The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race ?

Some of you may have read this before or have discussed it at length at Uni or some-such-place, but this is the first time I have come across it.
I haven't heard any reference to it from other sources since its been around from the late 80's, it may be controversial still, but it does ask questions and pose answers to how we got to where we are today and why.
Its a long but interesting read if you have the strength and time, but a rewarding read I think for the persevering.


Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of
the Human Race," Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66.

The Worst Mistake in the History of
the Human Race

By Jared Diamond

University of California at Los Angeles Medical School




To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy
taught us that our earth isn't the centre 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 neighbours. 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 neighbouring 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 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 farms 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 faeces 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 anaemia, 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 anaemia
(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 labour. "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 diarrhoeal disease
had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague and 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, non-producing
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 the 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 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 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 on
person 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 out-bred 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 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 longest-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 pm
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?


Courtesy of Ricardo J. Salvador, Associate Professor of Agronomy
Iowa State University of Science and Technology
Ames, Iowa 50011-1010.
In, Course Syllabus Agronomy 342, World Food Issues: Past and Present:
Jared Diamond on Agriculture.
See original at........
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Originally published in Discover Magazine, May 1, 1987. Pages 64-66.

Great stuff, thanks for sharing. The date at the bottom is before I was born. Perhaps this article partly explains my yearning to escape modern society and live in the wild somewhere if I could... On a more serious note, he makes some interesting and sound arguments. I guess he wasn't weighing in technological advances or at least didn't address that technology would more likely have been worse in a hunter gatherer society than what we have now. Perhaps he didn't consider it as important for quality of life. He's going on an average quality of human life which must be pretty low taking into account all the third world countries that have pretty much nothing. If it were possible to even out the resources and reduce waste then the average quality of life in the world we live in today would increase a lot.

Thats a fair point BitF, but in a monetary based world economy, there will always be rich and poor, and that pretty much sums up his theory of how Agriculture has disrupted and transformed life on this planet.

I can see your point in that technology can make life easier or better, depending on ones view point, but from a hunter/gatherers perspective, technology (be it metal tools and the wheel) renders his presence obsolete, because any advance in gathering or hunting would upset the natural balance of hunter and prey and of gatherer and cereal produce.

Once you become more efficient at gaining resources from nature, in the seasonal cycle, you upset the rhythm and bang goes the balance of that cycle.

We have seen that through all human history, when over harvesting of the earths natural products consumes more than is available, so we migrate and do it all again. Technology has only served to make us more efficient at destroying the world through nothing more than the need to fish farm the earths natural produce so we can survive longer and not have to "find" food to live.

His theory has echoes in something I remember reading about 20 yrs ago. That the plough was responsible for all our woes. It was the first "invention" that began our thirst for new technology. This was before the wheel of course, but it heralded the start of a culture that revered technological progress rather than adhering to traditional practices. What was the point of hand digging a field, when your neighbour was ploughing 3 fields to every one of yours.

As to your view about feeling the escapist in you, Jared's account of the calendar illustrates that we have evolved the world around us, but not ourselves, so in all probability, we still have yearnings to seek out a forest and dwell in it a while, or hunt wild boar and gather blackberries.

Its a strange contrasting life we live in, on one hand we have computers, on the other we have allotment owners, or mobile phones and camping holidays.

Where do we go from here ?

It's difficult to argue against agriculture having messed up the balance between humans and nature in a way that hunting never would have done. I still think technology is crucial to humans achieving their potential as a race (not so much as individuals). In sci-fi you often encounter super advanced alien races that are also super spiritually developed as well and therefore the technology is not out of place in their hands. I envisioned mankind being able to amount to something similar.

If humans refused to progress technologically beyond hunter gathering with spears then they'd be suseptible to being wiped out by natural disasters on a huge scale. I do think though that technology has advanced way too fast and the genius from which all these new devices were spawned is ironically accountable for numbing the minds of the masses. The disparity between people physically, mentally and financially is more pronounced than ever before; the part of the article that really struck me was about it not being possible or at least as simple for parasites to rise above everyone in a hunter gatherer society.

Could it have been any other way? Is it possible for humanity to develop as a race evolves? I think it is as I'd like to believe we're more civilised and empathising than early man but there's exceptions to that everywhere even today. I think post world war 2, all the scientists and innovators have been too effective. If they'd been maybe 100 years slower then things could have been significantly better in the western world at least.

I agree that technology enhances civilisation, but that is always going to be at a cost to the environment, because nature does not advance at the same rate.

Jared's calendar really struck home just how quick technology has grown in its infancy. This as you say has accelerated at an unbelievable rate and will probably be the one instrument in the demise of the human race if we can't slow it down, the earth's resources can feed the rush for further development but at some point, the scales will tip violently and its going to hurt.

My only problem with the advantage of having technology improve life is that, I didn't know this before I read his report, disease and illness was far less of an effect on the hunter gathers lives than with the advances that agriculture brought to them, their diet having a huge affect on their healthiness. In affect, they were less prone to epidemics that could wipe out entire villages than their successors.

I am sure that because of their nomadic life, natural disasters would not have impacted on their numbers as much as farm based communities closely grouped around their trading neighbours. But climatic changes may well have been the most dangerous of those disasters to hunter gatherers, so being based in one area with better housing and clothing and access to medicines and modern knowledge could afford a better survival platform I presume.

The very term parasite is a modern word to describe an entity that does not contribute or produce, but manages to survive in doing so. Of course this is impossible in the natural world and the term would never have been applicable, but the human race has always evolved, even hunter gatherers evolved ways of surviving against predators and catching prey. Weapons evolved and clothing too, so I think it was inevitable that we would discover agriculture as a way of enhancing a particularly hard existence.

Just looked at the last part again with the calendar, it's indeed amazing how quickly it all sprang up. A natural disaster would be more devastating in the agriculural scenario as there is more to lose population wise however in the event of a meteor strike or some similar scale disaster where technology is required to ensure the survival of mankind I think the right path was taken with agriculture and technology.

In deciding whether it was the right or wrong choice, I think it comes down to what you believe the purpose of humans is. If it is merely to live in harmony with nature then the hunter gatherer lifestyle is the better choice. If it's to unravel the mysteries of the universe then the agricultural root was indeed better though not without its problems. As much as the author tries to claim that hunter gatherers had as much or more time for art and culture, I can't see them progressing at anywhere near the same speed or extent as we have today.

"In deciding whether it was the right or wrong choice, I think it comes down to what you believe the purpose of humans is. If it is merely to live in harmony with nature then the hunter gatherer lifestyle is the better choice. If it's to unravel the mysteries of the universe then the agricultural root was indeed better though not without its problems"

Absolutely BitF, the whole process of evolving and progress would have been massively much slower and not as varied too imo. Maybe it would have taken 1000's more years to get where we are today, but we would still have taken the same route to technology and agriculture. We could say that the H/G's may have evolved more too, in relation to their surroundings and maybe their impact on nature might not have been as profound, but there would still be disease, overpopulation and wars.

Dependency on fossil fuels and its affects on pollution would still be a worry, so I can't see any way we would have shared the earth better by inventing machines that used the natural resources of the world to perform their actions.

There again, we measure everything by our modern standards, who's to say that a world devoid of machines would not have produced better art or culture or that we could have, with a little insight, have produced a better civilisation without a monetary existence.

Having heard of the Zeigeist Movement, that kind of culture may have been possible had we not "bartered" (a precursor to the monetary system) our way through the agricultural birth.

Interesting videos if you're inquisitive in nature.

http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

Its a long film but....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w

(I'm not canvassing, I'm not a member or anything, my brother sent me some bumf a few years ago)

BRING BACK CURRENT AFFAIRS!!

What have currents got to do with anything ?

Interesting read, thanks.

This topic is also raised in a great book called "why we get sick"

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-We-Get-Sick-Vintage/dp/0679746749

Thanks for the link McLaren. I may delve into it at a later date, still got lots of books to read from Xmas LOL.

Funny how an article can set you on a slightly lateral path sometimes, on another forum, this story got a link to the Paleo Diet, never heard of it, but something about it appeals to me. I may try it out.

Mariah Carey's parents forgotting to use protection that night

Justin bieber

VDT wrote:Mariah Carey's parents forgotting to use protection that night

Thanks for the oldest joke in the history of mankind.

JubbaIsle wrote:

VDT wrote:Mariah Carey's parents forgotting to use protection that night

Thanks for the oldest joke in the history of mankind.

Joke?

VDT wrote:

JubbaIsle wrote:

VDT wrote:Mariah Carey's parents forgotting to use protection that night

Thanks for the oldest joke in the history of mankind.

Joke?

Thanks for the 2nd oldest joke in the history of mankind.