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Home , Human history, Neolithic Revolution

13 TheWorst Mistakein the of the HumanRace

Jared

What we eat and how we eat are imPortant both nutri- As you rcad this selection, askyoutself the follouing tionally and culturally. This selection suggests that questions: gathering and how we get what we eat-through What is the fundamental differencebetween dra- versus , for example-has the progressivistview and the revisionist pretty We all matic consequences.This seems obvious. interpretation? imagine what a struggle it must have been before the How did the developmentof agriculture affect developmentof agricu-lture.We think of our ancestors people'shealth? spending their days searching for roots and berries to eat,or out at the crack of dawn, hunting wi.ld animals. What three explain the changesbrought In fact, this was not quite the case.Nevertheless, isn't about by the developmentof agriculture? it really better simply to go to the refrigerator, open the How did the development of agriculture affect door, and reach for a container of to pour into a socialequaliry including genderequality? bowl of flaked grain for your regular morning meal? What could be simpler and more nutritious? The terms iliscussedin this selectionate There are many things that we seldom question; follotoing in the Glossary at the back of the book: the truth seer$ so evident and the answers obvious. includeil One such sacred cow is the tremendous prosPerity agr ic ul t uraI dmel op ment . This brought about by the agricultural ciztilization selectionis a thought-provoking introduction to the dofiesticationof plantsand qnimals .onnection betweenculture and agriculture.The tran- ',ition from food foraging to farming (what archaeolo- hunter-gatherers qists call the revolution) may have been the Neolithic its most imPortant rforst mistake h history or paleontology event. You be the judge. But for better or worse, this paleopathology tultural has occurred, and the will neverbe the samea8ain. sociltlstrutifcqtion

T progress.In particular, recentdiscoveries suggest that I o sciencewe owe dramaticchanges in our smug the adoption of agriculture,supposedly our most deci- .elf-image. Astronomy taught us that our isn't sive step toward a better , was in many ways a :he centerof the universe but merely one of billions of catastrophe from which we have never recovered reavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we With agriculture came the gross social and sexual i. eren't specially created by God but evolved along inequaliry the diseaseand despotism, that curse our t\'ith millions of other species.Now is ex$tence. lemolishing another sacredbelief: that At first, the evidenceagainst this revisionist inter- ,\'er the past million has been a long tale of pretation will strike twentieth- Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every resPect than the people of the ,who in turn had it easierthan cavemen,who in turn were better off than ,:s|\lDiamond/O 1987Discooer ^atazir.e. apes. Just count our advantages.We en oy the most

95 96 CULTUREAND AGRICULTURE abundant and varied foods, the besttools and material neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted goods,some of the longestand healihiestlives, in his- eachweek to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for tory. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. one group of Bushmen,14 hours or lessfor the Hadza We get our energy from oil and machines, not from of Thnzania.One Bushman,when asked why our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting "Why his life for that of a medieval ,a caveman,or agriculture, replied, should we, when there are an ape? so many mongongo nuts in the world?" For most of our history we supported ourselvesby While concentrate on high- hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and crops like and potatoes, the mix of wild and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers pro- have traditionally regarded as nasry brutish, and vides more and a better balanceof other nutri- short. Sinceno food is grown and little is stored,there ents. In one study, the Bushmen'saverage daily food is (in this view) no respitefrom the struggle that starts intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was anew eachday to find wild foods and avoid staning. 2,1,10calories and 93 grams of protei4 considerably Our escape from this misery was facilitated onlv grcater than the recommended daily allowance for peo- 10,000years ago, when in differentparts of the norld ple of their size.It's almostinconceivable that Bushmen, people began to domesticateplants and animals. The rrho eat 75 or so wild plants,could die of starvationthe agricultural revolution graduallv spread unhl todav rvav hundreds of thousandsof irish farmersand their it's nearly universal, and fen' tribes of hunter- familiesdid during the of the 1840s. gathererssurvive. So the of at least the survivins hunter- From the progressivistperspective on which I h'as aren'tnasty and brutish,even though - '"Why Fatheres brought up, to ask did almost all our hunter- ers have pushed them into some of the world's worst gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is sillv. Of real estate.But modern hunter-gatherersocieties that course they adopted it becauseagriculture is an effi- have rubbed shoulders with farming for cient way to get more food for less work. Planted thousands of vears don't tell us about conditions crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and befor€ the agricultural revolution. The progressivist berries. Just imagine a band of savages,exhausted riers is reallv making a claim about the distant past: from searchingfor nuts or chasingwild animals,sud- that the lives of primitive people improved when they denly gazing for the fust time at a fruitladen snitched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists or a pasture full of .How many millisecondsdo can date that sv!'itchby distinguishing remains of wild you ihink it would take them to appreciatethe advan- plants and animals from thoseof domesticatedones in tagesof agriculture? prehistoricgarba ge dumps. The progressivistparty line sometimeseven goes Horr' can one deduce the of the orehistoric so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable garbagemakers. and therebydirectly test the progres- flowering of that has taken place over the past few si\ist vierv? That question has become answerable thousandyears. Since crops can be stored,and sinceit onlv in recentvears, in part through the newly emerg- takesless time to pick food from a garden than to find ing techniquesof paleopathology,the study of signs of it in ihe wild, agriculture gaveus free time that hunter- dirase in the remainsof ancientpeoples. gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that In some lucky situations,the palmpathologist has enabledus to build the Parthenonand composethe B- almost as much material to study as a pathologist minor Mass. todav For example, archaeologistsin the Chilean While the case for the progressivist view seems deserts found preserved whose med- overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show ical conditionsat time of death could be determinedby that the lives of people 10,000years ago got better autopsv. And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in when they abandoned hunting and gathering for dry cavesin Nevada remain sufficientlywell preserved farrning? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to to be examinedfor hookworm and other parasites. indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to Usually the only human remainsivailable for support the progressivist view. Here's one example study are skeletons,but they permit a surprising num- of an indirect test: Are twentieth-century hunter- ber of deductions.To begin with, a skeletonreveals its gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered owner's sex,weight, and approximate age.In the few throughout the world, several dozen groups of so- caseswhere there are many skeletons,one can con- called primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, struct mortality tableslike the oneslife insurancecom- continue to support themselvesthat way. It turns out panies use to calculateexpected life span and risk of that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a death at any given age.Paleopathologists can also cal- good deal, and work less hard than their farming culate growth rates by measuring of people of THEWORST MISTAKE INTHE HISTORYOFTHE HUMAN RACE 97

while early different ages, examining teeth for enamel defects hunter-gatherersenjoyed a varied diet, or a tew (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognizing farmersobtained most of their food from one calories at scars left on bones by anemia, ,leprosy, starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap (Today just three high- and other diseases. the cost of Poor . rice, and corn-provide One straightforward example of what Pale- carbohvdrateplants-, by the human opathologists have learned from skeletons concerns the bulk of the calories consumed vitamins or historical changesin height. Skeletons from Creece species,vet eachone is deficient in certain jdds because of and show that the average heiSht of hunter- arnino essential to life ) Second, ran qathererstoward the end of the ice ageswas a gener- dependenceon a limited number of crops,farmers failed. Finally, the ous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women With the adoPtion of th; risk of stanation if one crop people to clumP agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.c. had mer€ fact that agriculture encouraged of which then car- reacheda low of only 5'3" for men, 5' for women By togetherin cron'ded sociehes,many led to the classicaltimes heights were very slowly on the rise ried on trade h'ith other crorlded societies, disease. (Some aqain, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not spread of Parasites and infectious rather than agri- regainedthe averageheight of their distant ancestors. aichaeologiststhinl it u'as crol ding, is a chicken- Another examPleof paleopathologyat work is the , that Promoted disease,but this encourages study of Indian skeletonsfrom burial mounds in the and-egg argument, because croriding couldn't take Illinois and Ohio river valleys At Dickson Mounds, agriculture and vice versa.) in small bands located near the confluenceof the Spoon and lllinois hold when populations were scattered diar- Rivers,archaeologists have excavatedsome 800 skele- that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosisand tons that paint a picture of the health changesthat rheal diseasehad to await the rise of farming, occurredwhen a hunter-gathererculture gave way to and bubonic plague the appearanceof large intensive farming around A.D. 1150.Studies by Besides malnutrition, starvation, and another curse uPon GeorgeArmelagos and his colleaguesthen at the Uni- diseases,farming helped bdng have versity of Massachusettsshow these early farmers humanity: deePclass divisions. Hunter-Satherers food paid a price for their new-found livelihood Compared little or no stored food, and no concentrated cows:they live off io the hunier-gatherers who preceded them, the farm- sources,like an orchard or a herd of wild plants and animals they obtain each day ers had a nearly 50 Percentincrease in enameldefects the of socialpar- indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increasein - Therefore,there can be no kings, no class from others.Only deficiency anemia (evidenced by a condition asiteswho grow fat on food seized could a healthy, non- called porotic hyperostosis),a threefold rise in bone in farming populations the disease-ridden lesionsreflecting infectious diseasein general,and an producing elite set itself above at Mycenae c' increasein degenerativeconditions of the spine,prob- masses.Skeletons from Greek tombs "Life a better diet than ably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor 1500B.c. suggestthat royals enjoyed were two or expectancyat birth in the pre-agricultural community commoners, since the royal skeletons "but (on the average, wis about twenty-six years," saysArmelaSos, in threeinches taller and had betterteeth teeth). Among the post-agricultural community it was nineteen one instead of six cavities or missing ,q.o.1000, the 6lite were dis- vears.So theseepisodes of nutritional stressand infec- Chilean murnmies from c. and hair clips iious diseasewere seriously affecting their ability to tinguished not only by ornaments rate of bone lesions survive." bui also by a fourfold lower The evidencesuggests that the Indians at Dickson causedby disease. in nutrition and health persiston Mounds, like many other Primitive Peoples,took up Similar contrasts fich countrieslike the farming not by choice but from necessityin order to a global scaletoday. To peoPlein "I the virtues of hunt- feed their constantlygrowing numbers. don't think US., it sounds ridiculous to extol are an 6lite, depend- most hunter-gatherersfarmed until they had to, and ing and gathering.But Americans must often be imported when they switched to farming they traded quality for "ti ott oll and minerals that nutrition. If one quantity," saysMark Cohen of the StateUniversity of from countrieswith poorer health and in New York ai Plattsburgh, co-editor,with Armelagos, could choose between being a Peasant the Kalahari,which of one of the seminal books in the field' Paleopathology or a BushmanSatherer in "lNl.enl choice? at the Originsof Agriculture. first started mak- do you think would be the better inequality be- ing that lrgument ten years ago, not many people Farming may have encouraged from the need to trans- asreedwith me. Now it's becomea respectable,albeit tween the sexes,as well. Freed nomadic eristence,and controversial,side of the debate." port their babies during a hands to till the There are at least three sets of reasonsto explain under pressure to produce more have more frequent the findings that agriculture was bad for health. Fi.rst, fields, farming women tended to 98 CULTUREAND ACRICULTURE pregnanciesthan their hunter-gatherercounterparts- cide and other rneans,since a mother must carry her with consequentdrains on their health. Among the toddler until it's old enough to up with the Chilean mummies, for example, more women than adults. Becausefarm women don't have that burden, men had bone lesionsfrom infechousdisease. they can and often do bear a child every two years. Women in agri.cultural societies were sometimes As population densities of hunter-gatherers made beastsof burden. In farming com- slowly rose at the end of the ice ages,bands had to munities today I often see women staggering under choosebetween feeding more mouths by taking the loads of vegetablesand firewood while the men walk first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to empty-handed.Once while on a field trip there study- limit growth. Some bands chosethe former solution, ing birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry sup- unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced plies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The bv the transientabundance they enjoyeduntil popula- heaviest item was a 110-poundbag of rice, which I tion growth caught up with increasedfood produc- lashedto a pole and assignedto a team of four men to tion. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed shoulder together.When I eventually caught up with the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, the villagers, the men were carrying light loads,u'hile becausea hundred malnourishedfarmers can still out- one small weighing less than the bag of rice fight one healthv hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord abandoned their life style, but that those sensible acrossher temoles. enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas As for thi claim that agriculturc encouragedthe exceptthe onesfarmers didn't want. flowering of art bv providing us with leisure time, At this poini it's instructive to recall the common modern hunter-gatherershave at least as much free complaint that archaeologyis a luxury concernedwith time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure the remote past, and offering no lessonsfor the pres- time as a criticalfactor s€ems to me misguided.Goril- ent. Archaeologistsstudying the rise of farming have las have had ample free time to build their own reconstructeda crucial stage at which we made the , had they wanted to. While post- worst mistake in human history Forced to choose agricultural technologicaladvances did make new art betweenlimiting population or trying to increasefood forms possible and preservation of art easier,great production, we chose the latter and ended up with paintings and sculptureswere alreadybeing produced starvation,warfare, and tyranny. bv hunter-gatherers15,000 years ago, and were still Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful being produced as recentlyas the last century by such and longest-lastinglife style in human history In con- hunter-gatherersas some Eskimos and the Indians of trast, we're still struggling with the mess into which the PacificNorthwest. agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether Thus with the advent of aericulture an 6lite we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologistwho becamebetter off, but most peoplJbecame worse off. had visited us from outer spacewere trying to explain Insteadof swallowing the progressivistparty line that human history to his fellow spacelings.He might illus- we choseagriculture becauseit was good for us, we trate the resultsof his digs by a 24-hour on which must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls. one hour represents100,000 years of real past time. If "Might One answerboils down to the adage makes the history of the human racebegan at midnight, then right." Farming could support many more people than we would now be almost at the end of our first day. hunting, albeit with a poorer . (Popula- We lived as hunter-gatherersfor nearly the whole of tion densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over one that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 sunset.Finally, at 11:54p.m., we adopted agriculture. times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted As our secondmidnight approaches,will the plight of entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths famine-strickenpeasants gradually spread to engulf than a forest with scatterededible plants. Partly, too, us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive it's becausenomadic hunter-gatherershave to keep blessingsthat we imagine behind agriculture's glitter- their children spaced at four- intervals by infanti- ing fagade,and that have so far eluded us?