Reading: Jared Diamond (1997): Agriculture: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
Jared Diamond (1997): Agriculture: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race http://tinyurl.com/dl20161210a
The coming of agriculture would seem to have only pluses:
- You can obtain a lot more food with less work compared with hunting-and-gathering.
- You no longer have to carry your babies around the landscape when they are most vulnerable.
- You don't have to carry all of your useful stuff with you--hence you can spend more time making durable, useful stuff because it will still be around when you need it.
What's the downside? Jared Diamond says that there are very powerful downsides to the invention of agriculture and the adoption of an agricultural lifestyle? What are they? Is he right?
Jared Diamond (1997): Agriculture: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race http://tinyurl.com/dl20161210a: "The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life...
...was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.... For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants.... While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients....
Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women.... Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."...
Farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition... ran the risk of starvation if one [single] crop failed... clump[ing] together in crowded societies... led to... parasites and infectious disease.... Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities. Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.... Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B.C.... royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).... Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... more frequent pregnancies... with consequent drains on their health....
With the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off.... Bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter...
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