, not settled cities.

If you want a city, one way is to make it a place of religious pilgrimage where only a few religious professionals live, but where nearly everyone comes several times a year. It would need to have the places for people, but most of the year, those places are empty. Add a justice system and small groups of people will visit throughout the year. Food, firewood, and water can be brought in for those large gatherings without major harm to the environment.

Answer 5

Gleaned from this history.se question: What surface area per person is required for hunter-gatherers? the answer cites the following:

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. ... 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.

So assuming a highly favourable environment, and further assuming the area to sustain strict hunters is equal to that of hunter-gatherers, a city of 10,000 would need an area of 150,000 hectares (~370,000 acres, ~1,500 km²).

That isn't a completely unreasonable area, but as the population grows those hunters will need to travel farther and farther out to find prey and bring it back. Anything above 10,000 I think would begin to test the concept of city; there would be enormous pressure to undergo fission and split the population into smaller clusters scattered within the hunting area. And once split, they would begin competing with each other.

Answer 6

The current answers all base themselves on historical realism, but the OP does not specify this as a requirement.

The obvious answer is therefore mega-fauna. A city requires large amounts of food, your carnivorous civilization gets this from humongous creatures that cross the region the city is based in frequently and in large enough numbers to provide that food, while also being huntable by a small, rag-tag band of heroes.

This is essentially an extension of the Greenland/ whale hunting society in a comment on the question, but with fantastic beasts thrown in.

For bonus points, this migration could take place through natural portals so the local area does not have to support these creatures out of its own resources. Much like the Perfectly Normal Beasts in the 5th Hitch-hikers book.

Answer 7

Say I wanted to create a civilization of people who, in accordance with a vow to never harm plants, refuse to practice agriculture or animal husbandry, instead relying hunting and fishing for all of their needs. Is it conceivable that this society would ever produce a city with tens of thousands of people?

The direct answer is very likely "no", as many others have laid out. Agriculture is the easiest and most efficient way to convert solar energy into ... abundance of something we can eat, basically.

But let's just say we want a "yes":

An inferior or vassal civilization is doing agriculture for them

Your people don't do agriculture. However, they're good at conquering people living in their outskirts that just happen to have significantly different characteristics: blond instead of brown hair, blue instead of black eyes, speaks a different language, practices different sets of belief, etc. In short: another civilization, for any practical purposes.

You enslave them and tell them to provide for you, or else. They eventually resorted to agriculture, for the same reasons above. Strictly speaking, you don't harm plants, the vassal civilization do. Your civilization then can just keep having (pretending) the moral high ground ever since.

Answer 8

You can get around the thou-shalt-not-harm-a-tree mandate if you allow the collection of produce that has fallen to the ground (i.e. "That which Nature hath offered, directly").

In addition to the answers above, this lets you extract marginal nutrient content from non-animal sources, especially nuts/seeds which are decently high in fats that a lot of game animals will be lacking. Cultivation of those trees would be a form of agriculture, but more like landscaping than active farming. There's a number of fruits that are okay to harvest from the ground as long as you're checking every day to avoid fermented/rotting examples.

This avoids the whole "harming by harvest" angle, unless they understand that dropped fruit/nuts/seeds are how plants propagate themselves and find the interruption of that cycle objectionable.