The Worst Mistake in the History
of the Human Race
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 one 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 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 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 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?
