Below is an interesting article that can form the subject for discussion.
Paddy
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
WORLD FOOD ISSUES:
PAST AND PRESENT
Jared Diamond on Agriculture
Discover Magazine, May 1987
Pages 64-66
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy
taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely
one
of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we
weren't
specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other
species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that
human history over the past million years has been a long tale of
progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that 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.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will
strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off
in
almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had
it
easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just
count
our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the
best
tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives,
in
history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get
our
energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite
among
us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman,
or an
ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and
gathering:
we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that
philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and
short.
Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view)
no
respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild
foods
and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only
10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began
to
domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread
until
today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers
survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask
"Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt
agriculture?" is
silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient
way
to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons
per
acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages,
exhausted
from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing
for
the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep.
How
many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the
advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit
agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken
place
over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and
since
it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the
wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had.
Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and
compose the B-minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's
hard
to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago
got
better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until
recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose
results
(surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one
example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers
really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world,
several
dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari
bushmen,
continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these
people
have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard
than
their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each
week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of
Bushmen,
14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when
asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting
agriculture,
replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the
world?"
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 bettter balance of
other
nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake
(during
a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of
protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance
for
people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who
eat 75
or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of
thousands
of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of
the
1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty
and
brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's
worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have
rubbed
shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell
us
about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The
progressivist
view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives
of
primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to
farming.
Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of
wild
plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric
garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and
thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has
become
answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging
techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the
remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much
material to study as a pathologist today. For example,
archaeologists in
the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical
conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy
(Discover,
October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in
Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for
hookworm
and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons,
but
they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a
skeleton
reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few
cases
where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables
like
the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life
span
and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also
calculate
growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine
teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and
recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and
other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned
from
skeletons concerns historical changes in height. 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. By classical
times
heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and
Turks
have still not regained the average height of their distant
ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian
skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys.
At
Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and
Illinois
rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint
a
picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer
culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150.
Studies
by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of
Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their
new-found
livelihood. 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 bya 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."
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many
other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from
necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't
think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they
switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark
Cohen
of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with
Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology
at
the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that
argument
ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a
respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings
that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a
varied
diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a
few
starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants-wheat, rice,
and
corn-provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species,
yet
each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential
to
life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the
mere
fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded
societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.
(Some
archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture,
that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because
crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't
take
hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly
shifted camp. 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.
Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated
food
sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild
plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from
others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing
élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from
Greek
tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better
diet
than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches
taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six
cavities
or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the
élite
were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but
also by
a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale
today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds
ridiculous
to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an
élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be iimproted
from
countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose
between
being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the
Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well.
Freed
from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence,
and
under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming
women
tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer
counterparts-with consequent drains on their health. Among the
Chilean
mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from
infectious disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of
burden. In
New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering
under
loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed.
Once
while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some
villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp.
The
heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole
and
assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I
eventually
caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads,
while
one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under
it,
supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by
providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at
least as
much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as
a
critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free
time
to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While
post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms
possible
and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were
already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and
were
still being produced as recently as the last century by such
hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific
Northwest.
Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became better off, but
most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the
progressivist
party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we
must
ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming
could
support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality
of
life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on
eperson per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.)
Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops
lets
one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants.
Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep
their
children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other
means,
since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep
up
with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can
and
often do bear a child every two years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end
of
the ice ages, 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. It's not that hunter-gatherers
abandonded their life style, but that those sensible enough not to
abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't
want.
At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that
archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and
offering no
lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming
have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst
mistake in
human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or
trying to
increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with
starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and logest-lasting
life
style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the
mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether
we
can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from
outer
space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings.
He
might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which
one
hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of
the
human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end
of
our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of
that
day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54
p.
m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will
the
plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us
all? Or
will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine
behind
agriculture's glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?
Paddy Hackett
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