Except it really isn't that simple. Sometimes a new invention, even if obviously 'better' than what came before takes a surprising amount of time to become established.
The first automobiles were clumsy, unreliable and expensive brutes that were worse in nearly all respects than the horses they were supposed to replace. The first muskets were less accurate and took longer to reload than the long- and crossbows which had reached their design zenith in medieval Europe. The last of the clippers were far faster than the first steam packets designed to replace them.
A fascinating essay in this week's New Scientist points out that perhaps the second-greatest human invention of all (after language), that of farming, was not immediately successful at all. In fact the big switch from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming communities 11,000 years ago in the Neolithic had more to do with the creation of new social and economic structures than increasing food supply.
It has long been realised that the advent of farming was not necessarily good for humans. Skeletal evidence tends to support the idea that the first farmers were shorter, weaker and died younger than their wild-foraging forebears.
Indeed, people have been shrinking for millennia since paleolithic times and only very recently have those in the rich world begun once again to approach the statures of our prehistoric ancestors. In his 2010 book Pandora's Seed, geneticist Spencer Wells argues that farming made humans sedentary, unhealthy, prey to fanatical beliefs and triggered mental illness.
It is certainly true that large settled communities - possible only with specialisation of labour and organised food production - are more prone to diseases. Of course Stone-Age people got sick, but they tended not to get the plagues and epidemics that are associated with more recent history. A lot of this is speculation, but in his New Scientist essay, Samuel Bowles, describes his quantitative analysis of the relative effectiveness of foraging versus farming - in terms of which provides the most calories for the least effort.
Using a whole host of data, collected by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes and analysing the effort needed to wield replicas of ancient farming implements, he has come to the conclusion that, like the first cars, the first farmers were no better than what came before in terms of feeding the masses. Indeed, they were probably worse.
So why did we do it? Farming, Bowles points out, ushered in a new era of property rights, created huge inequalities, paved the way for a wealth-based economy, divided the sexes and led to the creation of militaries needed to defend all this. Along with farming then, we got war and crime, madness and disease, cruelty, dictatorship and religions that were all about telling us what to do rather than emphasising our links with the Earth. The writer Jared Diamond has called agriculture 'the biggest mistake humans have ever made' and it is tempting to see the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall as an allegory for the descent of Man into settled barbarism.
It is a persuasive thesis. For most of our hundred-thousand-year history human beings have not lived as we live today. Perhaps a great deal of our problems, from the modern plagues of depression and anxiety, obesity and environmental issues, can be ascribed to the Neolithic Revolution. In the end, though, there was no stopping the farmers. Along with the bad stuff we also got art, medicine, science and literature - all more or less impossible in a nomadic, Stone Age society.
Cars eventually got better than horses, guns won out over longbows and steamships overtook the graceful clippers. But the success of the new is rarely as obvious, at the time, as it seems with historical hindsight. A thought that must have occurred to those first labourers, breaking their backs on someone else's field, wondering why on earth they were doing this rather than picking fruit off a tree like their grandparents had done.
Comment: Actually, Jared Diamond is right, and agriculture is indeed the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Historical evidence also shows that it's not only temporal or that agriculture's benefits will be appreciated in the future. What's really been happening, that from the onset of farming human species have experienced a gradual degradation. We are on a fast track toward self-destruction on all levels.
Reader Comments
While we do find greed and power hunger playing out in some hunter/gatherer populations, it is not terribly common and it just can't grow to large proportions. Agriculture allowed for food production at a level that allowed populations to grow far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the land. With these abnormally large populations came a ready supply of slaves and soldiers, allowing the greedy to spread their greedy ways far and wide.
Also with agriculture came the ability to centralize and control food production in ways that weren't quite possible in a hunter/gatherer culture. That lead to ideas of land ownership that were probably unheard of in hunter/gatherer cultures.
So yeah, while I'd agree that greed (service to self) might be seen as the motivator of the horrors of human history, agriculture was the means by which that was carried out, I think.
This is a typical putting the cart before the horse or even as in the expression "money is the root of evil" when in fact, it is how it is used, it is a choice on which way one decides to go; all have the potential either way. If the development of farming marked the onset of all these negative traits that began to be played out, it was only because there was something already there in the collective consciousness of humans to begin with before farming started. But since the author of the article doesn't have the capacity or is at least blinded by his own academic training, his ability to look deeper fails which results in rubbish such as this. Farming could have easily jumped started the move towards a more bountiful positive period of agriculture which in turn a more bountiful and positive bronze age, industrial age, information age....and to where we are at today. There is nothing inherently "evil" or negative in moving from hunter/gatherers to farming.
Many other articles on SOTT also go through the evidence for the detrimental effects of humanity moving to agriculture - the one linked in SOTT's article comment (at "the worst mistake") is a good start.
Nowadays they thrive on Wall Street, another big game of ownership!
second, there is no way for farming to develop as you described, other than a perfect world. The very fact that we have a lack of understanding of pathologies in the human population, perfectly reflects our lack of knowledge of pathologies in our bodies. That is to say, the two are interconnected, so developing one without the other leads the uninformed user to "destroy" their bodies as a form of survival. It is a devolution in process instead of positive evolution.
"In fact the big switch from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming communities 11,000 years ago in the Neolithic had more to do with the creation of new social and economic structures than increasing food supply. "
Perhaps this can be said of most of our modern technology. It has more to do with the creation of social and economic structures (i.e., control mechanisms) than improving the lot of the masses of humanity. In particular, social and economic structures that increase the power and wealth of the few by exploiting the many, as well as the planet. That explains alot: internal combustion engines, centralized coal/nuclear-fired electricity production, vaccines and most modern health care, etc., etc., etc.
What kind of farming are you all talking about????There are certain plants-vegetables that are good for the body and good to eat. I can think specifically of carrots, spinach, onions, garlic cauliflower, olives,various fruits that are all about "farming".
Or are we talking about agriculture in the big sense - and the apparently toxic contents of corn and others?...Its all a system of default really and contrived. Where was agricultural farming really first started and by whom?
Since the world cant feed the world, there has to be some serious questions and answers produced here - if the ecological demand is 140% then 40% are going to go hungry and with the onset of GM destroying reycled reproduction in the natural state we see that there is an agenda afoot to starve humanity quite unselectively.
Anyway anything from the Dailymail is a croc of sh*t....
The biggest fallacy going, is this idea that there are such things as "left wing" newspapers and "right wing" newspapers, and that "left wing" newspapers contain "good journalism" whilst "right wing" newspapers contain "bad journalism".
The Daily Mail, a "right wing" newspaper is virtually the only mainstream organ in the last ten years to highlight the dangers of mobile phone radiation. Likewise, the tory Daily Telegraph is the only British paper to regularly trash the idea of man-made global warming.
Whilst on the so-called "left" side of things, award winning journalists in The Guardian and Independent have written some very incisive things about The War on Terror and Palestine/Israel none of them have gone anywhere near 911 Truth, and until January this year those same so-called "left-wing" newspapers were pushing the idea of introducing more nuclear power stations to "prevent global warming".
“It is always possible to recognise ‘formatory thinking.’ For instance, formatory centre can count only up to two. It always divides everything in two: ‘bolshevism and fascism,’ ‘workers and bourgeois,’ proletarians and capitalists’ and so on. We owe most modern catchwords to formatory thinking, and not only catchwords but in modern popular theories. Perhaps it is possible to say that at all times all popular theories are formatory." - P.D. Ouspensky
Pros and cons, as we move along. We gain on some, we lose on some other. I was discussing with a widow
on the net long before facebook came along, if we should put them on the scale. I'm sorry but I think we should , especially on digital ones, that's why we made them. I'm sorry but I'm not going back to the cave man era when people lived only 20 years. I'm a better man now than I was 5-10-25 years ago. And a joke : Divide by zero , your nick is a mathematical impossibility. No offense meant :-).
farming is good, but side effect of farming is disclosure of "human" true nature. nature of his mind, but not nature of being. restricted "resources" and technology for hunting in deep past could not show that facts. maybe today's fishing is showing how does it like in profit era. worse than farming.
article is missleading, i am not agree with.
Methinks greed, rather than farming is the idea that so misshaped human history.
There are some valid points here, though. Such as where do we each draw the line in technological development? How much is it our free and makeable decision and how much is that decision made for us, by others?