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 gradually 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 gazing 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 twelve to nineteen hours for one group of Bushmen, fourteen 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 better 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 ninety-three grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five 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 farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modem 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 founds 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 straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-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 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 lllinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and lllinois 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 fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold 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 preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural 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 hunter-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 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 appearance 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, nonproducing elite 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 average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).
Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite 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 elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported 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 11 O-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned 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, modem hunter-gathers 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 Inuit and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite 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 one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 time 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 extended nursing 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 abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmer 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 longest lasting lifestyle 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 us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It 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 facade and that have so far eluded us?
Reader Comments
the agriculture lifestyle has allowed for a dramatic growth in knowledge in the last thousands of years it seems. And maybe this has to do with written language being established, and other factors. having a defined language and written language is crucial to the accumulation or growth of knowledge it would seem.
The question is, if our pre-agricutlure ancestors maybe had some of the knowledge that we have today. but this is hard to imagine unless their brains operated differently... because the earliest types of writing are documented according to wikipedia at about 10,000 years ago.
It seems to me that the rise of agriculture and psychopathy go hand in hand with urbanization offering a less mobile and larger feeding ground.
Regular readers of this site will be well aware of the evidence pointing to farmed grains as the source of many debilitating human illnesses.
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More important perhaps has been the implementation of the multiple power and control systems, piggybacking in under the guise of ‘civilisation’ (a word which means those who inhabit cities) which have conspired over time to wreck such havoc upon our physical, spiritual, social and environmental realities. I constantly come back to the fact that nearly every ancient culture relates stories of how ‘sages’ or ‘gods’ or ‘angels’ or ‘fish people’ or ‘star visitors’ or whatever costume the 4th density STS forces fancied putting on at the time, were the source of this change, persuading us to move away from a system that gave us such freedoms to one that gave us unlimited chains. Do not take lightly the Sumerian/Babylonian stories of Oannes and his daily visits to their shores baring gifts of great wisdom and learning and teaching them how to plant. Before long came ownership, writing, laws, money, bureaucracies, and the whole system of limitations and manipulations. The best prisons are the ones we put around ourselves; they gave us the tools, we dug the ditches. To those who claim we would have never achieved what we have achieved without agriculturally derived civilisation I say, as we enact the 6th terrible extinction on this planet, as we divest ourselves of our last connections to any form of reality, or honesty, or self awareness, I suspect that our hubris and self-delusion knows no bounds.
Most illiterate cultures simply memorized things. Homer's poems come from an oral tradition that was letter written down. And so do much of the poetry and myth from that early era. There's a bit in Secret history of the world where Laura talks about how once an illiterate troubadour learned to read and write, he forgot all the poems he had memorized. Writing makes our memory lazier because it can be written down and stored outside ourselves.
correction to the above: I obviously meant 4th density STS
The only one who profit from this "invention" are Monsanto-like companies and PTB controlers, what a horror!!
If avoiding smoking and not eating meat was so good for the body, mind, and soul, then why are so many Veggie People so obnoxious and ignorant?
1) "Control the money and you control, laws and politics",
2) "Control the Media, and you can invent any lie you like and make the populace believe it",
3) "Control the FOOD (production-availability & price) and you will control the PEOPLE".
These are the concepts that the Zion Talmudic Mafia Dons have been applying to the human race in the last decades, even since the creation of the Bank of England to letting AIPAC run the USA.
Hyperdimensional overlords presenting themselves as "gods" teaching to do agriculture, and placing psychopaths at the top as the agricultural elite. Less freetime, weakening of our health and minds, division of the peoples(by sexes, classes, countries, kingdoms, cities, races, labguage), more suffering, more suffering, more suffering... Food for the moon.
I agree with Seeker that there is more here than meets the eye.
It seems what the "hunter-gatherers" have done, basically, is to say "no thanks" to modern society.
I don't see anything particularly idyllic about their life style. And if a major natural disaster happens, they could be in as much trouble as any of us. They have effectively insulated themselves from the man-made disaster we so proudly call "modern civilization." But they didn't always succeed in this: Remember how many "primitives" have been slaughtered over the years by European expansionists?
Anyone who ever bothered to genuinely interact with "primitive" people know that they have a basic dignity, sense of place, and caring for each other that is hard to find in our "modern" world.
But we could propose that this is mostly because they are relatively disconnected from many of the most virulent human sources of social dysfunction. If those sources were removed from the planet, we might all behave more like "primitives."
Let's make sure we have our causalities straight before we all run to the woods to get back to nature!
Simple. If you want to 'rule the world', it's best to have a large enough population base to conquer all your 'neighbors'. You need more energy which means more people to fuel the machine of empire building. A pyramid needs a large base, as does any empire. The hunter-gatherers didn't seem to be of the empire building mindset, so they didn't need, nor desire excess of any kind. Empires need excess to fund their operations. The lack of this excess is the problem today, even with all that fiat currency the central bankers are pushing out into their friends hands, the credit market continues to go flat when it needs to continue its parabolic rise. All the household and corporate debt continues to decline offsetting the various govt's increase.. thus stagnation, thus the inevitable collapse of the current con game. How many weeks are left?
Meanwhile, the hunter-gatherers remain in the background waiting for the next catastrophe to reset the game back to Go. What goes up, must come down, spinning wheel, gotta go round. every song, like every story, has it's beginning and it's end. Isn't this the usual warning from sources such as the C's? Natural progression they called it? Knowledge protects? The game goes on with or without you, and either you choose to play or pass, but passing means always being on the defense, which very rarely wins the game. Then the question becomes how to play the game with the old hunter-gatherer mindset yet remain free from the damage of one's imperial minded neighbors? Isn't that the lesson here? A lesson in strength?
OK, so hunter gatherer tribes still exist and thrive on 18 to 20 hours a week of effort, and our ancestors had things to learn about eating a balanced diet, as they transitioned to an agrarian centered lifestyle. Being full, or at least feed, as opposed to starving had a certain value all it's own.
But really, what makes the hunter gather based existence superior?
Are they making better use of their brains? Ability? Resources?
Show me what those hunter gatherer societies have done to better our existence on this planet. What technology have they invented? What medical conditions have they cured? What diseases have they eradicated?
When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake, what percentage of the total aid sent to provide relief comes from hunter gatherer societies?
Short, brutal and without value, to paraphrase.
What good have our inventions done? Did the invention of any of them improve our connection with each other? I see more people on cell phones texting that cannot properly communicate with their own neighbors or family. Did inventions reduce the work day as promised? Nope, it actually increased with technologies like agriculture and the industrial revolution.
Medical conditions, hmm from what I am learning of the corruption of medicine, a lot of the conditions we have these days didn't exist. Anyway, what is the point of living to 80 if we have to work till 65+?
Haiti would have coped very well in the earthquake if they were still hunter gatherers. You are saying that hunter gatherer societies should be the ones to solve the problems of modern society. That is like saying that doctors are stupid because they can't heal a broken car.
If one takes everything processed by the human body (meat, drink, air, light, music, films, literature etc) as a kind of "food", each with its own potential in the evolutionary/involutionary scheme of things, it becomes possible to start sifting out the snakes from the ladders....
wheat - snake
bacon - ladder
mobile phone radiation - snake
smoking - ladder
energy-saving lightbulbs - snake
sun/candle-gazing - ladder
ambient music/rap music - snake
polyphony, polyrhythmy - ladder
etc
Short, brutal and without value…
I seem to remember coming across such thinking before. Oh yes, it’s the typical dismissal of the violent colonial before he destroys the culture of those he has invaded! It seeks to justify the unjustifiable; the genocide ever at the heart of West.
We are so addicted to our own civilisation we are blinded to its objective reality. I am sure that from the outside we, what we have done and what we hold dear are seen in quite a different light. The natural wisdoms of the hunter gatherers may not have got us to the moon but many of them still know far far more more than we about the objective realities of the universe beyond the boundaries of our ego driven senses.
Throw away technology, left brain mechanistic thinking, and a depletion of natural resources and proud of it seems!
Blind, greedy and globally destructive… that’s us.
Things won't change if we don't start acting. In most places in the world, there's alternative food sources to supermarkets and farms. In my country we're pretty well off with traditional food sources despite our winters' harshness, since here's still many places to fish, hunt and gather berries. I only wish it was like this in other countries too. These are riches you ought to take care of, lets our children and their children won't be using them.
There's no question about peoples' will for an easier lifestyle. But I've come to notice that it's good to have hardships, both mental, spiritual and physical, in life, and it's good to voluntarily seek challenges you're interested in and do things that are harsh to you in order to realise those challenges, dreams. Seeking a more comfortable lifestyle may be natural, but I think there's an in-built instinct in us, yearning for movement and changes just as we need rest. It is our hunter-gatherer, it is an instinct that doesn't like the farming lifestyle. We judge violence too, yet we come to accept it as a way, a necessity in getting us food. But thrill of the hunt and survival struggle is as natural feeling as the will to protect your family. City life and electronic, no all kind of entertairnment that includes only repetitive and predictable things dulls us and something inside us wants to fight it. The caveman within.
Remember people, it's always up to you what you do. I'd rather live one moment in freedom and die, than a lifetime in prison. Chasing that dream, I submit myself to the comfortable prison of everyday work and life on conditions like these. We may be of higher intellect than animals, capable of way higher thinking, but our true nature seems to be that of an animal.
This reminds me of a story. There was once a great Native American Chief, he was born before the industrial revolution, and lived through it. So some journalist decides to ask him what he thought of all the progress?
The Chief said, before the White man came, there was no government, no taxes. The fields and forests were filled with game, the lakes, rivers and streams were clear and clean. Women did all the cooking, cleaning, sewing, and took care of the children. Men hunted and fished all day, and had sex all night! Only the White man is stupid enough to think he can improve upon that system.
though it reaked a little too much of chauvinism - women cant be envisaged as work horses - if so then men aren't men...in the sense that men are the physical strenght of women and women the emmotional stregth of men (simplified)...personally I like to sleep well at night and breakfast upon my female companion!!
I envisaged the modern hunter gatherer stalking the wilds of Lincoln or Sussex or Dorset looking for a suitable meal in the shape of a cow or sheep to shoulder home to his lair in some quiet spinney by a pond or stream...I thought of the richness of that meat that has been injected with various chemicals and steroids and GM produced feeds...
I envisaged the end of agriculture engendered by Monsanto and others where the agriculture all stops and goes genetically haywire as nature attacks the foreigner on her patch...then the big cities find no plastic bread on their shelves nor meat to eat as the hunter has been doing well at his art and confusion in the "civilised" world with transportation at a standstill due to overcrowding, stopped the deliveries of ersatz food to gasping hungry millions waiting at Tescos (for example) living off the last vestiges of beans and a famous tomatoe soup!!!
I envisaged the end of civilisation as we know it and felt quite comforted as what it brought was a plethora of garbage and useless gizmos that filled lives with temporary "isms" apart from the great currency scams and politico/religious corruptions that stained this world with the kind of shit that had the permanence of crude oil on the rocky shorelines of "paradises" turned cemetaries.
I think gdpetti got closest to it all - meanwhile when the shit hits the fan be sure you have a good ducking hole because its going to be be dinosauric in mass and stink!
question is : "Can we turn back the clock ?" . Even if we wanted to I don't think so. Secondly from the data that we have in our hands , evolution not just of the human race but of any universal race has pros and cons, meaning that virtually things remain the same. You gain on the one side you loose on the other. I've said that life is like a gift that continuously changes its wrapping. No wrapping is ideal. For me the question that no parent has asked his children is do you want the gift ? My mother has pleaded guilty and when I asked my father he didn't answer, just got out to the balcony and stared at the void.