The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

[Guest guest]

Opinion

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

By Jared Diamond

University of California at Los Angeles Medical School

http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html

 

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?