I've picked up Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations again. In the early chapters he explains the division the labor as an obvious development from individuals being better at producing certain things (like arrows) in hunter/gatherer societies.
This explanation is obviously flawed. Hunter gatherer socieities existed for tens of thousands of years, presumably with varying skills in their members, without, complex divisions of labor coming about. In addition, hunter/gatherers exist side by side with labor divided societies. So, it doesn't seem as though it is as easily explained as saying people have different skills.

What was the catalyst that changed hunter/gatherer societies with social theories of property into producing societies with theories of individual property rights. Was it just an historical accident that occurred in one place and spread out, or is there a natural development process.
It's obvious that child producing/rearing could be a 'natural' division of labor, but humans existed for thousands of years with no more sophisticated divisions of labor than this.
Marx connects the division of labor with the acceptance of private property rights. This could be explained by men deciding to own women in order to own their children. If men don't own and control women, since women can be impregnated by multiple men, men won't have clear ownership rights to children. But there is evidence, according to feminist archaelogists that early human societies existed in which women were not property. So did women become property as a result of a prior theory of property and division of labor?

So what is the explanation for the division of labor? Is the best explanation something like Diamond's in Guns Germs and Steel. Is it a consequence of learning how to farm? If so, what is it about farming that necessitates the division of labor?

It's late so maybe I'm missing the obvious, but the answer does not seem clear to me tonight.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

It’s obvious. Men are better able to hunt and kill large game and women can balance things on their head better.

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89 300E
79 240D
72 Westy
63 Bug sunroof
85 Jeep CJ7
86 Chevy 6.2l diesel PU

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

I think part of can be explained by the amount of isolation a given society experiences. Once one society comes in contact with another, it discovers things that other society innovated, and offers what it has innovated in trade. So innovation and product become prized. The strong within the society organize their society to produce and innovate more, so more goods can be obtained from their trading partners, and they organize defenses so they cannot be stolen from them or so they can not be enslaved to produce for others. That in turn leads to innovation in warfare, and the discovery that warfare can be substituted for technological advancement and trade goods bartering. As the more advanced societies and more warlike societies come into contact with weaker societies, they absorb them or colonize them.

I think it is true that contact with other tribes and the opportunity to trade increase the tendency to divide labor, but those facts don't necessarily lead to division of labor. Look at Native American tribes. The could have traded with each other, and certainly had opportunity to trade with the Europeans when they arrived and given up hunter gathering. Many (Most? All?) refused. The Utes here in Colorado are a good example. The whites tried to force them to become agricultural but the preferred to fight and die rather than become farmers. Would they have become farmers if the evolution had been 'natural' as opposed to imposed from outside (shades of Iraq!) I don't know. But they had existed for a long time with other tribes in close proximity to European labor-divided trading societies and did not seem overwhelmingly inclined to change their economic system.

There's a book by the anthropologist, Pierre Clastres called Society against the State. In there he closely examines the lives of South American hunter gatherer tribes and argues that their lives were more pleasing than the alternatives.
This leads me to wonder if Smith is overstating his case. Is he blinded by his own society and only sees the advantages of dividing labor and does not have a hunter/gatherer society in the immediate vicinity with which he could make a realistic comparison.
To put it another way, is it in fact that case that the transition from hunter/gatherer to the division of labor is not a very attractive change and that only some form of pressure will cause the transformation?

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Conditions have to be ripe for things to happen. For thousands of years man had no way to count past three. It was one, or many. We take it for granted, but the concept of number is actually rather complex. Even more complex is the concept of more and less. Once man learned that he three needles was in some way greater than four chickens, barter began.

That's my theory at least. Natural divisions exist. It takes man awhile to catch on.

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You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

I don't know if American Indians are a good example. The dynamic I am purposing assumes a longer elapse of time. The American Indians were faced with a situation that was extremely compressed while other primitive societies had a thousand years to convert from HGS to farming. Lets take the Goths for example. The Goths raped, pillaged and burned across the Roman Empire, becoming exposed to indoor plumbing, comfortable dwellings, tasty farm goods, along the way, and over the centuries they went from maurders of the Caucus into gentile manor landlords in France. If we look at American Indian societies that had longer and more gradual exposure to white society such as those who lived on the periphery of the Spanish empire, we find societies that were going thru revolutionary change, like the Commanche, whose society changed from top to bottom because of the horse, and caring for large herds of horses for the purposes of trading them is the beginning of agricultrual. Perhaps if the Utes had had the same kind of gradual exposure, they too may have found some innovation of another societiy that forced them to develop means of production in order to obtain it or produce it themselves. In fact, I did read an interesting study that compared the societal evolution of the Apache, who were much more isolated from both the Spanish and the English-speaking Empires, and how one society, the Comanche became more advanced and more what we would call civilized, while the other were virtual cave men right up to the 20th Century. The Apache had strong societal taboos against strangers and dealt with trespassers only one way - death. They were a society that discouraged any interaction with foreigners. I'll try to see if I can find it, it might offer you some insight.

Necessity is the mother of invention -- or adaptation. As long as living conditions are harmonious and comfortable there is no need for fundamental change. Outside contact, a changing ecosystem, a shortage of resources -- something must act as a catalyst toward progress.