To understand why this extraordinary suggestion could make sense, you need to visit the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, a shrine to modern anthropology. Its gates resemble a Cubist take on the DNA double-helix and its clouded glass windows are etched with phrases from Darwin's Origin of Species.
According to Prof Diamond, agriculture evolved about 12,000 years ago, and since then humans have been malnourished and disease-ridden compared with their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Worse, because agriculture allows food to be stockpiled and enables some people to do things other than look for food, it led to the invention of more and better weapons, soldiers, warfare, class divisions between those who had access to food and those who did not, and inequality between the sexes. This idea has been picked up again in a recent book, An Edible History of Humanity, by Tom Standage, which argues that agriculture is a "profoundly unnatural activity".
Beneath the centre's achingly modern exterior lies its greatest treasure, a basement containing 20,000 ancient skeletons. There are rows of skulls, kept in boxes with plastic windows at the front. As you walk along, you can peer into the great dark eyesockets of a skull from Sarawak, or the eggshell-thin cranium of a child from New Guinea. Some are so old they seem to have been stained with nicotine.
"Bones are like a book, recording the history of each person," explains Dr Jay Stock, an evolutionary anthropologist, as he slides out the boxes that contain the remains of ancient human beings. It was this collection that first proved to the world that humanity shares a common African ancestor. And it is this collection that has demonstrated agriculture could be bad for us.
The idea first came to prominence through Professor Jared Diamond, based at the University of California in Los Angeles. In his 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel, he wrote that "although we believe agriculture has enabled us to lead lives of wealth, health and great longevity, it has in fact been detrimental to the human species."
Dr Stock agrees that farming has played a powerful role in distorting human development. "The disparities we see today between those who are exploited and those who exploit are all based on those early origins of agriculture," he explains. Hunter-gatherers, for example, ate a wide variety of foods, around 60-70 kinds a year. But once humans switched to agriculture, we became dependent on a small number of crops. (Today, these are wheat, rice and corn, which provide the bulk of calories for the world's population.)
The problem is that most of these staple foods do not have the nutrients essential for a healthy life and are vulnerable to disease and drought. Moreover, having a population based in one place led to poor hygiene, just as living in proximity with domesticated animals inevitably resulted in diseases being transferred between species, as today's outbreak of swine flu reminds us.
To illustrate the malign impact of agriculture, Dr Stock and one of his students, Anne Starling, examined a unique set of skeletons. All 9,000 are from the Nile Valley in Egypt, but they span an extraordinary historical range, from Neolithic hunter-gatherers through to 1500 BC.
The researchers were looking for signs of malnutrition, which are reflected in a person's teeth. Just as tree-rings can indicate the health and age of a tree, so a defect in the layers of enamel called linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) can indicate whether a person has been ill, or deprived of food for several months.
What Dr Stock and Ms Starling discovered was that 40 per cent of hunter-gatherers who lived 13,000 years ago had LEH. Fast-forward 1,000 years, to when the Egyptians had become farmers, and the figure rose dramatically, to 70 per cent. Originally, the hunter-gatherers were about 5ft 8in, with robust skeletons. Yet once farming began, the average height decreased by four inches. Dr Stock showed me the bones of a man who lived 7,000 years ago, which are so thin and delicate they look as if they might snap.
What caused this reduction in height? One possibility is disease. A paper that Dr Stock is publishing with his Cambridge colleague Dr Andrea Migliano, in a forthcoming issue of Current Anthropology, demonstrates the link: the pair looked at pygmy skeletons from the Andaman Islands, whose body size shrank even more dramatically when they encountered Western colonialists, who brought with them diseases like influenza and syphilis. Hostile tribes who kept their distance from the newcomers actually grew taller during this period.
But while the Leverhulme collection demonstrates the drawbacks of agriculture, both in terms of our physical condition and our social development, it also shows the ways in which the benefits eventually came to outweigh the costs. The Egyptian skeletons reveal that around 4,000 years ago, farmers suddenly started to grow bigger and become more healthy, perhaps through the more efficient use of resources. The average height returned to 5ft 8in, and only a fifth of the population showed signs of malnourishment.
These results suggest that our ancestors struggled with poor health for 8,000 years before agriculture started to work in the favour of humanity, as opposed to benefiting the elites who controlled the food supply. "It's a case of whether the glass is half full or half empty," says Dr Stock. "Without the surplus of food you get through farming, we couldn't have the runaway technological innovation we see today. For instance, I can spend a lifetime in school, years doing a PhD, and then teach my students everything I know in a few months. They can then go on to become more expert than I am, pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Without agriculture, we wouldn't be able to stack innovation upon innovation."
While many scientists now agree with Prof Diamond that agriculture did lead to an increase in malnutrition, inequality and warfare, some, like Dr Stock, are challenging such a cut-and-dried assertion. Life as a hunter-gatherer, for example, may not have been quite as idyllic as anthropologists initially portrayed. "Anthropologists in the Sixties and early Seventies described humans as 'Man the Hunter', bringing back meat for the women and children, and there was an academic backlash against this," explains Dr Stock. "Hunter-gatherers became the original flower children. There was a romanticised view of indigenous cultures who were egalitarian and in touch with nature."
In fact, for many, life was probably "nasty, brutish and short", no matter how interesting the range of fruit and vegetables on offer. Dr Migliano has shown that the average life expectancy for a pygmy in the Philippines was 19. This meant that by the age of 14, most girls had already had at least one child. Other research has shown that, in hunter-gatherer societies, 15 per cent of young men are murdered: Prof Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, has calculated that in spite of two world wars, fewer people die violently today than before the advent of agriculture.
In any case, says Dr Stock, we are quite clearly at the point of no return. Agriculture has led to a surplus of food and this in turn allowed women to have more children (albeit initially unhealthy ones), leading to a global population of almost seven billion. "A lot of the problems we are facing today stem from the advent of agriculture," he says. "But we are ingenious enough to come up with technological solutions.
"We are facing grave environmental and social issues. How we deal with them today will determine how impressed or dismayed the archaeologists and anthropologists of the future will be when they view our remains."
Comment: Check out last week's SOTT Talk Radio show on this very topic:
Paleo food: Staying Healthy in a GMO world
Reader Comments
From an esoteric p.o.v., it is said that before Kantekkian man arrived on the scene, there was less technological development as well as spiritual development, as if the whole process was 'stuck'. So, fresh from blowing up their own planet with their warring ways, they arrive here to help 'push' things along, and who doesn't like an occasional punch in the face to set the mood? More catalyst please? Another 'shock to the system' or set of 'alarm clocks'?
It seems that without the 'dark side', where would the 'light side' be? Most likely lost in a sea called Tranquility, and how boring is that? Perhaps agricultural development was a means to the ends of greater self-conscious awareness? Another test to see what would happen if a more 'active' agent of chaos was added to the mix on this planet to 'spike the punchbowl' so to speak? It seems most of our technology is a result of military/intel R&D programs, one age after the next as competition between humans set in to replace that against the local critters once they were killed or controlled, then put in/on reservations, zoos or the like.. Sometimes these tools can be put to 'better' use later by those less interested in the competition of war and more interested in the need to survive in the wilderness outside the domains of these warring states, as it is in the wilderness they are pushed or pulled by their society if they choose not to participate, actively or passively.
This then reminds me of the whole Ayn Rand and 'romantic realism' theme thinking she could be a predator without worrying about all the other predators around her, not to mention the natural attraction of those of the psychopathic orientation to this competition for control and dominance, of which they enjoy a natural advantage but we aren't given any 'handicap' such as most novices in golfing are given, and technology only compounds this handicap, though perhaps it serves, once again, as the necessary 'punch in the face' to wake us up and ask if we care to leave this increasingly global one-room schoolhouse called Purgatory?
Agriculture was a way for humanity to get its opiate buzz on. It took 8000 years for some to realize that man does not live on bread alone. Humanity is lazy, too. Why gather grapes miles away when a nearby vineyard is more convenient. Why bother hunting when penning animals provides a steady supply close at hand. Hunter/gatherers would have seen the advantages of gathering food closer to home and protecting their supply as resources dwindled and competition increased.
A permaculture based on perennials could have provided food from tree crops, removing the need for tillage. Yields per hectare would have been higher and over all dietary quality would have been improved. The long term effort required, simply wasn't done.
I remember reading of a man in Spain, who early in the 19th century, did genetic selection on Acorns. Within his lifetime, he was able to breed Oak trees that provided heavier crops of sweet acorns. His goal was to provide mostly forage for livestock. Without a multigenerational interest and effort, nothing came of it.
The Amazon Indians deliberately planted food species not only as a direct food source but to attract game.
Some sources support the idea the the heavy concentration of Chestnuts in North America was due to deliberate effort by the Indians. Again this was more to encourage game than as a direct food source.
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So the big corps are telling you what to eat,what to drink ie flouridated water.Well I feel they are wrong.There is a bit of truth to this article.I know that if I take a non gmo vitamin,and eat the dribble that is forced upon us I do not feel hungry 1 hour later.Now if I am out of vitamins for what ever reason then I eat a big meal and my stomach is full but I still feel hungry.I dont feel there is any nutrition in the food we eat any more.So I feel I am starving for nutrients without a multivitamin.Of course the big agra companies dont want you to know that.